September 2010 Archives

Now that I know how to patch my OpenBSD-release installation and keep it updated as OpenBSD-stable, I pulled out the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 now running 4.7-stable, applied the latest patch, then rebuilt the kernel and rebooted.

As I wrote in the earlier entry, once you have the sources and know how to apply patches and rebuild the kernel and system, keeping a patched OpenBSD box is pretty easy.

The reason I brought out the OpenBSD laptop, which has been dormant for about a month, was that I am experimenting with ssh, more specifically X over ssh, and needed a host to run sshd in order to test X over ssh on client machines.

I managed to get sshd running (I declined to do this during the original OpenBSD 4.7 installation), allow X over ssh and connect and run X sessions from both my Fedora 13 laptop and Windows XP box (the latter running PuTTY and Xming).

So X over SSH is working on the OpenBSD box.

On an unrelated note, I'm still running GNOME as the desktop environment in OpenBSD 4.7, and one thing that strikes me about GNOME in OpenBSD, FreeBSD — and Debian for that matter — is that vanilla GNOME is a very fast, usable and stable environment. I went with the Xfce spin in Fedora 13 for a number of reasons, one of them being that I like Xfce (and Thunar, Xfce Terminal and Mousepad). But I'm also partial to GNOME, and running it on my various BSD and Linux installations has kept me in the GNOME game, as it were.

Back to X over ssh. The whole reason for this exercise is that my ultimate geek goal (I think small, trust me) is to run an X session from my 1995-era Apple Macintosh Powerbook 1400 and use actual, modern Linux/Unix applications on it. That way I'd be running real Unix/Linux on the Powerbook without the seemingly impossible task of trying to install a Linux/Unix system on hardware that's just about completely off the radar of any FOSS operating environment.

My thought is that if I could make this happen, my geek destiny will be fulfilled, and I could retire, so to speak (I'm throwing cliches around like ninja stars in an English-dubbed martial arts flick).

I've been able to run MacSSH for a console session in the Powerbook 1400's System 7.6.1 environment, but for some reason I couldn't get it to connect to the OpenBSD box this time, although I'm sure I've been able to do so in the past. (Note: I did figure this out. Turning off zlib compression enabled MacSSH and OpenBSD's sshd to work together.)

My two shots at an X server are MI/X and XTen. I've got both on the Powerbook. MI/X loads, but since I couldn't actually connect to the host I can't test it. XTen pretty much locks up the Powerbook as it loads, and therefore I'm less than optimistic about it working.

I never found the elusive MacX software that Apple used to ship with its Unix for Motorola 68xxx hardware. I think it runs on PowerPC, but since I've never been able to track down a CD of it, that's another solution off the table.

If I can only did get MacSSH to talk to OpenBSD's sshd, then I can start trying to figure out and I even figured out MI/X and ran a few X apps from both my OpenBSD and Fedora 13 laptops. Unfortunately most X apps are too heavy for the Powerbook to take. Geany was excruciating, Nedit less so, except that I was unable to save a new file with a new file name. Old files I could edit and save no problem, but I couldn't get MI/X to allow me to type into the file-name box.

Right now I'm thinking of all the super-light X apps I can run with success from the Powerbook 1400. I just installed SciTE, and I'll put Claws Mail on the laptop tomorrow. What light GUI apps do you think I should run (and what are the most elaborate console apps that I could run in the MacSSH terminal window)?

Again — running Unix/Linux apps in a GUI on a 1995 Powerbook 1400 ... is there anything cooler from a geek standpoint? (There probably is - feel free to unleash your inner geek in the comments below.)

Lest you think he did all he could do on the oft-played George Harrison classic, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," on Jake Shimabukuro's upcoming album, the Jan. 4, 2011-scheduled "Peace Love Ukulele," he tackles another classic of rock bombast, Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Check it out on this extremely high-quality video:

And if you haven't seen the video that seemingly launched a thousand solo-ukulele-playing fantasies with its now 6 million+ plays:

Do you think he's saving "Layla" for his next album?

Life's no beach for users of ATI Radeon video (especially my Mobility Radeon HD 4200 chip) in Linux these days, with kernel modesetting harshing my proverbial mellow and making things blurry and out of sync.

Sometimes turning off kernel modesetting in the bootline (radeon.modeset=0 or nomodeset) helps. Sometimes not.

And I'm a new Fedora users, not exactly well-versed in the ways of Yum and PackageKit.

So it came as a bit of a shock to me that the package-management tools in Feedora 13 wanted to remove the 2.6.33 kernel on my system as part of the process involved in adding the latest 2.6.34 kernel.

I can't give up 2.6.33. It's the only kernel that works with Radeon 4200 video (on my Lenovo G555 laptop anyway) without disabling KMS and losing the cool-looking Fedora bootsplash along with that bootline switch.

I've run the Catalyst driver, and now I'm back in the open-source ati driver, the latter of which gives me two working kernels - 2.6.33 all of the time, an older 2.6.34 some of the time (and the formerly newest 2.6.34 none of the time; we'll see how the latest 2.6.34 works).

So when PackageKit said it needed to remove 2.6.33 to give me the latest 2.6.34, I paused — big time — and did a little Googling to see how I could keep more old kernels.

I found that a change to /etc/yum.conf is what I needed to make.

As root I opened /etc/yum.conf in my favorite text editor and saw the following:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever
keepcache=0
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
plugins=1
installonly_limit=3
color=never

The line that needs to be changed is in red. As you can see below, I switched the number of installed kernels that Yum keeps from three to five, which has the effect of keeping 2.6.33 around at least for the next few kernel updates:

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum/$basearch/$releasever
keepcache=0
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
exactarch=1
obsoletes=1
gpgcheck=1
plugins=1
installonly_limit=5
color=never

Hopefully the trouble with ati video and kernel modesetting will be cleared up at some point, either in the ati driver package, the kernel itself, or elsewhere in xorg. Should that happen, I'll gladly bring the number of kernels that Yum keeps around from 5 to 3, but until that time I need 2.6.33 around as insurance against breakage on my ATI-video-running system.

One of the features of gThumb 2.11 that I love is its memory for my last photo resize. New in 2.11, this feature is (thank you, Yoda).

What this means is that if I resize an image, shrinking it from whatever large size to 600 pixels wide, gThumb remembers this, and the next time I resize a picture, 600px is the default value, and all I need to do is click a box and I'm done. Since I'm often (or usually) resizing everything to the same size, this is a feature that's saving me tremendous amounts of time.

The gThumb developers are adding features and polishing them continually, and if you do any kind of photo editing, especially as a Web producer who works with photojournalists, you owe it to yourself to try gThumb, especially 2.11.90.

Getting 2.11.90 into this Fedora 13 installation is one of the best things about F13 for my personal workflow. Ubuntu 10.04 still has 2.10, and (most) unfortunately, Debian Squeeze at this point has 2.11.5. Even Debian Sid is stuck at 2.11.5, with the Experimental branch the only place to have 2.11.92. That prompted me to check my build in Fedora 13, and it turns out I have 2.11.91.

While I'm on the subject, all this running Fedora I've been doing makes me very much aware of just how conservative Debian is about pushing packages through Sid to Testing and finally Stable. In many if not most cases, this wariness on the part of Debian developers is a very good thing. But for me right now, being stuck with a gThumb in the 2.11 series but less than 2.11.90 would be a bad thing indeed.

Version 2.10, which is what Debian Lenny and Ubuntu Lucid are running, would be fine, since everything is working right in that release, but things are so good in the 2.11.90+ world of gThumb that any "power user" of the app should do all he or she can to start using it as soon as possible.

Out of the three kernels present in my Fedora 13 installation (one 2.6.33, two 2.6.34), my quest to gain a usable display (i.e. not blurry/out of sync) had me replacing the stock, open-source ati driver with ATI's own proprietary Catalyst fglrx driver.

With the ati driver I could get perfect video in 2.6.33 but only the aforementioned blurriness in both 2.6.34 kernels (and I do have a bug open on the matter). Plopping radeon.modeset=0 into the Grub2-generated boot line had no effect.

With the fglrx/Catalyst driver, the boot line for the older of the two 2.6.34 kernels had radeon.modeset=0 automatically added. This kernel booted fine, except I missed the cool Fedora bootsplash due to turning off kernel mode setting. The newer 2.6.34 kernel yielded blurry video even with KMS turned off, and the 2.6.33 wouldn't boot at all.

Today I decided to roll back to the open-source, community-developed ati driver and run 2.6.33.

I removed the fglrx/Catalyst driver in PackageKit, reinstalled the ati driver, removed the /etc/X11/xorg.conf created by the fglrx driver and rebooted into 2.6.33, where I stand right now running with no xorg.conf.

And Fedora 13 works as well as it did when I first installed it.

One of the reasons is that I'd like to have an actual stake in the bug report, which is filed against xorg-x11-drv-ati. I hope that the situation is eventually resolved, and I'm both worried and otherwise encouraged because this isn't a Fedora problem. It's not even a Linux kernel problem. I've had similar issues in new builds of PC-BSD, Ubuntu and ZenWalk. It appears to be a driver problem (which moving to the proprietary driver can only partially correct) and is as serious as the Intel i810 issue that plagued my "old" hardware, which many told me to dump in order to "solve the problem."

Well, now I have "new" hardware and unfortunately the same problem.

Fedora is so relentlessly forward thinking that I'm hoping for some kind of resolution (literally and otherwise) to this video issue at some point in the development of Fedora 14, if not in F13 as well.

But looming are Debian Squeeze, which still runs a 2.6.32 kernel with perfect ATI video on this chip (Radeon 4200 HD), Ubuntu 10.04 (older kernel = ATI Radeon 4200 goodness). FreeBSD is a possibility (video issues in PC-BSD 8.1 notwithstanding), and OpenBSD is also a candidate; video works in 4.7, and the alc driver recognizes my Atheros Communications AR8132 Ethernet interface ... but I can't get past "no carrier" and turn its lights on. I'll be watching OpenBSD 4.8 for progress on the alc Ethernet driver (and regression on the ATI video driver).

Fedora 13 will be maintained until a month after Fedora 15's release, so there's considerable time on the meter if I wish to remain with Fedora and its 2.6.33 kernel and see if there's any action with the ati driver. It couldn't be just me having this problem, could it?

I filmed a video of my comments on today's San Jose Mercury News story about Apple wanting to get into the newspaper business by selling subscriptions on its iPad and other devices and keeping 30 percent of the subscription revenue and 40 percent of the advertising revenue.

Linux Mint, long known as a multimedia-ready spin on Ubuntu, has gone deeper and released a Mint distro based not on Ubuntu but on Debian Testing, and my first impression running the system from the live DVD is that this is a game-changer in the Linux world.

Here's the deal. Ubuntu is based on Debian and aims to make a more user-friendly desktop, newer packages (drawing packages from Debian Unstable for the most part) in a six-month cycle as opposed to Debian's release-when-ready (generally every 1.5 years).

Ubuntu has also attempted to build a large, welcoming, newbie-friendly community around its distribution and has by most accounts been wildly successful in that endeavor.

Until now Mint has gone further than Ubuntu (on which its based) with more (and different) custom user-interface features as well as almost all available multimedia support built in, whereas Ubuntu makes it easy to get multimedia codecs but doesn't ship them by default for various philosophical and legal reasons.

Mint also has a large, participatory community.

This is my immediate impression of where Mint is in the Linux world, being a Debian user since Etch (2007), an Ubuntu user off and on since Dapper (also 2007 in my case) and never having used Mint before.

Now the Mint team is changing things up with a release based not on Ubuntu but on the project that Ubuntu itself draws from — Debian.

I've written many times that Debian is nothing to be afraid of. If you can install and run Ubuntu with any degree of success, chances are you can do the same with Debian. No, the Debian community is not anywhere near as large, vocal and welcoming as that of Ubuntu, but the Ubuntu community remains of enormous help to Debian users since what generally works in Ubuntu also works in Debian.

And Mint goes even further than Ubuntu in making a distribution that's easy to install, expand, run and maintain.

Debian's huge repository of applications feeds both Ubuntu and Mint, and that flexibility is extremely valuable to any desktop user.

With this new distro, Mint is drawing from the Debian Testing repository, which is currently nicknamed Squeeze and which will (hopefully very) soon be Debian's next stable release.

But Mint Debian won't stick with Squeeze. It'll remain with Debian Testing (which will continue accepting new packages ... forever) and be a true rolling release that theoretically can be maintained for years on a given installation depending on how the hardware in question reacts to the changes in the core components of Debian Testing.

I've been running Linux Mint Debian (201009) and its GNOME 2.30 desktop for the better part of a day from the live DVD, and I can tell you that everything thus far works, runs fast and looks terrific (especially if you like the color green).

The most radically different thing about Linux Mint, in either its Ubuntu or new Debian spins, is the Mint menu, which is not what you generally see in the GNOME desktops of Mint's respective parent distros.

I couldn't make a screenshot of the menu, but clicking on the Menu button yields a squarish box that fills up about 1/3rd of the screen and presents your "favorite" applications, which in the default are Firefox, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Rhythmbox, Calculator, Gedit, GNOME Terminal, plus configuration utilities for sound, video and the system.

Clicking "all applications" brings up a more traditional lineup of application categories (All, Accessories, Graphics, Internet, Office, etc.) and mousing over the various categories brings up a list of applications directly to the right.

It's a nice system — and certainly different than what ships with GNOME in Ubuntu and Debian.

Since Debian hasn't jumped headlong into 2.6.33 and later kernels with kernel mode setting for ATI video, I haven't had any of the blurry/sync-challenged video in Mint (or Debian) on my Lenovo G555 laptop and its ATI Radeon 4200 HD video chip. But eventually Debian Testing will move forward, and if the Linux kernel and Xorg developers don't figure out how to deal with ATI chips that don't like kernel mode setting (and often don't even want to work with KMS turned off at boot time), just about any Linux or BSD system could frustrate users.

In the last weeks, I've had success with Debian (and now Mint Debian), I've been able to get Fedora 13 working with an older kernel and proprietary video driver, but Fedora 13, the Ubuntu 10.10 beta, PC-BSD 8.1 and ZenWalk 6.4 are among the distros/projects that aren't working with my ATI video chip. (And yes, I realize this is the same problem I had 2 years ago with Intel video and just about every distribution; video is pretty much back to normal for those machines, or as normal as it's going to get, and yes it's disheartening to have the same problem again except with "new" hardware).

As I mention above, I've still got Fedora 13 working well, though the project's aggressive philosophy on updates not just for applications but core components such as the kernel itself has pretty much broken video in the middle of the release cycle. And while I've had to figure out fixes for my ATI issues, mid-cycle updates in applications such as the gThumb image viewer/editor and gPodder podcast aggregator have been very welcome, making me feel like I really am running a bleeding-edge, rolling release.

Now that I've run both Debian Testing and Fedora for significant periods of time, I can tell you that Testing and even Unstable/Sid are way more conservative about updates than is Fedora — and I'm talking Fedora releases, not the even-more-bleeding-edge, rolling Rawhide that is currently spawning future Fedora releases.

Especially if my video issues are not addressed in kernel updates over the next month or so, I can see myself either moving to Debian itself (most likely Stable with Backports for my "go-to" applications) or maybe even this new Mint Debian spin.

While I really like the way Mint runs its community and distribution (the forums are great; the candor and openness in the official blog are refreshing), the one thing holding me back from adopting Mint Debian right now is its lack of an encryption option in the installer.

While I've used the encrypted /home option in Ubuntu, I still prefer the fully encrypted LVM available in the Debian and "alternate" (console-based) Ubuntu installers. Especially on laptops but also on desktops, I think that loss or theft of the hardware is a greater security risk than any over-the-wire attacks or phishing, and keeping unencrypted data where it can be compromised is just asking for trouble.

But while I believe in encrypted machines, I also believe in unencrypted, physically separate and secure backups, which I do on portable hard drives that I store in different locations.

I feel very good about where my backup drives are stored, but I'm not so good about carrying a laptop around with tons of data that can be examined by anybody who gets their hands on the hardware.

And since Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu all offer encrypted LVM or encrypted /home, these are the distributions I've been most comfortable with using on "production" machines. (There probably are others that offer encryption, and I'd like to know about them. Said encryption needs to be easy to implement by the average non-geeky user; the fact that security-minded OpenBSD doesn't offer this in its installer baffles me continually).

I haven't mentioned Ubuntu much in this whole thing. While I've thought in the past that a for-profit Canonical would be a good thing for free, open-source software in general, nowadays I'm not quite drinking the Kool-aid so deeply. I've found many of Ubuntu's user-interface changes to be less-than-polished, and while I don't begrudge Canonical trying to make money with things such as Ubuntu One, I'm seeking a lighter, simpler desktop solution (like I get in Debian, Fedora, Slackware and its derivatives and now Mint).

For an initial release, Mint Debian (201009) is incredibly polished and functional (as is Debian Squeeze itself at this point). It's good enough to make me reconsider my requirements for encrypted LVM and give Linux Mint Debian an extended tryout on my laptop.

Excepting the recent video issues, my last month and then some running Fedora 13 has been a huge success. If your hardware can cope with the frenetic pace of updates, I've never seen a non-rolling release roll as hard and fast as Fedora. It's exciting (in the geeky sense).

But the reality of getting real work done on real hardware means that a little stability can be your friend. The question is whether a Mint distro based on the rolling Debian Testing release will provide a stable-enough platform for your given tasks and hardware. I've generally run Debian Testing as it's gotten close to a stable release, sticking with Stable for a period of time after that.

And my time in Debian Testing hasn't been all smooth sailing. I've had hardware issues and application issues. Not that I haven't had similar issues in "stable" releases. Just as Fedora 13 has broken a few things, it's also fixed more than a few over the past several weeks.

So Linux Mint Debian is a project I'll definitely be watching. If a Mint distro based on Debian Testing proves to be a success, I wonder if the Mint team's next move will be a distribution based on Debian Stable (though it looks like you can easily make your Mint Debian install stick with Squeeze rather than post-Squeeze Testing). An easy-to-use, multimedia-ready version of Debian Stable would be a great addition to the free, open-source OS ecosphere.

Linux Mint Debian is good enough that it almost (but not quite) makes me willing to give up data encryption in the installer. However, a check of the Mint forums leads me to believe that an encryption option may be coming to Mint Debian. That could very well seal the proverbial deal. How's that for an endorsement?

Links
Linux Mint 201009 Debian installation screenshots from EasyLinuxCDs.com

OK, so this turned out be long ...

I'm not going to make this a long entry because it's Labor Day weekend and I'm laboring plenty already.

I've been running Fedora 13's Xfce spin on my new Lenovo G555 laptop for about a month and a half now, and I'm very much impressed with the performance, functionality and aggressive update policy even in an already aging (by Fedora standards) release.

By "aggressive," I mean new versions of apps with bug fixes, new kernels (not always a great thing given my ATI video, which broke in 2.6.34) and easily installed RPMs from the Koji Build System that are not in the main repo just yet.

My hardware issues at the moment (thought I would be done with these now that I have new hardware, but no ...) are Linux-wide, meaning I'm getting video issues in everything post-2.6.33 and audio issues in, well, everything.

By this I mean my ATI Radeon HD 4200 video, which has been great in just about everything but which started to look all blurry and wavy, some describing it as a vertical and horizontal sync issue, in 2.6.34 and later kernels in Fedora and Ubuntu. I also had a similar problem in PC-BSD 8.1.

Just like my Intel video problem with the old laptop everybody told me was too old to use (and now that I have a new laptop and the same kinds of problems ...), the problems with the ATI video have everything to do with the dreaded kernel mode setting.

Yep, kernel mode setting for ATI has come to the Linux kernel, and I sincerely hope somebody is benefiting from it, because as in Intel video on my 2002-era laptops, it's killing me on my 2010 laptop with ATI video.

And with the open-source ATI driver, in my case anyway, passing nomodeset or radeon.modeset=0 to the kernel at boot time doesn't clear it up. And I lose that cool boot screen between Grub and GDM.

And the problem is happening in the current Fedora 13 (with 2.6.34, not 2.6.33, which is perfect as always), the Fedora 14 alphas and the Ubuntu 10.10 beta.

I found my own "solution" to the problem in Fedora 14. I'm not deliriously happy with the hack, but here it is:

I installed the proprietary ATI driver, which a) added radeon.modeset=0 to the boot line and b) actually provides perfect video, too.

So I lost that cool post-Grub, pre-GDM boot screen, but I do have usable video in the console (which is no longer using the framebuffer, which I also miss, by the way) as well as in the GUI. And with the proprietary driver, for some reason the 2.6.33 kernel doesn't work anymore, although having a working 2.6.34 kernel is enough to stanch that psychic wound.

I wasn't able to install the proprietary ATI driver in the Ubuntu 10.10 live environment, so I can't confirm whether or not the same fix will work in Maverick.

However this all shakes out, there's still Debian Squeeze, which has a 2.6.32 kernel and works great on this Lenovo laptop.

Now on to sound. Also failing in all Linux and BSDs is the Conexant 5069 sound chip in the Lenovo G555. Not failure exactly. It sounds great, mic input seems pretty good, but plugging in a headphone jack does not mute the speakers, and that sort of limits the laptop's ability to a) allow me to listen to audio without disturbing other people and b) enable me to pipe analog audio out of the laptop in Linux without audio from the speakers bleeding into my recordings.

And yes, I am using this laptop as an analog audio source for podcast production. It's just easier to pump audio out of one PC and into the mixer on our main Audacity-running rig than to mess around with multiple audio sources in an all-digital environment. I'm just not that good, and for our purposes a little analog makes up for a multitude of digital sins.

So unfortunately when I need to do this one task, I boot into Windows 7 where plugging something into the headphone jack actually mutes the speakers.

There are all sorts of tips out there on how to trick ALSA into muting the speakers in Linux, but thus far none of them has worked for me and a) I've tried them all and b) doing so is a huge pain in the ass.

And yes, I've filed bugs on this. I'm a huge bug-filer now. So don't bug me, so to speak, because I've filed a bug in Fedora on this very issue, which is a total upstream problem, by the way ... and I guess I should look into ALSA and what the bug situation is for this issue up there.

But back to Fedora. I got my workflow back on track with gThumb 2.11.90, which I got from the Build System, I was able to not just output but also input MP3 audio with the audacity-freeworld package (loved finding out during production that I needed this ... but it was easy to get).

Audacity has been performing very, very well in Fedora 13 on this hardware (and runs just as well in Windows 7, which I'm still dual-booting and will continue to dual-boot until I and the rest of the world figures out the speaker-muting issue). Performance-wise it blows our Apple Macintosh G5 with dual CPUs out of the audio-processing water. No crashes, plus render times that are way less than half (and probably about a quarter) of what the G5 can do. Even with the annoying headphone/speaker mute issue, I've still been using the Lenovo as an Audacity workstation for podcast production.

I'm not happy that the dreaded oauth change at Twitter broke Pino, and I hope a fix is forthcoming.

As I detail above, the 2.6.34 kernel did break my video, but I'm back again with the proprietary ATI driver.

Xfce is working great. I'm not happy that Gigolo can't seemingly handle FTP connections, so I'm using FileZilla instead. But Thunar otherwise has been great.

I'm still using Mousepad for much editing, but more often than not I'm using Geany. The syntax highlighting, ability to have multiple files open, plus more search/replace options are very helpful.

Firefox has been great. I don't run into any of the problems I've had on my older hardware in terms of speed. I'm not happy with the amount of CPU the 32-bit Flash player (in the 64-bit wrapper) is eating up, but it's manageable. Java performance in my sole use of it (a photo-upload helper) has been great.

I did install the Chromium browser (from Spot's repo), but I have yet to figure out how to do the symlink for Flash (and if it will even work with the wrapped 32-bit Flash Player), so I haven't really used it. Truthfully I don't really need it.

As I mention in an entry below, I used the GIMP to create a hackergotchi (small cutout PNG image of my head) for planet-type blog aggregators. I'll tell you if I actually get "aggregated" anywhere.

While gThumb wasn't doing IPTC very well, I did install Wine and the Windows-based image editor IrfanView, which is running great. But now that gThumb is working again for IPTC in 2.11.90, I really don't need IrfanView. On that topic, Wine wouldn't install IrfanView from the .exe installer. Instead I followed a tip and just dragged the IrfanView folders onto a thumb drive and then moved them into the Windows C drive portion of my Wine installation in Fedora. I also got the mfc42.dll file from my Windows box and dropped that into Wine.

For the podcasts I'm producing, we really need to start using voice over IP, and while we've experimented with Google Voice, it looks like Skype is what we are going with due to its ubiquity and relative quality. I'm not happy thus far with the choices for recording a Skype conversation, but I'm living with it.

I'd love to figure out how to record Skype in Linux. If anybody has any tips/how-tos in that regard, please send them my way. I promise that when I have this all worked out, I'll do a full "this is how I podcast" series of entries. (FYI, these are the new shows I'm building out: Inside UCLA Podcast and The JV Show.)

I've been wrong before and will be again, but something about Apple TV, new and old, just doesn't compute.

Now the box is $99, it has Wi-Fi and HDMI, and it'll deliver content to your TV.

But the consumer/business model of Apple TV for the most part, aside from streaming Netflix for subscribers to that service (who already can do that with a cheaper Roku box), the whole "pay 99 cents for a TV show" model just doesn't seem all that attractive to me.

And meanwhile, aside from ABC and Fox (the production arm, not the network for Fox, I believe), nobody else is biting. It seems the networks don't think 99 cents/viewer is enough.

Like I said, I could be totally off-base here. But what are these people smoking?

I am NOT paying 99 cents to watch a TV show. NOT. No way. No.

Now a $10 or $15/month subscription, that I'd live with, if the programming were/was there. (Feel free to weigh in on were/was.)

Show me some advertising. That's how you make it up. Dual or triple revenue streams? Forget about it.

Why can't the current Hulu model work? Viewers watch the shows they want to watch, there are actual ads running in those shows. Can't the ad revenue pay for everything? How does this work on broadcast TV (you know, the thing you use an antenna to pick up)?

I am not paying 99 cents to watch "Law & Order." Not happening.

Via Planet Fedora I saw Fedora design guru Máirín Duffy's extensive post on the redesign of Fedoraproject.org, with the general idea being to let not just fanboys but the rest of the world know what the Fedora distribution of Linux can do.

As we all pretty much know, Canonical/Ubuntu is very good at whipping up excitement for its desktop Linux system, and it's nice to see Fedora saying, "Hey, look at all the cool stuff we can do."

It just looks so great — it's the kind of thing I could see actually working and getting new users. Here's a sample (and go to Duffy's blog for more — and bigger, clearer — images):

I've been eyeing getting this blog on a Planet-type blog aggregator, and to do that I needed a hackergotchi — a smallish, cut-out PNG image of my head, examples of which you can see on Planet Debian, Planet Ubuntu and Planet Fedora, among others.

My graphical skill is pretty much confined to messing around with JPG images, and things like cutting out the background are lost on me. So I found help with creating a hackergotchi and found this Linux.com page that helped me roll one out quick and dirty. I didn't even use a good photo of myself - just something I shot on the webcam a while back that I've been using here and there.

The instructions were pretty clear, and here's what I came up with in five minutes of work:

I've got no chin because that didn't get captured in the webcam image. But otherwise it's not bad for a lousy photo and a few minutes in the GIMP, don't you think?