Hi Folks!

My name is Taylor and I’m the new editor around here, see? I don’t wanna hear any lip, see? Anyway, on to the article.

Up until about six months ago I was a Windows guy. I had never even run a stand alone linux machine before I had become fed up with vista on my laptop and decided it was time for a change. Originally, I bought a 160GB drive to put my Vista partition on and I was going to try out Ubuntu Gutsy on my old 80 GB drive, but I decided to try it out on my 160GB to keep from having to copy my partition over from the 80, and I’m kinda glad I did. I use the qualifier, “kinda” because, while I’ve stuck with Ubuntu, the relief it brought was only temporary, like how the joy of masturbation is only temporary.

I had earlier tried Edgy after my first hard drive failed about a year ago and I was not impressed. First, it took me three days to figure out how to get my wireless card to work. Second, while it was functional, Ubuntu seemed more like a novelty, a toy, rather than a full-fledged operating system. I later installed vista, and was happy, for a time. Come my hard drive upgrade and I’m ready to dive off the bow into anything but vista.

So it’s been about six months and my Ubuntu install is well lived-in. There are many things I like about it and many more things I don’t. In the interest of fairness, I will reveal both to you.

PRO: System Updating For Everything

This is totally awesome. Virtually every single piece of software on the machine receives semi-automatic updates via the update manager. Anything that’s in an available “repository” is automatically checked for new version releases and updated at your notice. Every operating system should have this function built-in. Well, I think every one does, except windows.

CON: Troubleshooting

I often find myself at the ubuntu forums trying to find out how to do something or fix something. Usually it’s one of three things: quick and easy, slow and painful, or impossible. This is important, because if I can’t do something quickly and easily I usually don’t want to do it unless I have some time and it’s important for me to do it, and while it is usually easy to find the information on how to do it, it is sometimes very complicated and lengthy to get it accomplished.

PRO: UI + Visual Effects (Compiz)

While it didn’t come enabled correctly out of the box, I was able to easily correct that via a tutorial on the Ubuntu Forums (which I use, A LOT) that allowed for some stunning UI action. I use the multiple desktops (also a PRO) which work great with the visual effects, which make switching desktops seem like the turning of a big cube, or prismatic hexagon in my case, which works and looks fantastic. The window manipulation is also pretty great. Windows flex and ripple when you move them, which sometimes leads to a permanent wiggle, but is easily corrected. They also close and fade away in an almost identical way to vista, but the window seems to fall over as it fades away. I sat down in a computer lab at school and found myself trying to bring up another program by switching to another desktop and I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working until I had that V8 moment.

CON: Software Compatibility

This is the Biggie folks. There are simply so many mainstream pieces of software that do not work great, or in most cases, at all with linux. Games, flash, music organizers, none of them work unless they are explicitly designed to work.
While some games work through wine, the windows emulator for linux, the performance is so low compared to how they would run in XP that in most cases it isn’t worth the case unless you have a rockin’ system. Flash, for the most part, is broken. While videos play and web sites load, they often stutter and are impaired functionality-wise. For example: webcams don’t work with flash websites, at all. Want to watch a youtube video full screen? Forget about it. Flash games seem to work right, for the most part. I have an iPod, and while there are some players that claim iPod functionality, they are either too unstable (songbird), too ugly (banshee), or too unusable (amarok) to bother hooking my iPod up to them.
I am also learning how to code C++, but the compiler I use only works for windows, which also works great in wine, but none of the programs I make work correctly in the command line. I have to go over to my windows machine and test my compiled programs there, which is really a pain.

PRO: Virus Free

Since I’ve been using Ubuntu, I haven’t had a single infection which means I don’t have to run anti-virus, which means I don’t have to dedicate memory and computing cycles to running it and I don’t have to be a-feared of surfing some shifty porn site.

CON: Tiring

Lastly I just want to say how tiring running Ubuntu is, even for me. Every few days is an uphill battle to conquer some misbehaving software or research solutions to specific problems, where on windows it would be relatively simple. The forums are great and all, but it begins to be repetitive when you go back every other week for something.

Linux is great and is extremely stable, but sometimes it just seems like its a big puzzle with some missing pieces and some pieces that sometimes don’t fit together correctly. With that said it’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever go back to windows for anything more than a sabbatical and I await Hardy Heron with great anticipation.

Thanks Tux.

-Taylor

Update: I’ve gotten a new laptop and my first try to dual boot Heron with vista didn’t pan out so well, but I still plan on dual-booting when it gets to release.

Demonoid is Back!! But Will It Last??

Some of you may have noticed that Torrent tracker giant Demonoid.com went back into business yesterday. First I would just like to say to the Demonoid crew, Welcome Back, you have been sorely missed by myself and many others. Also, I’d like to say that it’s sad to see Deimos himself go, hope things work out for you bro.

Now this warm welcome back comes with a bit of speculation on my part. That is to say, can Demonoid last? There have been so many other sites that have stepped up to fill the void when they went down. Some have come and gone (Oink.cd) some have revamped their current service to become stronger than ever (Pirate Bay) and many more private ratio trackers have sprung out of the demise of Oink. (what.cd, waffles.fm, swebits, etc.) So at this point, can Demonoid restore itself to its former glory? The answer in my opinion is that only time will tell.

That said, I wish them the best of luck, and I can’t wait to start using their site again. Private trackers are nice and all, but can be a major pain due to the amount of work you have to put back into them (i.e. surfing requests pages endlessly to find something actually WORTH uploading so that your ratio doesn’t dwindle and get you banned).

PeerGuardian blocking Revision3

So anyone who knows me, knows I’m a huge Revision3 fan. Diggnation, The Totally Rad Show, Systm, I watch every single show they have.

So imagine my chagrin when suddenly, their site no longer loads in my browser on my Windows machine. For a while, I thought that maybe it was a DNS issue, so I checked OpenDNS using their Cache Check page. All reports were in the green there, so I figured maybe they were just having some issues of their own…Until one day, while trying to browse the forums, PeerGuardian began flashing at me….I opened it up to see what it had blocked…lo and behold, Revision3 was inexplicably on that list! For a minute I thought maybe I was just seeing things…but I re-enabled PG and tried to browse the site again….boom, blocked again!

Now not to drop names or make myself seem like some important person, but I run an IRC network for fans of Rev3, it’s not official or anything, but we do, from time to time, get some of the show hosts and other Rev3 staffers dropping by to chat. On this occasion, thankfully, one such person was in the popSiren chat room. Mauricio Balvinera (aka maubrowncow), one of Revision3’s editors, had stopped by like he does every couple days or so, and I mentioned this to him. He told the head of their IT staff, Chuck Siu, who then provided the picture seen below from a Flickr photostream he googled.

I decided that something really should be done about this, besides just writing a disgruntled blog post and submitting the photo to digg. So I logged onto PhoenixLabs’ IRC Chatroom on Freenode to see if I could get some answers. Here’s a log of my conversation with them.

Apr 10 16:43:53 <TuxOtaku>      hey guys…I have a question about the PeerGuardian Blocklists
Apr 10 16:45:12 <TuxOtaku>      are they user-compiled? or are they something that are maintained internally?
Apr 10 16:45:37 <TuxOtaku>      the reason I’m asking is that certain legitimate sites I frequent are on the blocklists
Apr 10 16:45:43 <TuxOtaku>      namely Revision3.com
Apr 10 16:46:44 <siofwolves>    TuxOtaku, we use the lists that bluetack.co.uk create, as we don’t have our own.
Apr 10 16:46:54 <K`Tetch>       forget it, bluetack runs the lists, and they add stuff and random and NEVER take it off
Apr 10 16:47:52 <TuxOtaku>      damn
Apr 10 16:48:11 <K`Tetch>       they got 1/3 of the net on those lists
Apr 10 16:48:18 <K`Tetch>       they’re meaningless
Apr 10 16:49:21 <TuxOtaku>      meaningless??
Apr 10 16:49:43 <TuxOtaku>      whenever I have PG running and try to browse Rev3’s site, it gets blocked
Apr 10 16:49:44 <K`Tetch>       theres no way to tell who’s anti-p2p, and they mostly use home connections to just LOG
Apr 10 16:50:03 <K`Tetch>       so using bluetack’s lists to try and make you safe during p2p doesn’t work
Apr 10 16:50:15 <K`Tetch>       because the people they’re trying to block, they can’t identify
Apr 10 16:51:50 <TuxOtaku>      sooo, if that’s the case….are there any other lists that PG can use??
Apr 10 16:52:04 <K`Tetch>       not really, you torrent?
Apr 10 16:52:04 <TuxOtaku>      because clearly, that’s bad practise
Apr 10 16:52:26 <K`Tetch>       who can you complain to, complain to bluetack they’ll just ban you

So, not only do PhoenixLabs acknowledge that their software is inherently flawed, they have no means or even motivation (it would seem) to correct the problem.

Bearing that in mind, I no longer use PeerGuardian, and I would advise against installing this program unless you want to see similar issues to what I have experience. If this is how they plan to run things, I’m sure there are better alternatives out there. Also, I would encourage people to speak out against Bluetack and their extremely flawed service, and just generally help get the word out that this is not a product that will aid those in the filesharing and internet privacy communities.