bodom_lx blog and things|

I've never been a big fan of rpm-based Gnu/Linux distributions, since I've always preferred the stability of Debian and Debian based distros, with their great dpkg system.
The problem with Debian on Macbooks is that I do not see both the stability and performance anymore, as I have to use Lenny/Sid. Etch is too old and I don't have the time (*sic*) to play with it to make it work well. Lenny should be next to be released but I don't feel the very famous stability AND lightness of Debian distributions on this release, like I was accustomed in the past years. Is this because I own a Macbook? Maybe, but a Macbook Santa Rosa is nothing more than an Intel-powered notebook with some strange input devices and a strange non-bios system

Regarding Ubuntu, I believe that this distribution has become naff and really slow. See this Slashdot discussion on this topic.

Yesterday I stumbled to Scientechie review of Fedora 10, which convinced me to try it out.
The software shipped with Fedora 10 is aligned with the one provided with the other distributions: Gnome 2.24.0, kernel 2.6.27.5, NetworkManager 0.7.0 (svn) and so on. Read the release notes for more information.

Fedora 10 really surprises me, as it is the first Gnu/Linux distribution in many, many years that makes me feel again the great stability and performance of the Penguin. Therefore I'm writing this review that is also a how-to, as it contains some fixes for Fedora 10 and Macbooks.

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I really like (and miss) Linux Mint Menu (mintmenu), so I installed it on my Debian Sid box and here is how I managed it:

• Install mintsystem and mintmenu deb packages, either by adding mint repository to yout sources.list file or by downloading them from mint packages or simplier, by grabbing them from my blog
• Help it to recognize your applications by symlinking some files in /etc/xdg/menus (as root):
  

  ln -s gnome-applications.menu applications.menu
  ln -s gnome-preferences.menu preferences.menu
  ln -s gnome-settings.menu settings.menu

• Add mintMenu to your Gnome panel..

et voilà! Here are the two deb files I'm using:
mintsystem_61_all
mintmenu_4.2_all

Here is an updated screenshot:

MintMenu complete under Debian Sid

If you also want to enable beagle or tracker, be sure to add the correct search command in the preferences of mintMenu (see the screenshot)

I set up a site for testing my theme on a fresh installation of Wordpress. This immediately brought very interesting results, as I always tested my theme on my blog which had customization/plugins I could not remember.
Nevertheless, I'm going to use this test site for validating the theme against W3C's HTML and CSS validators.

The site is up on http://test.bd-things.net/

Introduction

This guide will help you to install OpenGEU and every other Ubuntu based linux distribution on your Macbook (either "normal" or pro). Even Ubuntu will work with this how-to.
The tutorial is aimed on how to succesfully partition the hard disk and to correctly boot the distribution. For a better post-install configuration I suggest you to follow the Ubuntu Wiki.

This tutorial is also posted on the OpenGEU Wiki
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As I promised more than 2 months ago, I've just released the sourcecode of the wordpress theme on my blog. BD-theme 0.8 is a set of experiments that will bring me to the final release, I cannot promise that it will work perfectly on every browser, but it will almost do the job. Meanwhile, I'm working since 7 days to the next release, 0.9, that should bring to the blog a final layout.
UPDATE 2008-08-22: The theme you're actually seeing in the blog is what will become BD-theme 0.9. I'm testing it.

The first lecture of DSA was already interesting for me, I learned something about "Mutual Recursion" (when two procedures call each other). The pseudo-code example was about checking if a number is either even or odd.
Given that

• 0 is even
• N is even if n-1 is odd
• N is odd if n-1 is even

And the algorithm:

even
INPUT: n – a natural number.
OUTPUT: true if n is even; false otherwise 

odd(n)
  if n = 0 then return FALSE
  return even(n-1)
even(n)
  if n = 0 then return TRUE
  else return odd(n-1)

I implemented a tiny C program which uses it:

Let's see if I can keep understanding things at DSA