I ran 3 miles yesterday at a 9 minute pace. Looks like my ankle is nearly back to normal. It started feeling a little weird at the 2.75 mile mark so I decided to stop at 3. Nevertheless, this means that I can go back to playing raquetball! Now if I can just find someone at the L.A. Fitness to play with.
I have two savings accounts. One from HSBC Direct and the other from ING Direct. Both are a really good way to keep your money liquid but earn a decent annual percentage yield. Neither requires an initial deposit, and HSBC will issue a debit card if you wish–an option that I skipped so that I’m not tempted to spend the money. I have had the HSBC account since I started working at Danger, and I have built it up to a pretty decent balance. This month, I earned $7.40 interest based on a 5.05% APY, putting my total YTD earnings after two months at $10.40.
That may not seem like alot, but given the spectrum of interest rates on savings accounts I’m getting the returns of a 12 month CD. Without the whole “you can’t touch your money for a year” thing =D. I have only recently started my ING direct account so it hasn’t accrued any amount of interest. It has a slightly lower APY than the HSBC account, but 4.50% is still nothing to sneer at. I’m thinking of making it my road bike fund.
I bought a PS3. Amazon had a sweet deal that I finally gave in to: 100 bucks less than retail for a 60GB PS3 (the one with hardware emulation) with 5 free blue ray DVD’s. I missed the better deal–the one where you get a free DVD remote and Resident Evil Apocalypse on Blu-Ray. Oh well.
Now for a HDTV on which the glory of this 7th generation console can be seen. That probably won’t happen for quite a while though =P.
Fedora 7 is a very good Linux distribution. However, it is not without it’s faults. Last post I outlined the things that I liked about Fedora 7. This time, I’ll discuss the shortcomings of the distribution. Note that all of these are opinions and based on my own experience and user level. I am in no way an authority on this =D. Let’s get started shall we?
XGL/Compiz/Beryl
I usually judge a distribution on how easy it is to set up Beryl and the cooresponding native drivers. Fedora actually isn’t too bad, but it’s not good enough to get a mark in the good column for this category. Since everything is handled through its package manager, theoretically I should simply be able to search for my NVidia drivers, install them, and then install all the Beryl packages. Unfortunately this did not work. I ended up with a white screen, even after adding beryl –use-copy to my Gnome session. So, in short, I’m sure I could get it to work, but it’s not as easy to set up as it was for me using Suse 10.2 for this particular Dell at work.
Sudoers Access Denied
Seems like Fedora took a page out of Madriva and Ubuntu’s book for this one. The default user that you create during installation is not granted sudo rights. This results in you having to edit the sudoers file in /etc/sudoers. This is a hassel if you are a pseudo power user because you have to find the file (thank google for that), and then decipher its cryptic syntax in order to be able to give yourself sudo rights. I simply created a group called sudoers, and edited the following line:
## Allows people in group wheel to run all commands # %wheel ALL=(ALL) ALL becomes %sudoers All=(ALL) ALL
Package Manager Searches
You can forget using the search function on the package manager to look for any librarys you think you may need. It appears that the search is not very smart. You need to know the exact name of the library or software that you are looking for in order to find what you need. For example, say we are looking for a plugin for xmms that would enable mp3 playback. An obvious query that comes to mind would be: “xmms mp3.” Sadly it yields nothing.
Random Updates
It appears that Fedora will only check for updates after a reboot. I am unsure if they have a daemon running in the background to check for updates to packages, or if I simply don’t know how to configure it. I also have not found a way as of yet to run a manual update, and the update manager tends to be a little flakey.
Despite its annoyances, Fedora is quite impressive. It definitely deserves a high place on my favorite Linux distribution list; of which it currently holds third =).
Been a while since I launched a Linux post. What better catalyst than the recent release of Fedora 7. Note the omission of ‘core.’ Since one of my companies proprietary tools had a domestic disagreement with how SuSE 10.2 handles USB devices, I was forced to replace my usual distribution with Fedora. Despite all the purple in the default theme, so far it has been a great experience. There are a couple of things that Fedora does right, and a couple of things it does wrong. Let us begin our two post discussion of Fedora with the good:
Installation
First on the list of good things is the installation procedure. It took me less than 20 minutes to install Fedora 7 from a DVD. That is very impressive. Additionally, all the installer screens are sleek, intuitive, and very well designed. Creating a custom harddrive partition schema was much faster than in any other distribution I have used so far.
Fonts
Fedora’s biggest big green check in my book is the way it renders fonts. Or maybe it’s just because SuSE 10.2 does this horribly. Fonts in Fedora are beautiful, crisp, and sub-pixel hinted straight out of the box. No screwing around with byte-code values or dpi settings. It just works.
Hardware Compatibility
Something should also be said about Fedora’s hardware compatibility. Hands down this has to be the most hardware friendly distribution of Linux on the market. It automatically detected my NVidia Quadro and configured the xorg perfectly.
Package Management
One thing that confuses lots of Linux newbies is how to get software on their machine. These days most Linux distributions have jumped on the package manager bandwagon–to the advantage of users everywhere, but users must still install package repositories because of legal issues with some software that cannot be shipped with any distribution (mp3 support is a good example). Fedora simplifies the repository setup process by having the Red-Hat Package Management (rpm) system do all the work for you. To install a new repository like LIVNA, simply go to the website and install the repository rpm. That’s it. No more configuration needed. New software can be browsed relatively easily via Fedora’s dependency resolving package manager.
So far I am quite happy with Fedora, but it is not without it’s annoyances and room for improvement. I’ll save that for next post =D.