Hugh's Worthless Blog

The box I was hosting my Linux mirror site on is going to be upgraded so I moved my archives to a new box and updated the distros there a bit. I am pretty much dropping Mandriva and Slackware which just are not all that exciting anymore, and keeping more in tune to the various Debian distros that I now prefer (MEPIS, Ubuntu, KNOPPIX, etc).

Several major distributions made major releases recently, including SUSE with version 10 and Mandriva with their 2006 release, but I think the distro that is really shaking up the world is Ubuntu and their latest release of 5.10, the "Breezy Badger". Their new release does not add too much that is truly breathtakingly new, but they have polished up many little problems from 5.04 ("Hoary Hedgehog"), and made a completely open, 1-CD install distro that has solid open support and updates, and with firm financial ground. They appear to be the "Red Hat" of the era, the distro of choice for academia and other "self-supporters", those who do not want to or cannot shell out lots of cash for support and have the knowledge to do it themselves. Red Hat themselves are just a 100% commercial company now with some pretty lofty support fees, and I do not consider Fedora stable enough to use on anything except as an experimental test platform. My big US hope wa...

Well, I see my last post was at the beginning of the playoffs before the Cards swept the Padres. Unfortunately, their season ended last night as they were shut down by Roy Oswalt and the Astros. And the Red Sox did not have much of a chance either. In any case, two great pitching staffs will be playing in the World Series this year and it should be interesting to see what happens. However, the Cardinals still had a great season having won 100 games two years in a row and making it to the World Series last year and to the NLCS this year. A World Series championship would have been nice, but what other team has lost in one NLCS and lost in one World Series in the past two years? The answer: The Astros in about one week. Hey, I have a 50% chance on getting this right, and even with the way the Astros shut down the Cardinals, I am still betting on the White Sox to finish them off.

Playoff time again! Go Cards ! I sure hope they don't choke against the Padres . They were not looking so good late in September, but they did come back to life this past weekend to end up with 100 wins for the season. Unfortunately, the dreaded Yankees are again in the picture, but I want to see them beat the Angels just so the Red Sox can kick their butts again like last year. I think a repeat Red Sox-Cardinals Series would be nice, but this time the Cards had better show some life!

Wow, I can't believe people are actually spamming blog comments now. I had to go back and delete some annoying comments from my extremely boring posts. I was wondering why so many people suddenly wanted to comment about Linux distributions!

Version 4.0.2 of Knoppix finally came out last week and now wuarchive is proud to hoouse both the CD and DVD versions of the English versions. I think is it interesting how if you access wuarchive via HTTP you cannot see the large DVD iso images (larger than 1GB), but if you use FTP you can! How weird. It must be something with Apache. Late last night I checked distrowatch and noticed that a new Puppy Linux release (1.0.5) had finally come out after 2 long months. It sounds like they made quite a few changes. But another thing I noticed was a distribution called featherweight linux based on version 0.7.5 of Feather Linux . Version 0.7.5? I thought 0.7.4 was the last and final release! It looks like someone else has taken over and has brought Feather Linux bask to life. Good for them!

A long awaited Games Knoppix release has come out, albeit only now on DVD. I do have a few DVD burners at work to try it out, but it did take while to download the ISO with BitTorrent yesterday. You can FTP the English version from ftp.wustl.edu . I will probably end up burning the beast on Monday on our iMac G5, since the older Dell system I have available with a DVD burner only burns DVD+R/RW but I only have DVD-R/RW media right now in the office! Time to buy a combo drive that burns both, but should I get a dual layer burner too? Decisions, decisions... The Cards have clinched the Central Division but the Astros have refused to lose the last two nights and the Cubs came back and beat the Cards last night. They had better not lose two to the Cubbies this weekend! That champagne is getting stale!

Last night the Cards beat the Pirates and the Astros lost to drop the magic number down to 4 . Amazingly neither my wife nor my daughter seems to care. How sad. But the Rams lost to the 49ers on Sunday, looking amazingly as bad as they did last season (Wow, horrible special teams, again? Is anybody surprised?) Switchfoot's new album, Nothing is Sound was officially released today. Now I must deliberate the difficult decision of which version to get! Get one with a bonus song at Wal-Mart or Target, or just get the one with a bonus DVD for an extra $2. It is pretty annoying having to decide on what version of an album to get. There were already 3 or 4 different Beautiful Letdown versions, some with extra songs or a DVD or with a free album, etc. What ever happened to the idea of just releasing the same old recording? Cheap CD and DVD media makes it too easy to make a billion different versions of everything. Anyway, the album sounds good from the (*cough*) "online" versi...

Hmm, not too much. The Cardinals are cruising through the rest of the season now with their magic number down to 10 after last night's win over the Mets. Carpenter is up to 21 wins and looks the the Cy Young winner for the year. Good for him! No new Linux distributions of note in the past few weeks. MEPIS 3.3.2 should be finalized soon, but it is just an update. Version 3.4 should be a more substantial update when it moves to KDE 3.4. I am also awaiting the CD version of KNOPPIX 4.0 which should be pretty soon. I am currently listening to the new Audio Adrenaline CD Until My Heart Caves In , which is the first CD of theirs I actually purchased. I think the new AA sounds nothing like the old Bloom/Zombie AA which I never really cared for back in the mid-90's when I first started listening to Christian music. I much prefer the "Tyler Burkum" sound which is now their mainstay. But hey, I always preferred the more "pop" style of Christian music as you can tel...

For anybody looking for a US location to download the new KNOPPIX 4.0 DVD, you can find it on wuarchive.wustl.edu where I grabbed it via Bittorrent last week. Weighing in at over 3GB it is quite a download, but pretty nifty to have on one DVD once it is done. I am anxiously awaiting the CD version which should be coming out shortly, and I will also post that on wuarchive for us midwesterners to easily download.

Well, since I now use this blog for nothing but adding links for google to spider through, I will add a link for the Washington U Speleology Site which has lovely pictures of caves in Missouri. These are folks in my department, so why not! Myself, I don't know a thing about caves.

Argh, summer in St. Louis! This was one hot weekend. The only things that weren't hot were the Cardinals losing 2 of 3 to the dreaded Cubbies. Everyone's air conditioners were running full blast, including our neighbors who had to go three days last week without theirs when their old one went belly up. Any HVAC engineering folks designing new HVAC systems for buildings in St. Louis should make sure they design them for these nasty consecutive 100 degree days. You could call up Coad Engineering and use their innovative new on-line HVAC design software at ESI Programs (Engineering Software International) to design an optimal system on-line! Was that a shameless plug? You bet it was!

I have recently posted my family's review of many children's and science museums we have visited over the years. We had just returned from Memphis a few days ago after visiting the very nice Children's Museum of Memphis , and we realized we have visited so many of them that we were starting to mix them up. So what a better way to keep straight our highlights of our visits then on a museum review web page ! We will update it as often as we visit more such museums!

It looks like Patrick Kolla has finally released the official 1.4 release. I had been using the beta and then release candidate of 1.4 and they were working great, but it is good to see he now considers it ready to roll. With this new release, I think SpyBot is definitely the slickest anti-spyware product out there, although I do like AdAware and even "Microsoft"'s product (if you can call it really theirs). You can grab a copy from the official site or from my mirror site . There is also a new version 3 release of KANOTIX (KANOTIX-2005-03.iso) which is available at ftp.wustl.edu . This includes the new 2.6.11.11 kernel, KDE 3.4.1 among other updates. KANOTIX continues to be the bleeding edge live Linux CD out there.

Well the Cardinals have beat the Red Sox two in a row. Too bad they couldn't do that last fall during the World Series!! The Cards are currently 38-20, wow! Of course they had a great regular season last year before collapsing in the Series. Who knows what will happen this fall...

Wow, I haven't posted anything in a while! Today's latest news is the 3.9 release of KNOPPIX, available from wuarchive.wustl.edu . This release finally includes KDE 3.4 and also updated wifi drivers. The next 4.0 release will be available both on DVD and CD versions. More news includes a "lite" version of MEPIS, but that is only available by subscription for now. The latest SimplyMEPIS is 3.3.1 which I have installed on a couple machines here at the university, and it works just splendidly.

The ISO images for the new Mandriva "Limited Edition" are now available on the public mirrors, including my own . I have seen a pretty high level of traffic there for the three CD set, so it appears to be quite popular. I also put the small LiveCD produced by the MandrakeClub Netherlands (MCN), MCNLive "Brugge" there as well. It is based on the Limited Edition release and runs as a LiveCD that also allows you to install the full Mandriva release. Pretty neat.

Time for some baseball commentary. Despite losing after converting a triple play last night, the Cardinals are having a great early season. The starters look pretty amazing so far, and the batters are starting to come together led by, who else, Albert Pujols. It is equally fun to watch what has become of the overpaid, full of themselves Yankees. They share the basement with Tampa Bay after getting beat by them last night. What fun!

For some reason he is still listed for adoption on the APA site but our cat has now been home for about three weeks. After working on names for a while we have decided to call him Slinky, for he does "walk down stairs alone on in pairs", and he is an incredibly flexible, spring-like critter.

Our old house before demolition  Our lovely old home in Brentwood was ripped down and replaced with two monstrous blobs of homes by Kingbridge Homes . It was weird to go to their site and see our previous home being shown as the before part of their before and after montage . The whole city of Brentwood is going way too upscale for just about any normal folks to move in there now. We bought this house in 1991 for $155,000, sold it in 1996 for $187,000 and it sold before demolition last year in the mid $300K range. It has now been replaced by two $700,000 homes. Incredible...

Smokey, our new cat  Since our old cat died last month, we saved a new cat from the shelter. We looked online and went back to where we found our first cat, Bill, at the APA on Hanley in Brentwood. Smokey is a nice cat! I posted this picture mostly because I was trying out the new Picasa 2 application from Google . It is pretty neat.

Well, it seems like this is a busy weekend for releases. The long awaited KNOPPIX 3.8.1 was finally released, although I was amazed it did not ship with KDE 3.4. However, the new KANOTIX 2005-02 release does come with 3.4 which may make it more interesting than the standard KNOPPIX release. Get both at the WUARCHIVE KNOPPIX mirror site. A bug release of SLAX has also been released to solve some bugs found in SLAX 5.0.0. On completely unrelated news, my wife has finished up her room parties web site that I am hosting at the university on my neighbor's old home PC. In fact I just bought five old PC's from Simplified Computers for the total mind boggling price of $180 (including shipping!). That makes even RetroBox look expensive (although their shipping is pretty steep!)

The folks at SLAX just released version 5.0.0 which many updates, but the neatest part is it allows people to save their LiveCD configurations on the SLAX website using "webconfig". You select a 10+ character passphrase which you use to save your unique configuration online, so you just boot with the passphrase and the machine boots as you last configured it. Neat idea. You can find the latest version on my SLAX mirror site The KNOPPIX team has announced their latest release, version 3.8.1, will be coming out any day now with 2.6.11, unionfs, more wifi support and permanent home directories on NTFS filesystems. Once it becomes available, I will grab it with BitTorrent and dump it on wuarchive.wustl.edu.

Well, Illinois made a game of it last night, coming from behind with their 3 point shooting to come close in the end, but there wasn't quite enough. North Carolina won a well deserved game with Sean May just dominating the inside game. So the NCAA tournament is over, and St. Louis did a wonderful job hosting the Final Four. So now it is time to start thinking baseball!!

Well, it should be a wild Final Four here this weekend with Illinois, UNC, Louisville and Michigan State. I was hoping WVU would pull out the upset over Louisville, but it was not to be. Those were four great games last weekend, though. I think the Final Four this year is too close to call. Yes, even Michigan State could do it. You heard it here first! On the world of Linux distributions, I will first have to say that something has gone amiss with the new wuarchive so my home directory there is not working. I have grabbed a new name for my own mirror site though from dyndns.org with the lovely name of mymirrors.homelinux.org , which contains both my Linux mirrors and my freeware mirrors . My most recent updates there include the latest patched Mozilla 1.0.2, the just released Puppy 1.0.0 versions and the Ubuntu hoary release candidate .

With the CeBIT starting up in Germany, Klaus and the KNOPPIX folks have released a new version 3.8 for the convention. It is available via BitTorrent at stacktrace.org , or via FTP/HTTP at WUARCHIVE.WUSTL.EDU , of course! I have dumped it on the mirror but have yet to try it out myself yet. I have also put the beta version of SAM (sam-2005-2beta.iso) on my own Linux mirror site . Like KNOPPIX 3.8 it also uses the 2.6.11 kernel with its goal being a system for "average users".

Well, they made it unbeaten until the very last game, but even the mighty Vashon Wolverines could not put away Poplar Bluff and their star center Tyler Hansbrough. I guess they will no longer be ranked #1 in the country. At least it was good to see them play in Class 5 where they belong. If they were still in Class 4 like last year it would been easy for them to have swept through the season, but it would not mean as much. In the big NCAA world though, Illinois came back from their lone loss last Sunday against Ohio State to sweep through the Big Ten tournament, ending with another convincing win over a strong Wisconsin team. They are going to be a hard team to beat.

I have written two little free utilities that I have posted on my website (although the actual executables reside on artsci.wustl.edu to save my bandwidth.) The first is missing.exe , a standalone version of my What's Missing calculator that also lets you write a full amortization of the loan. By doing so that replicates the functionality in the Generic Loan Calculator , so it pretty much combines the two programs into one standalone application. It is a 310KB Win32 executable that was written with Rapid-Q that should run on just about anything, but it does not have the ability to print or save results. You have to copy and paste the fields to do that for now. My other new application is another ~300KB Rapid-Q program called mathsolv.exe that solves quadratic equations, the pythagorean theorem, distances between x,y points, and solves for characteristics of circles. Just a little app I thought might be useful for middle schoolers like my daughter!

As you expect, nothing can stay perfect. So the Illini finally lost yesterday in the come from behind win for Ohio State. Some folks thought they needed to learn how to lose one and now they did. Now we will have to see how they react in the conference tournament. As for Vashon, they won two more and are again headed for the Missouri Final Four. Now they face two really tough teams from outside the metro area, first Springfield Kickapoo and then either Poplar Bluff or KC Rockhurst. It should make for some interesting games next weekend.

I find it interesting that there are two undefeated #1 ranked basketball teams just a few hundred miles apart right here in the midwest. One is the more well known Fighting Illini team in Illinois, but the other team actually is running with a longer unbeaten record. That would be the Vashon Wolverines out of St. Louis, the number one ranked high school team in the country. They have currently won 57 consecutive games including going completely undefeated last year in winning the class 4 state championship. This year they have been moved to class 5 but continue to beat every team in their path. I believe they are much more likely to go completely undefeated for the year than the Illini, but the Illini are facing much tougher competition from aroudn the country. The Wolverines now just have to win 4 more games to win another championship. It should be fun to watch!

Well, a lot of new things happened since Friday. On Friday the 25th the long awaited MEPIS 3.3 Final was released and I put it online on wuarchive almost immediately as SimplyMEPIS-3.3.iso . Already over 2.7TB of it (yes, that is TB) have been downloaded from wuarchive, so it is a rip roaring popular success. I will have to check the new MEPIS forums to see if there are any issues with the final release. The Mozilla folks also released version 1.0.1 of Firefox to address some security flaws that had been found in the browser. It is good to see them so responsive (as opposed to the developer of the most popular web browser in the world.) I have upgraded all my personal machines and the new version runs flawlessly. There have also been new releases of SAM and Featherlinux. The SAM release is version 2005-1SE which is primarily a bug fix. The Featherlinux release is version 0.7.4 which mainly updated some packages.

Since there is no exciting new Linux news today, I will just say that we finished up ours and my mother-in-law's taxes this weekend using TurboTax online. Anybody can file there for free by using TaxFreedom.com , and then you either pay for the state, or just do that one by hand. The online version is almost identical to the standalone version, although we did find it annoying not having an "Open Form" option like in standard TurboTax to go straight to Schedule D or whatever specific form you want to view. Overall though, it worked well and our taxes are now completed. After completing my mother-in-law's taxes it amazed me to realize that even though our family of 4's gross household income is substantially higher than hers, she is paying over twice as much federal income tax due to a myriad of factors (our before tax retirement contributions, itemized deductions, child credits, her capital gains and interest income). Is it fair? Who really knows.

It sounds like the final 3.3 will not be ready until after LinuxWorld, but they did release test03 this past weekend for the conference. Other new releases this weekend included a finalized version 2005-01 of KANOTIX and a finalized 2005-1 version of SAM. Isn't is interesting how many different distros are using the same naming convention now? It does make it easier to date a release if the date is actually in the name. The funny thing is that MEPIS went the other way -- they used to have the year in the release number but now they switched to 3.3. Go figure...

With the Super Bowl over, I am now concentrating on more exciting matters like what Linux distros are being released. The top two on my list are the final release of MEPIS 3.3 at LinuxWorld (probably right on Feb. 14), and the release of the GamesKnoppix 0.3 , reportedly at the end of February. To keep up I like to read DistroWatch Weekly every Monday morning.

It was a good game, with the outcome uncertain until the last minute. But as they have done all year, the Patriots defense did what was needed to stop the Eagles and win the game. After beating the Colts, Steelers and finally the Eagles in the playoffs, you have to admit they are the best team in the NFL and deserve once again to be champions. So much for the NFL this year! Now my blog will have nothing to talk about except geeky matters until the baseball season starts....

Warren has just released a second test release of SimplyMEPIS 3.3 and you can find it on wuarchive and all the other mirror sites. This latest version includes Skype preinstalled as well as new pulldown menus on the grub page to make it easier to select languages and screen resolutions. MEPIS will have boot 1512 at LinuxWorld in Boston next week.

Warren and the folks at MEPIS have released a test version of SimplyMEPIS, which is now versioned with numbers so it is version 3.3, not 2005.01 or anything, and it comes with options to boot using either kernel 2.4.29 or 2.6.10 with a final release around Feb 15. It has many of the features from the ProMEPIS betas as well as a "new look", so I am interested to try it out myself. Grab the ISO from my MEPIS mirror on wuarchive .

Firefox is great, but on my one computer, a 166 MHz Pentium MMX w/ 64MB RAM, even Firefox ran a bit poky (although it flies compared to IE 5.5 or Netscape 7.2). But today with the release of its new version, I heard about this fantastic Gecko based open source browser K-Meleon . It has actually been around a while but does not get the press that Firefox does since it is Win32 only, and not as easily configurable with plug-ins. Instead you have to configure it by (gasp!) editing text files, like on that horrible Linux operating system (unlike the wonderful Windows systems, where you must click through layers of menus to configure things -- much better, of course, Bill!). We won't mention the countless GUI interfaces that have been written for Linux to easily modify those text configuration files if you prefer things that way, but I digress. I was talking about K-Meleon, which truly flies on my antique Pentium MMX and works with most any site that works fine with Mozilla or Netscape....

Well, not too surprisingly the Patriots and Eagles moved on to play each other in the Super Bowl. As a Rams fan it is fun to watch two defenses play who can really make some good plays. The Patriots shut down both the Colts and Steelers convinvingly, and the Eagles defense did the same to the Vikings and the Falcons. I think the game will be closer than most folks think, but the Patriots will pull it out at the end. I am now hosting a new distro both on my Linux Mirror site , and at WUARCHIVE , which is a stripped down Live Linux CD which boots into Mozilla Firefox and nothing else. It is called KioskCD and it runs on any PC with a CD-ROM and an ethernet port using DHCP. It is a small download but works quite well. Visit the KioskCD web site and download it from my site or wuarchive .

This year for the first time in about 5 years I did not purchase TurboTax to do my taxes. Why? Because this year I can file them online completely for free, and so can you! Just go to the IRS Web site and click on the link for Free File there. It then tells you which of the free services you can use. Some of them are free for everybody, and they just assume you will pay the extra $8-10 extra to file your state taxes through them too. However, since most state returns are pretty simple, you can just use the free federal on-line and do the state returns manually easily enough. If you feel uncertain sending all that information online, you can also grab federal tax preparation software completely free from TaxAct , which hopes you will at least e-file through them for $7.95 (or for free through the IRS link). In reality, paying $8-$10 to file both returns electronically is a pretty good deal, but I prefer going the completely cheap method myself.

I wasn't sure when or if they would ever release a new ISO, but after the big success of the the Game Knoppix releases, the Live Linux Game Project has released a new version of their Knoppix based Games CD: llgp-0.1pre0.iso . Grab it from the KNOPPIX directory on WUARCHIVE .

Well, unlike last weekend where 3 of 4 underdogs won away from home, this weekend all 4 favored home teams won, even if the Steelers did so by the skin of their teeth. The Jets sure make games exciting, but alas, their kicker ended their possible Cinderella season. The mid season Rams reappeared in Atlanta to watch the Dunn, Vick and Rossum running show trample them down into the ground. It was ugly to watch as a Rams fan, but it was cool to actually watch a special teams return team who knew what they were doing. The Falcons were actually blocking for the return back on kick returns, instead of trying to take the ball away from him. Plus they even knew how to tackle which means the kicker does not have to do it. The true display of a defense this weekend, though, was the Patriots who just shut down Peyton Manning up in wintry Foxboro. After squeaking by the Jets, the Steelers should have a tough one again, even if they did beat the Patriots during the regular season. My predictions...

This last weekend the MEPIS folks released a new beta of the ProMEPIS product, namely ProMEPIS-2005.b04.iso which includes the 2.6.10 kernel which should give it a performance boost. The b03 release was very solid, so I am anxious to see how this new release fares.

Amazingly, the Rams, Vikings and Jets all advanced this weekend. Not surprisingly, though, Peyton Manning and the Colts destroyed the Broncos. This sets up a great game next week in New England with the Colts vs. the Patriots, and some interesting games in Atlanta and Philly. The Rams could actually do it in the Atlanta dome if they can slow down Vick, but I am not holding my breath. And the Vikings looked really good yesterday, and if the Eagles are rusty (and being without Terrell Owens), that could be a close game as well. Most people are expecting the Steelers to beat the Jets, but you never know there either. It should be an interesting weekend of football. Does any "expert" out there think any NFC team can actually beat the Steelers, Patriots or Colts? The "experts" are pretty much assuming whatever AFC team makes it to the Super Bowl will win. Hey, they all said that the Rams would beat the Patriots a few years back, and that sure didn't happen!!

The new 3.7-0.2 release of the Games Knoppix CD has been released. Find out more at their site or download it fast from wuarchive.wustl.edu . Microsoft has released "its own" (i.e. they purchased Giant software) anti-spyware utility in a Beta release. I wonder how it compares to AdAware and SpyBot (my two favorites). I will have to download it and find out. Some folks on SlashDot joke how it probably detects FireFox as spyware. I wouldn't be surprised.

I never would have believed it, but due to beating the Jets in overtime along with a Vikings loss, the Rams actually made it into the playoffs to meet the Seahawks in Seattle. They actually have a reasonable chance to beat the Seahawks too, but once they have to travel to Atlanta, Philly, Green Bay or where ever, they are destined to get beaten. The defense actually showed some energy yesterday and Steven Jackson again showed his value in some key plays. I think it is time for Marshall Faulk to be used in special situations and to make Jackson the primary running back. After a nice holiday break I am back in the office at the university, with a lovely new Tux poster on my wall from Cafe Press . Time to see what is new in the world of Linux distributions ! I also have to update my St. Louis Buffet page . I ate too much over the holidays, but it sure was fun...