Hugh's Worthless Blog

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 It has now been replaced by two $700,000 homes.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.