May 14, 2004
Bloglines, Ximian, Modest Mouse and Apple
Bloglines is down. That means instead of reading blogs, I'm writing one. A few interesting things I"ve been thinking about and coming across.
Ximian is releasing their Outlook Exchange connector for Evolution as open source. Hopefully it gets ported to OSX soon. At work I use Microsoft Entourage to check my Exchange email but for some reason it won't allow me to send mail. For that I have to log into remote desktop and do it through Windows 2000. It's a pain.
Modest Mouse is coming on Letterman in a couple hours. Jenny is waiting up to see them. She's a fan since they were small time in Seattle... I've been a fan of Modest Mouse since 1999. It's kind of cool to see them getting big. If you're interested in them, check out this video. Their website is always interesting as well.
Rumors of new Apple Macintosh G5's are hot.. I, however am looking at the great deals on refurbished Dual 2ghz's. $2,399 is pretty tempting.
May 13, 2004
LPhoto, LSongs on Mepis
Last night I was able to install Lphoto (from Linspire on Mepis. It wasn't the easiest process (I had to install a number of Python addons) but I have to say it was worth it.
In case you're up to it, here are basic instructions on Debian:
apt-get install python2.3-dev python2.3-qt3 python2.3-id3lib python2.3-pyxine (I think the last one is only needed for Lsongs)
Extract it to a directory somewhere.
Open the directory from the command line, become root and type:
python install.py
type lsongs or lphoto and if you're lucky, it should run. Straightforward enough.
The application is pretty much an exact clone of iPhoto, but it's a decent clone. As you can see from the screenshot, the interface is pretty much the same. Suprisingly, it's a lot faster than iPhoto is. Actually, it runs at nearly the same speed as iPhoto on my 1.6ghz G5, but I'm running Lphoto on a PII 450. Hopefully in the future Linspire will try to come up with some original features for it, but in the meantime, kudos for releasing it as open source software.
I also installed lSongs. It is, again, a clone of iTunes, but a pretty good one.
Along the same lines, I've really enjoyed Linux on the desktop this time around. I've been using Gnome as my desktop manager (I couldn't get fonts to look even half way decent on KDE). I'll probably write more about this in the near future, but things are looking up for Linux. Less GUI crashes, better office software (kOffice seems underestimated to me), easier to use overall.
May 11, 2004
PearPC - OSX on Linux
This is something I never thought I'd see: OS X Running under Linux.
Sebastian Biallas has created the beginnings of what could prove to become a very, very popular and interesting project.