I've had it up to here with all this Windows 7 propaganda on the net the last month or since whenever MicroSoft released their public beta. Vista was the first time the press was bad to Windows from the beginning for the first time. All previous releases were crap as well, but the press and tech sites never really send out this negaive vibe en-mass as they did with Vista. Now this is no more, Windows 7 sound like the best thing since slices bread, at least accoring to them. Will Windows 7 really be this great? It will hopefully be better then Vista, but it will still be a piece of crap, just like all windows versions that preceded it. Yes, you say, but this time the press is really excited. Indeed, but mostly they are always excited when MS comes up with another OS release and it never turns out to be all that is claimed. Secondly, it could well be better then Vista, at least that is something to sheer about.

Listen, if you pull of a release like Vista when you are not MS, you would lose marketshare so fast. Imagine Canonial releasing a really bad Ubuntu, Vista style. Users would migrate to a better, other linux distro and it would take a long time to rebuild the community they had.

If you've been using computers for more then 10 years, and you're a Windows user and you're buying all the Windows 7 propaganda on the net right now? to you i say: fool you once, shame on them - fool you twice, shame on you!

Imagine that, both Red Hat and Sun Microsystems are about equal in market capitalization ($2.6 billion). This does not mean that RH turns the same profit as Sun does, at this point Sun still has higher profit by a very large margin. The market capitalization shows us what the market thinks the company is worth (or the total value of all the shares of the company). I don't know about you, but i think this is remarkable, a major turning point for RH.

Sometimes vendors do their best to hide stuff from customers. For example, i noticed a lot of laptops using the Intel Core 2 Duo T5870 processor, however searching for the exact specs of this beast you will find exactly nothing on intels site (and it is even the developer site, none the less). Nothing in the available list of cpu and even zero results from the site-search.

Then i stumbled upon intel ARK site, which did contain the information. After entering the cpu model, i got all the specs i was looking for, fast. great site to add to you bookmarks to lookup stuff when you stumble upon one of the OEM offerings with hidden specs.

2009 is already almost 2 weeks old and i still haven't looked back at 2008, I'm probably the last person on the net to do so, which is a feat in itself.

Linux & OSS headlines for 2008 for me include:

• Python 3.0 gets released. the good just keeps getting better.
• The first Android phone ships, it uses the Linux kernel. Not long after that the iPhone gets hacked and is able to boot Linux too. Seems like Linux own the portable-communication-device world.
• The whole Ubuntu/Firefox-EULA discussion

The best games of last year are:

• Wii: Super Mario Galaxy, although it was already available in '07, i only got around playing it in 2008. And everybody loved it, a lot. It is a great game to play with the family. Other great games include 'Lost Winds', 'Zack & Wiki' and 'de Blob'. Although, none have the attraction (to the rest of the family) as Mario has.
• DS: Final Fantasy IV, it is wonderful, goes of to a slow start and it doesn't seem to be as good as FF3, but it picks up pace very fast and doesn't let go.

TV brought some nice things in 08:

• Dexter is the best series,
• but Top Gear is now available on national TV and rates as the best show for me. No Heroes this year, the series was cut short by the Hollywood writers strike.

The price for best Linux distro in 2008 goes to:

• Ubuntu, but just. There are so many new (and older) good distros rising (some even based on Ubuntu) maybe next year the desktop king will be dethroned.

We went shopping recently, to one of the largest convenient stores in Belgium. At several places in the shop they have these TV's playing commercials of their own stuff. Normally i don't pay much attention to it, but this one caught my eye. It was about their on-line ordering system, and they were demoing how to buy stuff from them from the internet. The above picture is a close up from the browser used during the presentation. Statcounter i can understand, but the bittorrent and music finder links are a bit weird, don't you think?

On a normal PC, the latest Ubuntu isn't that much of a big improvement, however if you're an eee-pc owner it is a great upgrade, more on that possibly in a later post.

I did a clean install, wiped my previous xubuntu installation and started from scratch. The problem ofcourse was that my previous install was already a while ago and i didn't quite remember exactly what i did to get it booting from an USB disk. The new USB install creator doesn't work for USB disks, i guess it only works for USB sticks, which is silly. Luckily my bash history is long enough and i got it right after a few tries.

The procedure is as followed (i used xubuntu, but this method works for all ubuntu versions);

• First create a FAT16 partition on your USB disk, important to remember is the filesystem size limit is 2GB, so do not create anything bigger then this, i simply took 900MB (using gparted).
• Run syslinux on the newly created partition. 'syslinux -s /dev/sd'
• Run fdisk on the drive and set the FAT16 partition to bootable. 'fdisk /dec/sd'
• Mount the ubuntu iso image. 'mount -o loop xubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso /mnt'
• Copy the isolinux content to your USB disk. 'cp -a /mnt/isolinux /media/disk'
• Rename the isolinux config file to syslinux. 'cd /media/disk/isolinux && mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg'
• Get the HD disk install kernel from Ubuntu at - http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/intrepid/main/installer-i386/current/images/hd-media/ - change the 'intrepid' depending on what Ubuntu version you want to install. You need to download both vmlinuz and initrd.gz files.
• Create an install directory on your USB disk and copy the downloaded files into it. 'mkdir /media/disk/install && cp ~/downloads/vmlinuz ~/downloads/initrd.gz /media/disk/install'
• Now, just copy the iso file onto your USB disk and you're ready! 'cp -a /home/dirk/Temp/xubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386.iso /media/disk'