A blog entry on Eleven is Louder reminds me of the fact that there really are a whole lot of distros and that there are some really good ones worth checking out. Argh! So many distros, so little time. I used to check out distros but mainly the ones that run on live CDs because I didn’t really want to mess with the hard drive and I just test them for the sake of satisfying my curiosity.
Among the list of distributions worthy of checking out are:

GoboLinux
Draco
Blag
Enlisy
Protech

Blag has a very interesting name. This distro is fascinating because it …read more

Every Linux geek I’ve met recommended an essay called “In the Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson. I suppose that it’s a bit dated because some of the things that were true back during the time it was written don’t necessarily hold true anymore. In any case it really is an interesting read because it gives new Linux users insight and humor at the same time.
From that essay, you could learn something about Linux and other operating systems as well. I didn’t really know about BeOS until I read that essay. And there were …read more

Eleven is Louder summarizes what office suites are available for us that are open souce software. Of course it has OpenOffice.org in the list. However, it reminds us that Lotus Symphony does exist and that there are other suites like the GNOME Office Suite as well as the KDE Office Suite. I’ve tried using the GNOME Office Suite before but for the sake of compatibility I am using OpenOffice.org especially because I have to collaborate with co-workers on documents. I know that OpenOffice.org is commonly included in various Linux distributions and this blog entry shows you …read more

Akkana Peck has an awesome guide to writing your own Twitter client in Python. The timing of this article is perfect because I’m now using Empathy and I currently don’t know of any plugins to let me follow and post to Twitter.
What do you need?

python-twitter (source:http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/)
SimpleJSON (source: http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/simplejson)
Tkinter or python-tk

Akkana Peck’s guide teaches you what to write, line by line. Hers might be a simple Twitter client but it’s functional. Her guide teaches you what packages are needed, what the commands are for, and which variables are customizable. The guide also notes which lines of code …read more

I’ve been having some difficulty using Pidgin these past how many days so I was looking for another messenger client to check out. Incidentally I stumbled upon a blog entry about CenterIM, a messenger client for the command line/terminal. Knowing that it’s available in the repositories made me get it right away.
Pros:

CenterIM consumes barely 1% of my memory. I am running it on an Acer Aspire One 150Bb with 1GB of RAM.
Several IM protocols are supported: Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, LiveJournal. It also has an RSS Reader.
You can have several conversations at the same time.
The screen shows …read more

I’ve recently talked about using Newsbeuter and it has been interesting for me because of how focused I am on reading whatever content I get online through it. However, knowing that I need to somehow fix some things so I could work better with it, I decided to make a config file that does that.
My needs are mainly for saving articles in one spot, indicating which browser to use and indicating where podcasts must be saved. I am still happy with the keyboard shortcuts that are available by default and the colors look good in my eyes. …read more

I’ve been looking for a better way to read my RSS feeds and I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to take it away from the web UI of Google Reader. As much as I love Google Reader, I realized that I’d like a different way to read my feeds these days. Google Reader has been overwhelming, so to speak.

Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.
Enter Newsbeuter. It is a terminal-based RSS reader which you could easily use and tweak according to your needs. For one thing you could export your OPML file and use that as …read more

Do you ever get a lot of video links from friends over IM and you wish you could actually just save them first? Well, you could download them via clive on the command line.
It’s really nifty if you could save them and video them later, without having to browse it on the internet first. At least, for me, I think this is really cool.
Another awesome thing about clive is that it could download videos even from Google Video, CCTV, among others. See? Even other sites with video streaming could be a source for extraction …read more

Looking for a way to surf the ‘net on the terminal? Use w3m!
I’ve used w3m time and again because it’s quaint that way. I usually use it as an Emacs macro/extension. It’s nice! I could read webpages while in Emacs, aside from the terminal.
You could look it in Synaptic if you’re using Ubuntu. You could also check it in apt. Or your package manager.
There are really nifty commands from the w3m manual:
w3m [options] [filename|URL] -s — this one is for displaying pages in shift JIS so if you’re viewing a Japanese page, chances …read more

I must confess. I have bad command line habits! I make directories and subdirectories, one directory at a time… Meaning, I make a directory then cd to that then make a subdirectory from it. However, I learned today that I don’t have to do that. Thanks to the article: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits. It lists down the bad habits and the good ones.
Part of how the bad command line habits have been formed when I think about the way it is on the graphical user interface, like what steps I have to take. These days …read more