In the present cultural atmosphere where people seem to think they must "pick sides", its nice to see an injection of fairness and modesty every once in a while. The article is here.
in this post i am basically going to explain why i am unhappy with the direction of ubuntu, and why xubuntu - and the xfce way - appeals to me so much more. ubuntu, unity, and xubuntu for the past few releases (basically since maverick), the company behind ubuntu has tried to redefine how we interact with our desktop through the development of unity. i've been very supportive of these efforts overall. making design decisions is tough and treacherous, and if anyone has a vision to improve the desktop linux experience, then i applaud their efforts. now i want to evaluate these efforts. does unity improve the desktop experience? meh. definitely a mixed bag. the main problem is that everything feels half baked right now, and the improvements in the next version of ubuntu (quantal) don't really fix most of the issues i have. when analyzed from a user experience point of view, the changes canonical has brought to ubuntu can be largely divided into the following categories (i...
The internet sometimes sucks. I spent about 20 minutes searching the internet for an easy way to decode a base64 file in linux. Shouldn't be that hard. In fact, there is a base64 command. But fuck me, I sure couldn't get it to work with the file I had (which was supposed to decode into a .jpg). There is tons of nonsense about the theory and some stupid unhelpful web applications, but no practical examples. That is, until I stumbled upon this little gem - which gave me exactly what I wanted. perl -MMIME::Base64 -ne 'print decode_base64($_)' < file.txt > out A one-liner in Perl (of course). The fact that this info was so easy, yet it was so hard to find pisses me off. I'm sure there are other ways to do this. In fact, if you know of other ways to do this, then please leave me a comment telling me how. I hate when good info gets buried under the load of crap clogging the internet tubes. Technorati Tags: linux , base64 , perl
Follow these steps to install the Guest Additions on your Debian virtual machine: 1. Login as root; 2. Update your APT database with apt-get update; 3. Install the latest security updates with apt-get upgrade; 4. Install required packages with apt-get install build-essential module-assistant; 5. Configure your system for building kernel modules by running m-a prepare; 6. Click on Install Guest Additions… from the Devices menu, then run mount /media/cdrom. 7. Run sh /media/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions.run, and follow the instructions on screen. Once you install and reboot, then you can add shared folders from the device menu, and mount it with the following command: # mount.vboxsf [the_name_of_the_shared_folder] /media/[name_of_mount_point]
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