Mandriva, it’s all about packaging

From time to time distributions such as Mandriva, openSUSE, Gentoo get some attention through some features they introduce, Speedboot, control centers, first to include KMS etc. What I believe these guys miss is that the availability of software is the biggest problem some user might face.
1.Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat (and Fedora more or less) get most of the attention from closed source packagers.
2.Point 1 applies to open source packagers that don’t have resources to produce packages for all the Linux fauna. Not all software is like the kernel or Firefox to be omnipresent.
3.Even if the software is not available for the likes of Debian or Fedora, because of their high penetration, the chances to find an article on how to make things work are high.

Mandriva is not going to cut it unless you are in a well established setting, where you are assured to need nothing more than the available packages. I remember switching from Mandriva and SuSE to Debian and notice how it suddenly becomes possible to run all kind of software. I cannot imagine testing all the things I needed with anything else that a Debian or RedHat system.

I would suggest Mandriva to try to move all its technology to Debian-like packaging and make the system 99.9% percent compatible with Debian.
“Mandriva offers you 5 seconds boot time, super-duper control center, x kernel enhancements and the already proven Mandriva technologies combined with the possibility to install any package available for Debian”.
So this is far-fetched, they have RPM knowledge etc. Replace this with Fedora. I just chose Debian because of the primitive (in my view) packaging system that Fedora offers.

I don’t know the disadvantages, but the advantages are obvious: one less target for independent packagers, access to the whole of Debian software and one more step for compatibility between distributions.

Another Russian lyrics challenge: Ты узнаеш ыё by Krasnaya Plesen

I am looking for the lyrics of another Russian song: Ты узнаеш ыё by Krasnaya Plesen, which I believe is a parody of Ты узнаешь её by Korni.
The last.fm page is at http://www.last.fm/music/+noredirect/Красная+плесень/_/Гр.+Корневая+система+-+Ты+узнаеш+ыё

The beer (or other symbolic reward) is of course again insured.

KDE 4 Plasma theme to make panel usable

Here I introduce my first KDE Plasma theme, very humble artistically but, I believe, most usable.
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?action=content&content=106543

What it do?
It do make Plasma panel usable:
-it do make the task buttons clear.
-it do make the foreground, background and attention requesting tasks clear.
-it do make the pager clear and give big button to tray.
-it don’t confuse user with transparency.

After trying out so many overly artistic themes and finding that none of them is usable for me I made this one. It is lacking in artistic expression, but who cares. Now I can finally differentiate between things in on the panel. For the first since adopting KDE 4.

Alegeri europene – din nou cu bîta în baltă

Au fost alegeri și s-a votat cu picioarele. Cel puțin pentru Vadim și Becali, Elena Băsescu.
La viitoarele alegeri vom trimite în parlamentul european restul vedetelor românești, în funcție de cum apar la televizor, în Libertatea și restul tabloidelor.
Sunt convins am avea foarte mulți adepți și pentru: Monica Columbeanu, Mircea Badea, Andreea Marin și prietena ei*, oricine a făcut o casetă porno, spune prostii la televizor sau pur și simplu arată bine.

Faptul e confirmat de succesul campaniei de imagine al actualului ministru de turism*.

Mai e și o hoardă care-i este fidelă pe viață lui Iliescu, dar cred că moșul găsește prea mică miza pentru a candida la europene.

O analiză scurtă care se potrivește la toate alegerile din România: http://www.starlog.ro/2008/12/04/greu-de-ignorat/

*Nu-mi amintesc toate numele pe moment, mă aștept ca cititorii să-și de seama despre cine e vorba.

Twitter 2 – Nautilus File Manager

How on Earth does it choose when show the “Address Bar” and when not? How does it choose to show (and enable) the “Browse folder” action (Ctrl+Shift+O)?. Damn.

Nautilus kinda blows.