Hardy Heron

This is Nina from West Jersey. She's a prostitute by trade



OK guys it's time for another geek-oriented post. In honor of Ubuntu's latest release coming out tomorrow, I've compiled my own little top ten eleven list of reasons you would want to switch to Ubuntu 8.04

1. You spilled coke on your apple key and just don't want to deal with it any more
2. You can have conversations with Computer Science majors that completely alienate everyone around you
3. You have a lot of spare time on your hands and nothing to do with it
4. Text based interface trumps graphical interface any day of the week
5. You're not really interested in running "mainstream" programs
6. You're broke
7. You want to meet all the friendly new people that hang out in Linux support forums
8. You can use Kernel panics as an excuse for handing in the occasional late paper
9. No one can ever accuse you of supporting a giant corporation
10. You want to become really familiar with the names of every single component and driver that make up your system as you spend hours online hunting them down
11. Feel better than all the people you hear asking questions like "Wait, what's see-plus-plus?"


Convinced?

Download Hardy Heron right here:
http://www.ubuntu.com/

Linux has no Blue Screen of Death--it just dies

Wednesday night I had a philosophy paper to finish before my 8am morning class. Which made it the perfect time to erase my hard drive. Yes, even the mighty Linux is not impossible to crash.

***Skip this part if you don't want nerdy techno-babble***

I had opened up Linux's automatic update system to import plugins from the multiverse spectrum, which includes updates outside Linux's approved web servers and programs list. This gives a lot more updates, but it means not all of them are compatible. The computer froze up while compiling one of these. When I rebooted, my kernel was totally gone. In tears, I called up Vanderbilt's ITS help desk, only to find out that no one there knows how to handle Linux. I have nothing.

***Okay you can start reading again***

I was not even able to start the paper until after 3am. Luckily I had my old Ubuntu live CD in my desk drawer, which means I wrote my paper on about 650 megs of Operating System and entirely in gedit. I finished the paper despite all this 'cause I'm a trooper like that. My professor was very understanding when I explained the reason the font was Courier New instead of Times New Roman and there were no headers, footers or citations. I was planning on going to the Apple store this weekend and buying Leopard so I would have a plan B if Linux flakes out again, but my paycheck was late so I'm still running my laptop on a Live disk (gross). I'm also refusing to reinstall the same distribution I had before, which, puts me in a precarious position, system-wise.