2011-08-07

Featured Comments: Week of 2011 July 31

There were a few posts that got a handful of comments, so I'll try to repost a few from each.

Review: CentOS 6.0

Reader MIchael J King had a clarification countering one of my gripes: "The Live DVD of CentOS 6 has the special effects you were craving plus many many more applications including kde ones. On my Thinkpad T61 it runs perfectly and is very stable with support to 2016 and beyond."
An anonymous commenter supported my conclusion: "Except for a few nits, CentOS6 and Scientific Linux 6 should be identical. They have been in my testing (for server use). Why anyone would choose CentOS over SL after the repeated delays in updates (for both versions 5 and 6) in the last couple of years is a complete mystery to me. Scientific Linux is also free, is updated more frequently, and is supported by CERN and Fermi National Lab. No contest."
Reader Troy Dawson, who it seems is also a Scientific Linux developer, had this clarification for one of my assertions: "I hate to say bad things about your friend, but he's wrong about SL 'reverse-engineer'ing the RHEL packages. Unless a package has to be changed for branding reasons, we make no change whatsoever to our RHEL's source rpm's. We don't even unpack them. I should know, I'm the person who does it."
Another anonymous commenter countered some of the above conclusions: "CentOS has better hardware support than Scientific Linux. On my desktop computer, CentOS has sound but SL does not, because my sound chip is unsupported by Red Hat. Incidentally, it is incorrect to say RHEL is only a server distro: if you go to their products listing, you'll find separate listings for the server and desktop versions."

Movie Review: The Adjustment Bureau

Reader Mechatotoro (whose blog you should all read — it has lots of honest, funny, and insightful reviews, able to look at Linux from the perspectives of both the layperson and the expert) said, "Mmm. I'm not into movies myself, but you comparison of the movie being a combination of the Matrix and a romantic comedy stirs my curiosity."

Das U-Blog Turns 2!

Commenter Jussi said, "Congratulations! I have had a link to your blog for some time.http://tietsikka.blogspot.com/"

Thanks to all those who commented on this past week's posts. I had originally intended to review KDE 4.7, but there were a few things that made that not happen: I wanted to review it in ArchBang, but for some reason ArchBang refused to start in any graphics mode other than VESA, so I didn't think it was worth doing a review; furthermore, it seems like the improvements to KDE 4.7 are more technical than visible to the end-user, so I decided against doing a full review. This coming week, I may have another review out, but I can't guarantee anything. I'm sure I'll have something to write about though. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!