I’m getting broadband, even better I am getting allways on wireless broadband!! About time if you ask me!

This big step came about when I got sick of my crumy speeds using the 02 modem, which is very susceptible to the weather and that’s not been good lately! Anyway I had a long phone call with 02 and somehow managed to get rid of my 12 month contract with them three months in!

Then I went looking for a broadband provider. I opted for BT (Yes I know their british but their cheaper!). Unfortunately this bears another massive blow to me financially. I recently spent all of my money on an Oxegen ticket! woop woop! So I will have to figure out a way of earning €50 a month. Not a bother to me, don’t be suprised if you see me out begging on the streets though!

Our line has not been active for like 3 years so they have to send someone out to activate it (2-3weeks) then put the order for the broadband through (max 2weeks). But the main thing is i’m getting broadband and that kicks ass.

Gone are the days in which I am forced to use Windows. From now on I carry a Linux distro around my neck where ever I go. I have access to all my files and my favourite programs where ever I am. I carry everything I need on a 16GB Corsair Flash Voyager GT memory stick (on the right –>). Many distros support USB installations these days and I have tried two.

Firstly I went for Fedora 10. It’s really not as difficult as I thought it would be! Just yum install liveusb-creator then go to Applications > System Tools > liveusb-creator. This will bring up a nice program to make the proccess easy. And yes it is cross browser compatible! Well at least it works on XP, i’m not sure about Vista or Mac. There is one major disadvantage to the installer – it only lets your distro take up 2GB. I’m not sure why though. Anyway it’s as simple as select your device, your iso, your size and then just press the Create button! One bonus is that there is no need to change the file system, ie. you can still see the files through Windows. When your finished just reboot > go to multi boot menu > select USB > bang and you will see the friendly Fedora splash screen!

I was a little deterred by the small size of the Fedora installation so I decided to try something different. Dream Linux seemed like a good direction to go in. It is really all a Dream, and I like the Mac-like dock, that’s what really sold it for me. Initially I went for an on-the-edge version – DL 3.5 Candidate 5. After a long night of trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work I googled the error and found out that there is a bug in this candidate that prevents any Pen DL installations from being successful! One day and one long download later I started from scratch on DL 3.2 (a very safe and stable version I must say!). It’s relatively easy to create a USB distro with DL as well. Just select the Pen DL installer (should be on the desktop) and choose the relevant options. One disadvantage here is that you must use a Linux file system, I chose ext3, which means that you cannot look at the stick contents on Windows. I tried partitioning after the install but it would not let me! Anyway why would you want to look at your stick from Windows if you can just look at you whole computer!

In the end I stuck with Dream linux for a few small reasons, it gives you a choice on each boot between xfce and Gnome, it lets you “add modules” or programs to your USB which will remain forever, and it lets you use as much space on the disk as you want! One thing I don’t get about either of the installations is that while you are using your pen distro you cannot access the files that are actually on the computer that your using – at least I don’t know how to do it anyway. This does seem a bit stupid because whats the point in bringing a stick to use on another computer if you can’t look at files from that computer! It is possible on live DVDs, why not live USBs? I can’t stress enough, if you are going to do this yourself get a decent memory stick! The one I went for works seamlessly, there is no apparent difference between booting from it and booting from a hard disk. I should also mention that your stick will only work on computers that support booting from USB, but most modern computers do anyway.

Conclusion: Break out of the system, use a portable distro and shock innocent Windows users!

I got tagged by Kae today. I had actually never herd of the thing before, I just don’t do enough blog reading I guess! Anyway it’s tough to list seven things that people don’t already know. I don’t have much to talk about so don’t be surprised if you know half of these things already!:-)

1. I was sixteen on 19th September > Virgo (What a sign – a fucking  mermaid!). I am still in fifth year at school which i absolutely detest. In fact the only thing that is keeping me in there is the promise of College. From my perspective that is heaven! Parties all the time – and when there are no parties I will be studying for tests by Programming! What more could you want? I should probably mention that I have been in an all Irish school for my whole life and that I talk Irish at home. Native language gotta be done. Oh and just for the record my name, Conor Mac Aoidh is pronounced “Mac í” or “Mac e”.

2. I play the Drums in two bands > The Pot Smokin’ Pirates and The Dominican Affair. Guess which one I enjoy more? I started the drums when I was 13. Before that I played the bodhran (What a load of shite). I went to drum lessons for about a year then I tought myself. When I finished teaching myself I moved on to teaching other people. At the moment I am practicing for the local Panto. I have done it three times before, it is good crac on the night. Gotta hate the music though! The Pot Smokin’ Pirates where the first band I joined, or should I say formed! They were a school band but soon enough I discovered that school and rock music don’t go so well together! We used to practice in the lead singers garage. One day his older brother asked me to join his band ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’. Thats when I really got to grips with the drums – I was playing with a band three years older than me! Eventually ‘The Kamikaze Potato Men’ got rid of the lead singer, found a new one and formed The Dominican Affair!

3. I am Oifigeach na hAirgeadais for Ógra Shinn Féin Muineacháin. I don’t want to delve to deeply into this because once you start me I can’t stop! Basically I support and am a member of Sinn Féin. I am in favor of a democratic-socialist, anti-neo-libiralist, egalitarian 32 county united Ireland. Make Partition History! 26 + 6 = 1.

4. Oh what else… I am half Scotish, half Irish and was born in England. I used to collect Warhammer! God I have to include that because it was not a minor thing in my life. For those of you who are familiar with the way it works, I had a 3,000 point Empire Army! That is pretty massive for a ten year old in fairness. The strange thing is that I used them for display. I only ever played a couple of times and found the games to complicated. My main concentration was actually painting the things. I used to paint them like a machine. I also had millions of nobles and all that I couldn’t use because I didn’t have enough points to incorporate them! Come to think of it my first army was High Elves. By the end of my Empire collection I had gotten pretty good at painting the models. Then I started with Bretonians. I had just enough of them to play – two core units and a general. I recently got rid of almost everything in my collection. I kept only a few things. My two best painted pieces – ‘The Green Night’ and a Celtos model which I made a cool base for. Also I have an old White Dwarf from the 80’s signed by the Eavy Metal Team. I might Ebay it! I think that I have enough to make a core unit and general army at the moment!

5. PHP. This tagged thing is directed towards the language users so I had better talk about it. I started learning HTML at the end of 2007 as part of a school transition year course. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Then by chance I got work expierence with the local web design company, webworks last summer. That is were i learned CSS and began on PHP. Not to soon after that I got hooked on the language and I love it! I am currently writing Furasta CMS, which will be in beta of it’s first “stable” version by the end of next week, hopefully! I am a linux user and have been since November! I started out with Mandriva One 2009 and then recently moved on to Fedora 10. I think that Linux bears a big role in the future of computers in general.

6. I can fight. With a sword I mean! I trained for Medieval Historical Re-enacting for too many years. I did all the shows where you dress up and people stare at you and ask you if they can look at your sword. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be really. It’s like any other physical sport. You do the same thing over and over and over untill you can do it in your sleep! Then finally once you have done it for a few years you dump the wooden swords and go on to metal! I have to say the proper equipment is pretty cool. It’s quite tough to fight with armour actually because it weighs a ton. I learned how to fight with a sword. shield, staff, pike, bow and arrow and claymore. I haven’t really done anything with it in the last year but there is talk of it starting again so you never know!

7. This is tough… Em… I am an atheist. I believe that believing in God is a completely personal thing and that it should have nothing what-so-ever to do with the state and especially the schools! I don’t have a problem with anyone else that believes in god I just hate the fact that so much trouble has been caused in this world because of religion. I was not baptised and brought up to make my own decision – and I have! It annoys me that my school gets massive “grants” from Catholic Associations and therefore it is a Catholic School. Not only that but the fact that I have to take time out of classes to go to mass four times a year. Basically I think that religion in schools should be eradicated, but the religion class should be kept. I think it is a good idea to discuss religions and to make people aware that there are much more religions out there than Catholicism and that they should make their own decision rather than blindly following the crowd.

Now onto the tagging. I am bound by the rules to tag seven other people. The problem is that I only know one PHP developer and that is the person who tagged me! So for now I will leave this part. But I will update it once I meet other enthusiasts, so I’m not breaking the rules!

Rules

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter

I recently made the change from Mandriva One 2009 to Fedora 10. Oh what a difference!

Mandriva was the first Linux OS that I ever used and I suppose it appealed to me because of it being a very user

friendly distro. Actually when I first stumbled upon it I was extatic. I was stuned with KDE 4.1 and its amazing ability to allow you to customise everything. But eventually I realised that I didn’t want to customise everything and that some things are better left to the distro designers! Mandriva, for me, was kind of a bridge into the Linux world. I learned a hell of a lot while using it and I am now quite familiar with the Konsole and all it’s various

commands. But after a while I did feel like I wanted more, more Linux that is – and less Windows. Because at the end of the day Mandriva is designed for Windows users and in my opinion it is a bit Windows like.

Anyway I better start talking about Fedora. I went of to a faulty start with this distro. I had previously tried Fedora 9 on my laptop but it rejected my graphics card and I decided to wait for the release of Fedora 10. I know it has been released for a couple of months at this stage but I was waiting for a packaged release. I got this last week in the Linux Format magazine. Unfortunately Fedora 10 also rejected my graphics card. But not to worry the local Linux guru was happy to help! Once I got the graphics sorted I had free reign!

The CD I got with the Linux Format magazine had everything! I distinctly remember in Mandriva having to download ever

ything that you would expect to have with a distro, packages that a hell of a lot of programs depend on, such as glibc. Not the case this time though thank god because my internet connection would probably get stressed and stop working or something…. The CD gave me a pre-installed web server! Brilliant because frankly I could not have been arsed learning how to set up Apache vhosts again! It also came with a wide range of extra programs such as GIMP 2.6 (I tried to get this for Mandriva but urpmi was still stuck on 2.4!), Transmission Bit Torrent (usefull for downloading music) and rythmbox music player. I was surprised at the fact that it didn’t include Konqueror – I thought that all distros did. It could be a KDE program.

Another choice that I had to face was KDE or GNOME? As I earlier emphasised Mandriva One 2009 came with KDE 4.1, which was the first stable release of KDE 4, and Mandriva was the first distro to be released with it. It certainly had a lot to live up to after KDE 3, not that I would know – it’s a bit before my time! I had enjoyed KDE and I wanted to take it with me when I made the switch to Fedora. But i still haven’t actually got round to setting it up and for the moment I am stuck with GNOME 2.24. That is not a bad thing though because it is ever so slowly growing on me. I am at the point now where I think that I might just not bother setting up KDE…

So Fedora 10. All round it’s impressive. The last release I toyed with was Fedora 8 and it has certainly changed for the better since then! The new graphically animated boot proccess is much better than the old jumpy thing and the desktop photo of a blue star is very interesting. For those of you that reject it’s animated state you are wrong! I spent ten minutes yesterday staring at that screen and I am certain that it moves! However slightly and smoothly, it does move!. Thats about it. Fedora 10 gets top marks by me, great distro! Hopefully the team can keep up with their twice a year releases because I for one can’t wait ’till Fedora 11.

Oh and be expecting some Fedora Magik in the form of USB!