This will probably piss off just about everyone I know. So be it. If it doesn’t piss you off:

1) You probably agree with, or at least understand, what I’m talking about
2) Are saying to yourself “Oh, here we go again, ANOTHER John rant!”
3) I’m not trying hard enough
4) All of the above
5) You don’t care, in which case, why are you reading this?

The first thing we do, lets kill all the banksters. Yeah, banksters, not bankers. Rhymes with “gangsters”. Fucking criminals, pure and simple. Fucking rob us blind with your fiat fractional reserve banking system and easy credit, privatize the profit, and socialize the debt. We get to bail you fuckers out while we sink into the mire, and you get to keep your jobs, the house in the Hamptons, the private jets, the vacations, etc. Fuck you. You are filth, leeches, scum. And then you tell my company that we need to cut people’s pay 10%, because you’re not happy with the state of the print industry. Yeah, thanks, that 10% was my monthly savings. Now we don’t save. Fuck you very much.

We have a friend that’s a bankster. Sorry, but fuck you. You have allied yourself with a den of thieves, scumbags, and liars. I’m glad climbing the corporate banking ladder has worked out for you. Clearly you understood where the money is, and pursued it. Clearly, I didn’t. Three years ago I gave myself a $24,000/year raise by starting a new job, making more than I have ever made thus far in my life. Now, I’m barely keeping up, once again. All the money I have saved in those three years has now dwindled down to nearly nothing, just trying to meet month-to-month expenses. Everything costs more this year; I can’t believe how much more we’re paying just on food alone. At least gas isn’t $4/gallon, like last year.

A great big “FUCK YOU!” to all of the politicians. You stupid fucks create the policies that ruin the lives of millions, all under the guise of helping us. You told the banksters to lend money to people that shouldn’t have been given loans to begin with, creating the current credit crisis. But hey, those banksters are clever bastards, they found plenty of ways to create clever instruments to sell off all that bad debt to a bunch of suckers, and turned a pretty profit for themselves in the process. And hey, you have us fucking milk-cows, the middle class, to bail all your asses out, when everything goes south on you. The taxpayer gets to foot the bill for the STUPID FUCKING SHIT that these parasites foist upon us, all contained in 1000+ page bills that NO ONE reads. Why do people continue to believe these bastards about ANYTHING? Can’t you see what’s going on? DIVIDE AND CONQUER, that’s what they’re doing to us. Works every time. These people are not your friends, and they don’t give a shit about you.

There’s no such thing as “TOO BIG TO FAIL”! If you don’t know how to fucking run your business, then get out! Honda and Toyota seem to be doing fairly well, despite the times, without picking my pockets. In the real world, you either stop doing what doesn’t work, changing the way you do things, or you fail and get out of the way to make room for someone who can make it work. Instead, we reward failure, and continue to put our trust in people (politicians) who have never run a successful business, or whose best qualifier on their resume is “community organizer.” These idiots wouldn’t know sound economics if it dropped on their heads.

And speaking of economics, fuck you to all of my friends that want to argue economics with me, but have little or no knowledge on the subject. Your Krugman and Marx talking-points only reveal your ignorance on the matter. Get back to me when you understand money, fiat, fractional reserve banking, monetary inflation, price inflation, the Federal Reserve System, the business cycle, the division of labor, etc. Until then, shut the fuck up, you are ignorant, pure and simple. “Sounds good” and “feels good” do not constitute good economic policy. I will not continue to argue with you. I was once like you. I believed silly crap, too, until I dug deeper and learned how things really work. You believe what you want to believe, I’ll believe what I want to believe. I’m sure you can find plenty of info to support your beliefs, as can I. I just don’t care, anymore.

Being in the strange position of having found a Linux distribution that I am entirely happy with, I have stopped installing a new one every few days on my Thinkpad.

So now, the only thing to motivate me to install something else is…

…the new version of what I’m already using! Yup, the beta version of Zenwalk Linux 6.2 is out, and it’s shaping up to be a good one. I won’t put it on my Thinkpad until the final release, but I have installed it on the spare PC at work, so I could get a preview of the goods. There are some interesting changes:

GRUB2 instead of LILO

Linux kernel 2.6.30.2

Ext4 file system

Xfce 4.6.1

OpenOffice 3.1.0

New Netpkg featuring a refined interface, rollback support and instant install with dependency control

Faster boot time

These are all welcome changes, and so far everything is coming up aces on the desktop PC installation. I suppose it’s a good thing to dump LILO in favor of GRUB2, as that seems to be the direction of things, but honestly I don’t know the details as to why. Boot time is indeed faster, and it was no slouch with 6.0 anyway. Other than the Xfce and OpenOffice updates, there’s the move to ext4 as the default file system, which also is the direction things are going, in favor of ext3. My unscientific tests seem to indicate that ext4 is faster, another plus.

So in other words, things are looking good in terms of useful changes, but otherwise it’s not particularly eventful.

As it should be!

Sometimes you find perfection where you least expect it.

Just recently I had returned to using Crunchbang, after the release of 9.04. I’m a big fan of Crunchbang, and the new release is very solid. But I have to say, I don’t know that I like it as much as the 8.10 release. Although you can tweak any Linux distro to suit your needs and desires, I tend to get nit-picky over the little details of a distro, as to how it operates right out of the box. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a Mac user for so long — if there’s a company that really pays attention to the details, it’s Apple. Despite my (very few) annoyances with Apple and Mac OS X, nobody does it better than Apple. This is very subjective, I realize. Different people expect different things from their OS.

There are just certain things that have to work for me, right from the word “go”, for me to really feel at home with a system. I’m not opposed to configuring things, but mostly I just want things to work. After all, I went through the steps to install Arch Linux, but the repeated issues with wifi connectivity made me leave it behind.

If a system can do what I want it to do, with a minimum of hassle, and be really fast at the same time, well, it doesn’t get much better than that. With the issues of speed, stability, and usability in mind, I decided to give Zenwalk Linux a try. Based on Slackware, I had read several good reviews of Zenwalk, and those three issues appeared to be areas in which it excelled. Although I have tried Slackware, and really liked the speed, stability, and bug-free loveliness of it, I had some issues in the ‘usability’ department, centered chiefly around roaming wireless access. I’m sure I could have resolved these issues and been very happy with Slackware, but I don’t really see Slack as an ideal choice for a laptop OS. Even the folks I know that run Slackware on the desktop, tend to run things like Ubuntu on their laptops. On my Thinkpad, Ubuntu, Mint, and to a certain extent even Debian (using Gnome), were all too intolerably slow. Crunchbang and sidux were both much faster, but there are little things with Crunchbang, and a couple of major things with sidux, that keep me from using them over the long term.

So, Zenwalk. I’m simply shocked that it does everything I need it to do, it does it fast, it’s rock-solid (so far, anyway), and there are absolutely ZERO little annoyances that I can find. Both wired and wireless work as they should, and they JUST PLAIN CONNECT, without the need to tell me with a little notification window that it’s now connected! Multimedia works, even Apple Quicktime videos. I’m actually using Icedove (Thunderbird) as an email client, rather than my usual Sylpheed, because it’s actually FAST in Zenwalk! Even OpenOffice is fast; I usually end up using Abiword because OO is so slow in most distros.

I even find the overall default appearance of Zenwalk so agreeable, I have hardly changed anything. It took me a couple of days just to get around to changing the wallpaper, which is usually one of the first things I do. The “one mainstream application for each task” is well chosen and implemented. So far, I have only added the web browser Midori to the default setup, using the simple network package management tool, netpkg. While Iceweasel (Firefox) is faster than in most other distros I’ve used, it’s still not quite fast enough for my liking. Midori fits the bill nicely, here.

I had thought of doing a blog series entitled “30 Linuxes in 30 Days,” in which I would chronicle the testing of 30 different distros over the span of a month. Hell, I almost do that, anyway! I would take a specific set of criteria, and see how well each distro stacks up against it. But now, I’m so thoroughly impressed with Zenwalk, I’m not sure I want to do that. I’m a firm believer that with Linux, it’s largely a matter of finding the right distro for your particular hardware setup, and needs. I’m going to give it more time to see if anything breaks, but it would seem that I have found the right distro for me.

Zen, indeed.

Because of a wifi issue that I wasn’t able to resolve using Arch, I have returned to using my standby distro — Crunchbang. I had installed v. 8.10 over the weekend, but last night I noticed that the 9.04 release was available for download, so I did, and decided to back up my data and do a clean install, using the new ext4 file system. Oh how I miss the rolling release model of Arch!

A couple of things I noticed right away are the new, more attractive login screen, and a noticeably quicker boot time. Although it was no slouch with 8.10 (probably about 30 seconds), it seems even faster here, maybe on par with the 20 second boot time I was getting with Arch.

Actually, everything seems faster: app launches, file access, file copying, etc. I would imagine this is the result of using ext4 rather than ext3, amongst general speed improvements.

With this release, Crunchbang uses tint2 for its dock, rather than the lxpanel in the previous version. This is my first time using tint2, and I like it so far, probably more so than the lxpanel. I have only briefly looked at the configuration file, to add ’seconds’ to my clock, but it looks plenty configurable. A plus!

Also new is the addition of Transmission, rather than Deluge, for a BitTorrent client. I prefer Transmission, so this is another plus. Although I don’t have much experience using it, the Vim text editor has also been added to this release, along with an interesting full-screen editor called PyRoom. I’ll have to play around with that and see what I think.

Other big news is the addition of a 64-bit version, for those with better hardware than I.

One thing that I’m really glad that works this round, is the ability to retain my wired internet configuration at work. While wireless was not a problem, #! would not remember my wired configuration at work, so I’d have to re-enter it each time I connected. Now, it saves and works just fine after reboot.

Additionally, from the Crunchbang website:

Many other minor tweaks and fixes including:

• Improved documentation added to default configuration files.
• Openbox menu items added for commonly used configuration files.
• New and improved default Openbox and GTK themes.
• Additional Openbox and GTK+ themes installed, including the popular Dyne themes.

This looks like a solid release for Crunchbang, and I look forward to using it for my day-to-day computing. With all of the distro-hopping I do, I always end up coming back to Crunchbang, as it does what I want it to do, fast, with a minimum of hassles or getting in my way, and it looks good while doing it! If you like Ubuntu, but hate the bloat, give it a try! Like Linux Mint, you get all of the multimedia codecs from go, but unlike either of those, there’s no Gnome/Nautilus overhead.

There’s a new pre-release of sidux out today — Aether. With this version, sidux will use the new 2.6.30 Linux kernel, and also KDE4. If you’ve kept up with my posts, you know that I am not a fan of KDE generally, and not a fan of KDE4 specifically. My complaints with KDE4 are centered around my dislike of the tray, and its sluggishness on my older hardware. I’m also not particularly fond of Dolphin over Konqueror.

Being a fan of sidux, I had to download the pre-release to see what they had done with KDE4. And I have to say, I like it. Like Mandriva, they have done away with the default tray style of the start menu. And even on the live CD, it is very fast. Dolphin is still there, of course, but I can live with that.

If this release is indicative of what’s in store for the final release, I might just switch to sidux from Arch. I have a serious weakness for Debian, but I like the rolling release, living-on-the-edge model of Arch. sidux nicely fills both spots. Being able to do that with a fast, attractive KDE4 is gravy. Let’s face it, although KDE3 has a lot going for it in terms of usability and configurability, it’s getting a little long in the tooth, and looks SOOO late 90s.

Yeah, all that stuff I wrote about Arch Linux yesterday? Scratch that. I woke up this morning with the overwhelming desire to reinstall Crunchbang. Maybe it was the several Rogue Dead Guy ales I consumed last night, or the fact that I only had 3.5 hours of sleep. Or both.

So I did it. I’m now back to Crunchbang Linux on the Thinkpad. I keep going back to it because I really like it, despite the fact that it’s an Ubuntu derivative. I like to tell myself that it’s a Debian derivative, which of course, it is, once removed.

Seriously, how can you NOT like a Linux called Crunchbang? Same thing with Slackware. The pure, minimalist functionality keeps drawing me back.

But I’m starting to think, “Why bother settling on one Linux distro, anyway?” When you can have your “/home” directory on a separate partition, and everything else on one or more other partitions, you can keep installing Linux distros until the cows come home, or until your family sends you to the looney bin, whichever comes first. How cool is that?

I think now that perhaps I just wanted to install Arch to prove to myself that I could do it.

In other Linux news, there’s another cool looking release of a great looking “puplet” (a spinoff of Puppy Linux) out today — MacPup. This release uses the beautiful Enlightenment window manager, and I must say, it looks and functions really nicely. Yeah, I already downloaded it, burned it, and spun it.

Like I said, I’m nuts.

OK, for those that are keeping score, you’ll know that I’ve been doing a lot of distro-hopping lately. I had started out pretty happily using Crunchbang on my IBM Thinkpad T42, after testing about 20-30 different distros. Some never made it past the live CD stage, some made it to actual hard drive installation.

The latest version of Mandriva came out not too long ago, and their implementation using the LXDE desktop is actually quite nice, and I enjoyed using it, however briefly. Then it was back to Crunchbang. Then I got the hankering to install Debian, again, because it was bothering me that I wasn’t able to get the sound working the first time I installed it. I had done the standard Gnome installation, then added LXDE, and would switch back and forth between a Gnome/Openbox setup, and LXDE. So I installed the same setup again, and lo and behold, the sound worked just fine! Although I generally liked the setup, there were a couple of things that bothered me: Gnome, even using Openbox as the window manager, just seemed too slow, and LXDE seems too immature still. And I was feeling like I needed a challenge, and the need for speed, and something a little more bleeding edge. Debian, although rock solid, dependable, and pretty peppy (Gnome aside), is a very conservative distro, and is always a little behind on software packages, unless of course you opt for the testing or unstable (Sid) routes.

Both Slackware and Arch were calling to me. Having read good things about Slackware from Dave over at fullmetalgerbil, I decided to give it a try. I was always a bit intimidated by the supposed difficulty of installing Slackware, but as the same thing is said about Debian, and I found Debian very easy to install, I figured it couldn’t be too bad.

And, if anything, I found Slackware to be at least as easy, if not easier, to install than Debian. It is the post-installation process that is more challenging, getting everything configured right. There were a couple of things that I didn’t resolve, such as my scroll wheel mouse, wired networking with a static IP address, and roaming wireless internet, but all-in-all I found Slackware very pleasing, and fast, even with KDE 3. I may yet go back to Slackware and try to work my way through those issues.

But the one distro that has been pulling at me since I decided to buy another computer specifically to install Linux could not be denied any longer:

Arch Linux

Arch Linux described, at it’s website:

“Arch Linux is an independently developed i686/x86-64 community distribution, based on a rolling-release model and targeted at competent GNU/Linux users which offers large binary repositories and excellent package management as well as a ports-like packaging system. Development focuses on a balance of minimalism, elegance, code correctness and modernity.

Arch provides a minimal environment upon installation, (no GUI), compiled for i686/x86-64 architectures. Arch is lightweight, flexible, simple and aims to be very UNIX-like. Its design philosophy and implementation make it easy to extend and mold into whatever kind of system you’re building- from a minimalist console machine to the most grandiose and feature rich desktop environments available. Rather than tearing out unneeded and unwanted packages, Arch offers the power user the ability to build up from a minimal foundation without any defaults chosen for them. It is the user who decides what Arch Linux will be.”

I couldn’t resist any longer, but again, as with Debian and Slackware, I was intimidated about the installation/configuration process. So I cheated. I downloaded an Arch Live CD, with a GUI installer, from godane’s website.

And it was good. I installed Arch with LXDE. I began learning “the Arch Way”, although I had cheated to get there. But I liked what I saw, and over the course of several days, began learning as much as I could by playing around with my “cheater” installation, printing off the beginner and installation guides, and joining the Arch forum.

Finally, I felt like I was ready to do it right. And besides, I still wasn’t liking the immaturity of LXDE. After carefully considering the options, I decided to go with XFCE, and I also added fluxbox and IceWM, just so I could go even lighter still, if I wanted to.

And you know what? Everything went really smoothly. The installation was pretty easy, but not as much so as either Debian or Slackware. I had some sound and networking issues to work through, but I can now proudly say that I am typing this from my very own custom-built Arch Linux installation.

Oh, and it is good. Twenty second boot time. Fast. Rolling release. Up-to-date software packages. Pacman (the package manager, not the game: and I thought aptitude/apt-get was cool!). Great community.

I hear it a lot from others, and now I understand why. “I used to distro-hop, and then I found Arch.” I’m living on the edge with Arch, and I’m loving it.

I would still like to further explore Slackware, but in the meantime, this Thinkpad is set up just the way I like it. I’ll have to find another piece of hardware for Slackware.

My Arch Linux setup

Over the long Memorial Day weekend I decided to do some further Linux distro-hopping, and so wiped out my beloved Crunchbang Linux to test the following distros:

sidux – based on Debian Sid (unstable)
Arch – although I cheated and used an Arch Live CD
Knoppix – also based on Debian
Mandriva – probably the second Linux distro I ever tried (after Red Hat) around the turn of the century

I had intended on installing sidux as a replacement for Crunchbang. Not that I was unhappy with Crunchbang, but because the idea of running Debian Sid was appealing to me. I’m generally not a fan on KDE (or XFCE), but I figured I would install LXDE and play around with that for awhile, although KDE 3.5 on sidux is pretty fast.

Well, things went awry when I tried to update the system using smxi. I believe I inadvertently upgraded to KDE 4 — when I rebooted, things were horribly wrong. I don’t blame sidux for this, but my own impatience, for not more thoroughly reading the documentation regarding upgrading/updating sidux. Oh well, perhaps I’ll try this again sometime. Moving on to:

Arch
There’s something very appealing about Arch to me, although I haven’t worked up the gumption (or the time) to really dig in and go through the steps to install it properly. The idea of installing only EXACTLY what I want, and nothing else, is a very powerful draw. Plus, they have a cool logo! But, instead of doing that, I took the shortcut and tried an Arch Live CD from here:

http://godane.wordpress.com/

The Live CD features the XFCE desktop environment, and a graphical installer option. The installation failed about halfway through. I don’t remember what the issue was. So much for cheating. I REALLY have to suck it up and do a proper Arch install sometime.

Knoppix
There’s a lot to like about Knoppix, including working Compiz from the start. In the end, however, I was seriously annoyed by not being able to change the default Openbox theme. WTF? OBConfig was there, but didn’t work. This should be basic stuff, no?

And so, after reinstalling Crunchbang out of frustration, I happened to read Caitlyn Martin’s review of the latest Mandriva release:

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090525#feature

I had downloaded and tried out the KDE version of Mandriva One when it was first released, and the live CD was so incredibly slow, that I didn’t consider it as an option. Beautiful, but slow. I was intrigued by the LXDE option available with this release, but I was under the impression that I would first need to install either the KDE or Gnome flavors, and then install LXDE through the package manager. The idea of installing all of that KDE or Gnome baggage, just to get to LXDE didn’t thrill me, so I let go of the idea of trying out Mandriva.

It was in reading Caitlyn’s article that I found out that I could install LXDE at the front end, avoiding KDE and Gnome entirely, by downloading the much larger (4.3 GB) Mandriva Free ISO.

And so here I am, after many fits and starts of downloading the ISO on my desktop Mac, sitting on a non-Debian distro on my Thinkpad T42.

The installation was quite beautiful and flawless, with enough options along the way to make a Slackware user drool. Mandriva enjoyed the top slot at Distrowatch for a long time in the pre-Ubuntu Linux world, and honestly, I personally would choose it over Ubuntu, any day of the week. Mandriva is great at tweaking the desktop environment to create a thing of beauty. Even their implementation of the tray in KDE 4 is not annoying, and I REALLY hate the KDE 4 tray. What they have done with LXDE is also very impressive and attractive. So far, I’m finding Mandriva 2009 with LXDE very likable — attractive and fast.

I think I’ll keep it around a while, and see how it goes.

Hey, welcome to my neglected blog! What can I say, I finally discovered, or rather succumbed to, Facebook.

I promise, I’ll write something meaningful here, soon!

545 People
By Charley Reese
11-4-8

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget.  The President does.

You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don’t write the tax code.  Congress does.

You and I don’t set fiscal policy.  Congress does.

You and I don’t control monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices.  545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority.  They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash.  The politician has the power to accept or reject it.  No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault.  They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits.  The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes.  Who is the Speaker of the House? She is the leader of the majority party. She and fellow House members, not the president, can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in Iraq, it’s because they want them in Iraq.

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like ‘the economy,’ ‘inflation,’ or ‘politics’ that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses, provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees.

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Creators Syndicate  c. 2008