Recently, I've more or less abandoned my old favorite WindowMaker in favor of GNOME. But I decided to do a fair comparison of three desktops/window managers, in order to see if I'm right. All ratings out of 10.

GNOME 1.4/Sawfish
Desktop: Looks Nice! Nautilius does a good job of making it very intuative. 8
Window Borders: I think that the default Window Borders need help. Windows clone #392439... NEXT! But you can customise the borders, however, that's a bit confusing.4
Speed: Mixed. Loading is rather slow, but once you actually have it up and running, it's fine. 6
App Launch: The panel is nice, and so is the desktop. Flexible. 7
"Feel": GNOME feels very nice. I happen to love the appearance of GTK+. 9
Stability: Some clipping problems when resizing complex windows (Mozilla), but overall pretty good. 7
Overall: It's nice, if a little over-built. 8

Window Maker
Desktop: As simple as they come. Clean, fast, efficient. 7
Window Borders: No... Maximize... Button! GRRRR! 4
Speed: This is one of the single fastest WMs I've ever seen. 8
App Launch: You have a limited number of "dock spaces" or you can use the menu. If you want to use the nifty clip, you're out of luck, because the apps there are not omnipotent throughout the desktops. It's cumbersome. 5
"Feel": Smooth as butter. Sometimes, the illusion is broken by various little inconsitancies, such as the way the dock spaces shade. 7
Stability: It is beta. Keep reminding yourself of that. Keys "lock", it crashes for apparent reason, and not everything works right. 3
Overall: Very Minimalist and smooth. I'll come back to it once it's version 1.0. 7

KDE 2
Desktop: Lacks beautiful, resizable icons of GNOME, cleaness of WMaker. 6
Speed: Slow. Everything about it is slow. It takes 1 minute to load, apps are slow. I blame QT. 3
Window Borders: I think I'm going to staple myself to death. KDE 1 had nice, clean, customizable window borders. KDE 2 is a shiriveled mess. Yes, there are "skins", but it's not the same.4
App Launch: More or less the same as GNOME. 7
"Feel": Nasty. QT looks horrible on my system, the fonts with the RENDER extenstion look wrong and oversized, as well as ugly. Without RENDER, the fonts are chopped up. The whole thing feels like you've been hit on the head. 2
Stability: As solid as water. It crashes (not some weird bug, CRASHES) apps all the time, and non-KDE apps as well as KDE apps. 4
Overall: Needs work. And I hate QT. 4

These ratings probably aren't that accurate. I would have included more reviews, but then this journal would have been REALLY long.

Even now, gcc is churning through thousands of lines of code to bring me a brand new kernel. I untarred the file, and typed make config, make dep, and make bzImage. I, frankly, don't understand what's so hard about it. Sure, it takes a while, but that can be expected. The Slashdot article Should Aunt Tillie Build Her Own Kernels?, I feel, is totally unwarrented. It's already so simple that I think it absurd. This is my first kernel compile, build from downloaded source (2.4.17).

If it is so hard, why does everyone worry about it? It seems easy enough...

UPDATE Jan 17 19:57: Good god, Lilo doesn't want to boot it 'cause the kernel file is too large! What's the maximum size for a kernel? And that is really silly limitation!

People, it's offical. I've run out of space on my WindowMaker Dock. I would use the clip space, except for the fact the icons are resident to one desktop only, and changing it to omnipotent involves drawing a little annoying black triangle in the corner.

So I tried to compile WMBad. It had been recommended to me earlier, and the screen shots looked very nice. Unfortunetly, some of the code does not compile on my Linux system. So I had to change void shift(float) to a function that did nothing. The code still would not compile, due to:
gcc -o wmbad wmbad.o -I/usr/X11R6/include/X11 -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lXpm -lX11 -lXext -Xlinker -s /usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lXpm
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [wmbad] Error 1
What? Xpm? Hmm... I got the XPM library. The first file I downloaded was a .tgz and would not uncompress, due to it not seeing it as a gzip. The second file had the same trouble. I went over to a mirror to see if the file there worked better, which it did. Compilation went off with out a hitch. I then moved the files to /usr/include, which it did not like for some reason. I tried moving the files to /usr/X11R6/include/X11, many of which already appeared to be there. I overrode them, then retried compilation of WMBad. Same error. I tried coping them to /usr/X11R6/lib. This time I wiped the source directory and reuncompressed, with the same error.

Does anyone know where I can get the binaries for this? Or another WindowMaker launcher dockapp?

UPDATE Jan 13 2001 12:39: Woops, do I feel foolish! My XPM library was called libXpm.so.4.11 instead of libXpm.so. Oopsie.
UPDATE Jan 13 2001 12:41: The edits I made to the code apparently are illegal. I get a "segmentation fault" error whenever I attempt to run it. What is a segmentation fault? The changes I made were mostly centered around the fact that it was trying to define a variable of type clock_t, which I apparently do not have.

For a project, I am required to make a calender that has Latin days + months, and pictures of whatever. And so for my theme I picked chickens. I picked up about 8 megs of chicken pictures using Google Image Search. Mostly I used The Gimp to combine the pictures, and one picture that I totally screwed up :).

There was one slight problem, however. My printer hooked up to my Linux box was completely borked. So I had to put it on a CD to transfer it somewhere else. I tried three different CD burning programs (GToaster, xcdroast, and GCombust). One offered the utility I wanted, and that is GToaster. I highly recommend it.

But the chicken project turned out correctly. Now, if only I could transfer to my shell account using scp. If anyone has any resources on it or tutorials, please comment!

Moderation Totals: Redundant=1, Insightful=1, Interesting=2, Overrated=1, Total=5.

I kid you not. Are some comments that ambiguous? And what, exactly, consititues some of these modifiers? Overrated? Does that mean "I don't like you, so I'm going to mod you down?" Or does it mean "People modded you up too much?" This confuses me.

Slashcode Suggestion:
Make it so that moderators must provide (or have the option?) of providing a reason for their moderation, so that the commenter is not left in the dark.

I have seen people reported worse. Some people got their comment with nearly every single moderation possible. Are moderators really moderate?

Here is one of the worst examples of moderator abuse ever. MP4 is discussed in the article, and I post a question about it, and it gets moderated down. Apparently the moderator was unaware of the fact that MP4 is shorthand for MPEG-4. Duh hur hur hur... This is just stupid. I hope he gets M2ed. Honestly, though, do you think this is Offtopic? Read my comment and post below.
UPDATE: Jan 06 18:38 EST: The other moderators liked it! How odd... It's scored 2 or 3, I think.

I tried to. According to their site, all you have to do is type
lynx -source http://go-gnome.com/ | sh
and you're in. Or you can do it the manual route, downloading the installer. Both turned up the same error: "ERROR: Unable to download package set info." and a little while later: "ERROR: Unable to download package list." Whatever that means. It seems that Ximian's mirrors are broken (?). I've tried many different mirrors, none of which work. Is Ximian really worth the trouble required to install it? Have you installed Ximian, and have you like it? Is it possible to just install the RPMs for Ximian and totally circumvent the installer? Post your comments below...

I should never have posted this. I didn't read the article, so I wrote something stupid. Boy, do I feel dumb.

Suggestion to Help People Prevent Themselves from damaging their own Karma:

I think that Slashdot should impliment something where someone could recant a comment of theirs before any replies or moderation is applied to it. Of course, this probably has loopholes I am not aware of, so if you have constructive ideas about this, comment!

Well, everyone. I finally figured out a good use for this space. Until HashDot (or whatever) is up, this looks like MY space for editorials, et al. Some people clearly read this, so I know I'm not just throwing my ideas into the wind. It's essentially just a scaled-down Slashdot. Looks good to me, 'cos it's a whole lot better than nothing (it's even better than having to write the posting scripts myself!). Ah well. So it goes. If you have any immediate topics, feel free to post them. If you don't, that's okay too. If you would like to continue discussion on the idea of a new Slashsite, please look below.

Watch this space for more articles later...
A note about the User Journal icon: It will be used to deonate articles pertaining to the theroretical Slashsite, or to this space.

And of course, a reminder: this is not intended as a replacement for Slashdot. Only a small suppliment to corrolate the Slashdot articles. Or cool links I found. And feel free to submit any story you find here, as long as you include a link to this journal article in it.

Today is the beginning of the next set of articles...

Yesterday, I was in CompUSA (no comments, please). They have some new OS X machines there, so I went over to try one out. I was immedietly convinced. A real, live prompt (tcsh, but I think you can get bash), BSD kernel, password login, user hierarchy, filesystem permissions, on and on and on. And you know what? It doesn't LOOK like Unix. It runs on a PPC processor (amazing in and of itself!). But it is. So if you share your computer with a person who is perhaps no so technically inclined as you are, conisder Mac OS X, 'cos it is the first easy-to-use, full featured Unix. Cool.

It is true, though, that I write this on the basis of little or no experence with the operating system, only about twenty minutes in a computer store. But honestly, it has the slickest interface you've ever seen. And I don't think you can disable X (darn!) but that's the way it goes. But if Macintosh adopted Unix... then that leaves, what, Microsoft, as the only major computer company not more or less based in Unix. Just, wow. And in an indirect way, it kind of helps all the other Unix companies, because now people will see that Unix doesn't automatically mean "hard to use mainframe" anymore.

I have seen the future. The melding of Unix with ease-of-use interfaces to make the next generation of operating systems. I'm sure that someone will make a Linux-based clone of OS X for x86, then Solaris 9 (or whatever version is next). But of course, this is all a "stab in the dark" and is probably wrong. But I wanted people to know ONE person's opinon.

I see Slashdot. I see how it has changed, from a small community website originally, to a massive news outlet that no one can control in the slightest. This is bad. This is why we need a NEW site, based on the slashcode, and really devoted towards the community. We want a summary of everything, but we are tired of the Trolls complaining about editorializing. We are tired of the endless first. We need a more effective slashdot. Now, Slashdot is perfectly fine for just news, but if you want news of a certain combonation, you are out of luck. The site has simply become too bogged down. I will continue to use Slashdot, it provides an excellent source of links and news, but I am looking to start a new Slashsite. If you know of a place that doesn't ask too much in the way of personal info (I like my anonymity) and is totally free (maybe I can have some space on your box?) for me to put this new site, drop me a line about it. Any input is appreciated. Thank you.

Flames will be used to save on energy bills. No spam. Thanks. -The Great Wakka

UPDATE Jan 4 20:53 EST: Okay. I just want my own site :-) And I'd like to try and fix some of the problems of Slashdot, but that's just me. Also read the comment I wrote in response to fm6's comment. That might help clarify a bit.

Apparently, I actually have FANS. And I thought I wrote this journal for my own well being :). The people on this list, last time I checked, were rendler, Kingfox, and limpdawg. I know that rendler reads my journal, and comments on it sometimes, but really... wow. I had no idea. Guess I should use the "friend" option more liberally. Quite a surprise.

I submitted a story, and over 6 hours later, it's still "pending". Maybe this is normal, but it seems... slow.

Also: does anyone actually read this journal? If you do, please comment. Thanks! I'm Just Curious(tm). Of course, the first person who posts "I read it" should have their post replied to, instead of everyone submitting their own.

UPDATE 12:53 Jan 04, Eastern Time: It still is "pending". How odd. Two days of pending.
UPDATE 19:20 Jan 07, Eastern Time: Rejected. How predictable.

Apparently, somewhere out there there is these servers that will provide you with free shell accounts. I found one. It's M-Net. Totally Free. No catches. If you get on there, send me an email, colonele@127.0.0.1. Of course, it only makes sense if you are on there :). But it's got vi and nethack and everything! For free! Very cool. To sign up, telnet in to m-net.arbornet.org and use "newuser" as your login name, the directions will proceed from there. I rate it 8.5/10, 'cos no IRC. Oh well, I'll just have to use local accounts for that :). And yes, ssh is supported.

Well, people. Here it is. I want more quickies, and I would like them now. In the meanwhile, go over to User Friendly The Comic Strip . They have a new LOTD (link of the day) every day. It's like getting a tiny dose of quickies! And they have archives, so you can browse through their old quickies. Nifty.