Recently I've been trying out different linux distros lately just to see what everyone out there has to offer now. I've tried quite a few with VMware's excellent virtualization product and I've also tried a few just natively with my laptop (Inspiron 6000). For the most part I've liked what I see. Obviously you can get just about anything to run on linux if you have enough time, but I doubt that many will. I'm currently using SUSE 10.1 right now. The packagemanagement was pretty broken but everything is working pretty well now. I also tried Slackware with this notebook but of course had to configure many things by hand (kernel, wireless, xorg, etc.) I didn't expect Slackware to run automagically on my my notebook, but something in me makes me wish it did. I really like the design principles Slackware is built on. Most distros I find are quite buggy. For example Ubuntu Dapper hard locked X when I would logout with the proprietary ati drivers installed. I'm eagerly awaiting Slackware 11, but I think that for modern laptops it's probably easier for most to just pop in Ubuntu/SUSE/Fedora and have it all configured for you unless you are willing to learn quite a bit about linux, which can be a blessing itself.

p.s. I am quite pleased with SUSE though at the moment. The Knetworkmanager is amazing. It alows easy switching of wireless networks just by right clicking and then selecting a access point from the context menu. Pretty wicked. Plus who am I kidding anyway? I am getting lazy now and just want stuff to work. I'll probably just stick with SUSE for my desktop stuff.

I just setup a new typo blog after a few failed attempts. You can see a few hints I have on my blog that may help you, specifically if you are using dreamhost, but it should apply to other hosts as well. Typo definately looks really cool, alot of ajax going on here, but I think it has a long way to go to replace wordpress, at least for the non-technically inclined. Somethings are done better and most things just differently. One of the biggest problems that people may encounter is the lack of a wysiwyg editor for posts. Typo does let you use markdown, smarty pants or textile which are all more powerful than the simple wysiwyg editor in WordPress but a little harder to adapt to. There are some bugs still to work out but, overall it's great blogging software that is developing fast. Wordpress press is still the 80 pound gorilla in this arena though. It just works, does more and offers pretty much the same usability. It's always good to have competition though

An interesting review on Gmail vs Pine "I've used Pine as my email client for, well, pretty much forever. I use it because it's fast, powerful, stable, and very keyboardable. (I hate the mouse.) However, since I work at Google, I'm constantly bombarded with people who ask me why I don't use Gmail. After hearing the nth person brag about how much it increased their productivity, I finally broke down and tried it. I didn't expect much, since I've never liked web-based email clients. However, I made myself use it as my only email client, for a month, to give it a fair shot."

Cool, a new Gaim beta 3 http://gaim.sourceforge.net/index.php is out today. not surprisingly Google talk is out with another client as well. Something hilarious to do in Gaim to confuse the hell out of your friends is to use the I'dle Mak'er plugin to make your idle time something ridiculous.