Chris Peterman's MP251 Page for Spring 2006


Projects

I don't really have any individual projects per say. This semester I have been randomly learning more about different Open Source projects as it strikes my fancy.
Distro Tryouts
My Laptop has been something of a test machine this semester as I decided to try out a bunch of distros that I hadn't touched in a long time. So far this semester it has had Ubuntu Dapper, Fedora Core 4, Debian Sid, and OpenSuSE 10 on it
Arch Linux
For whatever reason I installed ArchLinux on my Desktop after getting a little annoyed with Ubuntu's track of making things too easy. It began to feel almost like Windows in that everything was done for me already and if I wanted to tweak I had to go through some hoops to do it (although not nearly as many as Windows), I think the final straw was the removal of XChat from the default install. With that I burned a CD for ArchLinux and let fly. I was immeadiatly reminded of what it meant to tweak, as Arch Linux dropped me to a terminal and made me earn X. A better review can be found in this blog post. Though I do have an additional comment on ArchLinux. I quite like the AUR (Archlinux User Repo) system they have set up. Aside from thier "official" Extra, Current, and Testing repos, they have an equally offical repo called Community, which is maintained by the AUR. The packages are of same quality as the three main repos, but there is a lot more there. Its also very democratic, as anyone can register for an account and vote on the "unsupported" packages (Unsupported doesn't mean they are bad, in fact a good deal are marked "safe" and work quite fine) to be included in the Community repo, or you can flag packages out of date.
Vim
Call it random, but one day out of the blue I decided to start learning VIM. I must say it does have some features I like over Emacs..but only time will tell which side of the Editor War I wind up on...
Ubuntu
As usual, I have been active with Ubuntu and helping out new users. My involvement has slackened this semester due to the amount of work I have had to do. I plan to be much more active in the release cycle for Dapper+1.
GNU/Hurd
I have been interested in a while about the HURD. I plan to install it in a Qemu image during a workday soon

Summer Plans

Infinity Linux Over summer, I have an idea to try to create my own Distro. It would initially be based on LFS and heavily influenced by ArchLinux. Why am I doing this? Because I can and I wanna try :D