i.justrealized

Wikipedia which ran a mixed of Red Hat and Fedora Linux servers are chosen Ubuntu Linux.

Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the user-driven Wikipedia project, is in the process of migrating its servers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wikimedia’s move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration of the organization’s 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.

Wikimedia’s entire collection of web sites—which includes Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others—serves up roughly 10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers. (Source: Arstechnica)

This is good new for Ubuntu which has in the past experience slow adoption rates with their server flavors. I am glad to add that this blog is powered by Ubuntu Hardy.

One of the features I like from - ahem - Ubuntu, is that it lets me shift the tabs of the task bar around. I just like to put my work on the left side and my nonsense on the right.

Windows Vista places it based on chronological order, left to right. And upon the restart of explorer.exe due to reasons I never fully understood, it auto arranges in an order not sensible to me at all.

Why why why!

This irks me a little, my computer sometimes show p.m. instead of a.m. and a.m. instead of p.m. It’s just strange. The time and everything is correct. I use the 12-hour clock instead of the 24-hour. (You are an army freak if you use the 24-hour clock.)

So two in the afternoons would be 2 p.m. instead of 14:00. Anyway, my computer would switch to 2 a.m. when it’s 2 p.m. sometimes. It might be something to do with Ubuntu settings. It didn’t seem to occur until I use Ubuntu and revert to Windows Vista. Something just messed up my clock somehow.

Anyway, did you know that a.m. and p.m. stands for ante meridiem (a.m., Latin “before noon”) and post meridiem (p.m., “after noon”) respectively? I remember asking my primary school teacher before and he couldn’t answer. We didn’t have Wikipedia that time, hahaa…

What fun is there when sudo replies your incorrect password attempt with a mere incorrect password - make it insult you. Masochistic people can shout hooray.

Here’s how you do it, you have to edit ’sudoers’. It uses vi commands which I hate. You’ll be prompted for your password.

Append “,insults” at the end without the quotes and then save the file.

Now you can make your terminal window forget your sudo password:

And now type ’sudo visudo’ or even ’sudo me a sandwich’ and then input an incorrect password. It will say something like:

• You can’t get the wood, you know.
• It’s only your word against mine.
• My pet ferret can type better than you!
• Maybe if you used more than just two fingers…
• Listen, burrito brains, I don’t have time to listen to this trash.

Well, have fun. (Source: Ubuntu Tutorials)

Third day straight in Ubuntu. The lack of oxygen and the familiar ALT-Tab interface made breathing hard. Half the population has already been wiped out and an enemy space ship appeared out of no where to hold some of us hostage, I had to sacrifice my brother to escape being a hostage.

Anyway, Ubuntu turned out okay. Most of my annoyance is due to familiarity with Windows.

• Double clicking on the top-left hand icon did not close my window
• Yeah, I am still pressing the Windows button 7 times in the day and 12 times when I’m blur at night. Each time I do that I feel stupid, it’s like attempting to push open a door that says ‘Pull’. Intelligence minus 10.
• Can’t undo a deletion of file easily through Nautilius
• Whoever told me using Ubuntu is just like Windows hasn’t used either or both of the operating systems.
• Still pressing F6 in Firefox to highlight the awesome location bar
• Pidgin doesn’t yet support custom emoticons. I’m sure Uzyn would call this a feature.
• The default font gives me a headache, I had to change it to Lucida to feel a little better.
• GIMP… Okay, nevermind that already. It already received enough bashing.
• I like the most recently used programs to be display on the start menu. Sure I can always put them on my desktop manually but when you’re talking about a better overall experience, the OS ideally should be able to discover the user preference and suit the user without him or her knowing about it.

Windows does almost everything Ubuntu can do. User-interface-wise Ubuntu is still poorer. I hand Ubuntu to my father to use and he prefers Windows. My father touched neither of them. He like the Windows Teletubby land wallpaper and more attractive icons and also says he likes Windows’ Firefox. He somehow didn’t like the Ubuntu one. It’s the colors somehow and I just let him have Windows XP in the end.

Okay I was a little bored so I took a screenshot. I heard about Lynx but never knew what’s it really for. Running my blog in Lynx looked like this:

And yes my messy archive.

It’s still usable I guess. I tried on Gmail and it didn’t appear to work, probably all the JavaScript.

Okay, back to work.

Was at Wikipedia checking out more information about Linux distributions when I chance upon an article on Ubuntu distributions.

• gNewSense is designed for users who wish to use only free software. It is officially supported and recommended by the Free Software Foundation. The project has also produced a set of scripts that allow anyone to create a free distribution.
• Goobuntu is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that Google uses internally. It is not released outside Google.
• gOS early versions used the Enlightenment window manager, featuring Google Apps and other web-based applications.
• Linux Mint’s purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable Linux desktop based on Ubuntu.

There’s so much distributions. They are all unofficial distributions by the way. And some are religion-related:

• Ubuntu Christian Edition (also referred to as Ubuntu CE) is a distribution designed for Christians. The first version of Ubuntu Christian Edition was announced on 24 July 2006.[4] Ubuntu Christian Edition features fully integrated web content parental controls powered by DansGuardian, as well as a graphical tool to adjust the parental control settings specifically developed for Ubuntu Christian Edition, and includes several popular Bible Study Programs such as GnomeSword.
• Ubuntu Muslim Edition (also referred to as Ubuntu ME) is a distribution designed for Muslims. Ubuntu Muslim Edition is a free, open source operating system based on Ubuntu. Its main feature is the inclusion of Islamic software, such as prayer times, a Qur’an study tool and a web content filtering utility.
• Ubuntu Satanic Edition (also referred to as Ubuntu SE) is a series of dark themes for Ubuntu, and a parody of Ubuntu Christian Edition. It’s not a derivative distro, the themes can be installed on any Gnome or KDE based distro.

 I laughed when I saw Ubuntu Christian Edition which is now, by the way, suspended: (more…)