What I like about Linux

During the last couple of years, more people have started to hear about Linux in one way or another. This is in a most indirect way helped by the incumbent of desktop OS king Microsoft with its Windows Vista release. Though very neat and full of eye-candy, Vista requires a very hefty hardware requirement to properly use all the features, such as a minimum of 1 GB RAM and top of the line graphics card. Many of the existing computers are not equipped with that sort of specification. In addition, most of the drivers working in the previous Windows XP don’t necessarily work in Vista. therefore, many people with non-Vista-ready computers are sticking with XP. Needless to say, even the Vista-ready computers are not necessarily able to run all features in Vista. To top it all, Microsoft planned to scrap sales of Windows XP as soon as June 2008.

Given the above situation, people are starting to look for alternatives, and this is where Linux come to the picture. Created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, it has grown to just a toy for the technically adept engineers to a user-friendly desktop replacement. I have begun playing with Linux system in 1999 with Suse 6.1, and I am following the progress Linux system has made until now where I have installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop and Fedora 8 on my old PC at home.

Here are some of the things I like about Linux (or should I say GNU/Linux):

1. There are many distributions to choose from. I think this is a strength rather than a weakness, since more variety provides many usefulness to many people with different tastes and needs.
2. Good community support. This is why I choose Ubuntu and Fedora over other distributors, due to their support availability in their respective forums.
3. Thousands of applications. Yes, many Linux applications are included in the distributions, and installation is easy with yum or apt commands via the internet.
4. Compatibility with old computers. Requirement for Linux is as old as Pentium II, or even lower. Even if you want to show the best eye-candy programs such as compiz and avant windows navigator, a 3-year-old IBM Thinkpad should be able to run it without any problems.
5. Compatibility with Windows programs. I know there are some file formats created by Windows programs that are not compatible in Linux, but there are many alternatives and other option such as saving it to a common format or totally migrate to its Open Source program in Windows. OpenOffice, Evolutions, Gimp, and Mozilla Firefox are some of the programs that will make Windows user to be able to do their daily tasks easily in Linux.
6. Many PCs & Laptops come with Linux. Dell and Asus have launched their Linux version of PCs and laptops last year, followed by Everex and many other PC manufacturers. Asus EeePC has been sold like peanuts. In the server side, HP and IBM has since sold their servers compatible with RedHat Linux system.
7. To top it all, it is free as in free beer during Oktoberfest.

Why don’t you give Linux a try? The big wave is coming and you certainly don’t wanna miss it!

=rms=

Originally posted on February 12th, 2008 at http://ruben.sentana.net

Creating your own blog site

First thing first, why blogging in the first place? Well, the answer to that will solely depend on whether one wants to share to the world what they know or think. This is why I strongly believe blogging can be a good tool for knowledge sharing.

There are many ways to start a blog site, and here I’d like to list down some of the available options for new bloggers:

1. Theme for your blog

You can create anything you want in a blog, but t would be better if you have some sort of ideas prior to creating your blog site as to what kind of content you want to put. Many people just want to list down what they are thinking, or use it as some sort of journal. Others may have more niche content such as IT solutions, self-help informations, as well as other contents like quotations and/or jokes. Once you have this content idea, then creating contents will be easier.

2. Hosting site

There are many free blog sites in the internet, such as Blogger, or even some existing social network sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Multiply, etc. The good thing about these free websites is two-fold. First, of course, is the no-cost associated to those hosting sites. Second, you may have a social network of friends and acquaintances who you may want to inform when your blog is being updated, and most of the social network sites provide such feature. In my case, although I already use those free sites to host my blogs such as here or here, I would like to use my own domain to accomplish these objectives:

• Learn how to manage a domain & subdomain
• Learn how to install and use a blog system from scratch
• Learn how to promote your own website

In short, I want to learn how this thing works from end to end. :-) But for a starter, I suggest you to use the free available sites.

3. Deciding the blog system to use

If you are using the free sites, then you will be stuck with the blogging program that they provide. Well, actually even when you have your own domain, you’ll be stuck with the blogging program that you have selected in the first place. However, in those free blogging sites you will have to make do with the limited features in that site, while if you have full control over the programs, you can easily add the plugins you desire into the site.

There are many blogging programs out there, but I am focusing on two: Typepad and Wordpress. These two systems are the most widely used blogging programs out there, albeit there are many Content Management System (CMS) that can be used to host a blog site such as Drupal and Joomla.

My choice is Wordpress, since it is free and relatively easy to manage. There are many plugins such as Ajax-based plugins and Tag Cloud available in Wordpress. Typepad is available in a 14-day free trial, after which you need to purchase the program. However, there are some affiliate sites that is using Typepad such as Friendster, though it is using the limited version of Typepad.

I suggest you to try out a few sites first, then choose the one that you like most, usually the ones that can give you more capacity and / or more features.

4. Promoting your blog site

There are some pointers out there on how to promote your blog sites. Here are some of them:

• List your blog site link in your e-mail signatures
• Join a widely used forum and put your blog site link in your comments / replies
• Simply ask your friends to look at your blog sites and give comments

One key point: Meta tagging used to be very popular to “trick” search engines on what your site contains; however, this method has been over used to the point that Google and many other search engines have changed their methods to categorized their searches from using meta tags. I still suggest you to use meta tags sparingly, but don’t rely on it too much.

5. Reporting

A good tool to use for reporting is Google Analytics. It’s a free service from Google to keep track how your blog sites perform by listing how many hits per day your blog site reaches. Currently I am using it for two of my sites already. The result is quite accurate, and it even shows a map to where the visitor IP addresses come from. In my case, it is as far as USA, Australia & Sweden. :-)

Final word: Enjoy blogging, y’all…

=rms=
Originally posted on February 12th, 2008 at http://ruben.sentana.net