Catching up with Arch Linux

Let's begin with a little update. I've been off-line for a few months now, mostly due to a new job and just feeling like I needed a break. Recently though, I've been having the urges to blog again, mostly due to Quvmoh putting the audio of my presentation "Life without a GUI" from UTOSC on HPR. (thanks Quvmoh) This also reminded me that I need to put my slides up from the presentation which you can find here. Use the tpp application to view them as slides or any text editor will work as well. You can also download my handout of the presentation here. The handout will give you useful links for file conversion and the syntax for playing video in the framebuffer.

The last time I blogged I was praising Slackware, but since then I've moved on to Arch. Don't get me wrong Slackware is awesome, but there was one unforgiving issue that caused me to dump Slack for Arch. It was the lack of supported software for Slackware. I just couldn't find everything I wanted on the main repo or on slackbuild.org or anywhere else. One example of this was tuxpaint for my son. I just could not get it installed on my 64-bit system. After hours of frustration without any progress I was done. This is tuxpaint for heaven's sake, it shouldn't be this hard, especially when I could easily just "apt-get install tuxpaint" on Debian/Ubuntu or "yum install tuxpaint" on Fedora or "pacman -S tuxpaint" on Arch.

And speaking of pacman... WOW! I'm in love. It really does put apt to shame. It is so fast. I literally blink and applications are installed. More praises for Arch, include the rolling release methodology. I always have the latest and greatest stuff and everything is stable. I just can't say enough about it. I recommend everyone to give it a try.

Finally, I've been throwing around the idea of doing a Linux command line podcast. I figure it's a niche topic that's not exclusively covered in any other linux podcast. I would cover alot of what my UTOSC presentation was all about, "How to live life and get everything done in the command line." Topics I might cover could include: How to deal with various office document formats, How to blog from the command line, How to email and view attachments from the command line, How to do photo editing from the CLI, discuss how to use the various apps listed on my CLI apps list or maybe interview the developers of these apps, and so on. For the 2 people out there that read my blog let me know what you think. If anyone is interested and would like to co-host that would be great. Now all this being said, I really don't know anything about podcasting so if anyone could give me some tips or advice or just point me in the right direction that would be greatly appreciated.