I recently picked up "Firefly, The Complete Series", and would like to enjoy viewing it on my newly recycled laptop. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 2650, with a copy of the KDE Live version of Fedora installed on the harddrive. I'm doing my best to add capabilities in a GUI manner, even though I personally much prefer a terminal window and a command prompt.

Placing a Firefly DVD in the drive, after a moment, the 'what do you want me to do with this?' window popped up. Fedora Live KDE version installs player Kaffeine, so I'm going to be working with Kaffeine. I pick play with Kaffeine, a short banner appears, and then Kaffeine dies, being unable to read the DVD. No shiny yet.
Read more

This is a kind of part 2 to my Fedora and YouTube, Part 1, but in reality, it should work with most distributions. So now I can go to YouTube, and listen to jazz selections like this, but what if I want to hear them again? How about if I'm travelling, and I don't have easy access to the web? FireFox has a number of add-in modules to assist with capturing video to the hard drive, but really, it's already there. All it takes is knowing where it is, and what it looks like.
Read more

On a fresh install, neither Konqueror, nor Firefox will play content from YouTube. Fedora and Redhat's take on patents and licensing issues seems to be rather than risk stepping on thin ice, they'll avoid going out on the lake at all. Me, I'll take a stroll on the lake and trust I'm aware enough not to fall through the ice.
Read more

For my first ever wine review, I've chosen Sundown, a blush table wine by Mission Mountain Winery, located on Flathead Lake in Western Montana.

Sundown is a blend of grapes from Yakima, Washington and Montana. It's comparable to a White Zinfandel, though somewhat sweeter. I think the color is more of a peach, than a rose, and does remind me a bit of the sunset colors in Big Sky country.
Read more

Live CDs allow you to test drive a distribution before actually installing it to your hard drive. Booting and running from the CD, or DVD lets you see what works, and what doesn't work when it's coupled with your specific hardware. Something may still not work until you've installed, and have the opportunity to modify a configuration, or install a driver, but a Live CD gives you a good quick look at how things are going to go.
Read more

I was recently gifted a Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop. The poor thing had been replaced, and was living in the back of a closet for the last year or so. I think that's unfortunate, since it was quite the machine when it was new in January of 2003. With the installation of Fedora 8, I think it can still be quite the machine.

As shipped, it has:
Read more

• 1.7 GHz, 512K, Pentium 4
• 256 Megs of memory
• Read only DVD drive
• Floppy drive
• 20 GB Hard drive
• ethernet port, modem port, two USB1 ports