Ubuntu comes with a nice application called “Hardware Drivers” (a.k.a. jockey-gtk) for installing proprietary drivers for wireless cards and other devices that lack open-source support. This is great, except when your only connection to the Internet is wireless and you have no way to download the driver or firmware you need. Here’s why this situation should change.

I was just recently blown away by what I can accomplish with the Debian installer. I used to think that the openSUSE installer was the most flexible Linux installer, but I think I’m going to at least put the Debian installer in a 2-way tie for first with openSUSE.

Eric Pritchett commented on my blog post about a complaint I made against the design of the Ubuntu software center. Eric correctly suggests that the next step would be to actually show a better GUI.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral comic strip by merc & crimperman

Safaribooks online were availabe in HTML-View for a long time and were accessible with free software.Now the O'Reilly Safari team has decided to stop this and deliver online books in Adobe flash format only for online reading. As expected gnash does not work. This means reading and browsing O'Reilly books online is no more possible with free software.

It's a fact of life that Linux distributions go extinct and it happens more often than our Linux fan base would like to admit. At last count, there are approximately 50 individual distributions that are now extinct. What happens to the poor unfortunates who adopt and use these defunct distros?

Lerdorf announced his departure via the popular Web2.0rhea service Twitter. "Feels a bit odd to be unemployed. Probably crazy to leave the best job I have ever had," he wrote, "but after 7+ years it was time for something new." Twitter is also where Lerdorf voiced his opinion of Yahoo!'s search pact with Microsoft back in July. "As lame as I feared," he said. "Time to find a new job." Yahoo!