This time we bring you quite a long episode since Fab’s CMOS battery was low on power and subsequently slowed down his system’s internal clock which in turn screwed up his timing of the show. The culprit has been found and exchanged for a fresh battery though, so next week’s show should be more typical in length again.

Kicking it off, Fab tells us that despite his earlier vows of abstinence, he has begun playing World of Warcraft which will probably terminate the last resisting shreds of his social life that were still holding out — well, what can you do if your girlfriend of all people suddenly comes home with months of free game time. We are sure you understand… Dan relates his outlandish experiences with Slackware, including installing Skype by hand which might also be blamed for the fact that he sounds like he’s podcasting from Soviet Russia during this episode. Sorry for that! We then slag off Slackware a bit because of this (we don’t really mean to offend anybody here, it’s just that it doesn’t seem to be a feasible distribution for us — if you like it, more power to ya).

We were also mentioned on TLLTS again, for which we want to say thanks a lot, guys! They are planning to do an aggregated feed of all kinds of Linux podcasts which would certainly be very cool. So guys, feel free to grab our feed or podcast files directly and do with them whatever you want. Whatever gets more people listening is fine by us.

Listener Feedback
Ronald Campbell writes us, suggesting Gizmo as a voice mail service for the podcast. We defibitely would love to set up such a system for our listeners so we will look into the possibilities of doing something like that.

David Roberts from Utah (aka buffalodavid) asks if we have heard of Buffalo Linux which we haven’t, but want to look into if only for the cool name. Another chance for Dan to practice his Generic George W. Accent™!

Our third email is from John, who thanks us for considering an Ogg feed of the show and tells Fab that there actually are portable players out there that support that format. We also would like to plug his Source Trunk podcast.

Main Section
Dan tells us of the following new F/OSS releases this week: Sabayon 1.1 Professional, Finnix 90.0, Trisguel 1.5, PUD Linux 0.4.8, Vyatta 3.0, Damn Small Linux 4.0, MEPIS antiX 7.0 and SystemRescueCd 0.4.1. Fab also mentions interesting new features of the upcoming Fedora 8.

We go on to talk about the hard drive problems that people with laptops seem to have in Gutsy and Fab says that he’s not so sure, if the problem isn’t a bit exaggerated. But read the initial bug report on Launchpad and decide for yourself; there’s also tips on there how to prevent this unwanted behavior which is caused by a bad ACPI setting. Fab also says he has his ACPI disabled anyway since it doesn’t report his CPU temperature correctly. We also talk about Gutsy’s networking problems which seem to be caused by a bug in its IPv6 implementation. During this discussion, Dan expresses his general concern about the amount of last-minute fixes that seemed to be going on with 7.10, which might have something to do with these problems.

After this we talk about more humourous stuff like the fact that someone put up a “W1NNT” number plate on eBay in response to the Linux one from last week. In this context, Dan points out that Microsoft’s old slogan “build on NT technology” makes no sense since it actually means “build on new technology technology”. Fab then tells us about a screenshot he recently saw which shows that on the Mac, the icon for a Windows PC on the network is an old-school CRT with a bluescreen on it. Props to Apple for a nice sense humour for that one!

In other news, the Brazilian Ministry of Education bought 90,000 Linux machines to distribute them in schools over there. Fab says he would be really happy if the German government would do sane stuff like this. Related to this, we follow up on our BECTA story from last week — BECTA now advises schools not to sign any license agreements with Microsoft, which is pretty awesome. Also in the UK, Tesco starts selling Ubuntu pre-installed machines in their stores now which we both agree is another huge step for Linux in the mainstream market. We then talk a bit about Linux adoption in general and also the fact that more and more people we know start considering switching to distros like Ubuntu, even people that are not particularly tech-savvy.

Our next topic is a Linux distribution by the peculiar (at least for German speakers) name of “Vixta”. Vixta is a distro made with the single purpose of emulating Vista’s “Aero Glass” interface — although it isn’t nearly as much of a resource hog, of course (it’s basically a fancy KDE skin with really cool effects). Dan goes on to tell us about porn-get, a nifty little utility that aims to be apt-get for porn. We also talk about the Linux distro which came up with this, Lesbian Linux and Fab also reports he picked up on his promise from last week and tried out Ubuntu Satanic Edition, which is basically a very cool skin pack for Ubuntu

<br/>Fab actually also wanted to talk about his new WRT54GL router, but we decide that we are going to do a special episode about this next week. We then talk a bit about Fab’s experience with World of Warcraft in Wine, which is great fun. Fab’s character is a human warrior called Aleksandar which he plays on the Ghostlands realm. If you have a character on this server, feel free to check him out.

Homework for the Greenhorns
Install Wine, get a Windows application of your choice to run (be sure to check in the Wine AppDB that it has at least gold rating beforehand, though) and then tell us about your experiences with the whole process.

Package of the Week
Fab: Alien Arena, a great, open source, Quake-like first person shooter
Dan has no package this week due to his stress with getting Slackware to work. He promised to bring one for the next show, though.

To wrap it up, we talk about the recent influx of visitors on Dan’s blog and his continuing distro tour on there and then finally close down shop.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.