Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

My new Linux machine

I recently ended up building a new home desktop running Ubuntu - Intrepid Ibex.

I use this machine mostly for development work, but being a home "desktop" it also needs to serve as a great web browsing platform, play music and videos, have a word processor and other essential software, connect easily to other local machines, and support devices like a fancy graphics card, a DVD burner, a headset, and so on.

I considered buying a new MacBook, and just docking it at the house, but for the money the machine I could build far outperforms what I could buy from Apple. Don't get me wrong, I still really like Apple (fanboy, yes), but I ended up with a great Intel P45 chipset motherboard (Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R), 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo with 4GB ram, a 512MB Nvidia 8800 GT video card, dual raided 400GB SATA drives (nice ones), a 1TB non raided drive, and the rest including a wireless keyboard and mouse, and 22" LCD monitor for under $1K (well under actually). I started from the Ars System Guide in terms of components, and then went off in a few tangents of my own. I couldn't touch that with any Mac product, much less a MacBook (it's not a fair comparison to the mobile machine, I know that, but I felt I could keep my old MacBook for going mobile and throw some horsepower at the desktop while using Ubuntu).

Ubuntu has become my favored Linux distro as of late, and 8.10 or Intrepid Ibex is supposed to go final today.

Ubuntu is impressive to me for it's simplicity and reliability, stuff just works as you would expect. Really the difference with Ubuntu over other the other Linux distros that I have used for a decade+ is that it's more intuitive at install/upgrade and or add new feature or piece of software time. Underneath it all it's the same stuff of course (Debian Linux, and either Gnome or KDE), but it's just packaged and polished a bit more than other offerings.

Ibex has a laundry list of new packages and a new kernel, and many new features (new Gnome, use of NetworkManager which supports 3G, and more). Also, it might seem small with all of the other changes, but it's about damn time Tomcat 6 made it into the main repo.

Gufw is an easy to use Ubuntu / Linux firewall, powered by ufw.Gufw is an easy, intuitive, way to manage your Linux firewall. It supports common tasks such as allowing or blocking pre-configured, common p2p, or individual ports port(s), and many others! Gufw is powered by ufw, runs on Ubuntu, and anywhere else Python, GTK, and Ufw are available.

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PyTube is a GUI for various command-line tools such as:youtube-dl, sox, mplayer, mencoder, ffmpeg and others.It allows you to resize, rotate, apply an external mp3 into a video, generate a 10 to 30 seconds mp3 ring tone.

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Maximum Transmission Unit(MTU), the largest physical packet size, measured in bytes, that a network can transmit. Any messages larger than the MTU are divided into smaller packets before being sent.By optimizing the MTU setting you can gain substantial network performance increases, especially when using dial-up modem connections.

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