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ASUS ZenBook Pro UX501VW Review

After three years of using my trusty Vaio laptop, the time had finally come to replace it. The Vaio has been a great laptop for me, but it was starting to show its age. When I bought the Vaio, its intended use was to be a desktop replacement when I wasn’t at the office. Its large 17.3" screen suited that purpose well. At the time I bought it we weren’t living in a place where we could setup a desktop computer at home, there simply wasn’t enough space. We’ve since moved and have the space for a desktop, so my laptop requirements have changed a bit.

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Migrating from GFS to GlusterFS

This week I started the process of migrating from GFS to GlusterFS.  The hardware running my GFS cluster is older and I decided it was better to replace it than continue maintaining it.

Background Information

Back in 2003 I needed to find a storage solution that was fast, reliable, and fault-tolerant.  It also needed to be accessed by multiple clients simultaneously.  After doing much research, I ended up going with an IBM FAStT 600 2GB Fibre Channel (FC) based storage system.  The intent was to replace a single server running a JBOD SCSI disk chassis and RAID-5 card acting as an NFS server.

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Linux Soft Phone Roundup

I’ve been working heavily with VoIP for the last couple of years, and every few months I find myself looking at SIP soft phones again. I haven’t really used them at all under Linux in a long time because none of them quite fit my needs or are as good as the ones available under Windows. Because of this, and the fact that I do 99% of my work under Linux, I’ve got 8 SIP phones, 3 ATA’s and 2 regular phones sitting on my desk right now. This makes for quite a bit of clutter.

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Fedora out, Xubuntu in

The number of minor annoyances in Fedora 11 turned into a major annoyance.  Last Saturday I wiped Fedora 11 from my home machine and installed Xubntu, which is the Xfce-centric Ubuntu distribution.  I did the same on my office machine on Wednesday.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with Xubuntu and Ubuntu in general.  For the most part, everything just works.  The Synaptic package manager made the installation of most things pretty painless.  I’ve installed all of my “non-standard” apps without having to first find the right repository, then hope that there aren’t conflicts, and then fight with different versions of things because there were conflicts, etc.  Everything that I use on a normal basis is in one of the repositories that Ubuntu has included.  On Fedora I always had to fight with them.  I didn’t realize just how many extra steps there were in Fedora until I didn’t have to do them.

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Fedora 11 First Impressions

So this week I did something unprecedented for me.  I downloaded and installed a new Fedora release the same week it was released officially.  After reading a bit about how stable and quick it is for others I decided to take the plunge.  I’ve now installed it on three machines (in this order):

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Fedora 9 and KDE4 - I wanted to love them

I’ve been running Linux as my primary desktop since about 1996 (switching from OS/2 when IBM started dropping support for it), and running Linux servers since early 1994 (my first Slackware system was running Linux Kernel 0.99pl15). Over the years I’ve tried many of the various distributions including Slackware (which is what I started with), Caldera, Debian, SuSE, and of course RedHat. Back around RedHat Linux 3 I switched and have been using RedHat distros for my desktop almost exclusively since then. There have been a lot of frustrations with RedHat over the years, but with the Fedora Project things have gotten much better. The switch to Yum for package management and 3rd party repositories such as Livna have made things very easy to upgrade and maintain. Every 6 months I watch to see what’s new in the latest Fedora release. Typically I’m a version or two behind since I want my computer to be stable. Right now at home I’m on Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 at the office.

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