Moving Day is coming closer. Mascha and I have been busy the last nights packing stuff and (more importantly) throwing stuff away.

It's been now three years in our current apartment and I still can't believe how much stuff got accumulated in that time... Right now, our place looks like after a bomb exploded ;-)

As I'm writing this, Mascha's picking up a "Robbe" (terrible-website-alert[tm]) and we're going to do a "light furniture run" to ease the strain on our lovely, helping friends on saturday... Gotta go now...

Must remember, when upgrading applications from the port collection: they increasingly switch to checking an enable flag in /etc/rc.conf in their startup scripts. If I upgrade from a version that didn't do that to one that does (such as todays apache 1.3.31 update) and don't add the enable flag the application simply won't start, eventhough technically nothing is broken.

One word: duh!

For reasons I have yet to disclose on this blog I'm needing to run two Windows applications (this and this) regularily on an Intel-based PC.

After a week, though I just couldn't stand using Windows. Call me arrogant, but it annoys me to no end using it.

To ease the pain, I've decied to pop in a second HD and install my new favourite flavour of Linux, use VMWare to run said Apps and do everything else (browsing, email, Office and XML editing) in a more sane environment.

And I must say, vmware is a rock-solid and impressive piece of software. I could even emerge it from Gentoo's portage system. I run the two Windows apps fullscreen within the vmware window, essentially using the virtual Windows 2000 installation as a non-KDE-conform Linux application ;-) and after three days of real day-to-day work with this constellation I'm happy to report that it works just great.

Currently I'm still running the 30-Day trial, but I know I'm gonna buy it. I must say, though, that I find US$ 189 a bit steep for my use. I can understand, that i.e. for developers using it to test their code on multiple operating systems on one box it's neglible and well worth it. But for someone who just wants to run a couple of Windows apps on Linux it essentially doubles the price considering the cost of your choice of Windows.

I suggest that vmware produce a 'light' version of vmware workstation that only runs under linux and supports only one virtual machine. But somehow I doubt they'll do it within the next 25 days... sigh...

Recently I have ventured back into Linux. While I personally am quite happy with Mac OS X on the Desktop and (Free)BSD (and Mac OS X) on the Server, I do realize that there are valid reasons for sticking with PC Hardware for the Desktop.

Having tried SuSE, RedHat and Debian over the years I was left underwhelmed and in appreciation of the ports concept of BSD and the elegance (in form and function!) of OS X.

So when I switched my father-in-law away from Windows XP a couple of weeks ago, I decided to try something new and went for Gentoo. And while I've had a rough and disapointing start, I now can safely say, that that is simply because Gentoo (like many good things in life!) is an aquired taste.

Meanwhile I am installing my third Gentoo-based system (already using the Quickinstaller instructions instead of following the Handbook;-)

The general concept of Gentoo could (perhaps) be summarized this way: instead of booting into a colorful installation wizard, the Gentoo CDs drop the user into a fully functional shell (great for debugging or recovering systems). There are no install scripts or anything the like. All steps are executed manually at the shell propmpt. That sounds worse than it is. I.e. while you actually must issue a mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot followed by (later, much later) chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash to create the systems boot folder... on the other hand you got such goodies like being able to simply issue a /etc/init.d/sshd start followed by passwd and screen and can now log into the machine (still booted from the CD!), issue a screen -x and can continue the rest of the installation from the comfort of your WLAN equipped living room and powerbook ;-)

And just like the BSD ports system, Gentoo's portage way let's you a) get software you need and want compiled and optimized specifically for the machine you're installing it onto and b) that and only that. Once I've installed my first Gentoo system I really felt "at home" on it. I know what's running and where it is. I've been there when it happened, after all!

In the end I think it comes down to a compromise between power, control and ease-of-use. Distributions such as SuSE (let alone lindows!) emphasize the latter but leave the user with little control and thus little power. Approaches such as Linux from Scratch give you much control and power but little ease of use. For me, Gentoo is the perfect compromise. Do an emerge system -UD and you'll know what I mean ;-)

Open Source Software has the reputation of being functionally powerful, but esthetically challenging (at least in my little world...)

But having had a look at the current version of Camino and Thunderbird I was pleasantly disappointed: folks, you're lookin' good ;-) (at least on Mac OS X...)

While I still won't give up Safari and Mail.app as my main tools any time soon I'm thoroughly impressed with the design efforts of these two projects. This is something KDE and Gnome should take a good look at...