• Title: Linux Outlaws 4 - Your Own Private Robot Army
• Genre: Podcast
• Year: 2007
• Length: 50:22 minutes (23.19 MB)
• Format: Mono 44kHz 64Kbps (CBR)

We start the show with Fab confessing that his BIOS ate his homework, i.e. the openSUSE Live DVD he downloaded wouldn’t boot on his system, keeping him from trying it out this week like as he had promised. He will give it another try at a later time.

Listener Feedback
Then we have some listener feedback from the infamous Chopper Read (not really) from Australia. He wants to get back into Linux, dual-booting with Windows. In our reply, we discuss virtual machines, backups and how we think one should best set up a dual boot environment for Linux. If you are trying to accomplish this task, you might find episodes 15 and 16 of the Linux Reality podcast helpful.

Main Segment
In (slightly dated) news this week, we talk about the features of the new Gnome release (2.20) and also the new Linux Mint 3.1 “Celena” — including why we think the name isn’t a good idea and other reasons why we wouldn’t use it. But Fab does like their artwork…

Staying within the topic of releases, Dan tells us about a nice guide giving you instructions how to upgrade to the upcoming Ubuntu version 7.10 (codenamed “Gutsy Gibbon”) which is currently in beta. We then rathole a bit on our general upgrade, maintenance and backup habits. Dan uses a separate /home partition and Fab says he’s fond of nuking his systems with DBAN and running SpinRite before a reinstall.

After this we talk about Red Hat’s success with Linux sales in Q2 of this year which we think is really great news for the open source world and we then go on to talk about a great game that Fab discovered this week and is now completely hooked on. The game is called NERO and can be found at nerogame.org. It is all about training your own, private army of autonomous robots and pitting them against robots trained by the computer or other human players. While it isn’t open source (yet), it is fully cross-platform and actually part of an experiment in AI by the University of Texas. How cool is that?

Package of the Week
Dan: grip, a CD ripper/player for Gnome
Fab: Banshee, a full featured audio player and music organiser

Fab also ratholes Dan’s package and says he still prefers EAC under Wine for ripping CDs.

Before we wrap up the show, we plug Stephen Fry’s new blog and his talent, including the amazing VOCO clock.

Addendum
The slightly annoying background noises you might hear in places throughout the show are coming from Fab’s mouse wheel and buttons. We appologise for this, Fab will make sure this won’t happen again by adjusting his microphone better next time.

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.