[Fri Nov 30 13:57:21 CST 2012]

I recently found out about a Linux distribution that looks pretty cool. It is called Uberstudent (their website can be found here), and it aims to provide a comprehensive set of tools for higher education and college-bound high school kids, their teachers, schools and researchers to do their work. The screenshots look pretty cool, and it all seems to be customized for the needs of academic work. It may be worth testing. I'll see if I can convince my older son to give it a try and report back to me. {link to this story}

[Thu Nov 29 12:42:39 CST 2012]

Here is an interesting idea. As many of you may know, Hostess Brands, the maker of such American all-time favorites as Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos, announced that it is filing for bankruptcy and liquidating all its assets. So, Jason Hibbets, from OpenSource.com, decided to start a poll asking if Hostess should open source its recipes. Don't get me wrong, the idea is appealing, but I seriously doubt they will even consider it. After all, they are trying to liquidate their assets which, presumably, include precisely the recipes to their most popular products. Why open source the recipe now that they are in a dire need of money? {link to this story}

[Tue Nov 20 16:13:47 CST 2012]

Somebody asked me about the meaning of all those .rpmnew and .rpmsave files that litter your file system after upgrading an RPM package. Well, by default, when RPM finds a configuration file that was never edited, it will silently replace it with the file from the new package. On the other hand, if it realizes that the file was edited by the system administrator, it will do one of the following:

• If the package was built in such a way that the file was included in the %config list in its SPEC file, it will proceed to replace it with the new configuration file and will save the old one with the old name and the .rpmsave extension to it.
• If the package was built with the file in the %config(noreplace) tag, then the old configuration file will stay in place and the new one will be saved with the same name and an .rpmnew extension.

So, what do you do when you find them? The best thing to do is to merge them. It could very well be that the new version of the package will not work fine with some parameters from the old configuration file, for example. You have to do this manually, but a tool such as sdiff may come in handy, since it allows you to merge changes interactively. {link to this story}