The folks over at dynamism have started a brand new site selling all of the latest cool Japanese imports.  From the cute, to the weird.  It’s all on Gizmine.

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We’re nearing the release of the Intrepid Ibex, and I thought I would share some of my thoughts after having used both Ubuntu and Kubuntu versions of the venerable and popular Ubuntu Linux.

First, since there’s not a large Linux audience on Gear Diary, I will do a little explaining.  The Linux Kernel was first developed by Linus Torvalds in or around 1991.  He was designing it as a replacement for the Minix kernel.  It’s hard to say when it truly started to take off, but the most important thing Linus did was release the kernel under the GPL, which then lets anyone who wants to modify the kernel.  Since the kernel is GPL, anyone can download a copy, modify it if they wish and then redistribute it  - so long as there is credit and a copy of the GPL included with it.

Since it is GPL, many others have taken the Kernel, the GNU utilities and other GPL software and then distributed it.  First, was SLS.  Then Slackware, then Redhat and Debian.  So as the years have gone by, there’s been distribution after distribution…more distributions than I can count.  Some think this is a bad thing, but I think it is a very good thing, as it gives the user a choice of which tools they would like to use.

My choice (or choices) as of late have all been Debian based.  My top two favorite distributions of Linux are Ubuntu and Kubuntu.  The main difference between the two is that Ubuntu uses the Gnome Desktop as its interface, while Kubuntu uses KDE.

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