What am I up too?

What have I been doing lately?  Well, a few weeks ago I went to Linux Fest Northwest.  This got me thinking on my "plan 'B'" career. So, I got looking for a college where I could study 100% online.  And this college would have to be accredited and honored by my current employer.  And finally, I am anticipating the release of Fedora 19.

Linux Fest Northwest is an annual event held in Bellingham, Washington at Bellingham Technical College. This is a place where Open Source people converge, once a year, to show their stuff, give tutorials, promote new things and have a great time.  Leading Linux Distributions were there as well as groups from many bleeding edge Open Source Projects.  Being an "End User" I simply kept my hands in my pockets, maintained a smart and geeky appearance (so I would not be discovered), attended a few lectures and pushed my way through the maze of displays.  It was all way over my head but not out of the reach of this white boy because he knows how to jump.

I was challenged to reach for greater heights in my career path and began pursuing a "plan B" career.  I have been a laborer all my life and really have a desire to settle down to a low impact job that can provide for my needs.  In my research I discovered that an entry level tech job will start at around 40K which is about 10K more than I started in my current job.  Depending upon experience and education, a tech job could pay in the upper 5 figures and possibly 6 figures.  Again, that all depends on experience and education and ability. 

I started searching for a college where I could attend 100% over the internet.  I knew about Phoenix University for some time, but it was always way out of my price range.  Well, the company I work has a partnership with the afore mentioned institute of higher learning.  This means, my company will help thwart a high percentage of my potential education expenses.

In the Open Source arena, when a person stops dreaming, he must be dead.  Knowing this, I will continue using Linux and reaching higher every day.  Fedora helps me do just that.  I can do simple day-to-day tasks with Fedora or I can study programming languages and actually begin to write my own code.  Everything I need is built into the Fedora packaging.  I rarely have to go outside of the repositories for extra software.  But if I do, not too awful difficult to add the extra software to my system.

As far as trends go, Open Source is continuously evolving.  I'm glad to at least be able to tinker with it.

Steam on Fedora

Yes, I have tried Steam on Fedora.  Actually, I'm not much of a gamer.  Selinux really does not like Steam because Steam likes to install executable junk on the system.  So, instead of working through it, I usually just end up removing Steam.  I'm sure that eventually, the Steam people will get'er done with the help of the Linux community.

That's all.  Originally, Steam was ported to the Ubuntu crowd and some of us created RPMs from the DEB.  Well, that was a few months ago.  Now there is an RPM for Fedora, but it is still a bit tricky.  You have to install a bunch of 32 bit libs first, then you can install Steam.  And still, you might have to adjust the Selinux policy to allow Steam to work properly.  That's just too much for me since I'm not really a die-hard gamer.  I'm pretty much content with Minecraft and the default Fedora-KDE, Fedora-Gnome games.

But, don't let that stop you.  Steam really needs the Linux community to install and play on Steam.  With you, they will be a success.  So, your free service will help them make a lot of money.

Typical Sunday

My schedule has been really weird.  I have been watching some great Bible Teaching streaming from Sunvalley Community Church:

http://new.livestream.com/sunvalleyccgilbert/events/854748

Feel free to join.  Streams live all morning starting around 8:30 PST.

Sneek Peek F18

So, you know how couples go in to see the doctor to get an ultrasound?  You know, they want to get a peek of whether the baby will be a boy or a girl?  Well, Fedora 18 comes out on Tuesday, less than 48 hours away at the time of this posting.  Guess what.  I do not even know what is in it.

I am looking forward to doing a full install of the new F18 because of all the junk I have installed on my current system.  I messed around with getting an HTTP server up and running and simply have some things that I really don't want on my every day box.  I won't go into all those things, but need-less-to-say, it will all be fresh and new this week.

One of the things that I will keep for F18 will be KDE Desktop with the K-Office Suite.  I have a bunch of other stuff that I will want to take to F18 as well.  I got Steam up and running, Skype works pretty good, Minecraft is awesome,  FireFox, Blender, Virtual Box, Lotus Symphony is working nice and I still want to do some stuff with an HTML editor called Blue Griffon.  Also, I use Openshot and Netbeans.  Anything else I need will be in the Fedora repositories.

Some of these were not working very well because I had the Oracle Java running against the Open JDK.  Can't do that as they will both cancel each other out. 

Another thing I want to carry over is a program that will convert .deb files over to RPM files.  Cool, huh?  It is called "alien".  And then, I also discovered that once I get the new RPM made and in it's own file, I just CD over to that file and use "#yum install "*.rpm" and it does everything for me.  Pretty cool.

So, "alien" is definitely coming to the new system.  Oh, "alien" is how I got my Steam Client software working.  I converted the .deb file to RPM and then installed it.  Worked very well.  Too bad Steam doesn't have a good selection of games ported to Linux, but I hear that is changing as I type.  I'm not much of a gamer any way, but you might be.  If you are, join my blog and send me a message.  I'll see if I can  help you get your Steam Client up and running.

Not much more to say.  I did my back-up and am ready for the new F18 OS.  It's been a long time coming.  Why did it take so long?  Ask Microsoft as most new hardware has now got to be made with Microsoft in mind.  All other OS's have to conform to the new requirements.  Fedora jump through a lot of hoops to get F18 out and Red Hat through some dough down on the table before it was all over. 

Long story short, F18 is due on Tuesday and I'm ready.  Hope you are.  Have a great week.