"Jack of all trades, master of none" is a figure of speech used in reference to a generalist: a person that is competent with many skills but is not outstanding in any particular one. (Wikipedia)

== Begin Opening ==

I ventured onto the gnu.org website wanting to read what their licenses actually were. In the process I decided that I should figure out what GNU actually is. Aside from discovering that the FSF seems to be just a source of income for GNU, I was quite disturbed.

I want to make very clear that I went into this with no bias in one way or the other. It is only after all my research that I developed a very strong opinion. I also want to say that a majority of my research was done by reading pro-GNU information. I also asked about this in the #gnu channel on Freenode. Below I'm giving my opinion on two specific documents that bothered me in particular. Their text is cited verbatim as well as links to the original.

# Documents are below the conclusion.

== Begin Conclusion ==

Instead of placing my conclusion at the very bottom it's going here.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, it boils down to GNU feeling they thought of it first so their the originators of the Linux project and all work belongs to them. However, I encourage you to actually read it for yourself. Just follow the links, you don't need my opinions for this.

After everything below I have no doubt that what we call "Linux" should be "Linux" and NOT "GNU/Linux." I'm actually very certain that GNU doesn't belong in the name of any operating system at this point. If they can ever finish their own OS, then perhaps they can call that system "GNU." Until then, they should realize their failures as developers and as free software idealists. They should realize that they can make a "GNU Linux" system that is stripped of anything they don't like and realize that this is what theire "GNU system" is.

They claim we can't exist without them but that's wrong. Linux distributions exist without any GNU software in them. They really need to remove themselves from their communist beliefs and take a jump into the real world.

00:00 GNU: No! I use "Linux" and I will never use "GNU/Linux." FOSS belongs to everyone. Stop trying to claim the work of so many others as your own.

If you know me, you'll know I run a very trimmed down version of Ubuntu. I love the Ubuntu community and the OS. However, I do feel it's somewhat bloated. I've setup my system to be very lean.

I recently upgraded to 9.10 and then decided to drop back to stable. This involves reinstalling the base system and reinstalling all the packages. My sister complained about her system being incredibly slow. I decided to reinstall both at the same time to compare the time it takes to do them at the same time.

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Backup:
Linux: dpkg --get-selections > ~/packages.list

How good are your backups?

I thought mine were pretty dang good. I found out otherwise. I had the following two lines running nightly for my backups.

# Make MySQL backup
mysqldump -u root -p "$( /var/mysqldump/mysql-$(date +%F).gz
# Delete old copies
find /var/mysqldump/ -mtime +90 -exec rm {} \;

Anybody know what's wrong with that?

For 99% of Linux commands, this would be perfectly good syntax. Unfortunately, this is one of those 1% times where things aren't the way you expect them.

I was using -u root -p "$(</root/.sql.pwd)"

I think it's come time for somebody to write a down to earth article about using IRC for advice. In short, it's best to never assume any advice on IRC is good advice. This is for a multitude of reasons.

IRC is a place for people to come and communicate with one another. Most of them do not have degrees in what you are requesting advice on. In fact, it's likely that not a single person on any network you are on has any document stating they know what they're talking about.

What an interesting question... Why not use all the RAM and HD space you have as long as it doesn't affect performance? It's one that's been nagging at me a lot lately.

I've seen an 8.10 64bit Live CD running on a dual monitor setup and I've seen it do so VERY beautifully. Everything except sound worked right out of the box. If I had a desktop system like that, I'd be running it that same way. It was fast, responsive, pretty, everything.