Recently, I noticed that audacious (ver. 2.3.-2) is gulping my CPU resources (~25%CPU according to top) and today I discovered, on my Debian Linux (sid), that the culprit seems to be the combination between audacious and ALSA: once I installed pulseaudio, and set audacious to play through pulseaudio, the audacious dropped to 3%CPU (top says Pulseaudio takes about 1%CPU on my box).

cheers

I switched this year from Windows XP to Debian (I tried various Linux distributions since 1997, but I’m picky in terms of user interface and tunability) and this time around I was surprised that everything I was used to under Windows, and more, was in place and functional: the easy and intuitive installation of the operating system (tried Debian and Ubuntu, and I like them both, but prefer Debian as a matter of taste, Ubuntu is more for the hurried user), the smooth installation/deinstallation of applications, the graphical interface(s), the documentation, the sheer number of applications available in the Linux world, the elegant updating mechanisms, convinced me that the Linux world is already a much larger, interesting and useful world than Windows can ever hope to be. Don’t waste your time, switch now and donate half of your Windows license money to these contemporary heroes, and drink the rest with your friends sharing your experience, you won’t regret a dime.

Note: I don’t work in anything related to GNU, Linux or FreeBSD and I’m not part of any promotion campaign, I’m just using them (Debian, the universal operating system, on my desktop and laptop, and FreeBSD on my home-server machine) and this is an authentic message from a picky previous user of Windows confirming the quality and the maturity of the software which finally allows you to use your freedom of choice with no strings, or pains, attached.

MSWindows could stand a chance against Linux only if it would be released under GPL.

WindowsXP is (made) obsolete, and windows7 is irrelevant now. It’s time to call your senator or local political representative and ask him/her why is s/he still spending public money on licenses to Microsoft or Apple for his/her public office, for the flickery buttons these operating systems are mustering in their new versions?

Internet is a revolution, but GNU/Linux is its completion, a new world is opening for PC or notebook users everywhere, and that is due to all those GNU hordes of true intellectuals. Congratulations to all of them.

All these operating systems are free as in speech and as in beer.

Ubuntu installed like a breeze on my laptop (a Toshiba Sattelite Pro for which I paid more because it came with a default WindowsXP installation and I had no choice in the liberal turbo-capitalist Romanian serfdom) and it’s most up-to-date.

On my PC,Debian got all the drivers right after it needed a kick to pass the boot stage (I have an Intel DQ965 motherboard and I had to say install pci=nommconf at the boot prompt, that’s because Intel doesn’t follow the open-source principles). The ntfs-3G driver (free also) was needed to read-write my external NTFS formatted drives.

On my server, FreeBSD does exactly what I told it to do, not what some corporate wanker decided it should do for me.

The usual applications one has on its desktop are also free: Pidgin for instant messaging (as in speech and beer), Skype (as in beer) for VoIP, Firefox for web browsing (speech and beer), Thunderbird for email (speech and beer), OpenOffice (speech and beer); I won’t mention the development tools, the list would be too long.

I have now the clear feeling of a nice and functional desktop based entirely on open-source. I’ve been waiting for a long time for this to happen and now it did.

So goodbye Windows, goodbye Microsoft, goodbye bloated applications with unjustified bloated prices. I only regret the Microsoft Sans-Serif fonts. I opened my apartment’s windows for the corporate stench to go away.

Your country’s public administration should do the same transition, now it’s not only technically possible, but advantageous in any meaningful way. Bill Gates has a wealth of tens of billions, add to it the wealth of the other corporate slaves at Microsoft, it may be the size of an usual financial corporation public bailout, and guess where the largest part of that is coming from: from the licenses your government pays so that all the secretaries can play Minesweeper, there’s a free Minesweeper in these free desktops too.

Whenever you go to a public office (governmental, EU level, UN level) and see a Windows installation on the public clerk’s screen, or an Adobe pdf-related application remember that you’re actually paying for that, not just the clerk’s salary, but also your share to Microsoft’s profit and other proprietary software companies’, like Adobe. Tell those public offices to switch to GNU, FreeBSD and Linux, before Microsoft, Adobe and the likes would get too big to fail.

All these free operating systems/software distributions wouldn’t have been possible without the GNU base and without the only global army that matters today: the open-source developers, these people are writing more than fiction: their writings are authentic speech.

So now that I’m left with some money to spare, I’ll make some donations (although the idea of donation is wrong, these are social infrastructure public services, so they explicitly deserve a part of the taxes we pay, you and me, wikipedia belongs to the same category): 100USD goes to GNU, 100USD goes to FreeBSD, 100USD goes to Debian Linux (I don’t have the right to work yet, here, but I have the full support of my wife on this, so you guys can have a non-free beer, this time it’s on us). I hope I’ll be able to provide these meager resources yearly if I won’t have the time to contribute as a developer.