Avinash Meetoo: Blog

Ronaldinho has just won the Ballon d’Or bestowed by France Football. Essentially, Ronaldinho is the best football player in Europe according to journalists.

Like all football maniacs, I agree with that decision even though I wanted Liverpool’s captain, Steven Gerrard, to win after his heroics during last Champions League.

Here is the Dream Team selected by the same journalists:

Now, there are some interesting facts about this selection:

• Very few teams are represented
  • Four (Cech, Terry, Makelele and Lampard) from Chelsea,
  • Two (Carragher and Gerrard) from Liverpool,
  • Two (Maldini and Shevchenko) from Milan AC and
  • Ronaldinho from Barcelona, Juninho from Lyon and Henry from Arsenal.
• Very few nationalities are represented
  • Four (Terry, Carragher, Lampard and Gerrard) are from England,
  • Two (Makelele and Henry) are from France,
  • Two (Ronaldinho and Juninho) are from Brazil and
  • Cech from the Czech Republic, Maldini from Italy and Shevchenko from Ukraine.

So, after some very deep thoughts, I conclude that next World-cup final will be England vs. Brazil

(An update from Wikipedia: The 2006 FIFA World Cup was the 18th instance of the FIFA World Cup, the quadrennial international football world championship tournament. It was held from 9 June to 9 July 2006 in Germany, which won the right to host the event in July 2000. Teams representing 198 national football associations from all six populated continents participated in the qualification process which began in September 2003. Thirty-one teams qualified from this process, along with the host nation, Germany, for the finals tournament. The tournament was won by Italy, who claimed their fourth World Cup title. They defeated France 5–3 in a penalty shootout in the final, after extra time had finished in a 1–1 draw. Germany defeated Portugal 3–1 to finish third.)

Popularity: 47% [?]

written by avinash

For the past one and a half year, I’ve been a very satisfied Gentoo Linux user. I would advise all enthusiastic Linux users to install Gentoo at least once. It is a very instructive (not to say interesting in a geekish sort of way) process. Personally, I’ve learnt a lot about the internals of Linux thanks to Gentoo. Sometimes things get very low level but that’s Gentoo to me

But all nice things must come to an end.

I don’t use Gentoo any more.

I’ve finally found the perfect distribution (TM).

Let me introduce the mighty Kubuntu, the KDE derivative of Ubuntu Linux…

The three most important advantages of Kubuntu over Gentoo (IMHO) are

1. It just works!
   • Configuring my scanner under Gentoo was not trivial (i.e. difficult). It worked without any configuration whatsoever under Kubuntu
   • Configuring Gentoo to work with a laser printer at work (HP Laserjet 4000 family) was OK but I had to download the driver manually. In Kubuntu, the driver is immediately selectable from a list.
2. Updates are much quicker!
   • Gentoo features portage which is basically an equivalent of the Kubuntu packages. One fundamental difference is that in Gentoo everything is compiled from source and, therefore, takes time (and, sometimes, lots and lots of time) whereas in Kubuntu, packages are precompiled and, hence, are installed in no time. Granted, Gentoo gives the user a much finer choice about the various compilation options and what really needs to be installed. But, I prefer Kubuntu’s speedier updates over Gentoo’s much slower ones. Life is too short
3. Kubuntu is from Africa! And I am proud to be African!

Popularity: 8% [?]

written by avinash

I have (temporarilly) switched to AMD64 Kubuntu Linux from my normal Gentoo Linux. This switch might become permanent if I ultimately find that Kubuntu is better than Gentoo. That’s a really tough act as I love Gentoo

I want to really test Kubuntu (and, hence, Ubuntu) before installating it on Christina’s computer at work. I have decided to stick to the official packages. I want to be sure that Kubuntu is perfectly usable without having to download packages from unofficial (and difficult to find) repositories because this is the way I want Christina’s computer to be configured…

I have to tell you that I am very satisfied with the progress I’ve made:

1. Installation was a breeze. Everything except my ADSL modem was recognised right away.
2. Configuring the ADSL modem was easy thanks to detailed instructions written by some nice guy.
3. Firefox and Thunderbird were preinstalled and I had no difficulty importing my setting and files from Gentoo (as I am very knowledgeable )
4. I installed LyX, the rather wonderful document processor that I recommend to all of you, using apt-get which also installed the whole LaTeX infrastructure.
5. I finished by installing some programming tools for Haskell, Python and Ruby which are, IMHO, great languages. Forget about C, C++ and Java!

Everything is working really well. Might this switch become permanent? Only time will tell

Popularity: 8% [?]

written by avinash