[aklug] ramblings: Debian, Racket Scheme

Two things I wanted to mention, in my continuing Gnu/Linux journey:

First, I recently switched my desktop system from Gentoo to Debian
Wheezy. I still think Gentoo represents some great ideas, but due to the
small user base, and thus the limited development of some of those
ideas, it is difficult to use Gentoo as a practical distribution. In
particular, Gentoo doesn't have stable, long-term releases (with
security updates) like most distros have. (There is no technical reason
Gentoo couldn't have this -- they just don't have enough distro
developers to maintain it.)

So I went back to Debian, looking for something with good long term
stability, little configuration, and lots of packages. (I probably would
have tried Ubuntu, but some of the things I've read lately about
Canonical and Ubuntu have me feeling a bit stand-offish about it.)
Wheezy seems pretty nice. Despite everything I've been told, this whole
Gnome 3 things doesn't seem so bad (i.e., once I got my graphics drivers
working). I like the fact that I can do everything really easily with
only the keyboard, especially after I figured out the window switching;
Alt-F2; and how to enable Mouse Keys.

Second: something cool I've been playing around with is Racket Scheme
(also available in Wheezy repositories). It comes with an IDE that is
pretty nifty - great for learning and playing around. E.g., in "student
mode" you can actually paste an image into the interpreter text, define
the image as a variable, and transform it with functions. There's a
snazzy online book I've started working through from the Racket Web site
called How to Design Programs.
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Received on Thu Aug 29 22:30:43 2013