Very soon: a review of WengoPhone…

Podcasting seems to be a web revolution: more and more podcasts are made available, and more and more people download them!

You can find podcasts about almost everything: Sci-Fi stories, Linux, Web, … and radio programs.

In Belgium, the RTBF (Radio Télévision Belge Francophone) just launched their podcasts, featuring their top radio programs from their different radios: Classic 21 (focussed on Classic Rock), Pure FM (more modern stuff), la Première (if you like “Le Jeu des Dictionnaires”…), etc.

I especially like the “Making Off” and “Allo C’est moi” programs from Classic 21, and the DVD and Cinema reviews from Pure FM.

To keep track of new podcast, and to download them easily, I use iPodder, a simple Podcast Receiver:

The new name of this program is Juice, but it’s still known as iPodder in the Ubuntu Repository, and in Gentoo Portage (still hard masked though…).
You can easily add podcast feeds, schedule updates and downloads, and other stuff I didn’t have time to figure out yet :-).

I was getting sick of Ubuntu running on my laptop. Don’t get me wrong: Ubuntu is a terrible distribution, very easy to install and to use, and integrating everything you need without big troubles. It’s a great replacement of choice for Window$.

So, why am I getting sick of it? It’s just that it is too complete. It installs by default a lot of stuff I don’t need, and never will. I am was using it on my laptop: a Acer TravelMate 800, Centrino 1.3GHz, 512Mb RAM, 40Gb HD, … I used to run Gentoo on it in the past, until the on-board ATI video card has loosely abandonned me.

When I got it back from repair, I put Ubuntu on it: everything worked out of the box. But it was so slooooow. Maybe I’m used to the speed of my new AMD64 Desktop, but I still remember the laptop was running faster and smoother under Gentoo.

So I decided to give Debian a (short) try… The installation is easy, menu driven, and short. But then begins the struggle to have all the packages I need (Xorg, Firefox 1.5, ipw2100, …). I was surprised to find only Firefox version 1.0.4 in the stable branch. I thought there was some security hole in it…

Nevermind… I leave debian on a small partition of my drive, maybe for further use, but I’m currently downloading Gentoo 2006.0 to give my laptop a second breath!!!

See you soon for feedback about the last release…