fullmetalgerbil

So I gave BLAG Linux a try. I don’t rightly know what made me do it, I mean I’d seen it mentioned a couple of places but all I really knew was that it was Fedora based. Maybe it was just because it shared the same first name as that dude from the Dwarves.

At any rate, I went to the BLAG website to download it and was greeted by a simple declaration:

blag - le brixton linux action group

works to overthrow corporate control of information and technology through community action and spreading Free Software.

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–>blag - blag linux and gnu

blag is an operating system. blag has a suite of graphics, internet, audio, video, office, and peer  to peer file sharing applications. you can replace a windoz installation with blag. if you would like to install and run blag, download and burn it to cd.

No array of selling points making it out to be the best Linux distro on the planet or anything, and the fact that they seemed almost a tad bit militant, made me definately interested. I also had the feeling that they might be anarchists, a feeling that was confirmed by following some of the links on the main page. So I downloaded the iso and burned it cd then went about installing BLAG on my old assed, cantankerous machine.

Everything went smoothly. Installation was a snap and blag auto detected all of my hardware properly except my sound card which took all of about 90 seconds to fix. I just loaded the standard repositories on install-though it gives the option to add additional repositories-so, though I didn’t quite have a mass of software to choose from and only stuff that was free in both senses was included, there was still plenty enough choices for my needs. In fact, I doubt I would have even needed to add additional repositories.

The desktop enviornment was GNOME, though I’m fairly sure I could have also loaded KDE or Xfce (I’m not totally certain on that though) and the browser was Firefox. It also included the Mozilla Thunderbird email application. Everything was working fine, I immediately liked BLAG once it was running on my box-only there was one problem I ran into. The stock Bit Torrent client was weak, however Azureus was included in the software repository (oh, and let me mention-this was my first experience with using an Red Hat Package Manager add/remove. It was a little slower than I was used to but quite easy to use) so I loaded that and went to go download me some torrentage. No go, I just couldn’t seem to connect for shit eventhough my ports were properly forwarded and everything.

After trying everything I knew to remedy the problem I went to the support forums. People suggested it might be a problem with my ISP, so to check I took a blunt insturment approach. I installed a different distro and ran Azureus-this time with success.

However, tomorrow I’m putting BLAG back in. I got a couple more responses at the forum with some suggestions on how to possibly fix things so I’m going to give it a shot. Overall though, I’d like to stick with BLAG Linux if at all possible-if for no other reason than after months of trying out different distributions I finally found a non-Ubuntu family one thats a snap to install and configure and basically works like a charm. Also, I’m heartily in agreement ideologically with BLAG and I think that counts for something.