During the last couple of days, I began to seriously code a little Java application using Swing for the GUI. The only obvious thing I can say, is that I learned more about Java in the last 3 days than during the whole last year at school. There is a cool picture about that on xkcd:
On a sidenote, OpenJDK really freed Fedora and Linux in general for me. It works perfectly beautifully associated with NetBeans 6.5 
There has been quite some time since the last Fedora port to the Alpha architecture with a working Gnome environment was published, and the next iteration is still in the works. So I figured it was time to give Gentoo a try, a distribution I didn’t touch for years.
For those of you totally unfamiliar with Gentoo, you basically:
The installation from source packages is still a scary but fun concept to me. On the positive side, it lets you compile every software to take advantage of your CPU’s specificity. On the downside, it took 36h on a 667MHz EV67 CPU (I’m not joking) to compile a working Gnome environment. It’s looooooooong, especially with a noisy machine like the XP1000.
Note that Gentoo’s documentation is REALLY nice and well written, and I also got some support on the #alpha IRC channel, where the Fedora on alpha guys also live (thanks for your nice work, Oliver and Jay).
Gnome 2.22 running on an Alpha, Gentoo 2008.0
Oh, and Merry Christmas for all you Christians out there
A cool feature in iTunes is the ability to share your entire music library over the network, but few people know that the exact same thing is built into Fedora, and you can activate it in 1 minute. iTunes is using a protocol called DAAP (Digital Audio Access Protocol) for that, which is also available as a standard plugin for Rhythmbox.
To activate music sharing:
Done, now your music is shared across your network, and you can even see it in iTunes.