Mitrax and Wolvix

I tried out two more Live CD distros this week, first Wolvix, then Mitrax. Of the two of them, Mitrax has a lower release number, but for my interests, it better suits my needs, at least for a Live CD distro. Mitrax boots quite rapidly, nearly as quickly as most of my disk based operating systems, but it is quite functional for the simple kinds of things I do with Live CDs.

Mitrax boots in about a minute on my Dell Dimension 4100 desktop system, loads into RAM, ejects the CD, and runs a snappy version of FVWM, which is nicely customized. I did have to set up my network configuration to indicate that I use a DHCP based network, but that step was provided on an easily accessible menu, which gives you choices, including DHCP. From there, Web browsing and other services were readily available.

One of the better efforts in Live CDs, especially considering its early stages of development. Worth downloading and trying out.

I'll stick with Libranet for everyday use, but I'll keep this Live CD around for times when I want a fast system loaded into RAM.

Libranet alive and well

In another blog, I posted an entry, expressing concern over the future of Libranet. Tal Danzig, the primary developer of Libranet, wrote a note to my blog and clearly stated that Libranet was not going away or disappearing, but it wasn't going to be given away to the open community either. I was quite pleased to find out that Tal still plans to continue with Libranet, and that he is merely taking a "breather" to decide which direction to head next.

I am an avid supporter of Libranet, and I am very pleased to find out that Libranet intends to remain what, in my mind, is my preferred system for personal use.

Integration testing work

My current work involves integration testing of financial market data that is processed by both UNIX and Linux servers.

Now working in financial investments

Well, it took six years to get back there, but I am back working at a large financial investments company that utilizes a lot of leading edge software. They use Linux, UNIX, Windows, and all kinds of networking tools. I get to be in near the ground floor effort to revamp their infrastructure to provide very high speed, low latency access to up to the instant access to financial market data.
I like the company and the work very much!

Downloaded DSL 1.5

This evening I downloaded DSL 1.5, which is 48 MB in size. I will give it a test run shortly.

Starting new job on Tuesday

I was hired for the job I interviewed with back on September 2. I will be starting my first day on that job this coming Tuesday.

Interviewing for longer term positions

I had an interview this past Friday with a financial investments company to do some testing of market data feed systems that provide market data for the entire company. The work may involve either UNIX or Linux systems, and it will most certainly involve writing test plans concurrent with development activities. This is right up my alley. I did some work writing test plans for super computer extensions to large scale UNIX systems several years ago, and I wrote many shell scripts to test both individual test cases and a test harness to put all the tests together into a much larger comprehensive test suite.