I see via Planet Ubuntu that Ubuntu developer Mike Rooney, who had been blogging with geek-favored Octopress, has now moved to WordPress.

He acknowledges that most people seem to be moving it the other way (from WordPress to Octopress), but he cites a few things that he couldn't get past in the Ruby-on-one-side, static-HTML-on-the-other world of Octopress:

• Hard to set up on OS X
• Doesn't like Markdown
• Hates lack of copy flow
• Wants portability in composing entries (from machines without his private key)

WordPress has all of this, of course. It's not geeky sexy like Octopress, or the Jekyll project on which it's based.

Acknowledging that something isn't working for you and seeking something that does? Nothing wrong with that. And a whole lot right.

By the way, I love Markdown. And you can get it in WordPress

I decided to pull out a test machine -- the old Gateway Solo 1450, circa 2002 -- and try to install GNOME 3 in OpenBSD 5.2.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I was successful. Tips from Call for Testing helped.

This is an old laptop, so there is no 3D acceleration. That means it's Fallback Mode only for GNOME 3 on this machine.

But it's a working GNOME 3.4.2. Here is what I have in /etc/rc.conf.local:

 ntpd_flags=        # enabled during install
 multicast_host=YES
 pkg_scripts="{ dbus_daemon avahi_daemon"</code>

Here is my ~/.xinitrc:

 exec /usr/local/bin/ck-launch-session /usr/local/bin/gnome-session

Though developers for OpenBSD have a reputation -- deserved or not -- as less than warm and fuzzy, the project is nothing if not transparent in terms of letting the world know what they're working on.

I'm sure other projects are as good at detailing what has changed from one release to the next. But this is one area where OpenBSD excels.

Look at http://www.openbsd.org/plus.html for the changes between OpenBSD 5.2 and -current (the current development version). Every change is in there.

Most of what's new in the 5.2 release can be seen at http://openbsd.org/52.html, and the full changelog is at http://openbsd.org/plus52.html

The source is always available and up to date on the web -- http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ and via the CVS version control system.

You can follow the latest in ports -- software you can compile and run -- at http://openports.se/.

It's not like other open-source projects don't make their source available because they do. But I find it very, very easy to figure out what's happening in OpenBSD because of the systematic way the project's developers go about their work, which includes detailing what they've done in these changelogs as well as in the man pages for the operating system.

If the graphical stars align, it looks like it's possible to run GNOME Shell -- and not just Fallback Mode -- in GNOME 3.x when running OpenBSD 5.2.

A lot of the progress in getting GNOME running on OpenBSD goes to the developers at m:tier (more here, who are also offering binary updates to the OpenBSD base system.

So what other BSDs offer GNOME 3 packages without a whole lot of trouble? I'm not sure any at this point.

I have run GNOME 2 and Xfce 4 in the past on both OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and Xfce 4 on DragonFlyBSD), and a familiar environment goes a long way toward making you productive in an less-familiar OS.

I am trying to "hide" everything in this directory with the ShyPosts addin for Ode. Did it work?

Thanks go to Rob Reed, creator of Ode, for coming up with the ShyPosts addin, which allows you to "hide" posts from your blog indexes yet have them available via their permalinks.

You can read about ShyPosts here and in the same place download the addin for your Ode site. The addin itself is small, and the instructions are short. For the most part they work, but I needed to refer to this forum post to figure out how to write a "rule" that lets ShyPosts know what to hide. If anything, the shyness_rules file is a great place to get a little practice in writing regular expressions.

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If you see this, ShyPosts is NOT working.

If you don't see this, ShyPosts IS working.

A look at and how-to on installing GNOME 3 on OpenBSD 5.2 from Michael Dexter of http://callfortesting.org.

Read Dedoimedo's Linux-distro reviews, like these on Bodhi, Fedora, Netrunner and Crunchbang, this roundup of desktop environments and his top distros of 2012. And he loves CentOS.

No feelings are spared. If he likes it, you know he likes it. Also the other thing.

I'm testing Fedora 18 again. Yes, the live image. I didn't do an install, though I'm certainly thinking about it.

In this release's GNOME 3.6 desktop, at least a few applications -- all from GNOME proper -- like Nautilus are putting more functionality into the "global" menu that pops down from the app's icon in the upper panel.

While not catastrophic, it is problematic.

From where I sit, as long as most of an application's menu choices remain in its own window, putting anything in that app's panel-icon dropdown menu other than a superfluous "quit" does nothing to enhance the user experience.

More directly, having to go from the menu in the application's window to the additional menu in the upper panel to look for the functions you want just seems wrong.

For one thing, it kills discoverability, something that both GNOME 3 and Ubuntu's Unity seem overly fond of doing.

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