I’m currently out of town and just reading about Ubuntu Karmic experiences left and right. Some are pretty comprehensive compared to others. Steve Rosenberg of http://www.indiesocal.com who wrote about the Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade. There were snags in the upgrade especially when it came to X.org but he was able to fix it too. There’s also this thing on the Register about how terrible Ubuntu 9.10 is. But I guess it all boils down to one thing when it comes to any operating system: YMMV. Your mileage may vary.
It’s the combination of the hardware you …read more

Mandrake was the first Linux distro that I tried and liked a lot. It was a newbie friendly enough distro back then and I still hear (and read) about it these days. Although now it is called Mandriva. LinuxCrunch talks about the 20 new features of Mandriva 2010.

New design for the installer.
Live upgrade
Moblin desktop
Guest accounts
3G features request
Better wireless support
Easier wifi key setup
Better boot time
Better rpmdrake start up speed
Urpmi media auto configuration
Better user information in rpmdrake
Better Drakguard
Better krandr
OpenOffice.org 3.1 and KDE 4 integration
gcc 4.4
Improved diskdrake
GNOME 2.28
KDE 4.3.2
Nepomuk integration
Plymouth boot splash

I really liked it that the installer of Mandrake give us …read more

Because your netbook doesn’t need to feel sucky! And it could work better for you too!
Sounds like an infomercial, doesn’t it? ;  )  But thinking about what defaults you might possibly have, there’s gotta be something better.  And I might be biased but there really are other things better on netbooks compared to Windows.  Whether you believe it or not, that’s what I personally think.  Windows looks too cluttered for me even though it’s not as sluggish as I thought it would be.
Anyway, no need to freak out that your netbook isn’t quite as fantastic as you thought it should …read more

A blog entry on Eleven is Louder reminds me of the fact that there really are a whole lot of distros and that there are some really good ones worth checking out. Argh! So many distros, so little time. I used to check out distros but mainly the ones that run on live CDs because I didn’t really want to mess with the hard drive and I just test them for the sake of satisfying my curiosity.
Among the list of distributions worthy of checking out are:

GoboLinux
Draco
Blag
Enlisy
Protech

Blag has a very interesting name. This distro is fascinating because it …read more

linuX-gamers.net announced its latest release linuX-gamers live 0.95. There are different versions available for download and it depends on your needs.

Lite ISO: Small CD image (700MB)
This has games suitable for children and older computers. You just burn it on a CD with your favorite CD-writing tool.
Lite USB
This has the same games as the Lite ISO version but it is made for USB keys and USB sticks (requires minimum of 1GB USB device).
You could use:
sudo dd bs=8M if=/path/to/lg-live-0.9.5-i686-lite.usb of=/dev/your_usb_device

Or: use the Flashnul utility. You could also refer to this guide to using Flashnul.
Big ISO
Big DVD image (4.7GB) with the …read more

The wait is over for Fedora fans as Fedora 11, named Leonidas, because it has been released. You could start with the downloads already. You could get it from the Fedora Project’s download page. There are install CDs and live ones too.
Nifty features:

20-second boot-up. How much faster could boot-up times go? But a 20-second boot-up would be nice.
Automatic fonts and Mime installer. If you’re not familiar with the file format, it’s ok. You could try opening it and you will be prompted if you want to search for the application that will open it. …read more

In Portugal, Caixa Magica is reported to be popular as it is often deployed in offices and schools. Its latest release is now based on Mandriva instead of SUSE. I wonder how this would affect how people would accept it. Other things that came with the latest release:

support for proprietary drivers such as ATI and NVIDIA
support for suspend on notebooks
20,000+ software in the repositories
APT and Synaptic package managers
Linux kernel 2.6.29
GNOME 2.26.1
KDE 4.2.2
X.org Server 1.6.1
OpenOffice.org 3.0.1
Firefox 3.0.10

Kudos to the Caixa Magica team for releasing v. 14! They have become successful in making a distro their own …read more

Looking for Android-powered netbooks? Acer might be coming up with something. It is reported that Acer is currently working on a netbook running Android. The market will have another choice when it comes to operating systems on the Acer Aspire One.
Interestingly enough, Acer might be releasing the Android-powered Acer Aspire One in the third quarter of the year. And they could probably even have a netbook sale around Thanksgiving, right? Or around Christmas time. A strategic time of release, don’t you think? Especially if these netbooks would cost lower. For Linux users …read more

Just 9 more days before its release, I am sure Fedora users are more than excited to get the distro up and running on their computers. If you’re one of the brave ones who will try the pre-release version, here’s the link to the download page of all the options you’ve got for downloading Fedora 11’s pre-release version
PlanetOSS even has a review of Fedora 11’s pre-release. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols listed down Fedora’s 5 best features even.
On the best features list, I saw that the fast boot up time was included. I saw that on one of the tweets …read more

Ah yes, finally was able to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 or Jaunty Jackalope the other night. I decided to check it out already because it’s been quite a while since it was released and my internet connection was better. In any case, here are some observations after the upgrade :

Wifi was gone. But no worries. There’s a new wifi driver included apparently. For a time I was using Madwifi with Intrepid Ibex but JM Ibanez told me that there is a newer driver, which is ath5k. It was disabled, somehow, so basically we …read more