Archive

As many of you may remember I did a review of Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 (SFU) a few months ago. I remember being frustrated with that release because it seemed to me that all Microsoft did was throw something together just to be able to say "Hey look, we have this". I thought, since Microsoft released version 3.5, I would revisit and see what changes were done with it. I downloaded the beta version a while back and from the beta I was very impressed with the improvements that Microsoft made. Being a beta version it was buggy and some things just didnt quite work. I finally got the final version of the OpenBSD-based SFU 3.5 and this release makes dynamic leaps and bounds over previous releases of this software package. I am glad to see a lot more work was put into this release.

A few weeks ago, I stubbed my toe on my old Sun Ultra 5 as it sat there lifeless and unused in my apartment. Once my primary desktop, the envy of my geek friends, and a way to woo the ladies, its glory days have long since passed. As much as I would like to let it live out its days looking sexy and taking up space, I live on the island of Manhattan, where space is a premium. Since I can't charge it rent, I decided I'd better use it or lose it. But what to use it for? What operating system would I run on it? Solaris? What about Linux? FreeBSD? NetBSD? OpenBSD? They all run on the SPARC platform, so I thought why not do a quick review.

Onebase is still a very new distribution - the first version appeared only in July 2003, and Onebase 2004 released in early January 2004 is a major rewrite and enhancement of the original concept. It started out as a source-based system, but with this release it embraced binary packages as well, becoming a hybrid. It is not based on any other major distro or package management system, instead it prides itself on doing things its own way. These are still the early days, but this is also what makes it an interesting distro, and the one to watch.

I want to start off by saying that MandrakeMove is an incredible distribution and I am going to focus on some rather particular points in this review. My hope is to make the community aware of some of the outstanding issues with running MandrakeMove and not to discredit the countless hours Mandrake employees spent on making such a polished product. We all want Linux to succeed and that can only be accomplished by continuing to test, report and ask why or why not? The lifecycle of linux is like an organism, it has to keep breathing to stay alive.

Around 3 weeks ago, I downloaded the 2nd beta of KDE 3.2 from their FTP site. I've been using this release every day since then. The purpose of my writing this piece is not to highlight KDE 3.2's new features and applications - read the Changelog at KDE's site for that - but to give you a complete picture of how it measures up to its previous versions in terms of everyday use. Does it make me more productive? Is the command line more efficient yet? Or, even better, does it make me use the command line more effectively? Read on...

I'm a windows user by nature, I've been playing around with Linux for a little while, I'm no Expert in any way but I've used quite a few distro's. The first distro I ever stuck with for any amount of time Was Xandros 1.0, which a friend provided for me. Except for the fact that it ran an old version of KDE it was perfect for me, but the old KDE crippled my work. Enter Xandros 2.0.

About 3 years ago I was looking around for something to add multimedia capabilities to my GNOME desktop. At that point in time there wasn't really that much around. I think the most advanced video player for Linux in those days was XAnim, which was neither were moving quickly or could qualify as free software, except in the beer context. Projects like Xine and mplayer had either just started up or not come into existence yet.

MandrakeMove is a Live CD distribution, or in other words, it does not need to be installed. It is an interesting concept, but not a new one, there are quite a few similar products, such as the famous Knoppix, SUSE Live, LindowsCD, Mempis, PCLinuxOS, Gnoppix and a few others.

FreeBSD 5.2, the latest in the 5.x development series has been released and is now available from the master server and should appear at mirrors shortly. New features include ACPI 2.0, a much refined ATAng, a new swap pager providing improved throughput and many other changes. For the UI-inclined users, GNOME has been updated to version 2.4.1 and KDE to 3.1.4.

Linux can be made profitable and it can be made so without going the enterprise route or by relying on the traditional services an support model-- as long as technology companies are willing to sell the operating system on their own highly optimized and performance enhanced proprietary hardware.

It seems that I am in some sort of retro-mode. As Linux on the desktop is getting bigger and better, with more apps, more sleek looks (Galaxy, Keramik and Blue Curve for example) and more idiot proof, I am going onto simpler, more condensed stuff. The big distributions are nice, but I really do not need all the applications that come with them all the time.

When Knoppix was first released it was heralded as revolutionary in the Linux world. Its autodetection and configuration capabilities were unsurpassed. Many of my colleagues remarked that if 'KNOPPIX can't do it, Linux can't do it'. Theoretically, one would be able to get a Knoppix CD, pop it into an arbitrary system, run it, save one's data to a partition, USB stick, etc....), reboot and the existing system would be left completely as it was before the CD was placed in the system.

OK, so you want to create a windows service and you're not a .NET guru? This is exactly what got me in trouble with my wife. It started off easy enough, but before the weekend was through, my wife was getting on to me for spending so much time at the computer. She thought that I should be spending quality time with our family, imagine that. I told her that I was doing some 'personal' research, that, "no, it's not work honey" and "I'm trying to learn some new technology", "think of it as reading a book, only on the computer..." Inanities like that, she wasn't having any of it, of course. Regardless, I am glad to report, I figured it out and just in the nick of time, too.

This article is the fifth and final installment of my series on Debian-based commercial distros in a Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) environment. It has been a wild ride (see OSNews' archives under the "Features" menu for the previous articles of the series), and I would rather eat my weight in jelly beans than go through that again. But I think it was worth it. We will see in this article Xandros being reviewed and compared to all previous distros I used and reviewed the past 2-3 months.