You are currently browsing the Capnkirby weblog archives for November, 2009.
30. November 2009 by admin.
Some desktop Linux distributions are perennial favorites and Fedora is definitely one of them. Fedora’s slogan is “freedom, friends, features, first” and, while some may consider it rather cheesy, it’s a nice sentiment.
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30. November 2009 by admin.
Linux Mint is an extremely popular Ubuntu based linux distribution that rivals it’s predecessor when it comes to adoption rates. With the recent release of version 8, Linux Mint promises even more improvements.
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30. November 2009 by admin.
Early on in the lifetime of the KDE Community Forums, the staff launched regularly-held courses for people willing to help KDE called “Klassrooms”. For each of these courses, a mentor (usually a KDE contributor, but not limited to them) guided a group of “students” towards a simple, definite goal that would improve KDE, for example fixing simple bugs in an application. However, the courses were not limited to coding: documentation, promo and other important areas were handled as well.
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30. November 2009 by admin.
With the stable release of FreeBSD 8.0 arriving last week we finally were able to put it up on the test bench and give it a thorough look over with the Phoronix Test Suite. We compared the FreeBSD 8.0 performance between it and the earlier FreeBSD 7.2 release along with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Linux side and then the OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 snapshot on the Sun OS side.
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30. November 2009 by admin.
By now almost anyone who keeps up with Ubuntu knows about the Ubuntu Netbook Edition (formerly Ubuntu Netbook Remix). What many people are not aware of is that there is now a Kubuntu Netbook Edition and an Ubuntu Moblin Remix in development as well. By the time Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” is released next April netbook users will have three Ubuntu variants customized for their smaller systems. Development versions of the forthcoming Kubuntu and Moblin variants were released simultaneously with Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” in September. This week we take a look at the Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Technology Preview. Since the name of the release is more than a mouthful I’ll refer to it as KNE from here on.
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30. November 2009 by admin.
There’ve been a lot of big releases in the Linux distro world lately, and none bigger than OpenSUSE 11.2, the latest offering from Novell. Novell can be a controversial company in some parts of the FOSS community, but whatever your personal view you can’t deny they’re also contributing to progress in many ways.
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30. November 2009 by admin.
Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere is a happy time. Lots of fresh Linux distribution releases coming out, all ready for plucking and testing. Mandriva 2010 is one of those. Debuting two weeks ago, it has drawn many, mainly positive reviews, sparking intrigue and a desire to take it for a spin. The previous version, Mandriva 2009 was a decent distro, with some small issues here and there; overall it behaved nicely and gave the average desktop user a solid, unique package. So the big question for me is, what does Mandriva 2010 bring to the table?
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30. November 2009 by admin.
I had a quick look at the Mandriva Linux 2010 GNOME edition and it turned out to be great. Having used Mandriva Linux 2009 and 2009.
Spring GNOME, I was certain that this release is going to be as solid as stable as it ever was. The GNOME edition provides one of the best, stable desktop experiences.
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24. November 2009 by admin.
I’ve been using Fedora (and Red Hat Linux before that) on and off for about seven years now and I would say that Fedora is a distribution consistently on the cutting edge of open source software. This means that I’ve been regularly wowed by new technology and occasionally left virtually bleeding and scrambling for alternative install media. Overall, my experiences have been positive, especially with the project’s version 11 release, and I have been looking forward to Fedora 12 for the past few months.
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24. November 2009 by admin.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin says that Chrome OS and Android are likely to merge at some point, say reports. Meanwhile, we sample the response to Chrome OS from across the Googleverse, and explore whether calling the cloud-oriented, Linux-based OS “underwhelming” is a diss or a kiss.
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24. November 2009 by admin.
For over a decade, KDE has supplied Linux and Unix users with a graphical desktop environment and a suite of useful applications. It has become one of the most popular desktop environments and is the default on many Linux distributions. With the coming of KDE 4, developers promised native KDE applications running on Windows. While the current release is still not ready for production, as of KDE 4.3.3, it is coming closer and worth trying. What follows is a brief guide to getting KDE running on Windows.
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24. November 2009 by admin.
KDE has changed over the past 13 years. The application framework has grown, matured and gone cross-platform, as have the applications. Strong growth in our community has created an increasingly diverse and large set of high-quality applications.
In the process, KDE’s identity has shifted from being simply a desktop environment to representing a global community that creates a remarkably rich body of free software targeted for use by people everywhere.
KDE is no longer software created by people, but people who create software.
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24. November 2009 by admin.
I’m relieved. After close to 2 years of thinking and discussing, the rebranding of KDE is official. From now on, the K Desktop Environment is dead. “KDE 4.4″ will never see the light of day.
Today, “KDE” has officially moved on.
KDE is no longer software created by people, it is people creating software!
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24. November 2009 by admin.
GNOME Do is a fantastic little program that makes Linux Mint a very comfortable experience. At first glance, GNOME Do just looks like a collection of launchers that can be docked to your window, with a search function attached for completeness. What stands out about Do, though, is that the search function offers a lot of versatility.
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24. November 2009 by admin.
Started during the Ubuntu 9.10 development cycle was an Ubuntu project to address paper cuts in Ubuntu, or rather small usability bugs in Ubuntu and the Linux desktop that are often only minor impairments or annoyances, but these easy-to-fix issues have never been heavily targeted for correction.
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23. November 2009 by admin.
Regular visitors to this site will know that Fluxbox is Trent’s and Patrick’s preferred window manager. I, too, am impressed with its speed and customizability, and its low overhead. Fluxbox’s biggest drawbacks are that customization is somewhat less intuitive and significantly more labor-intensive than the full-featured environments’, and that the interface as a whole is foreign and unintuitive to those whose only other computer experience has been Windows.
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23. November 2009 by admin.
Back in July, Google made BIG waves in the tech industry by announcing the development of a Google operating system based on Linux. For years there’s been speculation about if/when Google would do this, and when the announcement hit, there was no shortage of people throwing in their two cents on how this new contender would be either the greatest thing in years, or a complete waste of time. Now that Google has finally opened the code for public view, we decided to take a look at what Chrome OS is really all about
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23. November 2009 by admin.
So here we are. Windows 7 launched and it isn’t like the whole world changed. We knew it wouldn’t. Snow Leopard launched with much less fan fare, but it brought some changes that someone needed to make. A fully 64bit OS that focuses on multi-core technologies as well the disposal of the Power libraries that permeated the Darwin landscape. Windows and Macintosh will be battling this out for many years to come. What changed with Linux?
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23. November 2009 by admin.
Google OS has been warmly embraced by the anti-Microsoft crowd, but Davey Winder is less than blown over by the announcement.
“…it’s all about the web. All apps are web apps”
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23. November 2009 by admin.
Some people are already convinced that Google will fail with its Chrome operating system. Others think that Chrome can’t possibly be a threat to Windows. Both groups are so, so wrong.
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