TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

OS X Basics discusses the four major browsers available for OS X and the main advantages of each. He prefers Firefox on OS X, and I’d have to agree. I use several extensions which I have come to depend on that Safari doesn’t have. Also, since I use Mac, Windows, and Linux regularly I like having one browser that is the same on each platform. Safari might be faster to load and run, but evidence also shows it could hurt your system’s performance.

From AppleInsider:

People familiar with the latest pre-release say Apple notes just one significant change since builds 8P2130 and 8P130 were issued last week, specifically a bug fix to ImageIO that was affecting image import speeds.

It looks like 10.4.9 will be out soon. AppleInsider also notes that the refinements Apple has been making to 10.4.9 may signal that it is the last maintenance release of Tiger before they focus solely on Leopard (10.5).

From ZDNet Australia:

Ubuntu developers are finalising preparations for the release of the next version — dubbed Feisty Fawn — of the popular Linux distribution in mid-April.

Overnight, Ubuntu developer Tollef Fog Heen announced Ubuntu’s main software repository had been frozen — with no changes allowed to the code — as developers got ready to issue a fifth major test version (”Herd 5″) of the next version of Ubuntu.

I’m looking forward to taking Fesity Fawn for a test drive soon. It looks like they have made some great strides in the usability of Linux.

“I and others do believe that 3D is an essential part of the modern desktop experience,” wrote Shuttleworth earlier this month. “It is difficult to buy a PC or laptop that does not include such hardware, and in terms of transistor count it’s almost as much as your CPU these days.”

“However, when we reviewed the status of the free software applications that depend on that hardware functionality we found that they were not ready for inclusion by default in Feisty. Neither Compiz nor Beryl have the requisite stability and compatibility to be a default option in Feisty.”

Read the rest of the article.

“The balance of power in the processor market is very clear: Intel’s Core 2 Duo leads, while AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 family lags somewhat behind without necessarily being inferior for the average user. But is the situation the same in the notebook space? Both companies offer powerful dual-core processors for portable computers, and we’ve begun feeding benchmark results into a new Interactive CPU Charts category for mobile processors. You’ve asked for it, and now you’ve got it - you can easily compare performance.”

Tom’s Hardware takes a detailed look at the mobile dual core CPU situation as it currently stands. Since notebook performance is dependent on many things, you should evaluate the entire package before picking a notebook solely based on its CPU.

“Poke around the net for a while searching for information on what it’s like to switch to a Mac, and you’ll quickly get a face full of hyperbole, zealots, platform bigots, feature weenies, and naysayers - from both the Windows and Mac camps.
“But there are precious few places to get an honest word about what it’s like to switch, other than some deeply technical face-offs. So, I’ve been taking notes for the past few years, and thought I’d write them down.”

I have to say I agree with most of the things on this guy’s list. One of my favorite things is the camaraderie of fellow Mac users at work. When I first started at my current job in 2002, I was the only Mac user. People left and right would make comments about my iBook G3 700Mhz and joking about my little Mac. Now, 5 years later, many of my friends and a lot of people at work now have MacBooks and other Mac computers. Since I’ve been a Mac user the longest, I find myself helping out my fellow Mac users on an almost daily basis. Oftentimes they will tell me about something new they discovered.

I’ve had people randomly come up to me at work and in public at airports asking about my MacBook Pro.

Beyond that, since I was primarily a Linux user, switching from Windows hasn’t been too difficult for me. I like the fact that OS X gives me a lot of the power that I am used to in a *nix operating system.

Check out the list.

Knopperdisk is a small, Gentoo based, Linux distribution. It comes in two flavors: floppy and USB pen-drive. The USB version, which will be reviewed here, contains many useful utilities which would make it a handy rescue Linux distro.

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Here’s a nice review of Pardus Linux, a distribution I had not heard of before. It is funded and developed by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey and brings some unique features to the table. It uses KDE as its desktop manger and has a very nice and clean looking interface. It looks like a distribution to keep an eye on for future releases. I’m going to have to take a look at Pardus myself soon.

Informit.com is running an article about the top 5 hard drive diagnostic and repair utilities for Mac. Looks like I’m going to be getting one to try soon to see if I can fix my girlfriend’s screwed up PowerBook drive. I’ve replaced her drive, but she’d like to get her photos back. If I’m successful I’ll write an article about what I did to get the files off her laptop’s busted drive.

Phoronix had the interesting idea to benchmark Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu. Considering that they’re the same distribution with a different desktop environment, it more or less boils down to a benchmark of which desktop environment makes the benchmark slower.

If you check the benchmark out, you’ll see that in each case the numbers were very close to each other. There was a minor difference with Ubuntu (GNOME desktop) being a little bit faster than the other two, and Kubuntu (KDE) being slowest on the “desktop” system (Sempron) benchmark. On the server system (XEON processor) neither distribution was always fastest. From what I read I don’t think the benchmarks were done repeatedly and averaged out. It was an interesting idea to try, though.

Windows and Linux have tons of BitTorrent clients available for them. What about on the Mac? There are several decent BitTorrent clients available, so I decided to check out four of them, and see what I thought about each of them.

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