TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Apologies for the light posting lately. I have been busy working on some other projects, and I went out to visit family this weekend for the holiday. I hope everyone had a good Easter! And now the reviews must continue.

Linux Mint, a Linux distribution based in Ireland, is an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to improve the out-of-box experience of Linux. Let’s see how this distribution stacks up.

Updated (April 11, 8:40AM EDT): Version number in title (and once in article) was incorrectly stated as “Beta 2″ instead of “Beta 020″ and has now been fixed.

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Due to legal issues with AOL over the Gaim name, after a lot of secret talks with AOL, the name of the project has been changed to Pidgin. This is definitely going to take some getting used to as Gaim has pretty much become universal in my vocabulary. Many of my non-Linux using friends also use Gaim… er Pidgin. In any case, it is good to see the legal issues finally resolved even though it resulted in a name change.

Well I woke up this morning (er… afternoon) and saw that hell had finally frozen over.

The Debian Project is pleased to announce the official release of Debian GNU/Linux version 4.0, codenamed etch, after 21 months of constant development.

Updated versions of many programs, including KDE, GNOME, Firefox (Iceweasel), Thunderbird (er… Icedove), and GCC are there. There’s also a new updated installer that will also finally detect all the new hardware the servers we’ve been buying lately have (mainly SATA issues). I’m downloading it now but don’t expect to get a chance to test it until tomorrow.

Check out the full release announcement.

According to this article on slashdot, a company called Net Applications has provided data that Computerworld claims to show that there was a small decrease (0.3%) in Apple’s market share, but a rise in the number of PCs running Vista (just over 2% of PCs now run Vista). The number of PowerPC-based Macs fell but were not fully offset by new purchases of Intel-based Macs.

In my opinion this shows a significant number of people are waiting for OS X 10.5 before making their next Apple purchase, as well as waiting to see when the new iMacs are released. Meanwhile, the total number of PCs are continually increasing which are now being sold with Windows Vista only.

Most laptops are not meant to be upgradeable, but Asus is trying to change that with the Asus C90. It will be the first user upgradeable laptop. You can upgrade the CPU, video card, and the optical drive, quickly and easily. Gizmodo has pictures and more details.

Folks, I am now mostly recovered from my illness and I am hopefully bringing to you the first (or one of the first!) reviews of the latest SimplyMEPIS 6.5. I am reviewing the 64-bit version on my AMD Athlon 64 x2 system that I built myself. This machine includes 2GB of RAM, 160GB and 200GB SATA drives, and most importantly an Nvidia GeForce 7800GT 256MB. My last review of SimplyMEPIS 6.5 RC 1 got a lot of attention, albeit not nearly as much as my PCLinuxOS 2007 Test 3 review did.

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Now this is one sweet computer! Two 3.0Ghz Quad-core Xeons in a nice package with OS X. The base price with the 2 quad-core cpus is a few bucks under $4000. Of course with only 1GB of RAM which is pathetic not only by today’s standards but relative to the overall capabilities of an 8-core machine. You can easily upgrade the RAM and I would recommend most people do it themselves rather than pay for Apple’s overpriced memory. You can also probably find cheaper hard disks than Apple offers, but I haven’t checked the prices lately on either RAM or hard disks.

That being said I’d love to have one of these to replace my home-built Athlon 64 x2. I certainly won’t be spending $4k on a new computer any time soon, though. I’ve loved my Apple laptops through the last 5 or 6 years of owning one including my latest Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, but considering I can build my own desktop PC for far cheaper I’d have to have a lot of money with nothing better to do to buy one of those. But it’s still very tempting. If only Apple would release OS X for non-Apple hardware. Not that I need an 8-core computer or anything…

Well I’ve been sick the last few days hence the lack of updates and another review. I’m happy to see that more and more people are coming to my site and reading it. I still have a plan to make a custom theme for this site soon, but I’m working on some other projects as well at the moment. In any case I want to thank all my readers for continuing to come by and check out my reviews. If you have any suggestions or comments, please email me or leave a comment. I hope to be fully recovered in a few days and hopefully I can get another review up very soon.

PC World takes a look back at the revolutionary technology products that have changed the way we live today. I have to agree with most of the choices, although their ordering is a bit more controversial. Nevertheless it is a nostalgic look back at what technology products brought us to where we are today. Check out the article.

This Filipino-based Linux distribution, initiated by the Open Source Group in the Philippines’ Advanced Science and Technology Institute in October 2001, hasn’t received a lot of press (in the US, at least). I just first heard of it via DistroWatch announcing their latest release. Curious, I checked out the distribution’s website, which looked very nice. I’m always interested to see what government sponsored software brings about. I didn’t see any reviews on the DistroWatch page for Bayanihan, so I decided it was time to change that.

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