TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Techgage takes a look at the latest release from Gentoo. There are some critical comments about the revamped installer. Without having tried the distribution myself, I’d have to agree that any installer that you have to baby sit constantly is very annoying. I prefer to get all the configuration done straight away, or at the very end, so the install can go without constant user interaction.

There’s a nice review of Mandriva 2007.1 over at lunapark6. Included are a number of screen shots. Like Linux in general, Mandriva certainly continues to come a long way with its desktop distribution. It also looks like the live CD mode of 2007.1 is pretty solid.

An Ars Technica article discusses Red Hat’s new desktop Linux offering, the Red Hat Global Desktop. An excerpt:

Designed to support a wide range of hardware, including minimalist budget computers, the Red Hat Global Desktop platform is highly scalable and will include open-source productivity software and a modern user interface. Primarily intended for local government and small business adoption in developing countries, Global Desktop, which will offer a very competitive pricing model, was developed in collaboration with Intel to ensure that it would be compatible with Intel’s Classmate PC and other low-cost hardware lines.

To me it just sounds like a bunch of marketing, considering that there are numerous Linux distributions out there and a vast majority of them are completely capable of being used on low-end budget PCs and yesterday’s hardware. They all more or less run the same software. There is no need for Red Hat to start selling a Linux distribution aimed at people who can’t really afford the software, let alone a new PC, when there are many distros already available for free that accomplish the same thing.

I’m not anti-Red Hat, though I do not like their Linux distribution very much, but can they really do something better than has already been done?

Check out the article at ars.

An article over at Yahoo! talks about a forthcoming version of Ubuntu Linux for hand held internet-enabled devices. Scheduled for release in October, check out the article for more information.

Released on April 30, GoblinX 2.0 is a live CD Linux distribution based on Slackware from Brazil. According to DistroWatch, “the primary goal for GoblinX is to create a more pleasant and functional desktop, standardising (sic) all icons and themes to make it easy for novice users to learn about available applications.” Never having heard of it before, I decided to download it and give it a try.

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Saw this on digg today. You can try out KDE 4 snapshots using a specially built live CD for that purpose. If you don’t feel like compiling it from source, this is a good way to see the latest and greatest KDE has to offer.

APC Mag’s Ashton Mills comes out with a critical look at the latest Ubuntu release and discusses some of the things it gets wrong. One of my pet peeves, display settings, seems to be one of the areas Ubuntu is not so great at dealing with still:

I have to come down on this hard here — widescreen monitors are ubiquitous now, and after all these years of X development (not to mention official driver support from Nvidia and ATI, though the latter are lacklustre) why does it not ‘just work’ under Linux? Five years ago this could be forgiveable, today there is no logical reason why the resolution of the monitor shouldn’t work out of the box — and if not automatic, then at least to have the option in the settings dialog. We all like to show off how Vista’s snazzy effects were already done by Compiz and Beryl before Vista was released — but at least it gets the resolution right first time.

I have to agree completely here. Of all the distributions I have tried, only Sabayon Linux was able to detect my monitor’s native resolution and configure it and my Nvidia card perfectly.

It is good to see a critical review of Ubuntu 7.04’s flaws as all the reviews I’ve seen thus far have been quite glowing. I’m looking forward to trying it out myself this week.

In any case, read the entire review here. You’ll see that it’s not all bad, however.

The One Laptop Per Child computer is now $175 up from $100 and will also be coming to the U.S. officially. They also plan to support Windows. This will seriously change how OLPC was going to help Linux spread throughout the world. Considering that Microsoft plans to offer Windows and Office for $3, I can’t see many people choosing Linux over that.

In any case, check out the article.

Apologies once again for the delay in reviews and new content to the site. Things are still quite busy for me lately, but I’m doing my best to get new reviews up. I have added a good friend as a contributor to this site, Steve Thate. I have known him for many years and he, like myself, enjoys testing out new Linux distributions and seeing what they are about. Expect to start seeing some postings by him in the very near future once he gets acquainted with things.

Also, if you haven’t subscribed to my RSS feed yet, please do so using the links on the left hand side.

Like srlinuxx over at tuxmachines, I was contacted by a guy who was wondering why I hadn’t done a review of Arch Linux 0.8 yet. Well, the simple reason is because I hadn’t gotten around to it! Finally, I have. Here’s my review of the 64-bit version of Arch Linux 0.8.

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Ubuntu has a lot going for it these days. It has just released a new version and has a great community following. It also gets a huge following on digg and other sites. In any case one of its drawbacks is that it isn’t the snappiest Linux distribution. Check out this list of guides for speeding up your Ubuntu system. There is some very useful information contained in these guides.