TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

From the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter comes word that Linspire is moving to Kubuntu as its base and will be the first Ubuntu-based distribution to offer Click and Run.

From the newsletter:

Linspire announced that they will be switching to base their distribution off Ubuntu. With their polished KDE desktop this makes Linspire the latest in the impressive list of operating systems based off Kubuntu.

It was also announced that Linspire’s Click and Run install programme would be added to the Ubuntu archive, giving users of all Ubuntu distributions easy access to a large range of free and proprietry software.

I’m curious to see how this improves both Linspire and Ubuntu. Ubuntu and Linspire pride themselves on being distributions for the masses. Both distributions will be able to benefit from each other. There’s always another Linux distribution to try and here’s another one I’m looking forward to checking out.

Here’s an operating system of a different flavor I am intending to try out soon. ReactOS 0.3.1 was released today. Its goal as an operating system is to be a free and open source OS that is compatible with applications and drivers written for Microsoft Windows and it is based on the Windows architecture. The reason for its existence is quoted here from this ReactOS web page:

The raison-d’etre of ReactOS is the simple fact that some people, or especially companies, will -never- switch to Linux. No matter how much Linux gets better, or is better, it is not an option for them. Some people out there still use the 2.2 Linux Kernel and refuse to upgrade to a new version of the same OS; it is understandable that others will be totally unwilling to switch to a whole new OS. Until now, open source had no way to reach out to those people. Sure, other free applications could slowly get rid of the Microsoft applications, such as Office and IE, but the OS itself is hard to get rid of. This is the target and intended audience of ReactOS. Because of its compatibility and visual consistency with Windows, it removes many of the problems that people or companies face when switching to Linux: training everyone on the new OS, increased support costs, acquiring or writing new software, hardware incompatibilities, and the list grows. With ReactOS, all those worries vanish, except perhaps for the fact that any support contract with Microsoft will be rendered useless (however, any technician or 3rd-party personel in charge of this would have no problem).

I think this sounds like quite an interesting project that I want to try out soon. I had heard of ReactOS before, but I didn’t have much motivation to try it since I’m a Linux and Mac person primarily. But since I’ve started this site I’ve been interested in all sorts of different things to try. Look for a ReactOS review sometime in the future.

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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Foresight Linux brings yet another new take on package management to Linux. It uses’s rPath’s Conary system as its package management and administration interface. It aims to be an easy to use desktop system featuring the latest GNOME-based technologies.

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Blogcritics has a short (and somewhat weak) review of Yellow Dog Linux 5 for the PS3.

The PS3 is designed to run Linux, so as developers start to take more advantage of the PS3’s capabilities no doubt we’ll see some cool stuff coming out running on Linux for the PS3. For a start, it looks like Yellow Dog Linux isn’t bad, although it currently doesn’t support the PS3’s built-in wireless card. Hopefully Sony will release specs or a driver for it soon. I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of developments are ahead for Linux on the PS3 (as well as a price drop for the PS3!) Maybe I’ll end up getting one someday.

Two new pre-release versions of popular Linux distributions have come out. openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 1 contains some significant changes from 10.2 including an updated kernel, KDE 3.5.6 and the entire OS being compiled with stack overflow protection to help guard against buffer overflows. Feisty Fawn Herd 4 is now available at the Ubuntu download site. The main features of Feisty Fawn over Edgy are improved hardware support, updated GNOME, a migration assistant, easy installation of multimedia codecs, better support for virtualization software in the kernel, and an improved Help Center.

I plan on reviewing the final releases of these two Linux distributions when they arrive.

After the post from a couple days ago about reasons for and against upgrading to Vista, I found this article from TG Daily that does some tests to find out if the Ready Boost feature of Vista (using a USB 2.0 memory stick in place of RAM) had any impact on application startup time in Vista.

The main feature behind Ready Boost, Super Fetch, pre-loads the most used applications in RAM to reduce startup times. The idea is that since most users have 512MB RAM, and many USB 2.0 memory sticks are faster than hard disks, the memory stick can be used as Super Fetch cache. What TG Daily found is that although Ready Boost does make an impact (in their tests they experienced up to 50% decrease in load times) adding just 512MB RAM more made far more of an impact in performance. It allows Super Fetch enough storage to cache several applications and prevents excessive swap usage. So while I still don’t feel it is a reason to upgrade to Vista, Super Fetch certainly seems like a cool and useful technology that will improve application load times for many people. Maybe they could try putting the swap on a USB memory stick and seeing how that affects performance.

PC-BSD is a variant of FreeBSD 6 that attempts to make FreeBSD much more friendly for desktop use. The installation is meant to be very simple and to give the user a fully working desktop system with minimal fuss. PC-BSD includes hardware auto-detection and comes with KDE 3.5. Moreover, PC-BSD has a new package system that is designed to install software by simply double-clicking on a package.

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On January 30, Microsoft will release its next-generation operating system, Windows Vista. Microsoft’s previous OS, Windows XP, was released October 25, 2001, more than 5 years ago. Given this long development time and Microsoft’s massive amount of development dollars, what is the new OS like? More importantly, should you upgrade to Vista?

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