TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

I’m back again after a few days. I got busy and had some things to take care of. My apologies to all my readers for that short and unannounced break. Nevertheless I am back with another review.

After a number of recommendations from readers on my SimplyMEPIS 6.5 RC1 review, I decided to make my next Linux distribution review about PCLinuxOS 2007 Test 3. Like SimplyMEPIS, it is an up-and-coming distribution that aims to make all the advanced capabilities of Linux easily available to everyone.

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I decided for this one to step away from the more mainstream and popular distributions once again and check out something I haven’t used before. Here’s my review for dyne:bolic 2.4.2.

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Enlightenment. Linux users who have been around for awhile no doubt remember this X11 window manager. I remember using in around 1999 and 2000 myself. Since then KDE and GNOME have grown by leaps and bounds and that’s where most of my GUI usage been since then. Every once in awhile a new story pops up on the web about Enlightenment and I reminisce about using it back when few people had heard of Linux. So, with the latest Elive release announcement, I decided to give Elive a try. I wanted to see how Enlightenment stacked up against the latest from KDE and GNOME that I had recently tried.

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Release Candidate 1 of SimplyMEPIS 6.5 has just been released and since I was planning on reviewing beta 7, I figured I might as well download RC1 before doing my official review. I am using the 64-bit version on my desktop.

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Some people prefer to use Microsoft Windows, and other people have to. Just because you use Windows doesn’t mean you can’t use some good high quality free open source software. This topic has been done before, but it never hurts to add another person’s opinion. Without further ado, here are my choices for the 25 best open source applications that you should use on your Microsoft Windows PC.

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A new version of Foresight Linux has come out, not long after I wrote my review of 1.0. In my review of the last release, I noticed some problems, mainly with the fact I couldn’t get my Nvidia card working on it out of the box. A number of people commented on the issue discussing solutions to the problem (and also telling me it wouldn’t work because they thought I was trying to get my card working under VMware — which wasn’t true).

So now with a new release so soon, I decided to try it out again and see if my feelings from the previous release changed any.

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SystemRescueCd is a Linux distribution whose purpose is to make it easy to check and repair your system and its data after a crash or other problems arise. It is more comprehensive than Knopperdisk for this purpose as it includes many more utilities for checking and repairing your drives and their file systems. Version 0.3.3 is the latest stable release as of this review.

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On March 1, Red Hat released Fedora 7 Test 2. Here’s my quick look at the live CD version of this distro. I’ll wait until the final release to do a full install.

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Dashboard, introduced with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), gives users quick and easy access to mini-applications called widgets that can provide a variety of information and help users accomplish common tasks. On Apple’s Dashboard widgets download page there are a ton of different widgets available. While I’ve tried a bunch of them, there are many more that I have yet to play with. Of the ones I’ve tried, here are the 10 best and most useful Dashboard widgets that I have used.

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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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