My name is Prashanth Venkataram, and I write and manage the blog Das U-Blog by Prashanth, where I write about open-source software and people’s freedoms relating to technology. I’ve used Openbox a bit, so today I’ll be comparing two Arch Linux-based Openbox Distributions: ArchBang and CTKArchLive.

A few years ago, CrunchBang (“#!”) Linux became very popular as a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution that made the Openbox window manager more palatable and appealing. Since then, it’s only gotten better and more popular, along the way ditching the Ubuntu base for Debian and gaining an Xfce version on the way. Because it was the first very popular Openbox distribution, it has inspired the creation of other distributions that use Openbox on top of various other base distributions. For example, Madbox, which I have recently reviewed, is based on Ubuntu to fill the gap from #!’s move to Debian. The two I’m testing today, CTKArchLive and ArchBang, are, as you can probably guess by their names, based on Arch Linux. Aside from Chakra GNU/Linux, a KDE-using distribution that’s sort of based on Arch that I’ve tested before for FreeTechie.com, I’ve never really used Arch before. Neither of these distributions claim to cater to relative newbies like Chakra does, so I may have to play the whole manual configuration thing by ear, as I’ve never done that before in depth. I will say, however, that I have tried the live session of a previous ArchBang release before briefly in a live session. Continue reading to see how each one turns out. I tested both of these by using the MultiSystem multiboot USB creation script on the two ISO files and trying each via a live USB system. As I just want to focus on the live sessions, I did not install either of these.

ArchBang
The first one I tested was ArchBang 2011.01 “Symbiosis”. After rebooting, changing the BIOS, and rebooting again, I got to the MultiSystem boot menu. I selected the default ArchBang menu entry, saw a bit of text, and then…a black screen. That was frustrating. I tried this once more just to be sure, and got the same result. I then tried the “failsafe” menu entry, and that seemed to work out well. After a scrolling wall of text came the desktop.
The default desktop looks decent. I think the wallpaper has a little too much going on, though; consequently, it looks to be a bit hard on the eyes. The tint2 panel at the top looks very nice, though; it contains a window switcher, a system tray, and a clock. The system tray has applets for both volume and network management, while the clock also contains a calendar applet. Conky is also present on the left. That’s cool. The Openbox right-click menu is pretty full and seems to be heavily modeled after the menu in #!, which is a good thing, to be sure. Unfortunately, as the “failsafe” option meant using the generic VESA graphics driver, the maximum resolution was 1024 by 768, which looked a bit out of place on my laptop whose native (and maximum) resolution is 1366 by 768. Finally, in terms of the aesthetics, the default GTK+, Openbox, and icon themes all look a bit too dark and garish. I’m just not a huge fan of those over-the-top dark techie styles. It’s bearable, though.

Chromium is the default browser, and it worked very well, which is nice. (This also meant, of course, that my ethernet connection was configured and selected out-of-the-box, which is quite nice for an Arch-based distribution). It seems like most codecs are installed out-of-the-box, given that YouTube and similar Adobe Flash-heavy sites worked well. (This also meant that my sound card was detected fine, which is also nice.)

Unfortunately, Thunar is the default file manager, and while I appreciate it for its light weight, my biggest beef with it continues to be its lack of tabbed browsing. I would much prefer something like PCManFM.

I tried installing Cheese Webcam Booth, and this is where I ran into my first challenge, owing to my lack of experience with Arch rather than any real issue with ArchBang. Unlike Chakra, ArchBang has no graphical package manager. The only one present is the CLI Pacman from Arch (which, interestingly enough, is aliased as “Packer” in ArchBang, but typing “pacman” still works all the same). I tried to do “su” and then “pacman -S cheese”, but for some reason nothing worked. I did “pacman -Syy” to update the list of packages, but even that didn’t work. I then looked on the Arch wiki and found out that the repository mirrors might be commented out in a configuration file. I then went to edit (as root) /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and uncommented all the requisite mirrors. I then tried the above commands again and they worked beautifully. I always thought APT was pretty quick, but boy is Pacman fast. I will say though that Pacman’s speed alone won’t be enough to convince me to switch to Arch or one of its derivatives. After installing Cheese Webcam Booth, I ran it to find that it recognized my integrated webcam and mic immediately. Awesome!

I did the same thing with Skype, and that installed well; that said, when running it, it recognized my mic, but it seemed to hang while trying to recognize my webcam. Oh well, at least it’s better than nothing.

In terms of appearance and applications, this latest ArchBang release is modeled heavily after the latest #! release (version 10 “Statler”). Even besides Chromium and Thunar, also present are Scrot to take screenshots, Obmenu to edit the Openbox menu, the AbiWord word processor, the Gnumeric spreadsheet program, Leafpad text editor, and Xcompmgr for compositing. Conky has much the same information and even the same keyboard shortcuts (well, not for Conky per se, but information for the desktop as a whole). Even the Openbox menu is organized very similarly to that of #!. Even more telling is what’s not present: a chat program, a mail program, games, and a few other things. Plus, in terms of appearance and tricks, when compositing is turned off, the terminal pulls a similar trick as in #! by displaying the portion of the wallpaper that it is covering even if it is on top of another window. Compositing does work beautifully, at which point the terminal becomes partly transparent, though I think it’s a little too transparent and makes the text a bit too hard to see.
One difference is that Geeqie is the default image viewer; it displays newly-taken screenshots. I found its interface a bit confusing; in any case, I didn’t really explore it too much.
RAM usage at idle, judging from Conky, was around 90 MB. That’s pretty darn good, if you ask me.
Finally, when I was ready to shut down, I got a really pretty shutdown menu. It’s even nicer-looking than the one in #!, though it has the same structure.

Well, that’s all I have to say about ArchBang. With a couple fairly minor exceptions, it seems to be a pretty faithful representation of what #! would be like if it was based on Arch, and I like that.

CTKArchLive
After ArchBang, I tested CTKArchLive 0.6. It’s a somewhat newer project, and before this release with the inclusion of the English language pack it was only available in French by default. It too seems to aim for a nice, lightweight Arch-based Openbox environment.

After rebooting, I got to the boot menu, and selected the menu entry for CTKArchLive in English. (The only other option was French.) Unfortunately, I faced the same problem that I initially did in ArchBang, and here I had no “failsafe” option. Then, I figured that maybe if I included some of ArchBang’s “failsafe” boot options in CTKArchLive’s menu entry, it would work. I pressed CTRL+E at the boot menu on CTKArchLive’s menu entry, typed in “xorg=vesa” and “nomodeset” (both without quotation marks) at the end of the first run-on line, pressed CTRL+X, and went on my way. It worked, and I was able to get to the desktop.

The default desktop looks pretty nice, with a nice-looking wallpaper and an Fbpanel (Fluxbox panel) on the bottom. The only applets present on Fbpanel are a main Fbpanel menu (although this is an Openbox distribution) on the far left and a system tray and clock with a calendar on the far right. All the space in the middle is reserved for window buttons, although of course it is possible to add more applets. In addition, the right-click Openbox menu is also present; although it has everything the Fbpanel menu has and a couple more things, the arrangement is different. Also, as evidenced by installing new applications, the Fbpanel menu updates automatically, while the Openbox menu must be manually edited to show installed or get rid of removed applications. There are two interesting features of the desktop, the first of which is that it is possible to enable desktop icons, though the only icon present when that option is clicked in the Openbox menu is the “Documents” folder icon.

This is because out-of-the-box, Openbox isn’t capable of handling desktop icons; a secondary desktop icon manager like ROX-Filer must be used, and typically most Openbox distributions don’t include that capability. The second interesting feature is that if Fbpanel doesn’t take your fancy, tint2 is also present. However, to switch, it is important to autohide the existing panel and then fix the new panel, all available in the Openbox menu; I didn’t try the reverse order of actions, but I suspect the two panels will overlap somehow and look really messy. Tint2 of course only has a window switcher, a system tray, and a clock (without a calendar, unfortunately), the latter two of which are on the far right. This obviously means that there’s no main menu accessible on the panel, though right-clicking on any empty panel space brings up the Openbox menu. Finally, in terms of aesthetics, the GTK+, Openbox, and icon themes all look too dark and garish, even more so than those used in ArchBang. Oh well, I can live. In addition, as I used the VESA graphics driver, the maximum resolution was, as in ArchBang, 1024 by 768.

Unfortunately, trying the browsers led to errors in loading pages. This is because the wired network wasn’t selected out-of-the-box, so I had to load Wicd from the menu and press the button to connect to the wired network. After that, everything worked fine.
The browsers available are Midori and…Arora? I’ve heard of Arora before, but I’ve never used it; it’s the Qt counterpart to Midori, the lightweight WebKit-based GTK+ browser. Given that this desktop is Openbox with GTK+, I’m not sure what the point of this random Qt application here is. Anyway, I tried out Arora, and it seems like a fairly pleasant, stable, and usable browser. It’s pretty fast as well. That said, no proprietary codecs seemed to be installed out-of-the-box, so I decided to install them.

As in ArchBang, CTKArchLive has no GUI package manager; only the CLI Pacman is present. Thankfully, all the requisite repositories were enabled from the start, so a simple “su” followed by a “pacman -Syy” and a “pacman -S flashplugin” installed Adobe Flash quickly. After that, it worked in Arora, though strangely enough, I was asked to click a button in the middle of the YouTube video I tried labeled “Load Flash” for the video to work. I guess this is good in that Adobe Flash components don’t automatically load in order to preserve performance on older systems. Also, the sound card was detected fine, which is good.

I used similar commands to install Cheese Webcam Booth and Skype, both of which produced identical results to those in ArchBang. Plus, Skype could use already-installed Qt libraries, so the installation went even a little faster.

PCManFM is the default file manager, which is nice for its light weight and its tabbed browsing.

The terminal, unfortunately, doesn’t pull the cool trick of displaying the part of the background image that it covers; plus, it has no window borders, so it isn’t obvious how to close that window unless Fbpanel is used (where it’s possible to right-click the window button and choose to close it).

Pidgin is installed for instant messaging, while Sylpheed is present as the mail client.

Neither the screenshot utility Scrot nor the menu editor Obmenu were installed, so I had to install these through Pacman as well. After that, I was able to take screenshots fine.

Some other installed applications include AbiWord, Gnumeric, Leafpad, some multimedia applications, the Tux Racer game (which didn’t work because of the generic 2D graphics VESA driver), the GPicView image viewer, GIMP, and GTKam (KDE’s Digikam for GTK+, I think). For the multimedia applications, a song is even included in the home folder for testing purposes. Xcompmgr is present for compositing as well.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t gauge RAM usage because the Htop system monitor didn’t display numbers for total RAM usage.
Unlike ArchBang, which has a nice shutdown menu, CTKArchLive’s shutdown main menu option is just a call to “sudo shutdown -h now”.
Overall, it seems like CTKArchLive just goes its own way in terms of applications and desktop appearance, where ArchBang tries hard to emulate #!.

Verdict
1. ArchBang
It’s more mature and gave me less trouble, from the boot process to recognizing the network to letting me do things like take screenshots and gauge RAM usage for this review. That said, the disabling of repositories by default is a little annoying.
2. CTKArchLive
It’s a younger project, to be sure, and it does things its own way rather than trying to emulate a particular project, but the fairly serious boot and network problems relegate it to runner-up.

No related posts.

This is guest blogger Prashanth Venkataram, and I write and manage the blog Das U-Blog by Prashanth, where I post reviews of Linux distributions and software as well as my thoughts about the current state of science, technology, and people’s freedoms (especially with regard to technology).

Today I will be reviewing Chakra 0.3.0 “Ashoc”.
Many of my regular readers have heard a couple times before that Chakra is an Arch-based KDE distribution. However, since its alpha releases, it has diverged enough from Arch and KDEmod to become to Arch what Ubuntu has become to Debian: while they share package types and many upstream repositories, there will be quite a few incompatibilities. So while they are fundamentally tied together, they are at the same time now essentially separate projects. Though Chakra and KDEmod made each other more popular within the Arch community, now Chakra is splitting from the KDEmod project and creating its own Arch-based implementation of KDE.

This week, the developers have released version 0.3.0 “Ashoc” into the wild; I have previously reviewed version 0.2.0 “Jaz” and came away slightly disappointed by Chakra’s GUI package installer CInstall and the choice of Konqueror over Rekonq, the latter of which was included in the alpha releases. Continue reading to see if any of these issues have been rectified. I wanted to test this through a live USB, but UnetBootin got hung up trying to create the live USB, so I settled for a VirtualBox test with 1 GB of RAM allocated to the guest OS; what this also meant is that I couldn’t test peripherals like my webcam.

When I started the virtual machine, I was greeted by a nice-looking GRUB screen, followed by a bunch of text. This was then followed by an extremely well-done KDE splash screen (unique to Chakra) which segued into the KDE desktop. I really like the combination of the blue wallpaper and dark Plasma theme; it gives the desktop the feeling of being simultaneously slick and soothing. The desktop is otherwise standard KDE, with a Folder View Widget showing some application shortcuts and a Kickoff menu at the bottom-left.

As I mentioned earlier, the Chakra developers dumped Rekonq for Konqueror, probably to build a better impression of stability for a post-alpha release (which would have been marred by the instability of Rekonq at that time). Well, now Rekonq is back, and it’s better than ever before. It now sports an “Awesome Bar” similar to Mozilla Firefox, and its interface is more compact, with the stop/reload buttons combined into one and the menu being put into a button on the side. Rekonq seemed to render most pages fine, and it never crashed.

The other big highlight is the collection of huge improvements to CInstall, which is now not just usable but also arguably a worthy competitor to programs like PackageKit and Synaptic (though it needs a bit more work to get to Mint Software Manager-levels of refinement). This time I was easily able to install new software, including Adobe Flash (where I was unable to before); not once did CInstall crash or complain.

Otherwise, the suite of software included is essentially the same relative to version 0.2.0. Though Chakra has generally been stable throughout its releases, just to reinforce the point, KDE never crashed once. Even better, Chakra never felt slow at any point in the live session. With confidence, I proceeded to the installer.

The Chakra installer, Tribe, has got to be one of the most beautiful and easy installers I have ever used, and is certainly competitive with Ubiquity and Anaconda. It has a really cool 3D globe that let me pick my city (to set up my time zone, keyboard layout, and language), though there was a bit of confusion in that some locations weren’t clickable cities. The addition of new users is really well done and couldn’t possibly be made simpler. The partition manager, though not quite as simple as the Ubiquity sliding bar, is pretty simple, though there could be a little more explanation included for new users (e.g. what ‘/’ and “linuxswap” are). After proceeding past the proverbial “point of no return”, I was greeted with a nicely-done slideshow talking about Chakra and the included programs. The installation itself was relatively quick (probably around 10 minutes), and at the end of that, I was even offered to add new programs within the installation program (i.e. without needing to reboot first), which was really nice. I declined, and with that, I was ready to reboot.

Unfortunately, this is where the fun ended. When I rebooted, Chakra seemed to boot properly, but the KDE session seemed to be just the cursor on top of a black screen. Judging from the Chakra forums, it seems like this is a known problem (though not just stemming from installations where the users also opt to install additional packages at the end), but this is pretty darn serious.

So what’s the verdict? I was really pleased with the live session, as it seemed to address my main gripes with the previous version. The installer was also a real treat to use. However, this was all marred by a nonworking installed session, which is essentially a show-stopper. Hopefully this gets fixed either in an update to “Ashoc” or in the next version 0.4.0 “Cyrus”, but I hope that “Cyrus” doesn’t bring a whole bunch of additional bugs after fixing this one. Chakra is really promising and probably one of the best KDE live CDs around, but it really isn’t installable at the moment.

No related posts.

As with any Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 10.10 has quite the hype train backing it, and its release. But this time, they backed it up better then most others. With the 10.10 release, they shipped a pretty impressive netbook edition, an updated installer and an opportunity to test it “in the cloud”.

Here are a few articles around the web that talks about some things Ubuntu 10.10:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/10/ubuntu-1010-arrives-with-impressive-new-netbook-environment.ars
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2370515,00.asp
http://www.linuxcritic.com/ubuntu-maverick-meerkat-10-10-review/

Once I have more time, I plan on giving better in depth reviews of the major Linux distributions again. Currently personally I’m running Fedora 13, but will be switching to to openSUSE 11.4 once it’s released.

No related posts.

browser download . florida tile . While working on deploying puppet 2.6.0 onto RHEL4, I found that the supported ruby version of 1.8.1 does not have the right support for default_argv via optparse, thus causing the following error when trying to start puppet: $ sudo su - -c 'puppet agent --trace --debug --test'/usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:267:in `option_parser': undefined method `default_argv=' for # (NoMethodError)from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:333:in `parse_options'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:332:in `each'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:332:in `parse_options'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:298:in `run'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:298:in `exit_on_fail'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/application.rb:298:in `run'from /usr/lib/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/util/command_line.rb:55:in `execute'from /usr/bin/puppet:4However, I have decided to go ahead and build (using the openSUSE Build Service) ruby 1.8.5 packages for RHEL4, and deployed them to a local repository here at my place of business. If you’d like them, you can get them here: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/eclipseagent:/ruby/RedHat_RHEL-4/

No related posts.

Recently my orginization signed a contract with Novell to implement some SLES. With this I decided to start implementing puppet (learning it first) along with setting up SMT repositories and the such. fruit bouquet . townhouses for rent . However, the puppet package that shipped with SLES 11 and eventually SLES 11 SP1 were the 0.24 branch, 0.24.8 to be exact. However, the said version didn’t include the zypper definition which is now in puppet 2.6.0, and if you upgraded to the 0.25.4 version in the system:management repository, you will have realized that it’s quite broken due to a few issues which I found. I’ve since then modified the .spec, and modified the upstream server.init and client.init to work and build correctly on SLES 11 and openSUSE 11.x. I’ve also put upstream fixes to the puppet 2.6.0 branch to fix their upstream server.init, client.init, puppet.spec and to update the conf/suse directory to include the required default conf files. I’ve also created a Novell bug for the system:management repository to be fixed, but don’t imagine that will be fixed anytime soon (I haven’t been able to get a response from the maintainers). With that said, the repository I’ve created in the buildservice can be found here: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/eclipseagent:/puppet/

No related posts.

The PCLinuxOS Development team announced the release of PCLinuxOS 2010.1 KDE 4 Edition. This is the second release for the PCLinuxOS 2010 Family, which includes many bug fixes, and upgrades of many core components including the kernel, which got a bump to 2.6.32.12-bfs. Also noted in the release notes is information about an upgrad

Also available for PCLinuxOS is the 2.6.33 kernel family, but currently through Software Repositories.

Note: If you already have PCLinuxOS 2010, then you can easily update using the Synaptic Software Manager

Feel free to download the iso.

Release Date: 05-05-10
ISO Size: 692 MB
MD5Sum: d2f8c4068a0d07c3fc4a1dcc252310da

No related posts.

One of the most noticeable features of ubuntu is the common use of sudo in order to perform ‘root’ level tasks.  By default the ‘root’ user is disabled leaving sudo as the most used method of running administrator level commands and tasks.

A intial setup of sudo requires the user to type in the password everytime the command is used.  Although the autorization is maintained for a few minutes after the password is first used it can become quite tedious to constantly be prompted for a password on commonly used commands.

I have set up my own ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala system to allow the aptitude command to be run without having to type my password.  This lets me cron a very small script to keep my system up-to-date without being prompted for a password.

Here’s how I set it up:

$ sudo visudo

Below the line “%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL” insert the following:

USERNAME ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/aptitude

for example:

jason ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/aptitude

If you would like to allow a different command just make sure you include the full location (use whereis if you are unsure of where the command is stored).

No related posts.

Today the VortexBox Development team announced the immediate release of VortexBox 1.3. VortexBox is a free, open source (GPL v3), quick-install ISO that turns your unused computer into an easy-to-use music server/jukebox.

Version 1.3 ships with the following fixes and updates:

* Logitech SqueezeBox Server 7.5.0 pre installed and configured
* Subsonic music interface for remote playing
* Edit your tags and cover art using the Subsonic web GUI
* Latest version of TwonkeyMedia Server
* Many bug fixes including USB backup manager
* File sharing fix for OSX 10.6.3
* Auto re-index after rip for Sonos players

You can Download VortexBox Here

Or learn more about VortexBox Here

No related posts.

The openSUSE team has released affective immediatly their weekly news release labels #118. In the release notes you can find the following from their site Welcome to issue # 118 of openSUSE Weekly News. Now the fourteenth Week goes to the End, and we are pleased to announce our new issue. From this issue on, we have a new Layout. We have more Teamreports, an Kernel Review (WIP) and the Sections From the Ambassadors and openSUSE in $Country. In that Place every Translation Team can post local Events and other stuff. Also we have changed anything in the publishing Process. massachusetts family law . In the past we have just posted the table of Content into news.opensuse.org. This means, that the Reader must click an next one. From now on we publishing the full Content direct to news.opensuse.org. So were hoping, that you like the new Weekly News. We wish you many joy by reading itYou can read te whole article with translations and all here

No related posts.

Techgage wrote an interesting article titled 10 things linux does better than windows. Here’s a quick rundown of the 10 things that the article eludes to:

1. Partitioning
2. Activation
3. Customization
4. Automatic User Logon
5. Troubleshooting
6. No-Nonsense OS Updates
7. Easy Installation of Common Applications
8. Interoperability
9. Command-Line
10. Performance & Stability

I find the list quite compelling as one of the major points that the Linux Community poinits to as a major plus, is the security aspect of Linux over Windows. I also believe that this list should have been titled 10 Things Ubuntu does better than WIndows, since every point made is made using an Ubuntu machine, and using Ubuntu integrations and not general / generic linux (with the exception of things like Command-Line etc.).

It’s a pretty good article, and I recommend it, but I think it could have been a much more comprehensive 5 things list.

No related posts.

eWEEK Labs’ Jason Brooks and Andrew Garcia discuss Novell’s latest community-oriented Linux OS, OpenSUSE 11.2.From www.eweek.com:

No related posts.

The second release for Parisix 3.0, codenamed “Kev”. This release is an update of all the packages that have been put into the APT repositories since the 3.0 release.

If you don’t know much about Parsix Linux, you can find the following on their home page:

What’s Parsix GNU/Linux?
Parsix GNU/Linux is a live and installation CD derived from KANOTIX and based on Debian. It is a complete GNOME centric desktop oriented distribution. Parsix GNU/Linux supports dozens of languages including English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Persian and many many more. You can install and use Parsix GNU/Linux as your default operating system. We have also included xFarDic multilingual dictionary and several free font packages. For more information about our release code names, see here.

Here’s more info from the release notes:

You can download the release here:
Parsix 3.0r2 32-Bit
Parsix 3.0r2 64-Bit

No related posts.

The Linux Mint Developers have released Linux Mine 8 KDE Edition which is based on Kubuntu 9.10.

It’s shipped with the Linux Kernel version 2.6.31, Xorg 7.4 and package with KDE 4.3.4 and Amarok 2.2.1.

Known Issues
Because of compatibility issues between wubi/mint4win and grub2, Linux Mint 8 comes without a Windows installer. The development team is working on the issue and new ISOs will be published when it is resolved.

The File Uploader introduced in Linux Mint 8 isn’t working well under KDE. The drop zone doesn’t accept any files. This is an issue we’re trying to fix.

If the sound pops before playing something, you can fix the problem by following these instructions.

If you have more than 3.5GB of RAM, install the linux-generic-pae kernel for your memory to be fully detected and used by the system.

What’s new
Visual improvements: The graphical interface is now easier to use and it shows more content. The layout was changed and by putting the screenshots in the corner of the application you can now see more software and more reviews at once.

A better layout for the Software Manager

Packaged updates: You don’t need to manually refresh the Software Manager anymore. When new data is available you get notified by the Update Manager of a new version of “mintinstall-data”.

APT status: The Software Manager is now aware of the APT status of each application. Among other things, this means you can now see the size and version number of each application and whether they’re installed on your system or not.

Software removal and multiple selection: The Software Manager now allows you to mark multiple applications for installation and/or removal. A new apply button confirms your choices and processes them all at once.

More about what’s new can be found here.

You can download here:
Torrent download: http://www.linuxmint.com/torrent/LinuxMint-8-KDE.iso.torrent
HTTP download: http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=47

And be sure to read the release notes.

No related posts.

Here’s some information about Absolute Linux from their site (note they go through a ton of releases, since the do a release with application updates etc). Here’s an excerpt from their site of what Absolute Linux is to them:

No related posts.

The ArtistX team announced the release of ArtistX .8 which is a multimedia distribution based off of ever so popular Ubuntu.If you haven’t heard of ArtistX, here’s an excerpt from their site:

No related posts.

The Vortex Box development team recently released Vortex Box 1.1 which includes a few new features.

If you don’t know what Vortex Box is, here’s a little excerpt from their about page:

Here’s more information about the actual release 1.1:

You can read the full announcement here

Or you can download it here

No related posts.

Goolge Chrome is a kick ass browser that is taking the browsing industry by storm. Its stunning speed has been winning users over since it’s initial launch.

Linux enthusiasts have also been adapting to the ever updated Google Chrome, which recently was put into official “Beta” natively for Linux. I’ve previously wrote how to install the rpm on openSUSE and Fedora but now it’s time for the guide on installing on Ubuntu or Kubuntu.

This procedure is quite simple, and starts with downloading the .deb package from http://chrome.google.com.

Once you download the package to your local file-system you can install it using dpkg, or by double clicking the package within your file manager. To install via the command line, open up a terminal and install using:

This installation will also add the google repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list for future updates of google chrome.

Related posts:

1. Disable Nepomuk or Strigi (Desktop Search / Indexing) in KDE 4.7 Kubuntu openSUSE

Here’s a quick how to on setting user x to auto login under KDE 4. You may want to do this if it’s your machine at home, or you really have no security reason to have a login screen.

If you didn’t set it at the installation screens you can easily set it up in systemsettings with the Login Manager module.

To do this first open your systemsettings:

You can do that using your kde launcher, or using the command line interface and typing:

From here you will go to the advanced tabs and click on “Login Manager” (as you see below)

Enter in your password on the prompt

Once you launch the Login Manager Module, you’ll click on the “Convenience” tab. Right under the big red Attention Please Read you’ll see the “Enable Auto-Login” checkbox. After checking the Enable Auto-Login checkbox, you’ll use the drop down menu to pick the user you want to auto-login with. Here’s a before and after:

If you want to do it in the command line, you can add the following into /etc/kde4/kdm/kdmrc:

Related posts:

1. Disable Nepomuk or Strigi (Desktop Search / Indexing) in KDE 4.7 Kubuntu openSUSE

A few days after the news from Zonker, we get the news that Jeff Jaffe, Novells CTO, is also leaving the company for new ventures in life after 4 years. What does this mean to the company? What really is going on at Novell? Here’s some of the postings from Jeff’s Blog:

No related posts.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, the fourth maintenance update to Ubuntu’s 8.04 LTS release. This release includes updated server, desktop, and alternate installation CDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS continues to be maintained through 2011 for desktops and 2013 for servers through online updates, but this is the final maintenance release of 8.04 LTS.

In all, some 70 updates have been integrated, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and
compatibility with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

The above excerpt was from the Ubuntu Mailing List

To download Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, or obtain CDs, visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

We recommend that all users read the release notes, which document
caveats and workarounds for known issues. They are available at:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/804

No related posts.