Jem Matzam at NewsForge reviewed the newest release of the Linspire distribution. At version 5.0 it’s come a long way, but Jem points out some flaws that will cause most Linux users to punch their computer in frustration.

Linspire Five-0 is a mildly improved edition of Debian-based Linspire. The interface and desktop are a little prettier than they were, CNR (Linspire’s Click N Run “software warehouse”) has a few more entries, and hardware support has gotten better. From a technical standpoint, there isn’t much wrong with Linspire 5.0 — it works well and as expected.
NewsForge

Linspire has tried to be the entry point for new Linux users coming from Windows. If a person is so new to Linux that they don’t miss the Gimp or the advanced features that all other distributions offer, then they’ll probably be very satisfied with Linspire. Linspire has software limits much like many apple products. The photo manager, for example, is designed to do manage photos in a basic way and burn them straight to a CD if a user presses the ‘burn to cd’ button.

Linspire is great for beginners, that’s about it.

I’m playing around with different themes for Linux is Hard. At the moment I’m running with a modified version of Equix. I hope to be writing useful content for a long time, hopefully this theme will help people enjoy the time they spend on the site.

If you shop around for a new stereo or new computer speakers you’ll be surprised at the similarity between them. The main difference is that computer speakers (while often pushing just as much sound quality out of themselves) are usually much smaller for the same price.

What this means is that a small computer is now an affordable alternative to a conventional stereo system. Computers can run any file format you give it and hard drives can store your whole music collection.

So what’s the ideal music system?
There’s a great article on O’Reilly about setting up a music station with Knoppix. It goes through installing Knoppix on an old PC (the kind you thought you didn’t need anymore) and turning something old and slow into a fantastic sound system.

If you’re really interested in doing this, I recommend setting up a secure wireless LAN in your home to allow you to put the sound system anywhere and control it from anywhere else. It’s pretty nice to carry a notebook into your kitchen that will allow you to change the songs that are playing in another room.

I recently installed Gentoo on my Dell 600m notebook and I’ve loved it. Immediately after installation I had DVD::RIP installed and began processing the backlog of DVDs that I had to compress to put on my hard drive.

I loved Gentoo from the start because I could simply type ‘emerge’ followed by a package name and it would install for me. I used this so much, however, that I really fouled up transcode and then libdvdnav and then libdvdcss to the point where they’re all re-installed now but DVD::RIP no longer works.

So I guess this goes to show that no matter how good software gets, there will always be some of us who have to play rough with it and find ourselves breaking our systems.

The same guy who cracked the DVD encryption years ago (which turned out to be a simple process but it really angered DVD companies) has now done somethins similar with iTunes.

DVD Jon (as the media is calling him) has released a version of iTunes that runs on Linux and removes the password protection from the downloaded songs. It turns out that the client (iTunes) is what encrypts the songs after they are downloaded so it was not such a task to create a version of iTunes that simply doesn’t add the encryption. It’s written in Python and runs on - you guessed it - Linux. They’ve got a Windows client but have announced that after this last version (v 0.4) they will not release anything for the Windows platform.

So if you’re interested in paying the same amount but getting the rights to your music that you deserve - check out PyMusique.
Visit Jon Johansen’s website
Download PyMusique

Named ‘Beagle’, the desktop search tool that will ship with Suse 10 (due in 2006) will be similar to Spotlight from apple which was in turn copied from the Google Desktop Search.

Beagle indexes documents, email, Web history, IM and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conversations, images, music files, source code, and more, including widely used file formats such as Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office PowerPoint files, MP3 files, and JPEG and Portable Network Graphics (PNG) images.
Novell Linux 10

I’m still holding out for Suse 9.3 which will feature the Xen hypervisor among other seriously cool softwares. When versioni 10 comes along next year you can be sure a lot will have changed in the Linux scene.

Gentoo has released their first version for the 2005 year. Named (cleverly) Gentoo 2005.0, this includes all the latest pieces of Gentoo.

It wasn’t long ago (and it still is with many distros) that upgrading your version of Linux meant reformatting and reinstalling from scratch. The greatest thing about the Gentoo distribution is that any current user can immediately upgrade their installation by using Portage. Portage is the package manager for Gentoo and works based on downloading and installing necessary programs upon request. Portage can automatically calculate program dependencies and install the required packages for you. For information on installing Gentoo check out my Gentoo installation guide

Those who want to try out Gentoo 2005.0 can get it at: Gentoo Torrents. (get the Universal LiveCD)
For current users, upgrade simply by typing:
# emerge –sync
# emerge -u world

From heise online:
Microsoft funded a report looking into the relative securities of Linux and Windows Server. They chose criteria that had little to do with real performance - mostly having to do with time periods between bugs reported and bug fixed.

Doubts regarding the reliability of the conclusions of the study begin to emerge, however, when one looks more closely at this MySQL example; thus the researches write:

For example, CAN-2004-0957 discusses a bug in MySQL’s mysql_real_connect() function. This was entered into the MySQL bug database on 4th June 2004, and fixed in the source tree 17th June 2004. However, Red Hat only packaged this fix in RHSA-2004:611, issued on the 27th of November.

It’s no surprise that the results were ‘massaged’ a little considering the funding came entirely from Microsoft. For details on the study, see the complete story.

Resolvo has released a tool to help Windows users make the switch to Linux. While MoveOver (their product) does not remove any of the power of Linux (i.e. does not hide access to terminals) it does allow for a window environment that is similar in look and feel to what a Windows user needs.

MoveOver works on any system running Gnome 2.6 and Evolution 2.0. It guides a user through a series of questions that ultimately configures the desktop to be like what the user had on their Windows machine.

While Resolvo intends to open-source many of the components of MoveOver eventually, there’s hardly a need for it as the software ships at an affordable $20. This is the perfect tool for corporations desiring to convert their entire employee base to Linux but also handy for small business and home Linux users.

Linspire Inc (formerly Lindows - they got sued) has released a free version of their otherwise closed-source operating system. It’s only the LiveCD but it’s enough for a tase of what Linspire has to offer.

Linspire was one of the first corporations to begin aggressively taking normal users from Windows and offering them a Linux flavor that wouldn’t make them do anything hacker-like. The package manager that ships with Linspire is called ‘Click-N-Run’ and it does exactly what it promises. It appears to be binary packages that can be browsed and downloaded from the Linspire server and immediately installed. The abstraction that the CNR interface provides is an essential component of any entry-level linux distro in my opinion. If you can’t install the program that you need, the rest of the computer has no use to you.

Version 5.0 of the Linspire LiveCD can be downloaded (for free, legally) via bittorrent at the following link: Linspire LiveCD 5.0

Linux Devices reports on the world’s smallest linux-running computer. Smaller than a shuttle, smaller than a pda, smaller even than an iPod mini - this computer fits entirely into an RJ-45 network jack.
Linux system squishes into Ethernet connector

German electronics company Kleinhenz is shipping a network-enabled Linux system barely larger than a standard RJ-45 Ethernet jack. “Picotux” is based on the DigiConnect ME module from NetSilicon, along with a 2.4.27 uClinux port that was probably developed by German embedded system specialist FS Forth Systeme.

While “Picotux” is not exactly Linux in the way desktop users are used to it, this is a great idea. This means that (if the jack were replaced by a wireless antenna) this could be used in minuature robots that could be controlled from across the internet.
Secure? No.
Fun? Oh yeah.

I probably installed Linux ten or more times over the years before I ended up with an installation that was worth keeping. It was partly that the software had a long way to go but mostly that I didn’t know how to use it.

It looks like now there’s another guy at the party (Ben from Shewbox.org)

I have a linux setup that does all the essentials I want it to: internet browsing, im, sound playback and editing, windows disk mounting, image editing, good looking fonts, bittorrent, flash, and video support with quicktime/real browser plugins. Any experienced linux user would quickly point out that all of these things have been possible for quite some time, but my point is that I finally figured out how to get it working for me, which of course makes all the difference.

He’s using Fedora Core 3 and has it running smoothly. To hear it in his own words, check out ShewBox.

My friend Sam uses Fedora Core as his primary operating system and has become something of an expert at using and configuring it.

He’s written a short explanation of something really neat to do with Gnome-terminal to launch console programs.

I think the prevalence of console-only (CLI) programs in Linux was one of the things that nearly scared me off at first, but now I’ve come to very much appreciate them. Using Lynx I sometimes don’t even start my X server and just stay in Gentoo’s console mode after boot. Of course, it helps that Gentoo provides you with four virtual desktops of consoles even when you’re not running X.

If you have a digital camera, an mp3 player, or a usb pen drive then you’ll want to access your data while you’re running Linux. For iPod users I’ve already posted some information on getting your iPod working under Linux, but for the rest of us there’s some pretty basic stuff we can do to make sure that our usb drives work and play well with our computers.

If you’ve tried to use a usb drive in Windows XP you’ll probably have noticed that all you need to do is plug it in and it appears in My Computer the same way that a hard drive appears. This is because most modern usb drives use USB Mass Storage protocol that makes them interact with computers as usb hard drives. If you’re using a modern version of KDE or Gnome then you shouldn’t have to worry about this too much because there’s a good chance that upon plugging in your usb device it will be automatically mounted and an icon will appear on your desktop.

If that doesn’t happen for you either because you’re not using new versions of those desktop environments or because, like me, you fiddle with things too much and that particular feature has long been broken then you can mount this drive yourself.

accessing usb drives under Linux
plug in the drive
if you don’t have the folder “/mnt/usb” then go ahead and make it
mkdir /mnt/usb
and then mount the usb device
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb
now make a link to the device on your desktop
ln -s /mnt/usb /home/[username]/Desktop/usb_drive

Then you can access this usb drive just like a hard drive partition. Enjoy!

I’ve written a lot and I figure it’s time to open up the mic to all of y’all who read this site. I use Linux because I love where Open Source Software is headed in terms of societal freedom and high-quality coding. I also love that I don’t have to either pay for or steal my software. Why do you use Linux? For those of you who are considering it but don’t use it yet, why might you use Linux?

The comment boxes are yours, go ahead and share with everybody.

I’ve written before about Mozilla Firefox running very slowly on Linux. It’s not a matter of page loading time, but GUI response time. I’ll outline the problem as I understand it:

• The Gecko layout engine is working just fine, there’s no sluggishness of page loading

(though there are some issues with font sizes)

• The firefox extensions and themes seem to be working perfectly under Linux
• Initial application loadtime is rather large

(5-15 seconds on my machine at the moment)

• response to cursor placement in addressbar of search bar is slow

(1-3 seconds)

It may have something to do with the large number of extensions that I have installed, but I have the same number installed in my Windows machine at work and it doesn’t go slow at all. I’ll try reducing (or eliminating) extensions in the near future and I’ll post about whether that has any effect.