Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

Search for a perfect OS

August 22nd, 2007
by Krishna Mohan

If you recall in my earlier post I was in search of a good operating system to replace windows. In these 20 days I tried several versions of Linux.

  • SLAX was fantastic distro using Slackware as a source. It uses modules which help you to simplify the installation of programs. live scripts it uses is simply awesome. SLAX is fast and beautiful Linux operating system which fits on small (3.14″) CD-ROM disc. It runs directly from the CD (or USB) without installing. Only reason I couldn’t use it on my machine as my main OS was that it was based on 32bit. So it could just see 2GB of my 4GB of RAM.
  • Ubuntu was another distro I played around. The Gnome interface was very spartan and was not much to my liking. The Ubuntu community is very enthusiastic. But the speed of Ubuntu was not upto what I expected.
  • Kubuntu is KDE variant of Ubuntu also did not enthuse me a lot. Both these were slower than my expectation.
  • Sabayaon Linux is a gentoo based Live DVD. I downloaded newest version 3.4a. it installed fine. A very nice arty interafce, but several programs were broken in the so called stable release. Portato which was used to emerge new packages was broken. I like the interface as well as the speed. I tried installing VMWARE workstation 6.0 on the Sabayon Linux as I wanted to run Windows along with Sabayon. It failed miserably to install despite all the tricks I could get from the Sabayon Forum. It is a worthy Distro but for some broken softwares. As I am writing this I saw new version which is released called 3.4e. I hope that solved these quirks. i gave up after struggling for over 3 days.
  • Finally I realized a fantastic distro which serves my purpose in Sidux. It is based on Debian’s unstable branch called ‘sid’. It was in 64 bit, it had the latest and most modern softwares, it had a fantstic manual, superb hardware detection and drivers, latest kernel. This finally was the OS of my choice.

I will talk in details about Sidux in my next blog. Until then happy surfing ;)

Posted in Linux, Operating System | Comments (2)

Finally Flash Player 9 For Linux (x86)

January 18th, 2007
by Krishna Mohan

About a year since Flash 9 was released for Windows and Mac, Linux desktop users can finally… use MySpace… well, there’s lots of benefits in Flash 9. Even if you don’t care for MySpace or YouTube or virtually any decent video site these days, a version of Flash hasn’t been released for Linux since 7.0 and most would argue the last “stable” version was probably Flash 6.

Go get it!

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Tamil Nadu – India may shut door on Microsoft

January 4th, 2007
by Krishna Mohan

The Tamil Nadu government, which is on a fast-track pushing the state to the top in the Indian IT sector, has almost shut its door on the software giant, Microsoft, preferring the Open Source Systems (OSS) for reasons of costs and easy migrating capabilities.

“Initially, 99 per cent of government systems have been running on Microsoft systems but then 2007 will be a watershed year for the state IT sector. We are fast migrating to Linux operating systems which are so much cheaper and can be operated at low cost, besides offering continuous updates and freedom from viruses,” says Mr C. Umashankar, managing director of state-owned ELCOT, vested with the responsibility of overseeing such ambitious government projects as e-governance, enumerating the beneficiaries of the free TV scheme, family ration cards and the free sari-dhoti distribution.

“We have already dispatched 6,500 Linux systems to village panchayats and another 6,100 Acer desktop systems with Suse Linux operating systems are on their way. We are procuring 20,000 desktop systems for schools, which will run only on Suse Linux. Remaining 30 desktop systems will also migrate as and when the new machines arrive,” Mr Umashankar told this newspaper.

He said all the ELCOT servers were on Redhat Linux and the government IT company’s 28-seater software development wing was fully on Suse Linux.

Source: Mandriva Blog, Richard Thurston ZDnet UK Blog

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