openSUSE 11.1 released!

openSUSE
The latest openSUSE,. version 11.1 has been released yesterday.

It has all the latest versions of desktop environments and the latest applications such as Firefox 3.0 and Open Office 3.0.

There is also upgrades on the partitioning tool, YaST which offers more options.

To read more about new features, click here.

To download openSUSE 11, click here

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KDE Desktop

GNOME desktop

Banshee

Open Office 3

Choosing your linux

Don’t have much experience on linux?
Don’t have much time trying out?

Well, if so, you’ll love searching for the right distribution that suits you in minutes with distribution comaparer and distribution choosers.

Distribution Comparer is a very mature comparer which provides a reasonable amount of information between each of the two distributions. It has some popular choices of distributions for you to choose from. And there’s also ratings from 1 to 10 in each categories.

Desktop Comparer can be found here.

Another mature and reliable option is to go through several questions which will work out and choose the right distribution for you. The questions are very mature and well revised. At the end, you can also explore the features of each distribution.

Distro Chooser can be found here.
Here is an alternative.

Well? What distributions have they recommended me?

I’m an openSUSE user and have been impressed with it for a while, but was openSUSE my number one recommended choice? No…

Well, here are my results.

1. Ubuntu Linux
2. Fedora
3. Debian GNU/Linux
4. openSUSE
5. Mandriva Linux

I got the same results and the same order form both of the choosers. But zegenie just didn’t put Debian on the list.

This is interesting. Fedora and Debian are the only distributions I haven’t actually tried thoroughly. I’ll have to check them out!

Try this yourslef! It’s fun!

50 ways on tweaking to make Ubuntu faster

TechRadar UK

Want to get the most out of the world’s favourite linux distributions?

Want to invest a little time tweaking you system for the highest performance?

TechRadar will show you how!

Click the link here.

LXF:: Fedora Core 10 Test

Fedora Core 10, one of the simplest to use Linux desktop available is now released!

With exiting new wallpaper and the latest applications and features.

LinuxFormat team is here once again to guide you around this newly polished distro.

Click here.

Linux Mint Felicia – Official TransLXP Review

Linux Mint Felicia:: Not impressive

The latest Linux Mint, Felicia had been released a couple of weeks ago. Overall, after experiencing new features and tools, they’re not impressive.

Well, the best thing they’ve improved so far was the mintInstall, Linux Mint package installer. It had been transformed into a professional installer, easy to use for all of us and not having to go through the hassle of downloading the package off the internet.

The second best improvement was the mintupload, now allowing us to upload a file onto our own server.

They have added two new softwares, Giver – An easy file sharer and Gufw – a lightweight firewall. But the Mint team hadn’t done any goods on those softwares. They just simply added them in.

Now, on to the “bad part”. They had added mintNanny which is an extremely lightweight parental control system. From the description from the mint website, it seems like this tool had been made by a four-year old. Why? It looks too simple and it isn’t very mature.

And quoting from the website:

When you “block” a domain in mintNanny it basically adds an entry to your /etc/hosts file and defines that domain’s IP address as being 0.0.0.0. This results in your computer not being able to communicate with the domain anymore.

• You can’t block domains for particular users or particular programs, the block is for everyone on the computer and for any protocol.
• Remember that mintNanny blocks domain names, not IP addresses so if your children are smart enough to ping the domain from another computer they’ll be able to access it via its IP address.
• Certain domains use subdomains and redirect to them so you might have to block them to. For instance if you want to block somewebsite.com you might also have to block www.somewebsite.com. As a rule of thumb try to access the website after you block it to see if your block was efficient enough.

It just seemes too imature. They just put the ip as being 0.0.0.0. You have to find out yourself if you have to block www. And if you only want to control your child’s account, you have to sacrafise yourself from being blocked to that website as well. Not very mature indeed.

The worse feature though. Since I used to be a Mint fan, when I heard of the release, I rushed towards the downloads and got the iso in 3 hours. I burnt it into a disc, insert it….and…..nothing happened. You can’t upgrade from older versions. I posted a thead on the Mint’s site and they told me that this RC hasn’t got the upgrader plannted in yet. It will be released on RC2!? What?! For f** sake! RC1 is for mature, stable, ready to use!!! They should’ve released that in BETA!

And up until now, there is no sign of RC2. Anyway, after getting completely bored with the distro. I’ve switched back to openSUSE. (bye bye Mint). If you’d like to give Mint a try, you can. It’s stable since it’s Ubuntu-based.

Mint 6 Felicia out!

Now for what we have been waiting for since the release of Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.

Linux Mint 6, code named Felicia is finally released!

The team is ready to announce the new features from Ubuntu 8.10, including the latest GNOME 2.24, the latest Firefox 3 and other GNOME applications.

The Mint team had also added a couple of new features to enhance security and accessibility features.

One of the tool is mintInstall. At last! Linux Mint had developed its own Software Manager!

The skin remains untouched. The Mint menu, which used to display the current version of Mint, had now changed to “Menu”.

Read the updates and new features by clicking here.

LXF:: Putting the new Ubuntu to the test!

And this is what we have all been waiting for!

The latest Ubuntu 8.10, Interpid Ibex had just been released!

New GNOME applications and tool updates are ready for you to experience!

LinuxFormat has put the new Ubuntu to the test and ready for you to experience the new features!

Click here!

Turn Your Ubuntu Hardy to Mac OSX Leopard

Can you actually stand the plain old Ubuntu skin?

Are you impressed with the latest Mac OSX skin?

Well, now I’ll show you how to change this Ubutu Desktop….

Into this….

Find out how! Click this link!

openSUSE – Official TransLXP review.

NOTE: I’ve tried openSUSE 11 3-4 months ago and haven’t wrote a review on this…So I guess it’s isn’t too old to do a review on this. On this post, I’ll be reviewing both openSUSE KDE and GNOME.

openSUSE is founded by Novell. It aims at simplicity and performance, but doesn’t spend much time maintaining it or reasearching on what customers need. It creates softwares but once it’s done creating it, it stops maintaining it and think of ways to imporve and it doesn’t care about interface. This is openSUSE’s main downfall. openSUSE is pretty much easy to use, but often tries to be complicted. It tries to improve the distribution but doesn’t seem to have spent too much time on this. You get a lot of bugs, but you can search through this great community forum asking experts about what you should do. This is the best bit about openSUSE. Its user friendly community.

openSUSE comes in 4seperate CDs or a DVD version. This is also annoying for users. Because either ways, it takes damn long to download. The DVD is the most preferred option. Although, it downloads smoothly. Once you got the DVD, you test it out. But openSUSE takes so long to boot up. Well, booting isn’t a problem though. OK, i’ve tried openSUSE, let’s install it. I wanted to dual boot windows and openSUSE. If you ever thought of that, you’ll realise that you wouldn’t ever manage to do it yourslef without any knowledge or any reasearch. And if you went ahead and install it, you’ll end up replacing Windows with openSUSE. This is when the community becomes part of the distribution. I’ve actually spent 2 weeks researching and asking for help. The community tries to help you. They directed me to a post telling you how to manage the partitions and stuff, but since I’m a newbie, I don’t get a s*** of what they’re trying to tell me. My first question was “Can you simplify it?” and it took me the whole week asking questions on what they’re meant. So…I GIVE UP!!! It even gave me a headache!! So I went to LinuxFormat and ask the community there. I wrote a post explaning my troubles and inform them of how much time I’d wasted on openSUSE’s forums. A smart guy came and explains everything in just one sentence or two. Thank him!

When dual booting openSUSE with Windows, you have to actually manage the partition yourself…You have to create a sepearate partition for openSUSE and go through all that trouble. Ubuntu does it automatically. This is not for an average user. And anyways, I didn’t end up installing it. It’s not worth it anyways.

My final notes is that openSUSE wouldn’t be too good for both starters and experts. It doesn’t maintian the software, it doesn’t look for customers needs. If you’re interested in openSUSE, spend a LOT of time researching it, asking for people’s opinions then, once you’ve decided check out the openSUSE community of LinuxFormat asking for information and help. You you don’t want to dual boot, you shouldn’t have any problems installing it. Just keep the defualt options…But I strongly recommend you to always ask them what’s going on.

Screenshots:

openSUSE KDE 4.1 openSUSE GNOME

Mandriva 2009.0 Released

Mandriva 2009.0 is released!

Already!

So if you’re bored of the year 2008 and want the taste of 2009 right now….Try Mandriva 2009.0!

Mandriva 2009.0 offers the latest KDE 4.1 and GNOME 2.24 desktops and the latest Firefox 3, OpenOffice.org 3 and the latest applications.

It still got the easy to use desktop and stunning interface.

Plus, a newly added desktop environment, LXDE…

Read more about this here.

LXDE

Gnome

Gnome