Where to start? First of all, installing Arch went well.

It installed with relative ease, had a clean (text) installer, though it required me to do a few things such as install xorg and gdm, these were easy tasks. Initial thoughts are that it is a very basic system with almost no applications, kind of nice if you like to have control over every application installed on your system, but I find it a bit irritating. To be honest, I was expecting it to be very fast but it seems to take twice as long to open an application in Arch as it does in Mint. So because it only made things harder for me, and there was not an increase, but a decrease in performance, I will be sticking to Mint Linux.

It may be that I’m too use to having the Distro do everything for me, but it seems like too much trouble to bother with all the extra work, for at best, minimal performance gains. Maybe one day I will give it another try, but at current, it’s not what I’m looking for.

On a similar topic, I have convinced my brother to let me install Linux on his computer. He has a very old E-machine that has the same install of Windows XP that it had since we bought it, so as you can imagine, there are many documents, pictures, and music scattered throughout the hard drive. For the last few weeks, he has been having problems with spyware and viruses on it, I’ve tried to help him in every way I can, so when I removed the virus I thought it was fixed, but the virus keeps coming back from a mystery source. The spyware comes up on his computer, pretending to be an anti-spyware application, informing him that his computer may be infected with spyware, and that he should buy this software to have it removed. It wasn’t so bad before, but now he has one that completely removes his background and, in very large letters, informs him of this limited time offer. Long story short, he’s had it with Windows, and he said that he hears me talk about Linux a lot and wants to give it a try.

I’m currently in the process of backing up his files and when they are done, I will wipe the hard drive clean. I think I will set him up with Mint because it has been such a good distro for me and it is very easy to learn. All he does is use Microsoft Word to do some school work, Browse the web, and sometimes he plays Tac-Ops (A Mod for UT2004), so in this case, Linux can easily do everything he needs. I’ll set him up with OpenOffice, Firefox, and install UT2004 along with the mod. We should have another Linux convert soon.

auf Wiedersehen

Sun Microsystems has announced its first supported version of the open-source OpenSolaris operating system. The project was created in 2005 by Sun aiming to build a developer community around its Solaris Operating System technology. The 2008.5 distribution has been made available and an official price list for support will become available on May 13.

The OpenSolaris distribution builds upon the strength of the Unix System V Release 4 codebase, with significant improvements by Sun. As such is the only open source System V-based operating system available. Solaris is also based on the same codebase.

For more information on how to get started with OpenSolaris 2008.5, Click Here.

Hello everyone,

I haven’t blogged in forever it seems. The reasons behind this are numerous, but the biggest cause is having to spend more time with my school studies.

I guess I need to update at least once a year so here goes.

First of all, I’m currently downloading the Arch .iso to give a try, Mint is all good and well, but I get bored with my distros after a while and start wanting to try new things. As I’ve heard many good things about Arch Linux, and they just released a new update, I thought now is the time to give it a try. I will make a post in the next few days explaining how it went, and whether I will continue to use it or not.

Second, I’ve been using Songbird as my main music player since the 0.5 release and I’m really pleased with it, I’ve had no problems other than the long load times on a cold start, and on my Linux box I use Compiz, but it doesn’t have any of my effects in the Songbird window, but other than that it plays all my music perfectly, keeps my library clean, and it can even detect my Creative ZEN. This is just me being picky, but for such an early product, I really like where Songbird is going.

0.5 Final has entered the station with hundreds of bug-fixes and several new features including:

MTP Device support
Windows users have a shiny new MTP Add-on that introduces MTP Device Support! Most portable media players and cell phones integrate the MTP spec so try plugging in your device and share your findings on the MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page.

The extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.

Media Views
Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets? Media Views provide new ways of displaying, manipulating, exploring, and contextualizing your media library. Songbird ships with two default views: a traditional playlist view, and a second playlist view with three filter panes. Developers can create new Media Views and upload them to the Add-ons site. This example media page replaces the standard playlist filters with tag clouds. To experience your music web 2.0 style, load your library, then select Tag Cloud from the View menu. Click the tags to toggle the filtering on and off.

Improved Filter Picker
Genre, Artist, and Album aren’t the only useful ways to filter your music collection. We’ve streamlined the filter picker list and fixed a few bugs that make it easier than ever to navigate your collection.

New List Background
After several requests from our community we’ve made our Library and Playlist backgrounds easier on your eyes. Keep sending us your ideas, suggestions, and requests, your feedback helps us improve the ‘bird!

And much, much more. I personally recommend giving Songbird a try, it’s come a very long way in the past couple of months.

Read the full release announcement.

Release features AMD 64-bit as well as 32-bit processor support

iXsystems announced today the release of PC-BSD Edison Edition. PC-BSD is a fully functional open source desktop operating system based on FreeBSD 6.3-STABLE. FreeBSD is one of the most used UNIX-like operating systems in the world and is widely renowned as the most stable and secure server operating system. PC-BSD has a Push-Button Installer (PBI) wizard developed exclusively for PC-BSD that lets users download and install a wide range of available applications in a self-extracting and self-installing format.

Read The Press Release.

NEW YORK (AP) — Computers that run the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows didn’t attract enough attention from Wal-Mart customers, and the chain has stopped selling them in stores, a spokeswoman said Monday.

Wal-Mart sold out the in-store gPC inventory but decided not to restock, O’Brien said. The company does not reveal sales figures for individual items.

Read the full story.

As part of Amazon’s latest MP3 download music offerings, the online retail giant is now offering its DRM (Digital Rights Management) free tunes for purchase to Linux users. Amazon is doing this by offering a new program, Amazon MP3 Downloader for Linux users.

Amazon is offering the program in both Debian’s DEB and the RPM format. To make it easier to install, Amazon is including versions for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE.

Now Linux users can legally download entire DRM free albums.

From Freebsd.org, Febuary 27th, 2008:

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches.

Some of the highlights:

• Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better. Results are from benchmarks used to analyze and improve system performance, results with your specific work load may vary. Some of the changes that contribute to this improvement are:
  • The 1:1 libthr threading model is now the default.
  • Finer-grained IPC, networking, and scheduler locking.
  • A major focus on optimizing the SMP architecture that was put in place during the 5.x and 6.x branches.

  Some benchmarks show linear scaling up to 8 CPUs. Many workloads see a significant performance improvement with multicore systems.

• The ULE scheduler is vastly improved, providing improved performance and interactive response (the 4BSD scheduler is still the default for 7.0 but ULE may become the default for 7.1).
• Experimental support for Sun’s ZFS filesystem.
• gjournal can be used to set up journaled filesystems, gvirstor can be used as a virtualized storage provider.
• Read-only support for the XFS filesystem.
• The unionfs filesystem has been fixed.
• iSCSI initiator.
• TSO and LRO support for some network drivers.
• Experimental SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) support (FreeBSD’s being the reference implementation).
• Much improved wireless (802.11) support.
• Network link aggregation/trunking (lagg(4)) imported from OpenBSD.
• JIT compilation to turn BPF into native code, improving packet capture performance.
• Much improved support for embedded system development for boards based on the ARM architecture.
• jemalloc, a new and highly scalable user-level memory allocator.
• freebsd-update( provides officially supported binary upgrades to new releases in addition to security fixes and errata patches.
• X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, GNOME 2.20.2.
• GNU C compiler 4.2.1.
• BIND 9.4.2.

Read the full announcement.

Tired of being blocked by your school or office?

This proxy will help you get past any blocked sites at school or blocked sites at work and allow you to surf wherever you want.

To use it, simply go to TrollProxy.com and type in the URL of the blocked site, and it will now allow you to access the site.

From Debian.org, February 17th, 2008:

The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 4.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update against ftp.debian.org after an installation, in order to incorporate those late changes.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.

New CD and DVD images containing updated packages and the regular installation media accompanied with the package archive respectively will be available soon at the regular locations.

Read the full announcement.