Meet Grml 2011.12, Basic Debian Respin for Sysadmins

Today we're looking at another more specialized distribution spin called grml that apparently has its origins in Austria, not that it mattered much when technology allows us to work pretty much from anywhere. Is it grml because those mountain folks up in the Alps are always grumbling and grumpy, or is it that life as a sysadmin is turning people into muttering zombies?
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Semplice Linux, An Exercise in Simplicity

Semplice Linux is a very young project that has only recently made its debut on Distrowatch with Release Candidate 1 for their upcoming 2.0 code-named 'Emily' getting listed. This means there must be a support structure in place, a website, bug tracker, documentation and user forum.
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Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year

Hello guys. It's been another long year, although it went really quick. Seems contradictory, but with everything going on in the world and in my private life it seems both long and short.
In the Linux and free software world both the Unity desktop and GNOME Shell had their first public releases that sparked plenty of controversy and set the scene for the year.
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A Review of Vinux - Linux for the Visually Impaired

Vinux is a specialist distribution remastered from a Ubuntu base and optimized specifically with visually impaired users in mind. Some others also come with a screen reader and other accessibility options by default, for example in the login screen, but these are never turned on from the start and voice recognition software is rarely if ever present.
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Slax 7 Is On The Way

Chances are you already know this if you're into Slackware based live distributions that are using SquashFS for an easy to manage modular architecture. Development has picked up again, and on Tomas M's blog there is also a nice video of what's called a Slax 7 technology preview. Looks like Porteus, the project spawned by the fan community as Slax-Remix, will soon not be the only choice.
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Quick Look at VectorLinux 7.0 Final

Around two weeks ago, on 28th November, VectorLinux 7.0 was finally released after two years of work, or, as the developers put it in the release announcement, "nearly two years of blood, sweat and tears". We don't want to be disrespectful then. You can get a brief overview of features for the standard edition here and here. I've previously looked at RC2 in a longer review over on Muktware, so this is more meant as an addendum.
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Bye-Bye, Firefox

It's been a long time coming. In October last year I wrote a post wondering what browser to switch to or whether to stick with Mozilla's Firefox. And that was even before the current madness, upping version numbers all the time with little if any perceivable benefit to the end user. The stability problems were easily overcome, just by re-enabling those little helpers called hosts file, Adblock and Noscript. It's a testimony though to how bug-ridden websites are that all those are needed just for a
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My Favorite Distribution Releases 2010-2011

I was going to write about how I finally dumped Firefox for Opera, but Firefox 8 does not seem too bad and for the first time appears a bit nippier at start up. Like Dedoimedo has found, this does not look like a completely arbitrary decision to pump up the version number but actually has some small benefits, so I'm going to give Firefox another chance before it is relegated.
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Updated CrunchBang Statler Images, More Like ArchBang

Corenominal has announced the release of an updated build of CrunchBang Linux 10 "Statler", with some significant changes since the last release. CrunchBang is a lightweight Debian-based distribution featuring the Openbox window manager. The Xfce edition has been discontinued to focus on the Openbox edition. The Gnome Display Manager (GDM) has been removed in favor of the SLiM login manager, as inclusion of the in Debian repositories upcoming move to GDM 3 was deemed undesirable.
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Arch Linux: The Big Upgrade

I've been putting it of and been running with linux 2.6.39 for months, but today it was time and the big upgrade went surprisingly well. Basically, I have not been updating this machine since I wrote the ArchBang article in July. After downloading around 420 MB in package updates (more than 2 GB installed size) two days ago it pulled in another ~90 meg today.
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Puppy 5.3 "Slacko" - Slackware With Added Woof

On 17/10/2011 a new version, or edition if you prefer, of Puppy Linux was released, this time based on Slackware, and it is appropriately named Puppy "Slacko", because we all know that Slackware users are lazy, right?

I haven't used Puppy before, in part because I felt no need considering the many distributions out there and in part because some things like its Ubuntu roots did
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New Page for Screenshots and Artwork Added

Today I've added a screenshots page to the blog for all those vanity shots showing off my desktop. Nevertheless, it's a bit of fun and something to look at if you got nothing else to do. It may also provide some inspiration, just like I get some ideas from other websites, and I will usually post links to the artwork used, icons, backgrounds and such. I'm starting with an old-style KDE 3.5 desktop taken in Slax-Remix (Porteus) 0.9.
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Linux light - SliTaz GNU/Linux and SliTaz-Aircrack-ng

Once upon a time there was DSL (Damn Small Linux) which provided a full workable system in a 50 MB image. I used to have it on a small partition for repair and rescue tasks on my desktops. It was never or at least very rarely needed as I recall, but I liked the pre-set radio stations in XMMS and the backgrounds and conky config in DSL, so I ended up running it more and more over Zenwalk 2.6, which at the time was using a very half-baked early XFCE 4.4, if only to listen to internet radio on a geeky minimalistic looking box.
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Overclock Your New and Cheaply Bought HP Touchpad

If you were one of the lucky, or organized, people to get a HP webOS tablets for £89/£99 respectively for the 16 and 32 GB editions. here's your chance to get more put of it with the so-called Uberkernel to 1.5 GHz and even up to 1.9 GHz apparently. This should get rid of any lag on this device. Or perhaps just install one of the many Linux distributions?

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New Generation of Smartphones Offers Better Voice Recognition to the Visually Impaired

It seems that after the Samsung Galaxy S II surprised at least me with extremely good voice control for daily operation, Apple´s iPhone is next to make life easier for the Disabled, and everybody who would rather talk than type. Technology is getting there, and as a care manager I can only be happy for the people with visual and other physical impairments that make it difficult to operate devices the traditional way.
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Sabayon Fscked My Home - The XFCE Spin Revisited

This should originally have been entitled 'The Sabayon Xfce Spin Revisited', but something disturbing happened. It's been a while since I tried Xfce 5.3 last August, but in the fast moving world of software and technology a year can be a long time. Back then I was a bit unhappy about the size of 628 MB that gave the user little more than Firefox and the package manager.
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Slackware 13.37 - Perfect for My Laptop

Most people who have dabbled in Linux for a while "know" that Slackware is difficult to install, configure, make work and keep up to date. It is an OS only for geeks. Not so. These days the developments in the wider universe have trickled down to Slackware as well, and having something like KDE 4 as default desktop already means plenty of things taken care of, with all the utilities and options this desktop environment is providing.
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One Year of Rolling with Arch/Bang

It's just a little over a year now that I first installed ArchBang with 2010.09 that had just been released. In comments to my following review a poster expressed the opinion it would be interesting to see how this would develop and if it would still be working in a year from then. So here we are. I've tweaked the install and kept it updated at my leisure, and it is still working fine. Over time the ArchBang base I started out with has turned into Arch Linux, as you would expect it to when pointing at Arch repositories.
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ArchBang 2011.10 Released

Hooray, yet another ArchBang release barely a month after the last. I think Will likes to give us options as he keeps changing things around.
Chromium is out again and Firefox Nightly is now the browser of choice. The Openbox Applications menu now has icons. Not sure if that might slow loading time down a bit. You can now edit keyboard layout configuration while installing ArchBang, and the Getting Started help has been updated. Read the release announcement here.

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Trisquel GNU/Linux - Free Software and Gorgeous

Welcome to Trisquel GNU/Linux! I've been wanting to write this for a long time, because trying this distribution really feels inviting. Trisquel GNU/Linux is as you can see by the naming convention one of the few distributions fully endorsed by the Free Software Foundation, and in return they're doing a lot to promote the FSF and their principles on their website. If you're yawning already, hold steady and read on, because Trisquel looks sharp and has something to offer.
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KNOPPIX 6.7 and ADRIANE Audio Desktop Review

Once upon a time the daddy of this distribution, Klaus Knopper, started a trend with his pioneering Knoppix live CD as rescue and repair tool. It was known for incorporating extensive hardware detection that required minimal to no configuration at boot to arrive at a fully working desktop.
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Unity Linux 2011 to use Arch-Linux-Like Approach

In other news another favorite of mine, at least in the rpm universe, has released an Alpha build of what will be Unity Linux 2011. I reviewed Unity Linux last year on this blog and images were 276MB and 277 MB per architecture, and the subsequent update 2010.2 brought it to well over 300 MB. This time the size is only a 100 odd megabyte and the team is making some significant changes.
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Archbang 2011.09 Released

Keeping up the schedule of a new release roughly every six months, a new and updated Archbang live/install image with the 3.0 kernel is out, 2011.09. Read the release announcement and see a screenshot here. As always it is available for i686 and x86_64 architectures. The images are a handy download size of 526 MB and 531 MB respectively. If you already have it installed there's no need to get this as of course Arch is rolling, but good for if you want to update a copy on your USB stick for newer hardware.
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Twittering for Geeks - Perl scripts send log messages to Twitter

Being a Linux Magazine subscriber this is actually an old hat as I had the fortune of reading the article when it came out. Nevertheless it's still an extremely neat trick to be able to send automatic status updates, log output and system messages to a microblogging service from where you can monitor it anywhere in the world on an infinite number of device, on smart phones, via rss feeds etc.
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Sabayon 6 Roundup - Fluxbox and XBMC

Having looked at the two main editions of Gnome x86 and KDE x64 I've come to the conclusion, that the best way to use Sabayon 6 on the desktop is... to log into Fluxbox. When talking about the installer I briefly mentioned that it launches in a Fluxbox environment if you choose install directly from the boot menu, which it falls back into if things go wrong, and believe me they do.
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Quick Look at Sabayon 6 Continued (KDE)

To give Sabayon a fair shake and with the aim of comparing it to recent releases of other KDE  distributions I also downloaded the amd64 image for the KDE 4 edition, which comes in at a hefty 2.13 GB, with a few surprising results (torrent here). First of all, boot options, boot loader background and splash, artwork and overall style and feel is very similar to the GNOME edition which makes for a good coherent theme across all spins.
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Quick Look at Sabayon 6 (GNOME)

Earlier this year we had a poll regarding which distributions to review, and Sabayon received enough interest so here we are. Besides, Sabayon Linux is always fun to try, to see which start up music and themes they come up with this time, and to play with the media center included. I also find the dark blue themes employed in recent versions quite appealing.
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Quick Look at Bodhi Linux 1.1.0

A lot has been written about Bodhi Linux in its short existence. Bodhi appeared out of nowhere not even a year ago it seems and quickly gained followers aplenty. Usually there's a good reason for something like this. So much has been written in such little amount of time, I'm not going to go into all the aspects of this little distro, for example that Bodhi means Enlightenment, a nice word play on the default desktop environment of choice E17, just a quick look.
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Trying the CompTIA Network+ 2009 Prepkit from uCertify

I've recently been approached to review one or more of this vendor's training and so-called PrepKits, and having obtained the CompTIA Network+ 2009 certification myself thought this would be a good start, as this is making it possible to compare with other solutions and methods of learning.
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Zenwalk 7.0 Live - Teaching tool and installable live system

This is a repost of the article on OStatic. What really annoyed me was that the editor cut off the top panel in the screenshot and did not even respond to email requests to rectify this. Perhaps he confused it with a Virtualbox window, no idea, but this just shows a high degree of incompetence. Everybody knows Xfce comes with a top panel by default, right?
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Did GNOME Shell Miss the Mark?

Having played with a couple of tablets over the last week it occurred to me that these are the sort of devices the GNOME 3 Shell is said to be intended to run on, a reasonable assumption when looking at the design. However, the current breed of tablets PC's come with their own interfaces already, and they seem rather streamlined and efficient at what they're doing. Android tablets, HP webOS, the Blackberry Playbook and of course the iPad all have rather good interfaces in my view that are more than up to the job they're intended for, and probably superior to the Shell because they have been designed with just that one purpose in mind.
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Using Tor to View Restricted Video Sites Internationally

How many times have you been stuck in another country unable to watch your favorite shows and channels? Or perhaps you don't reside there and want to watch them anyway, expat or other? Hulu, Spotify and BBC iPlayer all check IP addresses to ensure you are connecting from the country they are serving, in the BBC's case because they don't want you to get a free ride without a TV license which they are assuming nobody in a foreign country would have paid for.
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Preview: What's Coming Up in VectorLinux 7?

VectorLinux is a long-standing distribution that seems a bit underrepresented in the PR department. I took the opportunity for an early look at RC2 of the upcoming version 7.0 to see what we can expect after more than 2.5 years of development. You can read the full article on Muktware.
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How to Enable Broadcom Wireless on Slackware 13.37

This one has got a lot easier over the last releases. There is now a build script on slackbuilds.org that allows you to build a package with the latest driver from staging as kernel module. Choose the first one on the list, unless you want to mess around with fwcutter. I don't, and I always found broadcom-sta to work perfectly for me in Slackware and Arch. It's different in Debian and related distros though where it's called brcm80211. This package supports chipsets including but not limited to BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4321, and BCM4322. Mine is a BCM43225.
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Anniversary, Distro Testing, and Future Articles

This blog turned one year old yesterday and has had around 130 000 page views by the time of writing, a definite up from 36 000 in the first six months. Not as much as some others have but hey, it's supposed to be fun. Jim Lynch over at Eyeonlinux.com has identified what he calls The Dark Side of Distrohopping, and I'm not planning to get as stressed out over testing and writing as he seems to be, but then if I remember correctly he is trying to make a living from his sites.
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GNOME 3: Bearable with GNOME Shell Frippery

A while ago I read about this project, a small collection of scripts with the aim at creating a more GNOME 2 like user experience with the name of GNOME Shell frippery, so I had to try it out on my experimental install and took a few more screenshots to illustrate the effect. I'm also suspecting that many users are still unaware of it.
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Prettyfying Your LXDE

LXDE, the Lightweight X11 desktop environment, has gained quite a following over recent years seemingly coming from nowhere, and many distribution spins are now using it for their user interface. This is really a follow-up to my previous post about beautyfying Xfce. Because both are using gtk+ the same themes will work and the same engines are needed to make them look as intended.
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Beautifying the Xfce Desktop

Regular readers will know Xfce is one of my favorite environments, and the one I have been using for the longest period of time, since early 2006 to be exact. It already comes with a large selection of themes and typically all you need to do is get a few icon sets to spruce up your desktop and you're done. Or keep using Tango, nice and simple.
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Debian Bug: Iceweasel w/ Gtk-qt-engine Installed Consumes 100% CPU Power

After my recent trial run of the latest Kanotix I bumped into a bug with Iceweasel and gtk-qt-engine under KDE 4, as described in this 572162 and this bug report 543402, and possibly 523824.
Iceweasel on exiting leaves a process behind that consumes 100% CPU power on one core which can only be terminated by killing the PID.
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A Day Out at Berlin Zoo

I recently moved to Berlin temporarily and when my girl-friend came over we went to visit the Zoo. She loves animals and I love nature, and Berlin Zoo exhudes this special serenity that is so hard to find. There's plenty to do and big patches of green, bamboo forests and the like, the offices and care taker school built in the style of a Chinese pagoda while others are reflecting African architecture, you can spend all day there. And right next door, actually on the same grounds, is the Berlin Aquarium, but you'll need to schedule an extra day for this if you want to do it all properly and see everything. I would also submit that the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town is both bigger and better with its massive Kelp forests and Shark tank, the Penguin area and Whale exhibit and the like. Not surprising given that Berlin isn't anywhere near the sea. Btw, the name is a bit misleading, as the two oceans actually meet a bit East of the Cape Peninsula.
Apparently San Francisco's Aquarium of the Bay is also one of the best and one of only three in the world that house a living Kelp forest, and that will be my next destination when time and money allow.

Me and Big Brova

But back to our visit to the Zoo. I'm quite aware that some are of the opinion animals belong into the Wild and not locked up behind bars so to speak, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but let's not get into that debate here. At the very least they seem very well cared for.

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Gaming on Linux, Better Than You Would Think

Gaming on GNU/Linux is still getting a bad rap. Obviously there aren't as many titles to choose from and you'll be hard pressed to go into your local Game and find Linux support advertised on the jewel case. However, no big deal. There are plenty of games out there that will keep you busy, and how much can one person play, honestly, unless you're unemployed and up 24/7 living on coffee and coke, and still have mum to do your laundry?
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Kanotix 2011-05 'Hellfire' Review

This week, following the review of SimplyMEPIS 11, I will be looking at the latest Kanotix release. Kanotix is one of the older Debian derivatives and was inspired by the Knoppix Live distribution, also based on Debian, for which the founder 'Kano' had his own ideas how to improve it, like adding a hard drive installer. Knoppix was at the time using KDE as the main desktop but has changed since to LXDE.
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New Aliens Game by Gearbox Scheduled for Spring 2012

While on the subject of new and long awaited games coming out I came across this trailer for the new Aliens: Colonial Marines which will according to the Publisher be available spring 2012 on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.
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No More Duke Nukem Forever Jokes

It's here! After 12 years of development, or rather delays, Duke Nukem Forever will hit the stores 10th June. So they say. Believe it when you see it, but it looks like sadly, no more Duke Nukem Forever jokes.


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GNOME Shell Impressions - Trying GNOME 3 on Arch Linux

Another article about the GNOME Shell. Nothing really to see here, it's just opinion, and yours is as good as mine. If you are bored however, read on.

Recent trials with GNOME 3 using the Fedora Live CD's did not go so well. They always dumped me into fallback mode which is, despite some claiming it to be a solution for GNOME 2 lovers, nowhere near good enough as a tide me over, and it looked unfinished.
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SimplyMEPIS 11 - My First Experience with MEPIS, Ever

A disclaimer in the beginning: I have been aware of (Simply)MEPIS since at least early 2005 when it used to be on the front and cover CD's of various magazines during that year but have never explored it. I like my Debian 'straight-up' or not at all, and, given that MEPIS is based on Debian stable and given how easy it is to add repositories to the sources list, I felt no need for anything else. Also, regular readers will know I'm not much of a fan of the bigger desktop environments lately, but as MEPIS comes with KDE 4 by default I will try not to let that bias my assessment. With that in mind, let's proceed.
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Arch Linux: How to Make Resume from Hibernate Work

I usually don't use the Hibernate function much, but lately I have been wondering why it was that my Arch installation did not resume from swap when my new Slackware 13.37 on the same laptop had no such problems.
Two things. I found I didn't actually have a swap partition in Arch as through some fooling around a while ago the UUID of the swap partition had changed, and Arch identifies partitions by this ID by default.
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9 Slackware Based Live Distributions

A while ago I read a question as to why there are so few live distributions around based on Slackware when compared to other systems.  The answer is simple: there aren't. You only need to follow this link to a query on distrowatch to see that there are actually quite a few around, and probably more that are not in the site's database. I'll go through a few here that are my personal top choices.
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Slackware: Short Interview with Robby Workman, Community Server

A short interview with Robby Workman, who is part of the informal team helping out with the development of Slackware Linux, on the release of Slackware 13.37 can be found on Slack World. I happen to think that it's a great release, very stable, and the 11 months invested were worth it. But then, I can't comment on the performance of KDE 4 because I usually do a custom install with Xfce, Window Maker, and this time also LXDE from ponce (see my article on setting up LXDE on Slackware further down).
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Mageia 1 Beta 2 - Almost Ready for the Big Day

A while ago we had a poll here and a review of Mageia came second just after Scientific Linux. Mageia is a new distribution and this is only the second beta, but it's due for release in around 30 days so I thought we'll take a sneak preview now. No doubt there will be more reviews coming all over the web once this is out.
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Installing LXDE on Slackware & Salix 13.37

Slackware 13.37 is out. So what do you do if you need or want a light weight desktop environment for an old machine and LXDE is your favorite? You could wait for Salix to catch up and release their own spin as they always do because they are fully compatible and you could just pull it in with slapt-get from their repos. You could build it yourself using the scripts at SlackBuilds.org, but they need a bit additional work and you need to figure out the build sequence.
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Did You Know You Can Try BSD With VirtualBSD?

A while ago back in January I came across this announcement on OSNews.com and made a mental note that this was something I had to try.
VirtualBSD 8.1 was released on or around 4/01/2011 and it basically gives you a pre-defined FreeBSD 8.1 installation with Xfce 4.6 and a range of applications in a virtual machine. It is a desktop ready FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE in the form of a VMware appliance but can also in a few steps be made to run with VirtualBox. Read the instructions for that here.
As I already had VMware Player installed I went for using it as intended. Most of what I'm going to write you can also read on the VirtualBSD site so feel free to skip over.
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Slackware 13.37 Released

Oh excitement, Slackware 13.37 is out! I've been running it for around a week now on one partition with only Window Maker and Xfce and Sbopkg to make it easier to add a few packages from SlackBuilds.org, and what can I say, it's Slackware, and it works.  The release announcement gives 25/04 as release date, but as of yesterday that message wasn't there in the changelogs and on the front page, so it seems that at least the announcement to the public was only done today.
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Window Maker - The (Almost) Forgotten Window Manager

With the big two desktop environments changing massively over the last few years and getting quite a bit heavier at the same time I thought I'ld look again at another alternative that's been a staple in the area of  window managers since release in 1997 - Window Maker. Initially it was WindowMaker by the way, but due to a naming conflict this had to be changed.  It is designed to emulate the look and feel of the NeXTstep GUI, an object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer to run on its range of proprietary workstation computers.
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