Suse 11.2
After several months of not using Linux I recently installed Suse 11.2 on my home PC.
Rather than download the file and chew up a month’s worth of data I bought the DVD on eBay for about $10 including postage, and obtained a bonus copy of Ubuntu as well.
The great thing about Linux is that you can get a complete operating system for nothing, or just the cost of a disk. (more…)
Life before Microsoft Office
It’s hard to believe there was once a world in which Microsoft wasn’t the dominant developer of software for word processing and spreadsheets.
I actually don’t use MS Office much these days, but its presence is ubiquitous.
I like Atlantis for quick documents, saved to RTF format and OpenOffice is my main choice in Linux.
At work we use Pongrass for text editing and I only need Word for opening contributed documents. (more…)
Operating system compatibility
This isn’t meant to be a geek blog, but I want to vent a little here. I contacted the manager of a commercial website yesterday to point out the site didn’t render properly in Linux.
It’s the first site I have ever come across which does not view sensibly in Linux. The response:
“Thanks for letting us know. Based on the fact that only .36% of our traffic originates from Linux users, we cannot currently justify the time, money and manpower to amend this issue. We can look into adding this to future tasks.” (more…)
Ubuntu Hardy Heron
I’m using Linux again for the first time in about nine months. The release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron caught my attention and I decided to give it a go.
I recently revisited Puppy and Sidux without satisfaction. The main problem with Sidux was I just couldn’t get the fonts to look good. (more…)
Sidux Linux
I was always a fan of Kanotix. It’s a Debian-based Linux distribution which forked from the popular live distro Knoppix to offer a solid desktop system.
Somewhere along the line, I messed up an upgrade and moved away. By the time I revisited Kanotix it seemed to have lost impetus. Indeed, the last news items on the site today are from 2006.
I believe there was a split between the lead developers and one of them branched out to help create Sidux. I’ve now got Sidux installed in parallel with Windows Vista and I’m very impressed.
I had some initial glitches with screen resolution and fonts, but once they were sorted I’ve had no problems. It is a fast, attractive desktop which is easy to keep up to date.
Cross-platform applications
I was just looking at the 15 program icons on my Linux desktop and noticed that 12 of them are cross-platform applications which also operate in Windows.
The three Linux-only programs are Digikam (photo organiser), Bluefish (web editor) and Kontact (organiser/email). The 12 cross-platform applications are:
- Firefox (web browser)
- OpenOffice (office suite)
- The Gimp (image editor)
- Pidgin (instant messenger)
- Acrobat Reader (PDF reader)
- VLC (movie player)
- Songbird (desktop web player)
- RealPlayer (audio and movie player)
- PeaZip (archive utility)
- Skype (phone/messenger)
- JFTP (file transfer)
- Frostwire (file sharing).
The last two are interesting in that they are java programs.
The common use of these programs across operating systems shows that Linux is a valid option for desktop users who don’t want to pay a lot of money for Windows or software. It makes the transition less difficult.
PCLinuxOS
I went for a couple of months where I hardly used Linux at all. I had Suse on my laptop and Puppy, but for various reasons I stuck mainly with Windows XP for that period.
I think I had less time and no inclination to experiment. By the time I did want to revisit Linux there were problems with my Suse upgrades, so I checked out Distrowatch and the visit there coincided with a new release of PCLinuxOS.
I’ve used this Mandriva-based distro before and liked it. The CD is packed with useful software and more can be added easily through Synaptic.
My only issue at the moment is that fonts look a little furry. I’m trying various things to fix this, otherwise I’m a happy user. A full-size screenshot is here.
