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Last week I wrote a feature for DistroWatch Weekly on the trials and tribulations of installing CentOS 5.3 on my Sylvania g Netbook Meso. I was very pleased when Dag Wieërs, a CentOS developer and long time packager and maintainer of an excellent repository of additional packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, posted in the comments section with some useful suggestions and a request that I document how to get the netbook completely functional in the CentOS wiki. That's a project I'll take on when I have everything working to my satisfaction. In the meanwhile...

Last month Radu-Cristian Fotescu, who writes the Planète Béranger blog, posted about running CentOS 5.3 on the desktop, describing his experiences as "simple pleasures". Mr. Fotescu has a well earned reputation for negativity, particularly when it comes to Linux distributions. He has been positively effusive about CentOS 5.3, going so far as to create his own repository of additional or updated desktop software for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x, and sharing it with the community. As a result I began toying with the idea of running CentOS on my Sylvania g Netbook Meso.

This distro was brought to my attention in the BN IRC room, and whilst my distro hopping machine had difficulties with it (its a little anti social at the moment) I gave it a run on one of the many machines dotted around my house and found myself very surprised (pleasantly) by the results. Its a Slackware based distro, and in these days of MONO uncertainty and the ever growing popularity of about 4 or 5 of the “big name” distro’s, its nice to break out of the mold and take a look at a lesser known option (sans MONO I hasten to add).

Vector Linux is a popular Linux Distro whose motto is “speed, performance, stability”. Version 6.0 was released in February 2009. Their stated goal is to “Keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide.” Having said that, this end user decided to see what was cooking at Vector.

The Mandriva Linux Online team is proud to announce the second version of the MLO live CD, a lighlty modified version of Mandriva One KDE4 2009.1.

Important changes in this new edition: the live CD is available in the English and French Languages. It is oriented for the beginner and principally aimed at introducing and integrating Windows users.

If you looked at DistroWatch for a typical day five or six years ago you'd see a lot of familiar Linux distributions with announcements. You also would likely see some names that would be unfamiliar if you are relatively new to Linux. Currently the DistroWatch database contains 278 discontinued distributions and 36 more that are listed as dormant. Of these 314 distributions and countless others that never were listed on DistroWatch at all there are many which are probably best forgotten. There are others which were promising but for one reason or another were abandoned. A smaller number were truly exceptional but still failed to survive. This week I decided to wax nostalgic and look at five that seemed special to me at one time or another. Obviously this list is based on my personal experience. If you've been around Linux for a long time you might have a list of your own.

CDLinux is a minimalist distro from China which takes a different approach to small. Rather than cram as many application as possible onto a mini (3"/8cm) CD, the CDLinux Community Edition aims for excellent support of half a dozen languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Russian), support for a wide variety of filesystems and excellent hardware support, including CUPS and XSane for printers and scanners, all of which are included in the 204MB iso.

Last month I wrote about netbooks powered by the MIPS processor, originally developed by SGI. I also pointed out that the price for the Belco Alpha 400 had dropped to $149 last December and January. That is now the regular price for the lowest of low end Linux netbooks at Geeks.com. Last week they had a special and the price dropped to $139.

Believe it or not that doesn't sound like a bargain right now. A number of vendors are closing out the much more capable Asus EeePC 900A. Geeks.com is offering it for $149, the same price as the Belco Alpha 400, and they're throwing in an mp3 player.

We are proud to announce a new version - 0.95 - of our live DVD at Linuxtag 2009 in Berlin.

Calculate Directory Server is a Gentoo-based LDAP server providing a centralised storage of application settings, user accounts and access privileges. A new version of the product was announced yesterday. Some of the main changes include: "Support for Italian and Polish languages; support for the proxy service with user authorization in LDAP; support for Samba group settings in the LDAP server; support for setting of some Jabber service hosts; isolinux has been used for booting; when booting from CD user can now select a keyboard layout; support from loading the CD into memory; improved hardware compatibility when booting from a USB DVD...."

absolute Paul Sherman has announced the availability of the first release candidate for Absolute Linux 13.0, a lightweight modification of Slackware Linux for the desktop: "Absolute Linux 13.0 RC1 released. Pre-release that includes fixes for slapt-get and wicd, addition of a control panel, centralizing control and eliminating the sometimes confusing utilities menus. Big updates to Midori and Inkscape on repositories (under /CD2). New theme, new log on, Qt 4 up and running, several new applications along with Qt 4-based K3b. Overall a more cohesive look and simpler navigation. Wanted a release candidate so that 13.0 will not necessitate updates -- also wanted to have feedback on whether Midori is functional enough to become the default browser. (It uses about 1/3 the memory of Firefox in my tests.)"

molinux MoLinux 5.0, a Spanish, Ubuntu-based distribution developed by the regional government of Castilla la Mancha in Spain, has been released. Code-named "Dorotea", in reference to a pretty girl in Cervantes' Don Quijote de la Mancha, MoLinux 5.0 is distributed as an installable live DVD. New features: improved hardware support and boot speed; optional ext4 file system support; connectivity improvements with the latest version of NetworkManager; newest versions of most of the included applications. New software: GNOME Control Centre for configuring the system; CompizConfig, a utility for setting up 3D desktop effects; Tucan, a download manager; Gru, a tool for restoring the bootloader in case it has been accidentally overwritten or damaged....

The development for the next Stable version 2.0 continues with lots of work being put in all the time.

• USB Live: A tool to make your USB stick an Elive bootable live system !
• Acer Aspire One: Perfectly supported, also with a special tool to disable the fan when not needed (very noisy in the bed)
• Flash: Flash updated to the version 10.0.22.87
• Console: Better characters for the console mode, more languages supported, smaller font size for console.
• Music: Elive Essence is back ! from your Audio menu, also, your Music folder is full of the best music for you, the best for work, for play, or for relaxation...

The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the release of the new stable g:Mini distribution. The g:Mini 3.0 is released. The g:Mini formerly known as ‘GoblinX Mini Edition‘ is the son of GoblinX and contains only XFCE as the windows manager and GTK/GTK2 based applications. The edition is ideal for those users whose want to remaster the distribution.

After yesterday’s post on how I think Fedora is screwing up royally, I thought I’d follow that up with taking a look at the experiences of someone else. brunocb-sherlock-holmes-tux-5975 Specifically I want to talk about a blog post by a developer on Flumotion and GStreamer, and a Fedora user. In other words: Someone who really knows what they are doing and how to fix problems. He outlined his initial experiences with Fedora 11, and here is a few highlights that caught my eye.

So the great moment has arrived. But how do I make the switch? I have horrible memories of struggling with new partitions, running into special bits of Microsoft code designed precisely to make it tough to switch to another operating system … Maybe there is a better way? Of course, you are supposed to be able to get EeePCs preloaded with Linux, indeed they are supposed to be cheaper that way, but the review machine is firmly preloaded with Windows XP.

Last weekend my housemate went to Atlanta for an event she wanted to attend. She stayed at what is generally considered a moderately priced hotel chain which caters mainly to business travelers. After a nearly nine hour drive she wanted to unwind on Friday night and, being very much the geek, chose to go online. The hotel, like most major chains, offers free WiFi service. Perhaps more relevant to my point, they advertise free WiFi service.

Well, she could connect to their wireless network but couldn't get to the internet or connect to any websites. The hotel staff was neither helpful nor knowledgable when she reported the problem.

The Slackware-based VectorLinux project has been around for almost a decade, making regular releases of the fast, desktop-friendly Linux distribution. Robert Lange, the project's co-founder and lead developer, was kind enough to agree to an interview. How did it all start? And what does the future hold for the project? Read on to find the answers to these and other questions. In the news section, the Fedora community announces a new live CD featuring the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, Mandriva prepares for its 2010 release with major changes to the development branch, and Ubuntu gets set to tackle minor annoyances which impact negatively on user experience. Also in the news, we link to an interview with Linux Mint's Clement Lefebvre and O'Reilly publishes answers provided by developers about the recently released OpenBSD 4.5.

Yet another beta! Changes in 1.8.1 Fixed bug in 1.8.0 which defaulted to "nl" (Dutch) instead of "us" during boot (Live CD). Changes in a nutshell (1.8.0): + Updated kernel 2.6.28 * New module powernow-nx + Updated Firefox. + Default keymap for Dutch is now "US". + LiveUSB with options toram and myconfig=usb works now. + Nautilus script TextEdit: Yes/No Buttons instead of Cancel/OK. + Grub background now available for isolinux CD. + Infamous "i810" and "trident" bug in Xorg fixed. + CPU frequency scaling should work now with Intel (Centrino/Speedstep/...) too. + Added firmware for Broadcom 43xx wireless chips.

You may know that we used to have a cafepress store which sold t-shirts and stickers. It was completely commission free and we made no money from it - which made the stuff as cheap as possible. Well, it seems that Canonical is enforcing their intellectual property rights over the Ubuntu name. The store is now closed and you will no longer be able to buy any Ubuntu Satanic merchandise. This saddens us. We are big fans of Ubuntu and have a lot of respect for Canonical. However, they need to understand that a phenomenon such as Ubuntu is only as strong as its community and alienating that community over the sale of a couple of lousy t-shirts is not the way to go.