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My experience with Fedora has not been bad at all. I think a big reason for that is that my laptop has practically no need for proprietary drivers. The intel graphics card open source driver has gotten quite good and provides painless and efficient compositing out of the box. In fact, every piece of hardware, including sound, works out of the box. So, that leaves me free to compare distros by their features and ease of use. So what have I found in using Fedora 10 KDE version?

In today’s world the Palm does not produce the same level of excitement in developers that it used to. One of most important reasons for this is that the Palm OS itself has too many limitations, and, frankly, Windows Mobile is not exciting. Palm, the company, has been aware of this fact for years and has been promising a new Linux based OS for just as long. However, the mythical Linux based Palm has never come ... But, now there is Android.

Microsoft is going to become an OSS company, not a FOSS company. We are already seeing the early signs of this. They have created a couple of open source licenses and have submitted them for approval successfully with the Open Source Initiative. Microsoft has pledged to become a more open company. Although the said pledge has been received with a lot of skepticism, I think they really mean it. They have to. Microsoft is now hard at work trying to convince the world that they really have changed. Is all this going to be enough? I don’t think so. They have to still go a little further. Lets see why.

Linux is making great strides in the consumer market lately. Although there had been forays by different companies before, when Dell came out with their Linux line, it was clear that Linux for the general consumer had arrived. Since then, other companies have followed suit, like Lenovo, and even Wallmart.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my experiences installing several different distributions on my ThinkPad T61. One of the distributions I tested was PCLinuxOS 2007. And, as I wrote, there were a couple of small issues that I had to fiddle with in order to get everything working. With the recent release of the 2008 version of PCLinuxOS (the Mini Me version which comes with a minimal number of applications pre-installed), I thought it would be good to write about how this new version works on my laptop.

If one takes a look at Linux Distribution’s forums, it becomes very evident that there is a large swell of people switching to Linux due to frustration with Vista or XP. All these people are trying to install Linux on their existing hardware and hoping that it goes well for them. And that is a good thing. Thankfully, Linux hardware support has improved tremendously with the latest kernels. So, in most cases, the experience for these people is going to be a rewarding one. Nevertheless, for a good number of them, this switch is going to be frustrating. You see, that is not the best way to switch to Linux.

Those of you that read my writeup about “Finding the right distro for my ThinkPad” may wonder how things went with the distros I ended up choosing after a few days of use and if I was able to resolve the few issues that I had found with them. So, as a follow up and for the benefit of those interested in trying out those distros I decided make this post.

I am a long time Linux user (almost 10 years), but I do not consider myself an expert by any means. I guess I would consider myself a power user. I started with a floppy disk install of Slackware. From there I moved to RedHat, Mandrake, Vector, and SUSE.