PCLinuxOnline

What version of Linux has been at the top of the Distrowatch rankings for months now that I've never tried until today? PCLinuxOS. Everybody I know who has runs PCLinuxOS has good things to say about it. Scott Ruecker of LXer and the Los Angeles Daily News' own City Hall reporter Rick Orlov are among those who have used and liked it.

Review

It's rare these days for me to start up a Linux distribution and be surprised. Most major distributions all look fairly similar, use either KDE or Gnome (or XFce with a theme that resembles one of those), and offer essentially the same set of applications. Linpus, a Chinese distribution that I'd never heard of until a random post about it on a tech blog, is definitely different.

Review

Last month the Parsix Linux distribution made its 1.0 release after almost a year of development. Parsix is a GNOME-based distro based on the testing branch of Debian GNU/Linux with elements from Kanotix. It makes an attractive alternative to Ubuntu.

Review

Damn Small Linux (DSL) is a minuscule distro that is based on Knoppix. It has a business card size of around 50MB (48.5 MB to be exact). The main aim of DSL is still pretty much the same when it first started, and that is to provide those with ancient computer hardware a highly functional and capable desktop loaded with just the right amount of essential software applications.

Review

After some delay and threatening over the last couple of weeks I've finally gotten around to typing up my review of Foresight Linux, if you don't believe me you should do because you're reading it right now hehe Foresight is a distro I've been interested in for quite some time, I knew it had a lot of cutting edge features but I was a little worried about the stability issues that might cause. Would my concerns prove to be unfounded? Read on to find out...

Review

I have posted a howto about installing DirectX 9.0c into Wine, the diagnostics program (dxdiag.exe) passes each of the test that is included in the standard DirectX install.. after the install only five dlls need to be set as builtin Wine dlls and the rest can be run as native Windows dlls. While this is not 100% DirectX on Linux, it is 95+% and that's about as close as your going to get... as the five dlls that have to be set to builtin need direct access to hardware.


Full Story

I had the opportunity to speak Monday afternoon with the CEO of Mandriva, François Bancilhon. Recently, a deal with the Nigerian government to use and install Mandriva Linux on 17,000 Intel Classmate PCs was derailed when the government decided to overwrite the installed operating system with Windows XP. Mr. Bancilhon wrote about this issue in a highly publicized “Open Letter to Steve Ballmer.” I wanted to follow up with him and get his take both on this deal and on larger issues related to the adoption of open source software in emerging markets.


Full Interview

Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon takes on Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in an open letter and is getting a good bit of attention. At issue is Mandriva’s skirmish with Microsoft over a deal with the Nigerian government, which was looking to procure some Classmate PCs from Intel loaded with Mandriva’s Linux distro.


Read the Scoop

Today the new Wine help and discussion forum at wine-forum.org went live, the forums are meant to be a meeting place for anyone interested in Wine usage or development. In the past there there has never been a single forum dedicated just to Wine. In the past the Wine project has used mailing lists, newsgroups and other methods for user discussion leaving many postings about Wine in other forums where Wine was always relegated as a sub-forum.

We at Wine-Review hope the forum brings Wine users together into a single meeting place where they can discuss anything relevant to the daily happenings surrounding Wine. We have set up five main categories, Applications, Games, 3rd Party Wine Utilities, Commercial Wine offerings, as well as a category (Architecture) for FreeBSD, Mac, and Solaris users.

We would like to cordially invite anyone interested in Wine to register and join the conversation today.


wine-forum.org

We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. Maybe you heard about it, Steve. They were looking for an affordable hardware+software solution for their schools. The initial batch was 17,000 machines. We had a good answer to their need: the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. We presented the solution to the local government, they liked the machine, they liked our system, they liked what we offered them, the fact that it was open, that we could customize it for their country and so on.


Read It