The new P5E3 Deluxe by Asus is a milestone as it won’t only boast the old Intel Inside thing but Linux inside as well.
The board is based on Intel’s X38 chipset, it supports Intel Quad processors and has a Asus WiFi-AP wireless 802.11n adaptor (Ralink chipset) embedded as well as other nice perks, but that’s not really the half of it.
Upon boot the motherboard gives you the choice to run your installed OS, whatever that may be, OR to use its Express Gate in order to run Splashtop –a Linux distro.
Splashtop is embedded into the motherboard’s hardware, it boots in 5 seconds (or so ASUS claims) and gives you a Linux system ready to use. It includes the Splashtop web browser (which is Firefox rebranded), a Skype client and, oh yes, out-of-the-box support for the embedded wireless adapter –which is one hell of a step in Linux and WiFi usability.
Slashtop’s current limitations are plenty, anyway. The most notorious one, in my opinion, is that it can’t be used to read or write files from storage devices which render the thing kind of useless for backup and/or recovery tasks –the very same tasks one would think it should be mainly aimed to do. Hopefully, that will get fixed in the future.
Let’s see who will be picking this one to build retail systems.
Puppy Linux 3.01 just got released.
This new version is all about fixing bugs from Puppy Linux 3.00, which was released not two weeks ago. The bugs addressed by the new released are detaied in the release announcement and also in the developer’s news blog –links to the .iso images can also be found there.
Should you download it? Well, sure, if you are among the Puppy Linux 3.0 users pestered by some of those bugs or if you are thinking about trying Puppy Linux to see what it’s all about. On the other hand, it’s only about 100MB in size so you might as well just get it to be on the safe side.
Not two weeks have gone by since Absolute 12.0.6 got released yet there’s a new Aboslute 12.0.7 ready to go.
You can read a bit about this Slackware-based distro’s general features in my post from two weeks ago. The new stuff is mainly about fixing bugs and improving usability (such as enabling users other than root to write on external mounted filesystems, GUI dependencies, a new PDF viewer and a Firefox upgrade).You can also have a look at Paul Sherman’s announcement in the Absolute Linux Forum.
We are barely a week from the Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon’s release date.
A beta version came out about a week ago, and there’s now an stable release candidate. New features include:
- Compiz Fusion.
- Free flash support: through Gnash, the Gnome flash player plugin. This one is a bit of a preview.
- Automatic printer installation.
- Automatic Firefox plugin installation.
KDE users will find a bunch of new stuff in Kubuntu as well, including a few nice glimpses into KDE 4.0. More about Kubuntu 7.10 here.
Linspire’s new 6.0 version is available as of today.
Linspire is the Linux distro formerly known as Lindows with a very strong emphasys on making things easy on the user by providing a very Windows-like interface as well as restricted and proprietary software –so that formats such as realplayer, quicktime, mp3, flash, windows media work out of the box. It is now based on Debian and Ubuntu.
Also available are OpenOffice 2.2, lots of desktop applications, Gizmo for VoIP free internet calling, and updated wireless networking support.
As usual, it’s a $50 USD download. Here’s the list of Linspire’s 6.0 new features.
