Vlogcanic

The Sidux team decided to give us all a treat last december by releasing a fifth Sidux edition just after christmas. The Debian-Sid-Based distro came up with a LiveDVD (don’t jump, it’s only 1.4 GB) wich supports both i386 and x64 architectures in the same media. Extended hardware support for WiFi devices and ATI graphics cards and stability improvements, Xorg 7.3, and new initial localisations for languages other than German and English.

Among the newly supported WiFi chipsets are:

• Intel 3945
• Broadcom b 43
• Ralink rt2×00
• Realtek RTL8187

More information available in the release notes or, if you just can’t wait to get it, you can proceed to the mirror list.

Mandriva has announced the 2008.1 Release Candidate 1 release.

Among other things includes WPA support, KDE 3.5.9 or 4.0.1 for the KDE fans, some new default applications, the latest OpenOffice 2.4 and, at last, NTFS writing support among other features.

This release candidate is the fifth one on the way to the final Mandriva 2008 Spring and is available in the Free edition as an installation DVD for each 32 bit and 64 bit arquitectures or in the Mandriva One edition, as either a LiveCD with GNOME or KDE, 32 bit only. Here’s the mirror list.

While this is not a final release but a testing one, it may be just too early to jump into the Mandriva 2008 Spring wagon. The last full release (Mandriva 2008.0) has scored so many good reviews that it could be interesting what the coming Spring is up to.

OpenGEU the distro that brings together Ubuntu’s usability with Enlightenment’s beauty and GNOME’s robustness released Luna Nova, the distro’s version 7.10, based on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, last december.

It’s available as an installable LiveCD you can get here. But if you already have a Gusty Gibbon running in your machine, you can bring the coolnes of OpenGEU’s E17 desktop by adding a repository to your Synaptic and installing a few .deb packages. You can see the OpenGEU’s wiki pages for further instructions.

If you used to be among the linux guys that wondered why the hell Enlightenment never turned into a real desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE and had to resign yourself to use it because of its lack of development, OpenGEU is the just the thing for you. You get the whole Ubuntu thing along with an extremely efficient E17 desktop.

Among the customizations peformed by the distro’s developers are the use of Thunar (XFCE’s file manager) instead of Nautilus (which is GNOME’s) and the XFCE panel. Both things will make your system go faster.

In the words of the Sirius Cybernetics Company: Share and enjoy!

As you probably already know, Ubuntu’s default desktop environment is GNOME. I like GNOME. It’s simple, intuitive, usable, things just work –when they work… this is Linux, anyway– and still retains quite a bit of versatility. And yet there’s stuff I like about KDE: its visually more impressive and some KDE applications (Amarok being probably the most obvious example) are simply better than their GNOME cousins.

Ubuntu’s Synaptic Package Manager makes it simple enough to install any KDE application you would want to use, but for those who like to walk an extra mile to have more choices (being able to run a KDE session in Ubuntu as well as GNOME in this case), here’s how to do it. How to make your GNOME-abled Ubuntu capable of running KDE sessions as well.

You’ll need to be connected to the internet or have a Kubuntu CD close at hand — unless you already have the CD I suggest you do it over the net… the download is about 193 MB which is much less than the CD’s 700MB download. You’ll also need 584MB of disk space.

So, open a terminal and type

sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

type your password and then sit back and relax. You’ll be downloading almost 209 packages. Those are not exactly dependencies because kubuntu-desktop is not a package but a meta-package –something that calls for a bunch of other packages to be installed.

After the stuff is downloaded, apt-get is going to install and configure it automatically and at some point is going to ask you to choose a default desktop manager (gdm or kdm), go ahead and choose what you want. The thing will continue with the configuration task and once it’s done you can reboot. Just make sure you don’t interrupt the whole thing while it’s going on.

After reboot you’ll be able to choose between KDE or GNOME by clicking on “Options” at login and then clicking on KDE or GNOME.

Whatever desktop environment you want to use will give you all the default Ubuntu apps for both desktops and, also, future KDE application downloads will be much quicker as your dependencies will be much closer to being satisfied –or completely satisfied already.

The downside to all of this is the extra disk space you’ll need and longer, bigger updates, as you’ll have more packages installed.

Enjoy!

Hardy Heron’s fifth alpha release is scheduled for release today, but if you are running something like alpha 4 chances are you already noticed a kernel upgrade and of many packages in your system as well, including the new art for the desktop wallpaper which is really beautiful. It’s barely two months now before Hardy Heron’s final release is presented to the world so Mark Shuttleworth has notified the Ubuntu developing community that the time to think about the next step in Ubuntu’s history is now.

In a mail to the Ubuntu developers the distro’s founder unveiled the code name for version 8.10: Intrepid Ibex.

One of the goals for the Ibex will be to set it up to take advantage from the pervasive internet signals found almost everywhere these days so your roaming goat can get internet access using a variety of wireless technologies wherever you may find yourself.

This is interesting, specially taking into account the tumultuous relationship that Linux and WiFi have had over the years (let alone Bluetooth). So the Ubuntu enthusiasts all over the world have something to look forward to even if Hardy Heron hasn’t been properly released yet.

The development summit is planned for next May in Prague. Let’s see what transpires in the meantime.