With the positive reception my Linux Mint 3.0 review received, I figured I would make reviewing various distributions a regular occurrence here at Shift+Backspace. Once again, this review will focus on my opinion of Fedora 7 straight “out-of-the-box” and what it can do with minimal intervention. Lets get to it!

Fedora 7 was released on May 31, 2007 by Red Hat and the Fedora community. The overview on the DistroWatch website gives a great explanation of the deep history behind Fedora.

“The Fedora Project is an openly-developed project designed by Red Hat, open for general participation, led by a meritocracy, following a set of project objectives. The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software. Development will be done in a public forum. The project will produce time-based releases of Fedora about 2-3 times a year, with a public release schedule. The Red Hat engineering team will continue to participate in building Fedora and will invite and encourage more outside participation than in past releases. By using this more open process, we hope to provide an operating system more in line with the ideals of free software and more appealing to the open source community.”

According to the DistroWatch rankings, Fedora is currently the 4th most popular distribution based on the last 6 months of data, and is the 3rd most popular distribution based on the last 30 days of data. I think it’s great to see such a classic distribution (going back to Red Hat) at the top of the rankings.

Follow the link for the rest of the review! (Read more…)

Back to some Linux and open-source news! A couple of days ago, the first alpha (Tribe 1) of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 (successor to Feisty Fawn 7.04) was released. Please be aware that this is by no means even close to what the final product will be as there are 3 more alphas to be launched before the first beta release. In spirit of my Linux passion, I figured I would download the Gutsy and see how it performed on my laptop. I realize that in my review of Linux Mint 3.0 I said that I would be hesitant to format…well…I did!

With Gutsy still being in the early alpha stage I figured a review would not be fair anyway whatsoever, thus this is more of a brief discussion of Tribe 1. First, if you decide to download the Tribe 1 image, do not install and expect to have a stable machine.

As far as the installation is concerned, the LiveCD booted as usual and installation performed just as in Feisty, however, it did take about 40 minutes versus the usual 20. Upon boot I was promoted to install some updates, most notably a new window manager, Compiz (Beryl was a branch of Compiz, but the two are joining back together). I was unable to install the restricted drivers for my Nvidia 4200 Go video card, which I never had a problem with before, but it was not a big deal since Gutsy was going to be on my machine for only a few hours. I did not experience any ill-effects while using Gutsy, but I was only browsing the web using Firefox. One more note on Tribe 1, Pidgin has replaced GAIM as the instant messenger (as expected) and the OpenOffice Draw application was added.

Well, there you have it, nothing exciting thus far, but really, do not expect much before the beta release in September. I will probably give the remaining 3 alphas a try when they are released and post about what appears to have changed (please note that I am not looking “under-the-hood” with these releases). The official release of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 is scheduled for October, 2007.

For the official release notes on Tribe 1, please checkout this website.

Cole

Last night I was sitting around watching some baseball when I decided to bring out my aging and dying laptop in hopes of writing a new article for Shift+Backspace. I booted the old Inspiron 8500 to find out that I still had an old beta version of Linux Mint 3. This spawned a great idea! I immediately downloaded the image file of the full-release version of Linux Mint 3.0 Cassandra. I now had my topic for the evening…a review of a complete operating system!

What is Linux Mint? For a nice succinct summary lets go to DistroWatch, the all-knowing Linux information site:

“Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components. It is compatible with Ubuntu software repositories.”

According to the DistroWatch ranking system, Mint has quickly jumped from a ranking of 44th in 2006 to 9th over the last 6 months to 5th and then 4th over the last 30 and 7 days, respectively.

Follow the link for the rest of the review! (Read more…)

For those of you who use Ubuntu and have not heard of Automatix, stop reading and go get it! If you do not use Ubuntu, Automatix does support Debian Etch, Mepis, and Pioneer. Sorry, but other Linux distributions are out of luck, hopefully the team develops installers for other distros such as PCLinuxOS and Mandriva in the future. For those who use Windows or a Mac, well…continue reading to support Shift+Backspace!

Straight from their website, Automatix is:

“a graphical interface for automating the installation of the most commonly requested applications in Debian based Linux operating systems.”

Automatix contains many dozens of applications that help make the initial Ubuntu set up so much easier. While it does not contain some of the applications I commonly use (ie. Nvu and Amarok), it does contain 24 applications that I do install immediately. The most useful of which are:

• many multimedia codecs

• Java JRE with Firefox plugin

• Flash player for Firefox

• Extra fonts

Of course I install many other items from Automatix, but these specific ones make the transition much easier. For the Ubuntu beginner, the Flash player and Java JRE are extremely necessary and particularly difficult to install without Automatix. I also believe that the extra fonts package is a fairly recent and very welcomed addition as installing fonts one-by-one was getting to be a little tedious. For those who want to see what the program looks like, here are two screenshots:

Warning for Americans

The easy-to-use interface

Automatix is the first application I install when setting up Ubuntu and if you use Ubuntu, it may very well be the first for you as well. Currently, Automatix also offers some commercial applications such as CrossOver Office and Data Architect; this list should continue to grow after this announcement on May 8th:

“Automatix is collaborating with Technalign Inc. to bring a lot of new and exciting commercial software to Automatix users. An updated list can be found here.“

I look forward to seeing further development on this project and hopefully we will all see some releases for other non-Debian-based distributions. Unfortunately, Automatix may get some competition when CNR.com goes live. Once again, you can read more or get Automatix, here.

Cole

PS. Did I mention Michael Dell uses it? Because he does.

Before my full-time migration to Linux, I always used iTunes for playing my music and managing my iPod. I had always thought iTunes was as good as it could get as far as playing and managing MP3 files, especially when I after testing Linux software such as Banshee and Rythmbox. I have nothing bad to say about these 2 pieces of software, but they just did not seem to have the overall polish iTunes presented. All of this led me to trying the feature of this article, Amarok.

When I began to use Amarok (1.4.5) I immediately noticed a sense of polish and completion. Lets face it, when it comes to media players the interface is what can make or break a program as any player can playback a file by using the necessary codecs.

Personally, I find the interface extremely informative and easy to use. As you can see with the screenshot below there is a general menu at the top, another menu along the left-hand side, a control menu with visualizations at the bottom, and a list of the songs that makes up the bulk of the interface. You may have also noticed the list of artists that makes up about the left 1/4 of the screen. Depending on what left-sided menu item is chosen this area changes and is the focus of some great features that Amarok offers.

Follow this link for details on some of the features! (Read more…)