For those who are a bit lost with the word “partitions”, they are sectors in which your hard disk is divided.
You can divide your HD to have one OS in one partition and data on another, or add a partition just for back up data, and if you’ll be installing more than one OS in your system each one of them will have to sit in its own partition.
I’m starting my baby steps into web coding, really starting out with the basics of the basics. But, I didn’t want to start with a WYSIWYG editor, those are too simple and will not teach much of coding per se. So, I went searching for a nice editor for my Linux box and found Bluefish Editor.
From their site, “Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code.” You can use its syntax highlighting for Python, HTML, PHP, C, Java, JavaScript, XML, CSS, Perl, and languages.
Microsoft being smart again saw that Vista wasn’t being very accepted, decided to force people to have no other option. After July 1st, computers can no longer be sold with Windows XP (there are exceptions to the rules such as computer with low specs).
If you bought a computer today would you get it with Windows Vista like Bill wants you to? By the way, Microsoft is planning to release a new OS next year.
Our favorite IM client has just gotten a really cool plug-in, Facebook chat for Pidgin. So now we can connect to 16 different IM protocols with Pidgin. Pretty cool, right?!
The plug-in itself comes in a pretty easy installer for Windows and Linux. Tested and works very well.
If you’re afraid of the Linux transition because of your loved Windows-only app, your fears are greatly reduced with Wine.
Wine is a compatibility layer that will allow you to run and install Windows programs. A huge list of softwares has been tested to run with Wine pretty successfully. Specially now, that after 15 years in the making it has achieved its milestone 1.0 release. A large help was provided by the support received from Google to speed this development.
Workrave is a Windows and Linux only program that can help prevent dreaded repetitive strain injuries. Unfortunately techies are quite familiar with RSI.
Once installed, Workrave runs silently in the background monitoring how much time you’re using the computer. In pre-set times of activity, the program gives you alerts on when breaks are needed. You’ll see three types of alarms:
The times established for each alarm can be modified according to your preferences or, better yet, you can leave everything as standard.
I have a 1GB mini SD card inside my cell phone that I barely use the space. So, I thought I’d add a Linux install inside it for those moments I have to use a computer at a cyber café (I’m cautious about security), or just do an emergency data recovery of a computer.
Puppy Linux was my distro of choice for this task. It is very small, the ISO is just 88MB. Also I felt this was the right moment for me with the release of Puppy Linux 4.0 aka Dingo, which seems to be much more user friendly.
For users who have already made the switch to Linux, first congratulations!!
Most likely you’re now familiar with something called GRUB, the bootloader that will manage your access to the different OSs you have installed. GRUB comes in when you have a dual-boot (or more) installation on your machine.
If you’re sticking with a simple dual-boot Linux install most likely you’ll not have to change anything after you’ve made the OS installation. GRUB should work well. But… in case you start messing around too much with removing or adding other Linux distros or even want to completely remove Linux, things start getting a little complicated.
Blender is an open source, cross-platform 3D content creation program. This kind of stuff is way too off my league, but if you’re in to creating images and want to do some 3D work, Blender will surely be for you.
I’ve heard a great many things about this software. First and undoubtedly that it is feature rich and extremely resourceful. I’ve seen a lots and lots of work done on Blender and they look amazing. But, there is the other side of the world who says that Blender is useless if you want to be a real pro, mainly because the UI and standards it uses will not be the same as those found in other proprietary programs.
This is the third of a sequence of posts where we’ll take a look at a few of the main Linux distros to find out which are the most welcoming to Linux newbies. In our first article of this series we took a look at Fedora 9 Beta, the second article we spoke about openSUSE, and the third in the series was about Mandriva.
We’ll do this test with the live (Gnome) CD to analyze: parts of the hardware that are recognized, software package installed, general usability (setup adjustments, software installation). Computer tested specs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600, 2GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 6100.