Another distro in the seven distros included in Linux Format Magazine issue #110 is Gentoo 2008.0.  This is an interesting release given the recent news that, at least for the time being, Gentoo is not going to be releasing these discs anymore.  Apparently for both of the last two years there has been a lot of trouble with compiling the LiveCDs.

On the one hand, yearly (or biannual like Ubuntu) releases are redundant for Gentoo users.  You just install Gentoo and from then on you just emerge newer versions of packages and always stay up to date.  I have to say this is one of the features that makes Gentoo very attractive to me considering all the problems I’ve had with Fedora in-place upgrades.  But if they are no longer making these annual LiveCDs, what will the Linux magazines feature on their distro discs?  After all, there are people who have bandwidth issues and can’t download Linux distros to instasll.  They are dependent upon magazines to carry the latest releases.  And you know the magazine isn’t going to make a LiveCD for Gentoo.  I still think that a yearly snapshot makes sense.  Also, there has to be a starting point from which the user has a rolling updating system.

For some reason, I didn’t get Linux Format Magazine issue #110 when I was supposed to. I ordered another copy and it arrived recently, so it’s time for another slate of Linux reviews. Unfortunately, something appears to be wrong with the way they mastered the magazine DVD, because I was unable to boot into any of the Slax options. So I went online and got the latest ISO off of http://www.slax.org.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see an article on Linux Today about Moonlight and what a horrible person Miguel de Icaza is. So I thought I’d go ahead and do some exploration of what’s going on with Moonlight and Silverlight. First of all, what’s Silverlight? Check out the Silverlight article on Wikipedia. Basically, Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. MS is pretty peeved they haven’t been able to get people off of PDF and onto their own format. They waited way too long while the rest of us realized that PDF is great if you want to make sure that the document you create is displayed the same way on everyone’s computer regardless of the fonts they have or which version of Office they have installed. (Or if they even have office installed)

It’s time once again for a Linux distro review.  This month, Antix 7.5 was included on the LXF DVD.  It’s another light distro, so I will use the same metrics I used in the Lightweight Linux Throwdown.  Antix is based upon Mepis which is, in turn, based upon Debian.  I think at one point it was based on Ubuntu, but I think they’ve gone back to being based on Debian.  So, let’s get down to it.  Here’s a screenshot of my desktop upon boot.

So I waited until about halfway through Fedora 9’s initial life-cycle to install it.  I listed the reasons for that here.  Once KDE 4.1 was finally out and most of the complaints had stopped, I took the plunge.  I am actually very happy with Fedora 9.  I think most of the reviews you may have read criticizing Fedora 9 focused on the initial version.  That was, according to the mailing list, very buggy.  But, for those who run Fedora on their day-to-day systems, simply waiting a few months is enough to get most of the bugs ironed out.  First I’ll focus on what I have thought of Gnome since I’ve been using it since the install.  Due to Fedora’s servers getting cracked, I just got KDE 4.1, so I’ll just be giving my preliminary impressions there.  I’ve been wondering if KDE 4 would bring me back into the KDE came from the Gnome side.  We’ll see.  I intend to boot into KDE 4 for the next week or so to see how I like it.

Now if we could only get this on TV…

I’ve never used Suse or openSuse.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a “loyal” Fedora user since Fedora Core 1 and I have Ubuntu on my laptop since it had awesome laptop support.  I even got some Suse CDs as a prize for the Letter of the Month from Linux Format magazine.  However, I never even tried it at that time as I was mad at Novell for the Microsoft pact.  I think it lends a lot of credibility to Microsoft’s BS argument that Linux violates its patents.

Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy.  Everyone is talking about it.  It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release.  First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea.  Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with.  Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid).  Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?

Many people know the mantra - if you are a gamer or office worker, you use the OS from Redmond.  If you are a creative person such as a musician, video editor, etc you use a Mac.  Geeks use Linux.  But more and more people are moving away from Windows and seeking either Macs or Linux.  If you switch to Mac you have to spend a ton of money and if you switch to Linux, it’s free and you can use the hardware you already have.  But what if you’re a creative person?  Can you only go to a Mac?  Lots of people want to allow the creative people to come to Linux so there are more and more Linux distros for the creative types.  This month, in Linux Format Magazine, 64 Studio was bundled on the disc.  It doesn’t run as a liveCD or liveDVD so I’m running it in VirtualBox.  As you can see here, it is a Debian-based distro:

First of all, I guess we got all jealous of Ubuntu because we have a startup sound now. There goes signing in with the speakers on late at night or early in the morning. Second, I apparently no longer have any functionality in Gnome. There are no panels, I can’t right-click the background. I can rotate a cube, but that’s about it. Oh, and I can move my mouse around. Time to figure out what went wrong.