A few days ago it was announced that the Ubuntu release after Jaunty Jackalope will be known as Karmic Koala.  The funny thing is that a few months ago my friends and I were racking our brains for a K adjective and all we could come up with was Keen.  I was sure it would be Keen Koala or Keen Kangaroo.  The most interesting thing about Karmic Koala is that they will supposedly be considering getting away from brown.  Then again, they’ve been going on and on about a new art style for a few releases now.  We’ll see what they actually do.  I’m mostly excited for the new notification style in Jaunty and to see if/how this will be implemented in Crunch Bang Linux.

(ed note:  I actually ended up reviewing Crunch Bang Linux 8.10.02 due to a problem with my 8.10 disc)

I discovered Crunch Bang Linux (#!) through Linux Outlaws.  Fab kept talking about how awesome it was.  Then more and more podcasts and people on the tubes started talking about it.  So I wrote to Linux Format Magazine about having it on their cover disc.  They said there was a lot of clamor for it to be on a cover disc, but they couldn’t because it comes with multimedia codecs potentially covered by patents.  So why am I breaking my self-imposed rule to only review distros on LXF cover discs?  Because one of the most attractive features to me for #! is that it is supposed to load up a lot faster and run faster than Ubuntu.  Right now I have Ubuntu 8.10 installed on my laptop.  I pretty much only use my laptop for travel (although I do use it in the apartment ever once in a while).  So if it boots up and runs faster than Ubuntu, it will leave me with more battery power for when I travel.  I already ran the #! liveCD, so I know the wifi card will work.  So first off, I boot up Ubuntu to time it and see how much of a savings I’ll be getting.  From power on to GDM login screen is 1 minute 1 second.  And it’s 40 seconds from login to a useful desktop.  (Gnome)  So then I install Crunch Bang Linux.

I already tried installing Gento o.  Twice.  The other Linux distro for the hardcore, for whom the Ubuntus and the Fedoras is too easy, is Slackware.  Slackware is, of course, the oldest surviving Linux distro.  I’ve already reviewed some distros based off of Slackware such as Zenwalk and Slax.  Along the way I’ve come to learn about some of the appeal of Slackware and why people would base distributions off of it.  However, it does have a reputation as a very hard distro to install.  Fab, of Linux Outlaws, refers to it as the distro for those who “love the pain”.  But Slackware has always held a special place in my mind for the quirky reason that I almost selected it as my first distro ( as I recount here).  I had no idea that the Slack in Slackware was a reference to the Church of the Sub-Genius.  (that’s why the Slackware Penguin smokes a pipe)

There’ve been a lot of people recently on the MythTv mailing list talking about Boxee as a convenient way to was content on Hulu.  However, the Boxee developers have blogged that Hulu has nixed that idea.  ( And here’s Hulu’s side of the story)  I read a bunch of comments as well as both of those blog posts (I also read this great blog post) and the only conclusion I can come up with is that the TV execs that license their content to Hulu are braindead.  Here are the best reasons I read in the comments (summarized for brevity) :

After reading through LXF, I tried loading openSuse 11.1 with the failsafe settings and it worked in VirtualBox.  So I’ll now be reviewing openSuse 11.1.  Here’s the screen as it booted up.

and after it loads up, it gives a nice explanatory screen.

So I last looked at openSuse 11.0 in Aug 2008.  I’m not sure exactly how much has changed from 11.o to 11.1.  I re-read my old review to get some perspective on what I said last time.  Once I’ve gone through a distro at least once, I don’t see a point in repeating myself.  Rather I look at how the distro has evolved since last time.  Follow that link a few sentences back to see what I originally said about openSuse.  As with Linux Mint 6, this time I’ll be evaluating the distro installation process - since I didn’t get to do that before as well as the program installation process.  openSuse was listed in my Fedora 10 review as the distro with which to see how awesome KDE 4.2 is - so I’ll be testing that as well.

The latest LXF magazine arrived with Linux Mint 6, Slackware 12.2, and openSuse 11.1.  I was originally going to review openSuse, but I have been unable to successfully boot either into VirtualBox or just by booting my computer and running it as a LiveDVD.  ( ed. note:  I just checked the magazine and they suggested booting in failsafe mode, so I’ll try that out in a couple of days)  So, we’ll be starting with Linux Mint 6.  I reviewed Linux Mint 5 Light back in July 2008.  Since I wasn’t using VirtualBox at the time, I only tested it as a LiveDVD and that may have been the source of some of my problems testing the software installation.  Plus this time I can review the installation process.

Especially to my beautiful wife!

This month’s Linux Format Magazine includes Fedora 10.  I u pgraded to Fedora 10 a few months ago via a yum upgrade.  I started by looking at Xfce as I’ve been using Xfce non-stop ever since starting " I’m Not Mad" in November.  Xfce is much lighter than Gnome and I’m able to use Blender more effectively.  Fedora 10 comes with Xfce 4.4.3.  Overall, nothing major has changed on the surface although I know they’ve been doing a lot of work under the hood.