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Oracle’s Virtualbox vs Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager
I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them. It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source. So…
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Preupgrade from Fedora 15 (Lovelock) to Fedora 16 (Verne)
As usual, every time I upgrade Fedora I write a blog post to preserve this knowledge for others who might run across the same problem or in case it happens to me again next year. This time around the situation was a little less smooth than previous upgrades. After the preupgrade was done, when I…
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Ubuntu to the Rescue: A Tale of Broadcom Wifi Drivers, Prerelease Software, and a new Acer Aspire One Netbook
note: I wrote this on 17 April, a full week before it is published on the blog Nearly six years ago I bought my first laptop. I’d never seen the point of laptops over desktops – the value per dollar just isn’t there. But I was going to be traveling for work now and again…
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Replacing the File/Print Server
A few years ago I heard about the Fit-PC. It was a computer that was the size of a stack of two or three CD jewel cases running Ubuntu. This was pretty cool, but, most importantly, it only used 15 watts of electricity when under highest load. At first I entertained using it to replace…
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Amarok and my Stats Fail
So, as I mentioned before, I wanted to try and make sure to get mostly unheard music on my random playlist so I could go through all my music. So I put in a bias to make sure that there was an 80% that the next song picked was unplayed. I started getting even more…
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Testing Email Clients
Ever since late Fedora 12 or, for sure, Fedora 13, Evolution has been annoying me. I don’t know if it’s linked or coincidental, but it appears to have started getting buggy after I noticed it was using couchdb, a database that a lot of database people in the Linux world are getting all excited about.…
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Review: openSuse 11.2
I took a look at openSuse 11.1 nearly a year ago and so it’s time to see what’s changed with openSuse 11.2. For those new to my blog, when I review a new version of a distro I’ve reviewed before, I usually just do a comparison to the previous review. Also important to know is…
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yum upgrade to Fedora 12 (and mini-review)
So I was unable to preupgrade to Fedora 12, even after the latest update. So I did a yum upgrade since I’ve known that to work in the past. As always, I followed the instructions here. It was very fast this time around compared to past upgrades. It only took 2 hours 40 minutes. I…
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Review: openSolaris 2008.11
At work they were asking us to get familiar with openSolaris for a potential future project. I’d played with it a few years ago, so I decided to check out the latest version I had. On of my LXF discs had openSolaris 2008.11 and I figured that while I was checking it out I’d review…
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Review: Slackware 13.0
Even though I gave up on reviewing Linux distros a while back, I keep getting mountains of hits on here for people who who want Linux reviews. Since my Slackware 12.2 review was the second-most commented post on this blog, I decided it was a good distro to revisit. So, when Slackware 13 came a…
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Review: PCLinuxOS 2009
note: I started writing this months ago when I did the installation and now I am finishing up by looking at the installed distro. PCLinuxOS started as an extra set of packages for Mandriva. Interesting because Mandriva originally started as a KDE version of Red Hat. Eventually, it became its own distro. It became very,…
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Review: Debian 5: Lenny
Debian…the father and grandfather of many a Linux distro. I think indirectly Debian is probably running on more computers than any other Linux distro. It’s the basis of Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, and many others. And many people use Debian where they need a nice, stable distro. The fact that Debian’s stable releases come out every…
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Review: openSuse 11.1
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…
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Review: Fedora 10
This month’s Linux Format Magazine includes Fedora 10. I upgraded 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. …