Linux notes from DarkDuck

Dedoimedo: I don't believe in being idle or wasting time

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Thu, 31 May 2012 03:28:00 +0000

Linux part of Blogosphere is big. There are different people, different blogs. Some of them die, like it was with K.Mandla’s, some continue to grow. Today’s guest in my interview room is one of the most mysterious bloggers in the Linux world. Nobody saw his face. Nobody read his replies to the comments below the articles, simply because there are no comments. But still, he owns one of the most respectable and popular resources. Let’s talk with Dedoimedo about Linux, books and life in general.

DarkDuck: Hello Dedoimedo. You’re one of the popular bloggers in the Linux world. How would you introduce yourself in few words?

Dedoimedo: I would say I'm a lovable misanthrope who likes to help people, go figure. It's not a paradox. I also suffer from a classic case of unwarranted self-importance.

DD: Dedoimedo is a nickname. It sounds quite unusual. What is the story behind it?

Dedoimedo: Dedoimedo sounds unusual indeed. It means either "grandpa and bear" or "finger and fear", depending of whether you like Croatian or Portuguese. The nickname was actually conceived by my brother in about 30 seconds of intense thinking when we sat down to register my new domain in 2006.

DD: Your blog is about different aspects of computing: Linux and Windows, Security and games, 3D animation and general editorial articles. Which of those themes is your favourite?

Dedoimedo: I guess the passion comes in waves. I have these periods [sic] when I'm in a mood to be philosophical, so I write life articles. Other times, I'm into physics or 3D art. Software is more or less my bread and butter, so it's the easiest to go with.

DD: How old is Dedoimedo blog?

Dedoimedo: Dedoimedo will be six years old come June this year.

DD: It may be a little bit early to congratulate, but Happy Birthday! 6 years is a lot in the world of Linux and in the world of blogging. How long ago did you get an impression that your opinion counts in the community?

Dedoimedo: Toward the end of 2008 or so; that's when the traffic soared up and feedbacks started trickling in, slowly but surely.

DD: Do you have much feedback from your readers? Why are you not allowing comments on your blog?

Dedoimedo: I get some feedback, approximately 4-5 mails a day, sometimes less, sometimes more. Most of the emails are to thank me for a nicely written tutorial. Now and then, please ask me for help or point out a typo in this or that article. When I write a particularly scathing review or a deliberately controversial piece, there usually comes a flood of total agreements or outright accusations.
Now, as to comments, I do not have the time or patience for the administrative overhead the comments would entail, nor do I fancy giving a shouting stage to just about anyone who feels like warming up their keyboard.

DD: You have tried so many distributions so far. What are your favourites at this moment of time?

Dedoimedo: I would say the favor revolves around Ubuntu, Mint and CentOS.

DD: What is about DE and applications? Which ones do you prefer?

Dedoimedo: Gnome 2, but that will unfortunately die one day. The nearest equivalent is Cinnamon, it seems. KDE is ok, but it's a bit schizophrenic. As to the apps, well, my best of compilations reflect what I use.

DD: You are not only a blogger. What are your other projects and activities?

Dedoimedo: Okay, deep breath. Let me now make it appear as if I'm a multi-talented geek who absolutely has life away from keyboard. I cut down trees, I eat my lunch, I go to the lavatory. On Wednesdays I go shopping. Wait, I got confused. So I work full time in the IT industry, I write books, I draw and paint, do sports, volunteer in the community, the usual plethora.

DD: You have published a book recently. What is it about? Who is the target auditorium for it?

Dedoimedo: If you're referring to The Betrayed, it's a classic epic fantasy novel. Now, some people may assume it's about magic and green monsters and culturally diverse quests. But it's just a brutal love story in a fictional setting, really, softie that I am. The audience, hm, well I'd say mature fantasy fans.

DD: How can one obtain a copy of the book? Where is it available?

Dedoimedo: The book is available on Amazon, both in paperback and electronic edition, CreateSpace and many other online and offline retailers.

DD: Can you name some of those “off-line” shops?

Dedoimedo: The book should be available for order in pretty much any store. I know for a fact that Barnes & Noble have it in stock. I've also checked in two local shops where I live, and it's available there, too, so I guess anywhere is about as accurate as it gets. Whether they want the book to weigh down their shelves, that's another matter.

DD: Was the process of writing and publishing the book a worthwhile experience? Have you enjoyed it?

Dedoimedo: Writing is probably the best personal activity one can indulge in. It's not the matter of enjoyment, it's the matter of internal need, so to speak. The publication process was a long and complex experience, but a useful lesson in how things work in the big world. Namely, you get the ping-pong of revisions and re-revisions, subtle changes in wording and styling and cover art and press release notes and other details. But at the end of the day, I think it's a nice achievement to have a fruit of your imagination released into the world, properly packaged, glossy pages and all that.

DD: Apart from The Betrayed, do you have any other publications?

Dedoimedo: Well, does my Crash Book count? If so, then yes. But nothing as fancy as The Betrayed, yet.

DD: Are there any other books in your plans?

Dedoimedo: Technical, I am planning a few. Fantasy, I've almost finished the second book in the series and will soon begin writing the third. And there's a childhood action adventure I've written 20 years ago that I want to publish, too. I haven't read it since, and I think it will be an absolute thrill to see how I thought I could write back then. That's for now.

DD: Do you read the blog Linux notes from DarkDuck? What would you like to change or improve there?

Dedoimedo: Yes I do. I'd like more images! More! My biggest gripe with many blogs is the lack of visual information. Text is all good, but images are the key to a compelling and vivid story. That, plus high-quality content.

DD: I assume that was a compliment to me, because I only need one ingredient (images) out of two: high-quality content and images.

Dedoimedo: (In Borat's voice) Ah yes.

DD: What other blogs and authors do you follow, if any?

Dedoimedo: The greatest sites list on my site pretty much sums my favorites. Still, non-technical, I love Maddox, David Thorne, Encyclopedia Dramatica, xkcd, and many others. Technical, I am a fond visitor of DistroWatch, tuxmachines, Gizmo's Freeware, OSNews, and HowtoForge, to name a few.

DD: I suppose, after everyday work, blogging and writing books you don’t have much spare time. But if you have one, what are your favourite off-line activities?

Dedoimedo: I actually have a lot of spare time. I don't believe in being idle or wasting time. So, my offline activities would be hiking, yoga, driving. Oh, and gaming. But that's not really offline, is it?

DD: Thanks for your time, Igor. I wish you all the best in all of your projects!

Dedoimedo: Thank you! It was fun. See you around.

Xubuntu 12.04: upgrade, how it should be

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Sun, 27 May 2012 23:30:00 +0000

I once had versions 10.04 LTS of Ubuntu and Kubuntu installed on my laptop.

My first ever experience with Xubuntu started much later. It was Xubuntu 11.10 which found its way to my hard disk.

When the version 10.10 was released, I upgraded my (K-)Ubuntu 10.04 systems almost immediately. It was a painful exercise.

That's why I hesitated for some time, until I finally decided to upgrade my Xubuntu 11.10 to the version 12.04.

But I could not postpone it forever, could I? I had to take this step sooner or later. And the decision was made: do it now!

It was not a big problem to find the way to upgrade. Xubuntu's Update Manager had shown me an upgrade button for a few days already. So, I clicked "UPGRADE" and crossed my fingers.

Upgrade process itself took some time, but it was not a big issue. I think total time to download and install all the packages was less than one hour. Surprisingly, Xubuntu initially estimated it to be almost two hours, but this reduced as the progress percentage grew.

During the process, Xubuntu asked me some questions about new packages which are incompatible with old ones (to be removed), some obsolete packages and so on.

Finally, all the packages were installed, old packages removed and the system ready to restart.

Reboot. Let's see what changes Xubuntu 12.04 brought me.

Half of the surprise was that the Xubuntu upgrade replaced my previous GRUB setup. The Master Boot Record was previously linked to my Debian partition. After the upgrade, the MBR was linked to the Xubuntu partition. I saw the same behaviour from Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu 11.10 before, so I was not shocked.

If you know, or remember, I run a 4-system setup on my laptop, namely Debian Squeeze, Mageia 1 KDE, Xubuntu and Windows XP at this moment in time. I prefer to keep the GRUB master setup in the Debian partition.

Changing the bootloader without the user's permission is not acceptable, I believe. I can understand that a newly-installed operating system installs GRUB without explicit permission. But this time round, I ran an upgrade. The Xubuntu upgrade should not have replaced the existing MBR.

The cure was easy. Since Debian was listed in the Xubuntu's GRUB, I was able to boot into that operating system and run sudo grub-install /dev/sda and sudo update-grub.

Status quo was restored.

Another surprise was that Compiz was not properly running in Xubuntu 12.04.

After the first boot, I saw my windows were without window titles. It was similar to my experience with Compiz in Xubuntu 12.04 Live.

This issue was also easily cured: compiz --replace ccp put the window titles back. But... even though I had this command in the startup list, it simply did not work at bootup! Xubuntu 12.04 kept starting without Compiz.

A quick internet search gave me the answer. It was in "the missing ingredient".

If you remember, I recently published a guest post from Emery Fletcher about Compiz in Xubuntu 12.04. My own, and, by the way, Emery's experience, too, found that the article did not contain the full recipe of happiness. Another package was required to make Compiz automatically start in Xubuntu 12.04: namely Fusion Icon. Also, the Application Autostart section of Setting Manager should contain an item fusion-icon instead of compiz --replace ccp one. As result of these findings, I changed Emery's post.

Yet another nasty trick was found with the keyboard layout configuration. My Xubuntu 11.10 had a panel applet configured to show the flag for my keyboard layout: default English UK or Russian. The Union Jack flag remained in its place after the upgrade. The issue, though, was that the Russian tricolour was not available on Ctrl-Shift hotkey in Xubuntu 12.04. In fact, the Russian keyboard layout disappeared from the list completely!

Which meant that I had to add the Russian to the layout configuration, and also to re-activate the switch hotkey.

Otherwise, the upgrade was uneventful.

I started some applications: Skype, Qutim, Transmission, VLC, Putty, Vinagre, LibreOffice Writer, Terminal. All of them worked fine. I have only noticed the differences in the VLC and Terminal interfaces, but I don't think they are a big deal. By the way, VLC in my Xubuntu 12.04 was automatically upgraded to a new version 2.0.1 Twoflower.

Xubuntu 12.04: VLC and Flash videos work

Subjectively, all the applications now start and work faster than they did in the version 11.10. That's a real benefit.

I other words, I am again impressed with Xubuntu. Don't fix what is not broken, as I wrote in my review of Xubuntu 12.04 Live. Following this rule, the upgrade of Xubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 is the most peaceful upgrade I've ever had in my relatively short Linux life.

If you need to upgrade your Xubuntu, you can use the built-in tool, like I did. But if you need to make a fresh install, why not order a CD for this using the Buy Linux CDs service? The disk with your favourite Linux distribution will be delivered right into your mailbox.

Video used on the screenshot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rIsHw1ud6w

This post was edited by djohnston.

Users voted for the best XFCE-based distribution... again!

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Thu, 24 May 2012 13:20:00 +0000

I have run a poll some time ago. Its question was to determine the best XFCE-based Linux distribution.

I published the first results of the poll in the middle of December 2011. That time round, there were only 74 people who took part in the poll. Obviously, that draw lots of criticism for unrepresentative statistics.

People kept voting, despite the announcement of the results. Today I publish second round of the poll results, with number of participants more than doubled since last time: 169.

Are there any changes now? Let’s see!

Here is the table:

Xubuntu	70
Debian XFCE	30
Linux Mint XFCE	20
Other	14
Fedora XFCE	13
DreamLinux	5
Salix XFCE	5
Aptosid XFCE	4
Sabayon XFCE	3
Saline OS	3
Puredyne	1
Simply Linux	1

There are two significant changes, which I’d like to highlight.

First of all, Debian made a leap from 8 to 30 votes, which almost doubled its share from 11 to 18%.
Second is DreamLinux, which grew three times in the percentage from 1 to 3%, gaining 4 places in the chart.

Otherwise, there is nothing unexpected. The share of Xubuntu remains on the level of 41%. It means that Xubuntu dominates the market of XFCE distributions. I don’t think this will change in the nearest future, since Xubuntu 12.04 proved itself very stable and quick in both Live and installed versions.

How fresh is the dew: ROSA 2012 Marathon?

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Sun, 20 May 2012 23:07:00 +0000

Do you know what is happening with Mandriva as a company? It has been on the brink of collapse for quite a few years already. You can learn more from my discussion with Eugeni Dodonov, who used for work for Mandriva for several years.

There is no surprise that a Linux distribution under such poor management gets lots of forks. Mageia was a fork which I adore. Mageia 1 is a distribution which I have been running on my laptop from almost Day 1 of its release.

Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen was the latest release of the Mandriva team, and the world saw it in August 2011. This release was radically different from all previous versions of Mandriva Linux for a number of reasons. The biggest changes on the user interface side were brought by the team at ROSA Labs. ROSA Labs is actually a company closely related to Mandriva, they share the same management.

In May 2012, though, ROSA Labs released its own Linux distribution. Without much hesitation, it was also named ROSA. “Rosa” in Russian (spelt роса) means “dew”. So, what is in ROSA 2012 Marathon? Is it fresh like dew or as tiring as a marathon?

I decided to check for myself and downloaded the image. You can download it either from ROSA’s own server, or from Yandex mirror. We’ll see the Yandex name later in this review, but for now I’d like to mention that the downloading speed from Yandex was not bad at all. Other than direct downloading, there is a torrent option too.

The ISO image size of ROSA 2012 Marathon is 1.4 Gb. It is actually smaller than than size of Mandriva 2011 which was 1.6 Gb.

I used Unetbootin to “burn” the image onto my 8 Gb USB stick.official page

So, the preparations are over. USB stick is in the port of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let’s go!

Booting up and design

If you’ve ever seen the Mandriva or Mageia boot process, then you already know the boot sequence for the ROSA 2012 Marathon. Same questions, same terribly long waiting time, same desktop. The only difference from Mandriva 2011 was in the splash screen, which wore ROSA branding, of course. Otherwise, you won’t be able to see many differences in the interface, if any at all.

The freshly booted system took just below 400 Mb of memory, which was exactly the same result as for Mandriva 2011.

The first thing I did after the boot was to add the memory widget. There is one for the desktop in ROSA 2012, but unfortunately, there are no widgets for CPU and Network monitoring.

The menu in ROSA 2012 Marathon is the same as in Mandriva 2011. No wonder, because this is ROSA Labs’ own development. I saw no obvious changes in the menu since Mandriva 2011. Even the Timeline tab was still disabled in the Live run – it requires Nepomuk to run properly.

The bottom panel showed an item called ROSA Sync in the notification area. The icon suggests that this is a cloud storage provided by the company behind the distribution. I tried to create an account for ROSA Sync, and was redirected to the Mandrivasync.com site. Then, I was automatically taken to another site 2Safe.com, which in its turn bears ROSA branding. Quite complicated, isn’t it? This service is still in the testing phase, as declared on the start page. It gives you an ability to have 2Gb of storage, which looks funny in the age of Dropbox, Google Drive and Yandex Disk.

Since I have mentioned Yandex here again, I'll continue about this company. In case you are not aware of it, Yandex (YNDX) is a Russian competitor of Google. It is a rather successful competitor, because Yandex and Google have almost equal market share in Russia.

ROSA 2012 Marathon includes Yandex as the default and the only available search engine in the Firefox browser. It could be OK, if not for the fact that Yandex is not that good in international search.

Compare search result from different search engines for the same query and decide yourself:

Yandex.ru - this one is used in ROSA 2012 Marathon;
Yandex.com;
Bing;
Google;

In addition to that, a Yandex search in ROSA's Firefox takes you to the Russian search engine page with all the labels and descriptions in Russian. Not sure if this is good for international users.

Networking

The wireless card of my laptop, Intel 3945 ABG, was not configured by ROSA 2012. Again, this is exactly the same result as in Mandriva 2011. Command dmesg showed me that firmware files were missing. As a workaround, I decided to copy these files from my Mageia installation, but you would probably need to download them from the Internet if you face the same issue. After copying the files, ROSA Desktop Linux automatically configured my network card. My home wireless network was shown in the list. A few more keyboard taps and mouse clicks, and I was connected.

Slow, slow, slow… stop!

The performance of ROSA 2012 Marathon system was very slow during my Live run. Even running from the USB stick, it took significant time to process mouse clicks. For example, the feedback for the right click on the image file placed on the desktop (desktop screenshot, which I took) came after about 40 seconds of waiting. That’s just for the context menu to appear!

By the way, the file appeared in the top-right corner of the Desktop when I saved it. Not in the usual top-left corner. Have Russians started to use Right-to-left writing? Funny enough.

I have tried to open several tabs in the Firefox browser in order to put the desktop screenshot into the Blogger post. This caused the system to hang. Only the power button helped here. As a result, you cannot see my own screenshot of the system. If you want to see some, then probably the official page is the best place to do this.

Let me return to the question I asked at the very beginning: Is ROSA 2012 Marathon fresh like dew or as tiring as a marathon? I would select the latter option. It is too slow to be refreshing.

In the meantime…

The ROSA Labs team decided to give the LTS label to its first ever release of a new distribution. If you are not aware, LTS stands for Long-Term Support. This means 5 (five!) years of support for the distribution which came from nowhere. Nowhere, you may ask? Yes, if you think about ROSA. But no, if you think about all the Mandriva heritage (or legacy?).

Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen and ROSA 2012 Marathon are almost twins with indistinct differences.

Is ROSA a new name for Mandriva Linux? This well may be. As long as the Mandriva company has less and less chance to survive, then company management may make a decision to move the development wholly to new pastures. Why not?

In this case, I can only wish good luck to the team, which faces lots of new challenges in the conversion of Marathon into Dew.

Also to read: Review by Prashanth

The Porteus Team: We consider ourselves a "Portable Linux Community"

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:30:00 +0000

My blog started as short reviews, or even self-addressed notes, of "pocket" Linux distributions. SLAX was number one, soon followed by Knoppix and Puppy. Then, as I developed my knowledge in Linux, I started to dive into the world of bigger distributions: Ubuntu and Kubuntu, Debian and PCLOS, and many more.
But "pocket Linux" is still a toy I love to play with. That's why I have returned to that topic again and have done reviews of SliTaz 4.0 and Puppy Slacko 5.3.1.

Today I want to develope this topic a little more, and talk about another "pocket" size Linux distribution. It won't be one-man show, though. Let me introduce my today's guest: Ahau from the Porteus Linux team.

DarkDuck: Hello! You are a member of the Porteus team. Could you please introduce yourself?

Ahau: Hi, I am "Ahau". I keep my real name confidential. I am a member of the Porteus Team. I serve as the Documentation Team Leader, moderator on our forum, and maintainer for the XFCE editions of Porteus. I'm 32 years old, from the US, and I have been involved as a member of the Porteus Community since its inception in December 2010. Before that, I was a user of Slax and "Slax Remix", from which Porteus evolved.

DD: Are there more people in the project?

A: Yes, there are several people involved in the project. In addition to myself we have a lead maintainer (fanthom, who started Slax Remix), a 32-bit maintainer (brokenman), and several individuals who contribute modules, applications, documentation and support on the forums. We consider ourselves a "Portable Linux Community", and we take suggestions and contributions, subject to review by our maintainers, from anyone who joins up and is interested.

DD: Is there any formal project leader? Who makes the final decision?

A: Fanthom is our lead maintainer and he would make the final decision in the case of any disagreements, but we usually reach a consensus on decisions even before anything like a vote is needed.

DD: You picked up the SLAX project, which was stagnating after Tomas M. decided not to continue with its development. Now you have a different distribution. Why have you decided to do so?

A: Fanthom started Slax Remix after development on Slax was suspended. He did this in an effort to keep Slax current with a newer kernel, rebased on a newer release of Slackware, and he included bugfixes and other customizations. He also built and released a 64-bit edition featuring KDE4, which had never existed for Slax. He didn't intend on starting a separate distribution, but maintaining his project on a third-party forum became untenable after almost a year of development and nine releases.

DD: I heard that Tomas M. is coming back to SLAX project. What are your relationships with his project now?

A: We have many members that also Slax users, and I still visit the Slax forums on occasion to see what's new there. We don't have an official development relationship with the Slax project, but we think Slax is a great distribution and we're hopeful to see more releases from Tomas M. in the future.

DD: Am I right in assumption that Porteus Linux was never intended to be the primary OS on the computer, but rather a "pocket" distribution, which one could use on others' computers to have his favourite environment?

A: I think it's fair to say that Porteus is optimized to run from a CD or USB flash drive, but it's also just as easy to install Porteus on a hard drive for use as a primary OS. In fact, it will probably boot and run even faster this way. One of our chief goals in developing Porteus is maintaining and enhancing flexibility. As you know, the name of our distribution is derived from the words "Portable" and "Proteus", the greek god of the seas. A lot of our color schemes and art work have water themes, and I like to think of the distribution as something that can be transported in any container and used for a variety of purposes while retaining its original qualities, just like water. The distribution itself is less than 300 MB and software can be easily added and removed in the form of xzm "modules" to suit the specific needs of the user, whether it be for use as a primary OS, recovery tool, portable distro, or anything else.

DD: Does Porteus Linux have a large community? What would you say about its members?

A: We presently have just over 500 members on our forum, which is small compared to the larger distributions out there. But, we're new and we're growing, and when folks ask questions, they get a response. I'm continually encouraged by the knowledge, skill, and welcoming nature of our members. I've made many good friends in our community, and I look forward to my interactions there. We have an embedded chat window for members on our forum, and it's great for newbies with simple questions and also for the members and contributors to get to know each other on a more personal level. It's been a lot of fun working with everyone there!

DD: The current stable version of Porteus is 1.1. Are there any plans for future releases? When will they be? What new will we see there?

A: Yes, Porteus version 1.2 is in develompent right now; the second release candidate is already available for download in the testing section of our server. The final version should follow shortly. Porteus 1.2 will feature the addition of the XFCE desktop environment (available as a separate ISO) as well as a rewritten package manager (Porteus Package Manager, or PPM), a new GUI installer, a rewritten Langauge Selection Tool, and a rewritten "Save.dat Manager" which will allow more options and functionality (such as data encryption and a choice of filesystems) for users who want to save their changes persistently on FAT or NTFS partitions.

DD: What are own your favourite distributions, desktop environments, applications?

A: Obviously, Porteus is my favorite, and I still enjoy Slax. I also like Puppy and SliTaz, but the vast majority of my time is spent in Porteus. I've just started messing with Android, if you can call that a Linux distribution (I wouldn't...). I'm the Xfce maintainer for Porteus, and that is my favorite desktop environment now that I've learned my way around it. I think Xfce has the right mix of functionality, beauty, and configurability, but it's still light and intuitive. I prefer KDE over Gnome, and I think LXDE is a great DE as well.

DD: Do you read the blog Linux notes from DarkDuck? What would you like to improve or change there?

A: I don't read every blog entry, but I do stop by on occasion, I especially like your reviews of "pocket" distributions, as I like to know what other distros are up to, and how they are receieved.

DD: Do you read any other blogs or FOSS-related web resources regularly? Who are your favourite authors, bloggers, journalists writing about FOSS?

A: I don't follow many blogs, but I do keep up on the XFCE forums and mailing lists, and I visit distrowatch.com. I spend a lot of time researching the web trying to solve problems or learn how to do things, so I tend to bounce around a lot. I do have to give a shoutout to the folks at archwiki and gentoo-wiki, I've learned a lot from their articles.

DD: Thanks for coming, Ahau. I hope to keep in touch and have another interview with either yourself, or maybe other members of Porteus team later.

A: Thanks for having me, DarkDuck! Feel free to contact myself or anyone on our team if you'd like to do another interview, and please try Porteus 1.2 when it's released. We hope you and your readers enjoy it!

Update in Compiz for Xubuntu 12.04 post

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Tue, 15 May 2012 21:43:00 +0000

Few days ago I published a guest post from Emery Fletcher about Compiz for Xubuntu 12.04.

That post listed packages which you need to install in order to make Compiz up and running. Also, there was a method of starting Compiz.

Unfortunately, my own experience with Xubuntu 12.04 showed that the list was not comprehensive.

That's why I updated the post today. I also included the recommendation how to automatically start Compiz in Xubuntu 12.04.

Puppy Slacko: different, but the same

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:59:00 +0000

Most of my readers probably know, that apart from this blog, I also run Buy Linux CDs site. You can order CDs with Linux distributions there, and they will be sent to anywhere in the world.

There are not a lot of orders, I must admit. But sometimes I do get orders. A recent one was very interesting for me, because it allowed me to come back to my old friend, and see how it has changed in the last few months.

So, an order came from the Buy Linux CDs site. This order was for the Puppy Linux disk. Because I have not tried Puppy for quite a long time now, I decided to use the CD for my own review as well.

The latest current version of Puppy Linux is 5.3.1, and it was released on the 25th of October 2011. This is the Puppy Slacko version, which tells you that the roots of this Puppy are in Slackware. I believe this is different from Puppy I have used before, because it was previously based on Lucid Lynx version of Ubuntu, hence it was named Lucid Puppy.

The ISO image size for Puppy remained very small. The core system is only has 136 Mb in size. It is easy to download from one of the many mirrors.

When the CD was ready, it was time for me to start the review. Reboot my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Choose to boot from CD. Let's go!

First barks

The only question which a user sees when Puppy Linux boots up is an option to enter the boot parameters. If you don't touch the keyboard for 5 seconds, then system starts with the default options. That is what I did.

System boot time was more than I expected, even for a CD-based system. The fact is that the whole ISO image is copied to RAM. You can eject disk from the CD-ROM drive later, and use Puppy without it. This feature, for example, allows you to watch a DVD or listen to a CD. Or use the optical disk drive for any other business or home purpose.

Finally, after about a minute of waiting, I got to the default Puppy desktop.

The exterior

The default wallpaper in Puppy Slacko 5.3.1 is in black colours, with Puppy logo on it. There is also a spectrum of light beam. The wallpaper was definitely inspired by the cover of Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon. There is a choice between half a dozen of other wallpapers, which are available through the menu X Desktop - Nathan Wallpaper Setter.

There are quite a few icons on the desktop. These are links to all available partitions, launchers for the browser, mail client, file manager, text and graphic editors and many other applications. They are all on the desktop, so you don’t need to go through the menu to start them. This is a good decision, from my point of view, because the menu in Puppy Linux is very rich. It is difficult sometimes to find the application you need, when there are too many items listed.

The panel is at the bottom of the screen. The bottom-left corner is occupied by the Menu button, which has Puppy logo on it. Show Desktop button sits between the Menu button and the switch between two virtual desktops.

The main part of the panel is taken by the taskbar. As usual, the right part of the panel is the notification area. Apart from the usual items like battery monitor, volume control, clocks and network manager, there are three Puppy-specific items, which are not usual for most Linux distributions. They are: firewall configuration and status, CPU monitor and Save File status icon. The last mentioned item is important for those who run Puppy with persistence option.

Yes, Puppy Linux can save data on the hard disk, and then re-use it in the next session. In order to do so, you need to create a persistence file on your hard disk using the special Puppy tools. Puppy will automatically find the file during the next boot. I have not tried persistence in Puppy 5.3.1, but it worked perfectly for me in Lucid Puppy. I have no reason to suspect that anything could go wrong here.

Puppy Slacko 5.3.1 uses JWM window manager by default. There is Linux kernel 2.6.37.6, which is far from the latest available, I believe.

Interrogation or configuration?

Once Puppy booted itself, it started to throw questions at me. I can say that these questions are quite important, though some of them could be automatically answered within the startup scripts.

First configuration window, which I got, was about the X-server configuration: screen resolution and colour depth, system language, keyboard layout, time zone etc. Once I answered these questions, Puppy asked me to restart the X-server, in order for the settings to take effect. The restart literally took a coupe of seconds, and was not a big problem.

The next dialogue window was about further configuration options.

The most important question here was about the network connection. Puppy offers several wizards here. I used the most basic one, written by BarryK, the author of Puppy, himself. It worked well for me. The script automatically scanned the wireless networks, found my home network and asked me for the password. However, it did not detect the type of security automatically, so I had to select from the proposed options. You can understand from here that Puppy Slacko 5.3.1 includes the necessary firmware drivers for my Intel 3945 ABG wireless card.

Another important configuration utility was the keyboard and touchpad configuration.

The process of adding the layouts to the system was an easy task. I think it has become slightly simpler than in previous versions of Puppy. Earlier, I had to select the active layout in order to select a variant of the layout. Now Puppy offers list of available variants for all active layouts, and then attaches it to the relevant layout. For example, there are several variants for Russian keyboard layout: DOS, Winkeys, Osetian and so on. Winkeys is the one used on most keyboards nowadays. Puppy gave me the list of those variants, and when I selected Winkeys, it was automatically attached to the Russian keyboard layout.

Ctrl-Shift hotkey was also configured through the list of available configuration options, and it worked absolutely fine for me. Puppy Linux understood Control+Shift combination, not Shift+Control as I saw in OpenBox based distributions.

The touchpad configuration is also available in Puppy Linux. I activated both tapping and edge scrolling, but only scrolling worked for me. I could only use hardware buttons to "click" on my touchpad. That is a small defect, as I see it.

There are a good dozen, if not more, of other clever wizards, which can help you in different aspects of the Puppy configuration: CUPS and firewall, ALSA and locale, and whatnot.

External partitions

When using Puppy Linux, in order to mount and unmount existing partitions on the hard drive, you can either click on the relevant desktop icons, or use the PMount utility. This utility worked well for both NTFS and Ext2 partitions of my hard drive, and even Russian characters on NTFS partition were shown fine.

As for the network partitions, the Pnethood utility in the Network part of the menu is dedicated to this task. Unfortunately, this application did not work for me. It did not find my external network drive after the scanning. That's why I had to revert to manual mounting. The usual command mount -t cifs //server/partition /mountingpoint -o guest,nolinux,iocharset=utf8 worked well for me. I was able to browse my external partition, and Russian names were also OK.

Dog’s Waltz, or singing and dancing

Puppy Slacko 5.3.1 includes all the necessary codecs for MP3 and video files playback. I was able to listen to MP3 files and watch movies from both my local and remote partitions, although the default Pmusic player had an issue with showing Russian tags in the MP3 files.

Puppy Linux allows quick installation of Flash Player

As for flash, it is not into in the default distribution of Puppy Linux 5.3.1. But don’t worry! When you first start the SeaMonkey browser, there is another Puppy wizard, which suggests you to install Flash. The installation only takes a few seconds and requires the browser restart, as is always the case for Mozilla-based browsers.

Applications

I won't list all the applications available Puppy Linux. Even 136 Mb of the distribution size can be well-packed with different programs and utilities. Developers have shown this to all the Puppy users.

I'll only highlight here the most important from my point of view.

ROX-Filer is the default file manager in Puppy Linux. I am not a big fan of this file manager, honestly. Mostly because it resizes the window for each folder while navigating. This is inconvenient.
SeaMonkey 2.5 is the default and the only browser in Puppy Slacko 5.3.1. It has an interface with multiple tabs. I’d like to note that there are no icons for closing tabs. It is only possible to close the tab by right-clicking on it.
Geany, Abiword and SeaMonkey HTML editors are all available in Puppy for editing of different types of text.
Transmission and gFTP are the file transferring utilities.
Apart from previously mentioned PMusic, Puppy also includes CD player and GNOME Mplayer.
Midnight commander, unfortunately, is not included in distribution.

Puppy grows when you need

What if you need more applications? Of course, Puppy can do this! There are at least two mechanisms to do so.

PETs are small packages, like .tar.gz, which you can add to your system using the specific wizard. There are lots of available PETs in the official repository, but I am sure you’ll be able to find more in on the Internet.
SFS files, which can be attached to your system. They are usually for bigger applications like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Obviously, SFS files have a different mechanism of attaching them to your system. The number of available SFS packages is less than PETs, but still significant. Some of them are available on the official distribution mirrors, but you are likely to find more available to download somewhere on the forums.

Shutting down or going to sleep?

When you shut down Puppy Linux for the first time on the PC, the operating system asks you yet another question. This is a question about persistence. You can specify the file location for the storage of the persistence file and its size. If you decided to use this persistence options, then all your changes would be saved. Puppy can find the file during next boot and give you all your files and configurations back.

Conclustion

Puppy Linux 5.3.1 is a big change from the earlier version of Puppy. It has even more automated tools and wizards now. At the same time, It is still lightning fast and feature rich, as it was before.

The only downside, which I can mention for Puppy Linux, is outdated design of windows, which is caused by usage of a quite basic window manager. To help you with the little bit dull default outlook, there are sets of themes, which you can download and use.

But… There is an obvious trade-off. On one side, there is some eye candy you don’t get in Puppy Linux operating system. On another side, this OS can be used on very low-spec computers, boots quickly and is very flexible.

What is more important for you?

If you want to try Puppy Linux yourself, and I highly recommend you do so, you can order your own disk with the latest Puppy through the Buy Linux CDs service. The CD will be delivered into your mailbox.

Update: while preparing this review, I got the news that Slacko Puppy 5.3.3 was released.

Video on the screenshot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c__azQCmQ-U

This post was edited by djohnston.

Changes in the ZorinOS Contest Rules

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Sun, 13 May 2012 22:02:00 +0000

Have you heard about the contest which is currently running for all the Linux lovers, especially for fans of Zorin OS?

If you have not heard of it, then you have missed a lot.

Zorin OS team, Linuxaria and Linux notes from DarkDuck are giving prizes for the best Linux- or ZorinOS-related stories.

The contest was announced on the 6th of May and was planned to run for 2 weeks.

I am happy to announce that contest has been extended to 1 months.

You can submit your stories until the 6th of June, and organizers will decided who gets the prizes on the 8th of June.

Good luck, everyone!

Installing Compiz on Xubuntu 12.04

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:03:00 +0000

I have been a fan of Compiz for a couple of years and I usually install it on each of my distro-hopping adventures. Somehow, it just doesn't seem right any more for a window to simply vanish, rather than exploding, slithering off in pursuit of the cursor, or retreating to the perspective vanishing point. And of course I insist on the option of turning the desktop into a colorful ball that spins around on command. This addiction to eye candy I pursue even at the expense of loading down otherwise ultra-light desktops like LXDE or my current favorite, Xfce.

Installing Compiz is almost always a matter of pointing and clicking one's way through some routine operations, and the Ubuntucentric distros carry it in their Software Centers for easy access in a user-friendly mode. I tend to avoid those, because I am never sure just how much of the vast Compiz storehouse of visual tidbits is included in any particular one of the prepackaged offerings. I prefer to use Synaptic because I want all the bells and whistles I can get, but I am far too inexperienced to figure out on my own just what dependencies I would have to include to get them all. In fact, the more you use Compiz, the more you find out that even though Synaptic will take good care of the genuine dependencies, there are a lot of ought-to-haves and even can't-do-withouts if you want a really elegant final result.

I've found by experience on recent Lubuntus and Xfces (both 32- and 64-bit) that the particular selection of Synaptic downloads I show below will provide a Compiz installation that can do just about anything you can find in the CCSM (CompizConfig Settings Manager). I have always had a successful installation when I used these, but as usual, your mileage may vary. You will find that some of these are automatically marked as dependencies as soon as you mark the first, others you will have to select separately. My Old Reliable set of components is:

compiz
compiz-core
compiz-gnome
compiz-plugins
compiz-plugins-default
compiz-plugins-extra
compiz-plugins-main
compiz-plugins-main-default
compizconfig-backend-gconf
compizconfig-settings-manager
libcompizconfig0
libdecoration0
python-compizconfig
fusion-icon <- edit 14.05.2012 by DarkDuck

As distros evolve, Synaptic updates if more components become necessary. My practice is simply to accept whatever additional packages have been automatically marked. That is the way this list was built up, and I will allow it to grow as necessary. It is probable that more than a few of those I've included are not absolutely essential, but the combination has always worked so well for me that I never quibble over an extraneous entry or two.

Once those are all downloaded and installed, I usually pick a few effects to enable from CCSM even before I go to a terminal and type in the magic words to start a Compiz session: compiz --replace (in case you haven't done this before, that's meant to be a double hyphen, not a dash, in front of the replace). That way I can tell at once whether it is up and running by using the Compiz key binding for the effect. The Xfce desktop has a rich set of keyboard shortcuts of its own, and many of them are the same as Compiz key bindings. Still, they never interfere with one another, since once Compiz is running, it takes over the desktop management role.

Compiz has such a prodigious array of optional effects, and even variations within the effects, that it would be useless for me to suggest any specific ones. In fact I don't think I have ever set up two distros with identical effect combinations – the fun is in mixing and matching. It does take some practice to become familiar with some of the fine-tuning processes, but it usually turns out to be worth it.

In my brief (3 days so far) experience with my latest installation, I have the impression that Compiz integrates more smoothly with Xubuntu 12.04 than it did with 11.10, and even that was a nearly flawless experience. So unless exploding windows and spinning sperical desktops just aren't your cup of tea, I recommend you give it a try – you might enjoy it!

Edit 14.05.2012 by DarkDuck: In order to get Compiz automatically start in Xubuntu 12.04, you need to add an item fusion-icon into Xubuntu's Startup Applications in Configuration manager.

This is a guest post by Emery Fletcher

New design of buylinuxcds.co.uk site

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Wed, 09 May 2012 05:23:00 +0000

Apart from running this blog, I also run site www.buylinuxcds.co.uk.
This is kind of commercial arm of this blog. Buy Linux CDs site allows you to order disks with your favourite distributions, if you cannot create them by yourself for whatever reason.

buylinuxcds.co.uk was initially hosted on Yola, but term of the hosting ended. As a result, I decided to move the site to another hosting provider, and to another platform. The move has been recently completed.
Now buylinuxcds.co.uk runs on Free Open Source content management system Joomla! with FatFreeCart as shopping widget.

I would appreciate if you can check new design of Buy Linux CDs site and tell me anything you have noticed wrong there. You can either use comments here, or Contact form on the site.

And, of course, I would appreciate if you share the knowledge about this site with your friends who might be interested in getting CDs with Linux distributions.

Many thanks, my dear readers!

13 surprises from Kubuntu 12.04

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Mon, 07 May 2012 23:59:00 +0000

KDE-based version of Ubuntu is named Kubuntu. This is not a secret.

Kubuntu was actually one of the first Linux distributions I’ve seen. It was the second major one, after Ubuntu itself, which I saw. That was a version 10.04 LTS. I still keep a ShipIt CD on my shelf.

Kubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin was released on the same day as Ubuntu 12.04 and Xubuntu 12.04. I have written about these systems already. Let’s talk about Kubuntu today.

The ISO image size of Kubuntu 12.04 is just a little bit smaller than Ubuntu 12.04. It is 698 Mb. It is available to download either directly from one of many mirrors, or from the torrent. My personal copy of the image was taken from the torrent.

I used Unetbootin to "burn" the image onto the 8 Gb USB stick.

During the Unetbootin process, I activated persistence to check how it works in Kubuntu. I can approximate that it would work the same way in other systems of 12.04 release.

USB stick is ready and plugged into the port of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

Booting the system

If you expected that Kubuntu 12.04 would follow the KDE's traditional blue colour scheme, then you will be disappointed. This was surprise #1 for me. You can see it right after the start of booting process. Even the splash screen of Kubuntu 12.04 is... grey! There are different shades of grey, but this is still grey. Not blue.

It is funny that usually-blue-themed KDE became grey in Kubuntu 12.04, while usually-grey-themed XFCE follows the blue-and-grey pattern in Xubuntu for a few releases now.

Kubuntu 12.04 has the same boot mechanism as the previous version 11.10. It copies Ubuntu's behaviour, although with a slightly changed interface. System boots automatically for some time, finally leaving you with selection between "Try Kubuntu" and "Install Kubuntu”. This screen has similar choice, including set of languages, to the ones in Ubuntu and Xubuntu 12.04, although design of the window is radically different.

My choice, obviously, was the "Try Kubuntu" option.

Once selection was made, it took the system some more time to get me to the desktop screen.

I have noted in my Ubuntu 12.04 review that the system took more time to boot up to a window with Try/Install options than to make final preparations. I would say that it was 80-20 proportion. Kubuntu's proportions are 60-40, so total waiting time for Kubuntu Live boot is more than for Ubuntu. I can say this is surprise #2.

Once booted, I found myself in KDE 4.8.2 running on top of Linux kernel 3.2.0-23, as the other 12.04 systems.

Kubuntu 12.04 desktop
with memory, CPU and network widgets

Freshly booted system took about 280 Mb of memory, which is quite a lot, but that could be expected from KDE-based distribution. This is about 40 Mb more, than in version 11.10, but still 40 Mb less than Unity-based Ubuntu.

It is worth mentioning that Kubuntu 12.04 uses the kernel with pae requirement, similar to Ubuntu 12.04. So, if your processor does not have pae support, your choice should be either Xubuntu, or network installation disk with further selection of KDE environment.

Desktop

It should not be a surprise for you any more if I tell you that the default wallpaper in Kubuntu 12.04 is in grey colour. However, there are two more surprises here.

Suprise #3 is that the default wallpaper image is... ugly! I can't find a better word for it. KDE is famous for its eye-candies and nice user experience. This experience simply cannot start with an image like this: straight segments of grey shades beaming from the bottom-right corner.

And, if you want to change the wallpaper, then there is suprise #4: there are no other wallpapers in the default distribution! All the wallpapers are to be downloaded separately, either the "default wallpapers" package, or additional wallpapers from Internet resources.

There is nothing on the default desktop, apart from a single folder with "Install Kubuntu" shortcut in it.

First of all, I added my favourite widgets there: CPU, memory and network monitor. All of them were available right out of the box.

There is a standard panel at the bottom of the screen in Kubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. It has all the usual elements of KDE distribution. If you want to get a list, I'd ask you to check my Kubuntu 11.10 review.

Surprise #5 was waiting for me on the panel. The titles of minimised windows are barely visible there. They are in light-grey fonts on the light-grey panel.

KDE is famous for its desktop effects. I have already mentioned this above. So, I went to the system configuration and tried to activate these effects. Result? Surprise #6! Result was negative! System listed a couple of dozen effects, which could not be activated. As a result, I was left with a very simple desktop. There even were no shadows under the windows and menus! The fix was around the corner. Switching from OpenGL to XRender helped a little. Only few effects were left inactive. But I believe that the previous version of Kubuntu was able to work with OpenGL normally. Why did it change?

Network

I had no issues with network connection in Kubuntu 12.04. It automatically found and configured my wireless network card Intel 3945 ABG. The Network Management utility automatically listed available wireless networks when I clicked the icon in notification area. All I had to do was to type in my security code and click "Connect".

No surprises here. Oooogh.

Keyboard layouts

Keyboard layouts are configured in the same place in the System Settings of Kubuntu 12.04: Input devices. You will find the KDE standard interface there. Additional layouts, keyboard hotkeys and panel indicator can be configured in the same place. It took me less than a minute to replace the default English US layouts with combination of English UK + Russian, Ctrl-Shift hotkey and the flag indicator.

Here I'd like to mention the surprise #7. Again, it is in the user interface design area: the flag on the panel is visibly smaller than other elements. Why?

Applications

Kubuntu, as usual, comes packed with some applications. Let's see what is inside.

Rekonq is the only browser in Kubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. I used it for some time. I actually drafted this blog post using Rekonq. Here I'd like to mention couple of surprises.

Surprise #8 is that Rekonq recommends you to install Flash plugin at the start. If you do so, you still... have no flash! So, the installation basically does nothing good for you.

Surprise #9 is that Rekonq never crashed in my Live run! This is a good surprise! I remember issues with Rekonq stability in Kubuntu 11.10. They're now gone. Rekonq is now a mature browser, which you can use if you don't need advanced features of Firefox or Chrome.

Of course, Firefox installer is also available in Kubuntu 12.04. Other than these two items, the Internet section of the menu contains BlueDevil bluetooth manager, Kopete, KTorrent, Akgregator, KMail, KPPP and Quassel IRC. As you see, all of them are KDE-centric applications.

LibreOffice applications are in the core of the Office section of the Kubuntu 12.04 menu. This is not full set of LO applications: Base and Math are not in the distribution.

KPatience is the only representative in the Games section of Kubuntu 12.04.

Okular, Gwenview, KSnapshot and LibreOffice Draw are listed in the Graphics section of the menu. Funny enough, LibreOffice Draw is not listed in the export options of KSnapshot, it is only available through "More applications". That's not what I would call good integration of components.

Multimedia utilities have DragonPlayer, Amarok, KMix and K3B burning tool.

Kate, Klipper, KNotes and some other useful tools are in the Utilities section of Kubuntu 12.04 menu.

The System part of the menu includes the same K3B, plus Muon Software Centre, Muon Update manager, Muon Package Manager, Konsole, Dolphin browser, Akonadi configuration tool and some other utilities.

As you can see, there are enough tools in the Kubuntu 12.04 to get you started. The necessary office, graphical, Internet and multimedia tools are available.

But, of course, you're likely to require more. That's why you're more than likely to need Muon.

Muon came to Kubuntu as of 11.10, and now fully owns the package management of this distribution.

Kubuntu 12.04 comes with Main and Restricted repositories activated by default. At the same time, Universe and Multiverse repositories require additional manual activation.

Interestingly enough, Kubuntu 12.04 LTS default settings show upgrade available to any newer release. That was not the case for Kubuntu 10.04 LTS, which allowed only LTS version upgrade by default.

Just out of interest, I asked Muon Update manager to check if there was something for me. Kubuntu 12.04 was released exactly a week before I drafted this post, and there were some updates already: 8 security updates and many more system updates. Their total was about 40 Mb. Not that bad.

Of course, the installation of updates was not in the plan of my Live run, so I closed Muon Update manager without installing anything.

Muon Software Centre is the tool which you need to use to install the software. It looks fine, intact with other Kubuntu applications. Unfortunately, I found surprise #10 here, which would definitely stop me from using MSC. Search... does not work! I could navigate through the MSC menu to the Chromium browser. But search gave me nothing! It makes this tool useless. I know, this maybe an issue of Live run. But how could I (or any average newbie) ensure that all my applications are in the repositories, if simple search does not work? How can I trust the system at all after this?

Network partition

Mounting of partition from my external network drive was an easy task in Kubuntu 12.04. Dolphin lists Microsoft Windows Network Drive as one of the options in Add Network Folder tool. Connection took me only a few seconds, and then I was able to browse folders and files on remote device.

Multimedia, which is absent

Neither DragonPlayer, nor Amarok were able to play MP3 files in Kubuntu 12.04 Live run. Even the Dolphin's built-in "preview" player failed. All of them recommended to search for the required plugin, but then the search window disappeared without any visible feedback. I should name it surprise #11, even though I was not prepared for this by similar behaviour of Ubuntu 12.04.

I have already mentioned that my attempt to install Flash in Rekonq failed. The only option to get Flash would be to install it manually. Unfortunately, and this is surprise #12, that was not possible either. I received an error message in Rekonq:

Unable to create io-slave: klauncher said: Error loading 'apturl %u'.
When connecting to: apt:adobe-flashplugin?channel=$distro-partner

At this moment in time (and it was far beyond midnight), I thought: “Enough”. That was a time to stop my experiments with Kubuntu 12.04.

Persistence

Next day was a test for the persistence option I activated in Unebootin.
Surprise #13: persistence works.
Kubuntu 12.04 LTS kept my changed wallpapers, network connection, attached network drive. This is really useful feature, if you want to use your USB stick for pocket-size distribution.

What do I think about Kubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin?

The system was relatively fast on my laptop with dual core Centrino 1.7 GHz and 1Gb of memory. I found no significant delays or unexpected waiting time.

The system was solid. I faced no crashes during my Live run.

Both these points say that Kubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin is good enough for Long-term support version.

But, on the other hand, I found 13 suprises in this operating system during the Live run. And only two of them are nice: maturity of Rekonq and working persistence. All the other are more or less unexpected errors or defects.

I think that the design team of Kubuntu was on ~~maternity~~ ~~paternity~~ long-term leave when 12.04 was prepared. There are too many obvious omissions to think about Kubuntu as an eye-candy rich and polished distribution.

Should the long-term support version be like this?

I doubt it.

And what about you?

Maybe you want to try Kubuntu 12.04 yourself? Then, order your own CD of this distribution, or many others, from Buy Linux CDs site! Your disk will be delivered right into your mailbox.

More to read about Kubuntu 12.04:

This post was edited by djohnston.

The Joint Contest of Zorin OS, Linuxaria and Linux notes from DarkDuck

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Sun, 06 May 2012 20:28:00 +0000

With Zorin OS next release not far away, I am happy to announce a special contest.

This contest is organised together by Zorin OS team, Linuxaria, Linux notes from DarkDuck and Buy Linux CDs.

Who can participate?

Everyone with a passion for Linux, and with some writing skills. If you're good enough to compose a short e-mail to your friend, then you're ready for the contest.

What you need to do?

Please write a short story about Zorin OS, or maybe just Linux in general.

Why do you use Linux? How did you come to the Linux world? What do you like here? What are you doing to promote Linux? Any of these, or maybe your own themes are good.

It would be better, if your post is about Zorin OS, but this is just "nice to have".

The text you're going to write should not be one-liner. Please be little bit more productive. At least 50 words, if you don't mind.

Where to send your works?

Please e-mail them to zorinos.contest@darkduck.com.

When to send?

Any time until the ~~20th of May~~ 6th of June 2012.

What will you get?

Organizers of the contest will select winners, and they will receive:

Disk with Zorin OS 6 Premium with all the attached support. Prize is given by Zorin OS team.
15 USD bonus at Desura or similar resource, as per your agreement with Linuxaria, who has given this prize.
10 GBP e-voucher for Amazon.co.uk site. Prize from Buy Linux CDs.
CD with any Linux distribution of your choice. Prize from Linux notes from DarkDuck.
1 GB USB stick. Prize from Linux notes from DarkDuck.

Will my work be published?

By submitting your work, you allow organizers to use your work on their web sites, unless you specifically withdraw your permission in writing.

When will results be announced?

The results will be announced on the ~~22nd of May~~ 8th of June 2012.
The winners will be contacted by e-mail.

Small print:

One prize per contestant.
Decisions of contest organizers are binding, and cannot be changed.
Non-monetary prizes cannot be exchanged for money.
No cash equivalents.
Monetary prizes will be given in currency stated: 15 USD and 10 GBP correspondingly.
In order to get non-monetary prizes, you must provide your postal address. This will be kept confidential and never disclosed to 3rd parties.
Winners must respond the requests within 14 calendar days. If there is no response, the prize will be withheld.

400+ subscribers now!

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:19:00 +0000

The best way to measure the blog's popularity is probably to see how many people regularly read it. They may be one-time readers, or subscribers. The latter are those who consider blog interesting and worthwhile to read. So, number of subscribers more or less reflects the authority of the author(s).

This blog, Linux notes from DarkDuck, has just passed another mark in this area. As of today, I can officially say there are more than 400 subscribers. Feedburner confirms this.

Just a little bit of a statistics:

15th of October 2010 - blog's inception, 0 readers.
21th of April 2011 - 100 subscribers in 188 days
23rd of August 2012 - 200 subscribers, adding 100 in 124 days
7th of February 2012 - 300 subscribers, adding 100 in 168 days
2nd of May 2012 - 400 subscribers, adding 100 in 85 days.

So, it took two times less days now to get another 100 people who like the blog. I consider it as a good dynamic.

And, of course, I could not reach any of these numbers without you, my dear readers!

THANK YOU!

Robert Milasan: Kongoni GNU/Linux aims to anybody who likes to experiment

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Wed, 02 May 2012 23:06:00 +0000

Some Linux distribution are born to be big. Like Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat.

Other Linux distributions are born to die, because only limited set of developers are self-interested in them.

And there are distributions which are born to live small. They are changing maintaners and developers, but don't change the supporting idea. The example is Kongoni GNU/Linux. This is one of the few distributions born with an idea of freedom. This is one of the distributions approved by Free Software Foundation.

Let me introduce you the person who is steering this project now: Robert Milasan.

DarkDuck: Hello Robert! Your personality is not so well-known as maybe your project Kongoni GNU/Linux. Could you please tell some words about yourself?

Robert Milasan: Sure, so my name is Robert Gabriel Milasan. I currently work at SUSE Linux. I previously worked at IBM, both in Czech Republic. I'm originally from Romania, but moved to Czech Republic about 5 years ago, and this is my home since then. I’m married, living in Prague and playing with computers and cars. :)

DK: You are not the original author of Kongoni, but became a maintainer of it. Why and how did this happen?

RM: About 2 years ago, when the original author A.J. Venter still was the maintainer of Kongoni GNU/Linux, he had posted a note on the Kongoni website that he would step down from maintaining the distro, and if someone is interested in maintaining Kongoni to drop him a note. So I did, and I became the maintainer and developer of Kongoni. The reasons why he didn't want to maintain the distro are unknown to me, very possible lack of time.

DK: What has changed in Kongoni since you took over?

RM: Well, first of all, almost all packages are now Kongoni packages, not Slackware. The distro has proper udev implementation and KDE 4.7. It has not moved to KDE 4.8 yet. I added more packages, made sure all non-free packages are removed from the distro. There is now a proper live CD using udev, new installer (not the best, but …) and much more.

DK: Who is the target audience of Kongoni GNU/Linux, from your point of view?

RM: In general, it aims to anybody who likes to experiment, but otherwise it is mostly for power users or people who do know their way in Linux.

DK: What are the distinctive features of Kongoni, compared to other Linux distributions?

RM: Well, the most distinctive feature is the ported packages, similar for FreeBSD. The packages are build directly on the system, they do not come as binaries, similar to Gentoo.

DK: What are the weak points of Kongoni, which you’d like to improve?

RM: The weak points are the installer, the package manager and the update cycle. Also, there is no 64-bit version yet.

DK: How many developers are in the Kongoni team?

RM: 1 (one). Me. :-)

DK: What are the plans for the future of Kongoni GNU/Linux? Shall we expect a new release some time soon?

RM: At the moment, I would like to update all packages and release the next version. But I've just moved to Prague, because of the job, so I don't really have time to take care of Kongoni. I do hope that soon I'll be able to get back to my old routine, start again working on Kongoni and release something, at least an alpha version.

DK: Kongoni is far not the most popular Linux distribution, as per Distrowatch. It is currently somewhere around 200th place in the 6-month rating. Do you want this to improve?

RM: I don't really care about polls, as long as people do like the distro. Kongoni was never intended to compete with distro's like Ubuntu, Linuxmint or Fedora.

DK: Do you have an idea of how many users Kongoni has?

RM: To be honest no. At this moment I'm quite sure that not many. I do hope that after I get some time to clean up and release a new version, things will be a bit better.

DK: What are your personal preferences among Linux distributions, Desktop Environments, applications?

RM: I usually use and prefer Ubuntu and openSUSE for desktop. When it comes to applications, I use and like Deluge, Pidgin, VirtualBox, Firefox, Chrome, LibreOffice, VLC, gedit. This is for desktop use, of course.

DK: You worked for IBM and now work for SuSE Linux. Can you share what are your tasks there?

RM: Hard to say. Both where and are different in their on way. At IBM, I was a system and applications administrator and engineer, and at SUSE I'm L3 support engineer. Both jobs at totally different, and also the companies themselves. IBM was a huge and big multicultural environment, whereas in SUSE (CZ) there is mostly Czech guys and a couple of foreigners like me :). I suppose there are good things and bad things at both companies, but I do like SUSE better at this moment, most because of working in open source environment and Linux in general.

DK: What are your other projects, apart from Kongoni?

RM: I have some other small projects, but nothing interesting. If someone wants to know, please check my personal site.

DK: Do you read Linux Notes from DarkDuck blog? What would you like to change or improve there?

RM: I have never read Linux Notes or DarkDuck, sorry. :(

DK: If not at the computer, what are your interests, hobbies?

RM: Cars, movies, traveling and a lot of other things that I can’t remember now. :)

DK: From the places you’ve been to, what are the best ones? Where would you like to go again?

RM: Ohh, that’s easy: Italy, Croatia and Slovenia. My wife and I found the best people in these three countries: opened, willing to chat with you, warm, trustworthy and even fun. It's hard to explain, but we had the possibility many times to meet some very interesting characters during our road-trips around Europe. If someone has the possibility of doing this, do it, it's worth it. You can find some pics from some of our road-trips at http://photos.robertalks.com.

DK: Thanks for coming, Robert! I wish you all the best in development of Kongoni and other projects!

RM: Danke schoen, Thank you, Merci beaucoup, Koszi szepen, Multumesc mult, Molto grazie. :)

Xubuntu 12.04: don't fix what is not broken

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Tue, 01 May 2012 23:37:00 +0000

There are not so many successful commercial companies on the Linux market. Of course, RedHat is the flagbearer in that area, with their over-1-billion dollars revenue for the last year. Who is on the second place? I think most people would name Canonical.

Canonical’s flagship is Ubuntu. The recent version of Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin was released on the 26th of April 2012.

But Ubuntu 12.04 is not the only operating system from Canonical. The company also officially supports three other Ubuntu-based OSes: Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Lubuntu. These systems have different desktop environments: KDE, Xfce and LXDE respectively. There are also the less widespread variants Edubuntu and Myth-buntu, but they are targeted to specific markets, rather than to the general public.

I have reviewed Ubuntu 12.04 already, and my opinion is that the Precise Pangolin edition is better than Oneiric Ocelot. But it is still far from perfection.

Xubuntu 12.04 LTS (long-term support) was released on the very same day as Ubuntu 12.04.

If you are interested, this distribution is also available for order on CD through Buy Linux CDs site and through my eBay page. I had some orders for this OS, so I used one of the ordered CDs to run my own Live test of Xubuntu 12.04.

The disk image size for Xubuntu 12.04 is slightly less than Ubuntu's. It is only 680 Mb. I downloaded it through torrent, and there were no issues with this process.

So, the CD with Xubuntu 12.04 is ready and inserted into the drive of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from CD. Let's go!

Booting

Xubuntu 12.04 uses the same booting mechanism as Ubuntu 12.04. This is new in the Precise Pangolin release, because previous versions gave you a list of options before the boot started: Try Xubuntu, Install, Check disk, and so on. This time around, there is no pre-boot menu. The system boots itself up to a screen where you have a selection of system language and a choice between Try Xubuntu and Install Xubuntu. This screen is very similar to the one you can see in Ubuntu, with a difference in colour scheme only.

While booting, Xubuntu automatically recognised and configured my wireless card Intel 3945 ABG, and scanned for available networks. As a result, I've seen a pop-up message saying that there were some networks around. The message disappeared, and left a grey rectangle after itself. Also, a similar grey space was around the Try/Install selection window. I suppose this is something to do with the default configuration options of the graphics card. This is strange, because I have never had problems with this card before.

Enough said about the boot screen. My choice was for Try Xubuntu, obviously. A few seconds more, and I've landed onto the default Xubuntu screen.

Default desktop in Xubuntu 12.04
with Task Manager

The Live session of Xubuntu 12.04 took about 220 Mb of memory on my laptop. It is less than I had in Ubuntu 12.04, but still more than you could expect from Xfce-based distribution.

If you are interested in dots and numbers, then I am happy to tell you that Xubuntu 12.04 uses Xfce 4.8 on top of Linux kernel 3.2.0-23.

Edit: Very important difference of Xubuntu from K- and Ubuntu! This version of OS does not require pae-enabled processor. Please see Ubuntu review with my comments about this.

Desktop

The desktop in Xubuntu 12.04 is very similar to the one I've seen in Xubuntu 11.10. It has default wallpaper in blue and grey colours. Although the image itself is different, the style is the same. There is a choice of 5-6 different wallpapers in the distribution, most of them are default wallpapers from previous versions of Xubuntu.

There is a panel at the top of the screen in Xubuntu 12.04 with the usual very familiar elements on it. The left top corner is taken by a menu button with an Xfce logo (mouse head) on it. Next to the menu button, you can find a task bar. It is followed by the notification area with power, messages, network, and volume icons. Next to the right are clocks and calendar. The switch between two virtual desktops sits next to the clocks. By the way, each desktop has its own set of applications on the taskbar. And finally, you see the button with your user name (xubuntu in Live session), which calls up the session management options: reboot, shutdown, lock screen and so on.

As you can see, there is nothing unexpected on the top panel in Xubuntu 12.04.

There is another panel at the bottom of the screen. It has icons for quick access to the browser, mail client, home folder, terminal and so on. This panel auto-hides and only appears when you move the mouse to the area. Although the behaviour of the panel is more or less predictable, I nevertheless decided to remove that panel in my Live session. It is my dislike for all auto-hiding panels which made the decision. Then, I unlocked the top panel (Panel 1) and dragged it to the bottom of the screen.

These simple steps gave me a screen very similar to the one I have in my current installation of Xubuntu 11.10.

Xfce Desktop compositing is enabled in the Xubuntu 12.04 by default. It means that you can see simple eye candy features here, like shadows behind the windows and opacity for different elements.

If you want to have more eye candies, than Compiz is probably your way to get them. I tried to install Compiz in my Live run, as recommended by Emery in comments to my Xubuntu 11.10 review. As a result, Compiz got rid of... all window title bars, including the control elements! Nice! I could not resolve that issue, so had to use keyboard Alt-F4 in the rest part of my review.

Network connection

I have mentioned already that the message about available wireless network appeared on the Try/Install selection screen. This means it was not a big problem for me to connect to my home network. A few strokes on the keyboard, and I am on-line.

Applications

I quickly went through the list of applications in the menu of Xubuntu 12.04, and found very few differences from Xubuntu 11.10. That's why I invite you to read the corresponding section of my previous review, if you are interested in the list of available tools.

The few differences, which I'd like to mention:

Firefox is version 11 in Xubuntu 12.04 compared to version 7 in the LiveCD of Xubuntu 11.10.
Remote Desktop tool has been removed from the default distribution.
PulseAudio Volume Control replaced the Mixer tool in Multimedia section.

Otherwise, you have a good set of easy-to-use lightweight applications. Honestly, not all of them are my own preferred ones. That’s why I would probably need to add and remove some applications, if I was going to install Xubuntu 12.04 for myself. If you want to install more software, then you have a choice between Ubuntu Software Centre and Synaptic.

Network drive

Xubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin includes Gigolo by default. Gigolo is a very nice tool for connection to remote network drives in Linux operating systems.

I easily found that "Windows share" is one of the options in the drop-down list of Gigolo interfaces. I selected this option, specified the name of my external network drive, and pressed "Refresh" button. As a result, I got a list of available partitions on that drive. All the rest was simple as 1-2-3. A few clicks, and I was able to browse my remote drive. Job’s done!

Russian fonts in the file and folder names were shown fine in the Thunar file manager.

Multimedia

Xubuntu 12.04, like Ubuntu 12.04, which I reviewed before, does not include codecs for MP3 files and videos. You can download them separately during the installation, but the Live run comes without codecs.

That is why I could not play MP3 files in my Live session. GStreamer, the default music player, gave me an error about the missing plugin.
Edit: There is a simple solution. Thanks to my readers!

The easiest way to solve the issue of missing plugins, as always, is the installation of a player which has all them included. The most popular of such players is VLC.

I installed VLC using the Ubuntu Software Centre. It easily solved the plugin issue. I was able to listen to music from the files on my external network drive.

Xubuntu 12.04 with VLC
without window title bars after Compiz installation

Unfortunately, Flash is not included in the default Xubuntu 12.04 distribution.

Keyboard layouts

The process of configuring keyboard layouts in Xubuntu 12.04 is the same as in almost all other Xfce-based distributions.

First, I added the layout indicator to the panel. It appeared as the US flag, showing that the default layout was English US. A right-click on that indicator allowed me to set up Properties, where I could add English UK and Russian, and remove English US layout. I set up the hotkey as Ctrl-Shift, and this was exactly my favourite configuration.

Conclusion

Xubuntu 12.04 is a great system, from my point of view.

As you can see, there are not many user-facing differences in this version compared to Xubuntu 11.10. From my point of view, this is good. Xubuntu 11.10 was (and still is) a very nice all-round distribution. You don’t need to experiment in a system which is going to be supported for three years. That’s why a decision to keep changes minimal appeals to me.

Yes, there were some issues in my Live review of Xubuntu 12.04. The major of them was the Compiz bug. But I believe, it is easily solvable in the installed system.

Apart fron a long initial boot time, the system worked quickly enough for me, even when disk operations were involved. Subjectively, similar disk operations in Xubuntu ran quicker than in Ubuntu.

Will I install Xubuntu 12.04 on my hard drive? I am not sure yet. The reason is that I already have Xubuntu 11.10 installed there. I will first try to update my system. If it breaks something, then I will look at the re-installation option.

As for you, I highly recommend you to try Xubuntu 12.04. I hope you'll enjoy it.

If you want to try Xubuntu or any other Linux distribution yourself, but cannot create a CD with it, then maybe Buy Linux CDs web site can help you. You can order CDs with almost any Linux distributions there, delivered you your mailbox.

Top 5 Linux Platforms In The Market

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:26:00 +0000

The Access Company has developed various Linux application platforms in the market to go with its brands. These are generally the operating systems that aid in performing various jobs that suits the user. The following are the top 5 Linux Platforms in the market today.

UBUNTU

Top of the rank in the Linux distribution is the Ubuntu Software. This can be used at home and at work places. It can be applicable to use in the server. It comes in three editions. These are the Ubuntu desktop, server and notebook editions. It has various applications in audio, video and texts. It has also the latest Ubuntu studio applications. Others are applications in mobile technology. When buying, choose the latest version in the market.

DEBIAN

Another top 5 Linux Platforms is the Debian operating systems. It has various applications and is not accessible to ordinary users. It can however be compatible in your desktop machine and in your servers. It has over 29000 packages and can be installed easily. It is free to users and can be used in applications to play games, connect to the internet, various office works and printers. It can also be used in programming purposes. Multimedia applications are also available.

RED HAT

Red hat Linux is among the best software in the market today. It is among the cheapest and will save your company millions when you install in your computers. It is good for those people whose job involves critical work. This operating system has some features that are taken from well tested software called the Fedora. It is an open source program. The software uses an RPM package manager. It can be best suited to home use. For the new users then the software comes with a graphic installer called the Anaconda that helps in aiding the learners.

FEDORA

Fedora is also among the Linux platforms in the market that offers users new platforms to experiment on the latest technologies and packages. It works as the Ubuntu but is mainly applicable to the older personal computers. This is because it has limited requirements to the systems. It is an open free source software program. In addition you can use it with other 08 like the windows. It has good security features in the controls. Easy to download and install. It is one of the Red Hat Linux software.

CENTOS

Centos programmed software is also among the top five Linux platforms in the world. It is owned by the North American Enterprise. It is open source software and easily compatible in many machines. The advantages associated with it are that it has millions of users; it can be rebuilt easily to suit your needs. The main function of the centos software is the applications for the server and boasts of various versions that are currently in the market. It is also based on Red hat Linux technology.

The above are the top 5 Linux platforms that suits diverse needs for the users. Most of the platforms are free and can be downloaded from their websites. Easy installation and features makes them the most preferred in the market today.

This is a guest post written by Julieth, Chat Site Mezee is a platform to help people find new chat rooms around the world.
Author opinion can differ from the blog owner one.

Announcing the poll results

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:53:00 +0000

A month ago I announced a poll regarding recent changes in the blog. There were different questions about different aspects of the articles I publish.
It is time now to get the results published.

In total, there were 19 voters. That's much less than total number of subscribers I have. Probably, all the rest could only select "I don't care" option, and accept blog as it is, or whatever it can be. That's fine.

Now, let's see at the opinions of others.

Blog editors

I have asked you, whether it was easier to read blog posts in good English (i.e. after passing it though native English editors) or in bad English I usually write.
The results are obvious here

Useful. It is easier to read good English.	13
Not useful. I liked the charm of your incorrect English.	2
I don't care	4

This means I'll continue my work with editors. Maybe I'll become professional enough myself at some point to write without their assistance, but this is too far yet.

Screenshots

I usually use screenshots of operating system in review, which feature some YouTube videos, if Flash is enabled in the distribution. Usually I prefer some video with nice lady pictured. I hope you don't mind?
The results are also quite obvious here:

I like those pictures	14
I prefer 'normal' screenshots who describe the default desktop looks	1
I don't care	3

This means I will continue with my strategy regarding the system screenshots.

Videos

I started to embed videos, which feature in the screenshot, at the end of the blog post. The poll results are not so obvious this time:

It is nice to be able to watch music videos	7
I don't like those videos anyway	6
I don't care	5
like the videos but they don't get along with my dialup very well	1

There are as many likers as dislikers for the videos. I think I'll change the strategy now. Instead of embedding the video, I'll place a link to it. You can view it if you like. Or skip the link if you don't.

Interviews

From time to time, I publish interviews with different people from the Linux community. Some of them are famous, like Carla Schroder, some are less known, as Danny from the ITLure blog. I asked you, whether you liked the interviews. Here are the results:

I like to read your interviews	12
I would prefer more reviews, not interviews	7

This means that I'll continue with the interviews. Maybe, I'll publish them not so often.

And finally, I got some comments in the poll form, which I would like to answer:

More pictures and preview pictures please.

Unfortunately, there are some readers of my blog who don't use broadband. They struggle to get images if there are more than 500k of those per post. That's why I try to keep number and size of images to a minimum.

It's impossible to enjoy your site on mobile devices as the ads takes up 90% of the screen :/

If you use mobile device, than you should be able to get special mobile version of the site. It does not have any ads at all. If your device does not do it automatically, you can add string "?m=1" at the end of URL to get the mobile view of the site.
Also, I have changed the ads provider recently. Quite intrusive and annoying ads from Clicksor were replaced with less distracting ads from Technorati Media. I hope this helps too.

Thanks again to all those who took part in the poll!

Special non-blog post has been distributed

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 20:38:00 +0000

A week ago I announced a unusual e-mail which I was going to send to all my e-mail subscribers.
I have done this today.
So, please check your inbox.
If you see this message, but not the "special edition", then please write to me with a request to re-send. I know e-mail system is not reliable.

Ubuntu 12.04: A Stairway To Heaven?

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 22:45:00 +0000

Many of Linux users waited for that day, the 26th of April 2012. The day when Canonical released their Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. The day when Unity became the only available desktop environment for the current long-term support version of Ubuntu.

The day has come.

Let's see what it brought.

Canonical stuck to the classical ISO image size this time: only 700 Mb, which is just fine to be burnt onto CD.

As usual, there are several options available, either in terms of the system (32- and 64 bit, desktop and server, text-only and graphical installation), or in terms of downloading options (direct download from a mirror or using a torrent). I chose 32-bit desktop version and used torrent this time.

Downloading of ISO image from the torrent was not a big problem. Initial downloading speed was low, but I guess that was an issue of the last mile, i.e. my connection to the provider. Soon that problem was resolved, and I got my own ISO image of the Ubuntu 12.04 operating system.

This time the image was burnt onto the CD-R disk, because I was fulfilling orders which came via my eBay site and via Buy Linux CDs page. I usually quickly test each CD for the ability to boot and to run few programs. That's why I decided to use one of those CDs to get my own picture of Ubuntu 12.04.

So, CD is in the drive of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from optical drive. Let's go!

Booting the system

The first screen which I saw soon after the boot was about the choice between Try Ubuntu and Install Ubuntu. Same screen features selection of available languages. If you remember, Ubuntu 12.04 is not the first Ubuntu release to feature this method of booting the Live CD image. Of course, my choice was for the Try Ubuntu option.

While I am talking about the system boot, I'd like to mention that I also tried to boot my other laptop HP Compaq nc6000 with Ubuntu 12.04 CD. Unfortunately, I was not able to do so. I got an error about absence of pae support in my processor. This is now a requirement for Ubuntu. I recently got the same issue with pae when tried to install CentOS on the very same computer. It has Celeron processor of one of the first generations, which were produced without pae.

Coming back to my Live run. The total boot time of Ubuntu 12.04 Live CD was significant. It was not the longest I've ever seen, but much more than I expected - about 5 minutes to the final desktop. Most of that time was spent before the Try/Install selection.

Ubuntu 12.04 desktop with System Monitor

Freshly booted Ubuntu 12.04 operating system took astonishing 310 Mb of memory. That's more than I expected.

Desktop

The default desktop wallpaper in Ubuntu 12.04 is in very well-known to all Ubuntu users purple-and-orange colors. I would say that orange dominates this time.

There is a choice of 15 alternative wallpapers, if you want to change. My own choice was for the shot of London Eye. Obviously, because I live in London.

By the way, the window with the choice of wallpapers allows you to reduce the size of Launcher panel icons, down to 32 pixels, and configure auto-hide option for it. So, the functions, which were previously available via 3rd-party configuration utilities, found their way into the core distribution.

As in all previous versions of Unity, there are 2 panel-type elements on the screen of Ubuntu 12.04.

The left side panel, the Launcher, has some quick access application buttons on it, plus system elements like Bin, Workspace Switcher (there are 2 virtual desktops), and Dash menu button. Most of the elements can be easily locked to or unlocked from the launcher by right-clicking on the relevant button. Also, right clicking on the Unity-optimized applications gives you a choice of available actions for quick access. For example, right-click on the Nautilus file manager button allows the quick access to Home, Documents, Pictures and some other folders.

The top panel in Unity has notification area at the right hand side. There you can find clocks, keyboard layout indicator, Network manager, volume control and some other elements. Separate item is a cogwheel, which gives you access to system updates, system settings, displays, printers and also to session control functions (log off - shut down - suspend). All the rest space on the top panel works as the menu bar of active application, if the application supports this. Not all the applications have this support yet, for example LibreOffice components. Also, window control elements are on the panel in the case of maximized window.

Network

Ubuntu 12.04 automatically found and configured wireless card on my Fujitsu-Siemens laptop, which is Intel 3945 ABG. I can say the same about Realtek 8191SE, which is in my other laptop - Toshiba L500-19X.

A click on Network Monitor icon on the top panel brought me a list of available wireless networks, including my own. It was an easy task for me to configure security and connect to the network.

Keyboard layouts

I booted my Ubuntu 12.04 using English as the system language. The keyboard layout indicator with en sign on it appeared on the panel right after the boot. A click on it gave me the list of available English layouts: US (default), UK, Ghana and Cameroon. The same menu included the configuration option for the layouts. I tried to add Russian to the list, and succeeded only after some time. The problem was that "+" button on the configuration window was grayed out. I first had to remove any of the existing layouts, and only after that I could add more. I think this is a bug which developers can fix later.

The hotkey configuration for the layout switching was also available on the same screen, and Ctrl-Shift combination worked well.

Finally, I was able to type in both Russian and English UK.

There were no issues with touchpad. Tapping and edge-scrolling were configured in the way I am used to seeing them.

Applications

There is no menu in Ubuntu 12.04 as most of us used to see it in different operating systems in the last 15 or so years, at least since Windows 95. Dash menu is the place where you search and start applications.
Dash itself has 5 tabs, which you can navigate through: recent applications and documents, full list of applications, documents, music and videos. These are called "lenses", and you can install more lenses if you wish to.

Dash menu can be called by pressing "Super-key", which on most keyboards has Windows logo.

One of the most powerful features of the Dash menu is Search. You can start typing the name of application you need, and system will show you the available ones. Unfortunately, this feature does not always work as expected. For example, search for "graph" shows irrelevant applications like Orka Screen Reader or LibreOffice Writer, but not LibreOffice Draw, which would be more logical. The same is valid for search for "internet": it does not show the Firefox browser. This is the same issue which I've seen since my very first acquaintance with Unity in Ubuntu 11.04.

Other than using the search, you can limit the list of Dash items by using filters, which are context-dependent. For example, the Applications tab uses groups like Education, Internet, Games etc as filters. You can use this in analogy to menu sections in the classical menus. There is an important difference, although, from both the classical menus and from the previous versions of Unity: clicking on several filter groups enables all of them, so you can see applications in several groups at the same time. Second click deselects the filter group.

Firefox 11 is the default browser in Ubuntu 12.04. Other than Firefox, there are Thunderbird mail client, Empathy IM client, Transmission bit-torrent application, Gwibbler social networking tool and some more in the Internet section of the Dash menu.

I have written several times on this blog that Chrome, or Chromium, is my favourite browser. That's why I tried to install it.

Installation of Google Chrome in Ubuntu 12.04 went fine from the downloaded file. But I could not locate it anywhere in the menu. I could find and start it only by navigating to /opt/Google folder.

As alternative to Google Chrome, Ubuntu Software Center allows you to install Chromium browser. This requires activation of the Universe repository. Unfortunately, Chromium did not place itself into the Dash menu in my Live session. It was still shown as "Available to download", although, it automatically placed the icon onto the Launcher. So, I was able to start it from there.

Limited LibreOffice suite is in the Office part of the Dash menu. It includes Draw, Writer, Calc, but does not include Base or Math.

GIMP is not included into Ubuntu 12.04 either. Instead, you have LibreOffice Draw and Shotwell photo manager.

As you can already see, there are many interesting applications which have been dropped from the initial distribution.

I won't list all the available and unavailable applications here. I am sure there are plenty of places where you can get the list, or, better, try Ubuntu 12.04 yourself. And, of course, nothing is impossible with usage of Ubuntu repositories or PPAs (Personal Package Archives).

Network partition

Nautilus, the default file manager in Ubuntu 12.04, includes the Browse Network section. I tried to use it to get connection to my external network drive. Unfortunately, I was not able to do so: Nautilus was not able to retrieve list of available servers.

Manual mounting using the sudo mount -t cifs... command was not successful either. I had to install smbfs package in order to be able to mount the remote Samba partition. Once smbfs was installed, mounting of external partition was like a walk in the park.

Multimedia

Ubuntu 12.04 operating system comes without any audio and video codecs on Live CD. Of course, there is an option to get them during the installation, but if you stick to Live media, then you need to download these codecs separately.

In addition to problem with codecs, I found an issue with Russian filenames. An attempt to play an MP3 file with Russian characters in the name automatically started Rythmbox, the default music player in Ubuntu 12.04. But I got an error message straight away, saying that file cannot be opened. Opening the file with Latin characters brought me another error message.

Neither MP3s not Flash videos can be played in Ubuntu 12.04
Live session

Flash is not included into the Ubuntu 12.04 distribution ISO either.

General feeling

My general feeling is that Unity, and consequently Ubuntu, grows and starts getting more and more user-friendly. In this Long-Term Support version, Canonical tried to adopt Unity for desktop and laptop users, not for touchscreen users only.

But there are still lots of places where urgent improvements are required. Apart from above mentioned issue with search, I'd like to note that placing tabs switch into the lower part of Dash menu does not help usability. There are too many mouse movements required to start an application. Taking into consideration that default tab is "Recent applications and documents", it's getting too annoying to move mouse across the monitor twice: first time to switch the tab, and then to activate search, filtering or select an application.

Finally, I'd like to mention that the general performance of Ubuntu 12.04 is far from ideal. Running it from the CD is painful. I understand that not very many people will run Ubuntu from Live CD. But there are still somebody who wants to try Unity and Ubuntu, or maybe just Linux for the first time in his own life. And such a speed is really killing any enthusiasm.

Although, I still want to call Ubuntu 12.04 "A Stairway to Heaven". Canonical is getting higher and higher on this stairway. Of course, current stair is far from the top. But it is higher than in versions 11.10 and 11.04.

What is your opinion of Ubuntu 12.04? Is it an operating system you use, or plan to use? Can you recommend it to you friends?

By the way... if you want to try Ubuntu 12.04 yourself, but can't your CD, why not order it from Buy Linux CDs site? The disk with Ubuntu, or any other Linux distribution, will be delivered right into your mailbox.

SliTaz 4.0: light and stable

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 21:00:00 +0000

When I first started this blog, I tended to write mostly about pocket-size distributions. SLAX and Puppy Linux were my first ones. And I still love them.

Even though I've branched into more heavyweight distributions since that time, pocket-size small Linux distributions are still my favourites. I like trying them out, and then writing about them for you, my readers.

SliTaz is one of those small-size distributions. I reviewed SliTaz 3.0 earlier. It unexpectedly declined to work on my relatively old laptop Compaq C300 at that time, but worked on a newer Toshiba L500-19X. It was more than a year ago. Much has changed since then. First, I no longer use my Compaq laptop, and Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 became my main guinea pig. Second, and this is more important, a new version of SliTaz was released.

So, SliTaz 4.0 was released in stable version on the 10th of April 2012.

The ISO image grew in size a little bit since last time, but remained absolutely tiny - only 35 Mb. It means that you can download and burn it to your disk in no time. In my case, I burnt the ISO image onto a DVD-RW disk. The Buy Linux CDs site does not offer SliTaz in the list, but you can request one using the contact form, if you want.

So, the disk is ready and inserted into the optical drive of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from DVD. Let’s go!

Booting up

The boot screen of SliTaz 4.0 offers several boot options, including "justX", normal booting, command line mode and so on. There is also an option in the boot menu to select the system language and the keyboard layout. I was happy to see Russian in the same list as German, Spanish, a few options of French and English. My choice, though, was for English UK. After selecting the language, I was taken to a black screen with a boot: prompt on it. It means that if you want to use one of the default boot options with a different language, you have to specify these options manually during the boot, rather than using the system menu.

Even though the distribution size was really small, the boot time was average.

At the end of the boot process, I got directly into the graphical environment. Even though documentation says I should get a login window, I have not seen it.

Linux kernel version in SliTaz 4.0 is 2.6.37, which is rather old for a distribution released mid-2012. Freshly booted operating system took... silence... drums... 54 Mb of memory! Bravo!

Desktop

I am not sure which desktop environment / Window managers SliTaz uses. Some elements are from OpenBox, some from LXDE, and the documentation talks about BusyBox. So, you probably get a mixture of all those, where OpenBox plays the main role, some LXDE elements are added, and Busybox works as a configuration framework for all those.

Anyway, what do you get on the screen? The desktop wallpaper is an abstract image in orange and gold colours. Name of the distribution is written on the wallpaper too, so you won't have any doubts. The configuration of the wallpaper can be found in the menu Applications - Preferences, although there are no alternative wallpapers in the default distribution.

The default theme for the screen elements is in brown and orange colours, which nicely works with the default wallpaper. There are a couple dozen of other colour themes available in the OpenBox configuration utility. My choice was Mikachu theme in blue colours.

There are 2 panels on the screen in the default SliTaz 4.0 system. The bottom panel features an Applications menu button in the left corner. The switch between two default desktops and a Package Manager shortcut are in the bottom right corner. The main part of that panel is taken by task manager.

The top panel has the date and time in the middle of it. The left part of the panel is contains the shortcuts area, where the default buttons are to Terminal, Tazpanel (we'll talk about it later) and Midori browser. The right part of the top panel is the notification area with the usual suspects: volume control, network manager applet, battery monitor, CPU performance monitor and the Shutdown button.

Tazpanel

Tazpanel is the central configuration centre for the SliTaz. I would compare it with Mandriva / Mageia / PCLOS Control Centre. But, unfortunately, Tazpanel is less graphically attractive. Navigation between different parts of the configuration panel is via the top menu of this application.

Each time you start the Tazpanel, you're requested for the username and password. I'd say that it is a little bit annoying to get this request in the Live system, which requires quite a lot of configuration during initial exploring. I would prefer the password to be "remembered" for a few minutes before the next request. By the way, the default administrator password in SliTaz 4.0 is root / root.

Also, from my perspective, some Tazpanel options should not be password protected at all, like Live USB and Live CD creation. Too much security is worse than lack of it. Here I agree with Linus Torvalds.

Network connection

I started my experiments with SliTaz from the configuration of the network connection. My laptop has the Intel 3945 ABG wireless network card. A click on the panel applet opened up the relevant section of Tazpanel, which was quite handy, apart for yet another root password request.

Unfortunately, my first attempts to configure network were not successful. Even though another section of Tazpanel showed iwl3945 kernel module loaded, the complete answer was in dmesg output. As you may know, kernel module is not the only part of the driver needed for the wireless card. Some additional firmware is required. Unfortunately, SliTaz 4.0 does not include the necessary firmware.

A quick search gave me the forum page with the answer. I had to download and install the firmware and then do modprobe. I decided not to download the files, but use the ones I already had on my hard drive. I simply copied firmware files from my Debian partition into the filesystem of Live run of SliTaz 4.0. The next steps were modprobe -r iwl3945 and modprobe iwl3945. After that, I was able to scan my network in the Wireless section of Tazpanel, see my network and configure the security details.

Finally, I was connected to my network and the Internet.

System language

I have mentioned earlier that Russian was one of the available languages during the system boot. That's why I hoped that configuration of Russian keyboard layout would be an easy task in SliTaz 4.0. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

There are 2 items in the Preferences menu about the keyboard map and the system language. I tried to select Russian in both. No visible effect followed. Neither keyboard layout, nor screen elements changed.

I had to revert to the command line interface tactic. The command setxkbmap -layout gb,ru -variant -option grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp & worked fine, as usual, and allowed me to switch between Russian and English layouts with Alt-Shift hotkey. The same command with ctrl_shift_toggle parameter enabled the Shift-Ctrl hotkey, though it was not exactly what I usually use (Ctrl-Shift).

So, it is the same method and same principle as in Semplice Linux or CrunchBang Linux. What do all these systems have in common? You guessed right: OpenBox.

Honestly, I was so happy to see my Russian characters on the screen that I forgot about the panel indicator. If you know the way to show the keyboard layout indicator on the panel in SliTaz, please share in comments. I think this will be useful for readers.

I need to note quickly here that touchpad taps and edge scrolling worked fine for me in SliTaZ 4.0.

Applications

SliTaz is tiny in size, but it is not so tiny in the set of included applications.

The Internet tools include Midori and Retawq browsers. Retawq is a simple text-only browser, if you've never heard about it before. Also, Transmission bit torrent, Lost IRC client, SSH Secure Box tool and some more are in the Internet section of the menu.

There is no office suite in the default SliTaz 4.0 distribution. Instead, the Office section includes PDF and Document viewers, SQLite engine and links to Wikipedia. I am not quite sure why you need these links in the Office section, though.

There are two games in SliTaz 4.0: Chess and Sudoku.

Separate menu sections are for Documentation and Development. They are full of applications, documents and links useful to those who want to help SliTaz developers, or to learn more about the system.

The Multimedia tools in SliTaz 4.0 include Alsa Volume mixer, Alsa music player, Jamendo player, audio editor and CD ripper.

The System tools in SliTaz 4.0 include GParted partition manager, PCMan file manager, Live USB and Live CD creation tools, WiFi manager, device manager and a dozen other tools. Unfortunately, too many of them require root password on startup.

The Utilities menu section includes Nano and Leafpad text editors, Sakura terminal, Burnbox CD/DVD burning tool, calculator and a few others.

Most of the applications in SliTaz are simple but still functional tools. Many of them are text-mode based, which helps in keeping the size small.

Additional software

As you see, the list of applications in SliTaz 4.0 is quite impressive. If I remind you that the whole distribution is only 35 Mb, you may wonder how the developers managed to pack so much into so such a small distribution.

But what if you wanted to add more? Tazpanel has Package Manager included for this requirement.

SliTaz uses its own repositories, but there are quite a few mirrors. You're very likely to find the one nearest you.

I've checked some applications in the list of available ones, and here are the results:

Firefox - OK
Google Chrome - OK, via get-google-chrome installer
Chromium - not OK, but there is Iron browser.
LibreOffice - OK, via get-LibreOffice installer
AbiWord - OK
Gnumeric - OK
GIMP - OK
Pidgin - OK
GNOME - OK
KDE - not OK
XFCE - OK
VLC – OK
Midnight Commander – OK
smbfs - OK

Just to check how the package manager works, I tried to install VLC player from the Tazpanel, and it worked absolutely fine for me.

Installation of Google Chrome was not that easy. I could only install the get-google-chrome package in the Tazpanel. After that, I had to revert to command line and use the command tazpkg get-install google-chrome. That command worked OK, even though it took significant time to download and process the browser and all the relevant plugins, including Flash.

After some time of using Chrome browser in my Live session of SliTaz, I noticed something strange in its behaviour. The attempt to maximize the window resulted in the window covering only about two thirds of the screen, although the system thought that the rest of the screen was still taken by the same window. Hence, clicks on [visually] one window led to actions on another. It was quite confusing. This can probably be an issue with the unstable version of Chrome, which was installed by the SliTaz package manager.

Persistence

The documentation says that SliTaz 4.0 can keep all the changes you make. The only requirements are to have USB formatted in ext3 file system, and to provide the relevant boot parameter.

I have not tried persistence during my experiments with SliTaz, so I can't comment. If you have such an experience, please share.

External partition

Mounting of my external network drive to the local filesystem of SliTaz was up to the usual task. Actually, before mounting, I had to install the smbfs package using the Tazpanel. After that, the usual command mount -t cifs... worked fine.

Folders and files with Russian names were correctly shown in PCMan file manager only when I used iocharset=utf8 parameter in the mount command. Strangely enough, PCMan did not show some of the folders on my external drive, even though Midnight Commander was able to show all of them correctly.

Multimedia

Alsa music player is the default application for MP3 files. It worked well with my sample file named in Russian. The only "but" here is that, by default, the speakers' volume is set to zero in SliTaz 4.0. I had to use Alsa Volume mixer to get any music out of my laptop's speakers.

The Alsa Volume mixer is not a graphical tool, but rather a text-mode program. I've never seen it before, so it took some time for me to understand how it works. Nice experience, anyway, as it is interesting to learn something new

Both Alsa Music player and VLC were able to play MP3 files from a remote partition straight away.

Chrome browser in SliTaz 4.0 plays flash videos

At the same time, both Midori and Chrome browsers were able to show Flash videos in SliTaz 4.0. But, I cannot guarantee that the Flash plugin is in the default distribution, because I only tried to use it after installing Chrome.

Conclusion

What is SliTaz and who can use it?

From my perspective, it can be used by people who'd like to carry an easy-to-use but still powerful Linux distribution with them "in the pocket": on LiveCD or LiveUSB. It is extremely light and quick.

This lightness has some positive and some negative sides, I should mark here. Of course, SliTaz 4.0 is extremely light on resources. All the applications start and work in a flash. But, unfortunately, you may also face an issue with hardware firmware, because SliTaz includes the bare minimum. It means that you need to add the firmware you need, which is not always possible "on the go".

Anyway, my impression of SliTaz 4.0 is very positive. I would recommend everyone interested in this kind of distributions to take a closer look at this release.

Video used in the screenshot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIwqR57N6Is

This post was edited by djohnston.

Devil Live twins of OpenBSD: the project is kicking

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 23:55:00 +0000

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about twin brothers in the world of Open Source. They are not Linux-related, but rather BSD-based operating systems: LiveCD OpenBSD and LiveUSB OpenBSD.

If you re-read those posts, you may notice that I was not happy with those operating systems at all. They were not working more often than they were working.

Since that time, I talked to the author of the project, Girish, several times. He let me know recently that the project has an updated release, published on the 10th of April 2012. I must admit that it was not the only release since my first review of LiveCD/LiveUSB OpenBSD. But the one(s) you probably missed were not worth reviewing, from my point of view.

Now, let's check what has changed recently.

As it was before, there are 3 versions of the operating system available for downloading: Full, MiniX and Minimal. I chose the Full version. It is about 1.7 Gb in archive file form. The file is hosted on Sourceforge network, so you are likely to get good downloading speed. Once the file is downloaded, you need to use an archiver to get the ISO image out of the archive. Not a big deal, to be sure.

Even though the project officially bears the title "LiveCD OpenBSD", this is not the LiveCD in normal terms, in the form we are used to seeing it. Yes, you still need a CD (or a DVD for the full version). Once the disk is burnt, you need to boot from it and then... you still need to create a LiveUSB with the actual system! Yes, you can't use the LiveCD for work. It is only a step to create a LiveUSB. I think that this is not useful for popularisation of the distribution, and this is one of the areas which the developer might well look into.
Update: the developer updated me that he's looking into improvement in this area.

The process of installation itself is simple and is fully described on the screen which is presented by the installer CD.

So, using this unusual way, the LiveUSB was created for me. Reboot. Let's go!

First of all, I tried to use it on my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. The result was negative. The message "ERR M" was the only feedback from the laptop screen. It is probably the consequence of the BIOS issue, which I always have on that laptop.

I decided to use same LiveUSB with my other laptop, HP Compaq nc6000. This time I was luckier. I managed to boot the system and log in. By the way, there is no login information on the boot screen, so you need to remember the username and password from the project site. The normal user is live with password live123. I think that placing this information somewhere on the boot screen would definitely help.

The system screen is still the same as it was in the first version I reviewed a few months ago. This is the WindowMaker windows manager. You can definitely say that it is outdated in design, and it is different in the location of user elements compared to Windows, Unity, GNOME2 and GNOME3, but on the other hand, it is extremely light and fast.

The system menu seems to be the same as it was before. The difference, though, is that some of the items in the menu are now working. Yes, you can now launch some of the applications from the menu. It was not possible before. For example, I managed to start Firefox, vi, LibreOffice Writer and Calc.

Talking about versions of the applications, there is a mixture. LibreOffice is a rather fresh version 3.4.1. Funny enough, it is still hiding under the menu item called "OpenOffice". On another side, Firefox is version 5.0, which is very old.

Unfortunately, the issues with some other applications are still in place. GIMP, xPDF, Abiword, emacs gave me the same error messages as I had during my first review. Multimedia applications like MPlayer and Xine did not respond at all.

As in previous versions, I was not able to locate configuration of network interfaces or keyboard layouts.

And finally… I was not able to shut down the system! After logging off from user live, I could not log in back as root. Entering the password did not help.

So, the project is alive. It is developing. There are definitely some positive improvements in the latest version. But there is still some work to do to polish it. I wish all the best to Girish, the author of this OS, and encourage him to continue his work.

Something unusual is coming!

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 23:04:00 +0000

You may have noticed that I was not writing much reviews of Linux distributions in the recent past.

The reason for this is that I was away for holidays.

Of course, new reviews are coming. The next one is scheduled to be published in a couple of days.

In the meantime, I’d like to excuse a little bit more. I am preparing an absolutely unique post. I’ve never done this before, and this is unlikely I’ll do it in the future.

To be precise, this won’t be a blog post. Rather, this will be an e-mail, which I will send to all my e-mail subscribers. This e-mail will not be about Linux, but still about our favourite Tux.

Puzzled? Interested? Intrigued? Baffled?

Don’t waste your time – subscribe to this blog right now. The subscription form is on your right, or just under this text. The e-mail will be sent in a week’s time, and only to those who will be in verified subscribers’ list on the 27th of April 2012.

Артем Зорин о Zorin OS - воротах в мир Linux для пользователей Windows

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:05:00 +0000

Чаще всего имя бренда – это что-то абстрактное. General Electric, FIAT, Airbus, Pepsico, RedHat – названия всех этих компаний не имеют ничего общего с именами их основателей. Тем не менее, иногда имя человека становится именем бренда. Разрешите мне представить человека, чье имя стало брендом, по крайней мере, в мире Линукса: Артем Зорин.

Посколько и я, и Артем - русские, проживающие за границей, это интервью доступно на двух языках: русском и английском.
English version of the interview with Artyom Zorin.

DarkDuck: Привет, Артем. Я думаю, что твоя фамилия более широко известна, чем ты сам, потому что ее носит популярный дистрибутив Линукса. Расскажи, пожалуйста, немного о себе.

Artyom Zorin: Меня зовут Артем Зорин. Я – студент из Дублина, Ирландия. Мои родители – русские, переехавшие из Украины в Ирландию много лет назад. Именно поэтому мое имя не похоже на обычные ирландские имена. Я начал экспериментировать и работать с Линуксом в 2008 году, и это привело меня к разработке операционной системы Zorin OS, над которой мы работаем совместно с моим братом Кириллом.

DD: Ты – генеральный директор компании, которая также носит твою фамилию. Каковы основные направления деятельности компании?

AZ: С самого начала деятельности компании в 2008 году мы постоянно занимались разработкой операционной системы Zorin OS, основанной на Ubuntu и предоставляющей знакомый, понятный интерфейс для новичков. Однако, наша компания занимается не только Линуксом. Скорее, мы – технологическая компания с сильным акцентом на Линукс.
В сферу наших интересов входит разработка продуктов для других устройств, отличных от ПК, и в будущем мы также планируем заняться обслуживанием корпоративных клиентов.

DD: Какая часть бизнеса более успешна?

AZ: В настоящее время Zorin OS – наш самый успешный продукт с более чем 2 миллионами загрузок. Основная часть их приходится на бесплатные версии. 75% роста пришлось на последние 9 месяцев, что, по моему мнению, является потрясающим показателем.

DD: Как ты пришел в мир Линукса?

AZ: Я впервые столкнулся с Ubuntu в 2008 году. Вы можете мне не поверить, но больше всего в Линуксе меня привлекли эффекты Compiz. Когда я впервые увидел их на YouTube, я был просто потрясен. В самом начале я побаивался сделать первый шаг, но после того, как мой брат установил Ubuntu на наш компьютер, мы увидели, что помимо красивых эффектов Линукс обладает множеством других преимуществ. Мы также заметили, что множество людей, приходивших из окружения Windows, считали интерфейс Ubuntu достаточно сложным для понимания. Им не хватало знакомого интерфейса. Это натолкнуло нас на идею создания дистрибутива Линукса, который бы решал данную проблему и делал переход от Windows на Linux как можно более безболезненным. Этот дистрибутив сейчас известен как Zorin OS.

DD: Сколько сейчас разработчиков в команде Zorin OS?

AZ: В настоящее время у нас работают два постоянных разработчика - я и мой брат. Нам также время от времени помогают другие программисты. Наш проект в значительной степени опирается на поддержку со стороны широкого Линукс-сообщества.

DD: Вы занимаетесь маркетингом Zorin OS?

AZ: Из-за ограниченных финансовых ресурсов мы не проводим никаких платных рекламных кампаний по продвижению Zorin OS. Поэтому мы полагаемся исключительно на отзывы пользователей и обзоры, в основном, в Интернете через такие ресурсы как Distrowatch, Lifehacker и твой блог.

DD: Ваша бизнес-модель очень похожа на Mandriva - есть бесплатная версия Zorin OS и есть платные. Кроме нее, есть еще модели Canonical с их бесплатной ОС и платной поддержкой, и RedHat с полностью коммерческим ПО и поддержкой. Почему вы решили пойти путем Mandriva?

AZ: Наш главный продукт распространяется бесплатно, так как мы хотим помочь максимально большому числу пользователей Windows перейти на Linux. К сожалению, многие пользователи Linux не осознают, что разработка такого бесплатного ПО требует значительных финансовых ресурсов, которые многие разработчики получают от сторонних компаний, спонсоров, добровольных взносов, продажи продукции и использования прочих ресурсов, как например те же Red Hat и Canonical. Так как мы студенты и не имеем собственного дохода, мы решили предложить нашим пользователям версии Premium и техническую поддержку в качестве поощрения за оказание финансовой помощи нашему проекту. Эти пожертвования, несмотря на их скромную величину, помогают нам поддерживать и развивать проект.

DD: Почему вы решили использовать Ubuntu как основу для своей ОС?

AZ: Прежде всего, в Ubuntu имеется множество удобных в использовании, «коробочных» технологий, и мы решили воспользоваться этим преимуществом для того, чтобы сделать Zorin OS максимально удобной для пользователя, так как это – наша основная цель.
Другой причиной использования Ubuntu явилось наличие в ней большого, легкодоступного набора имеющихся приложений. Пользователи Windows привыкли к огромному выбору программ, и хотят иметь то же самое в Линуксе. Так как Ubuntu – самый популярный дистрибутив Linux, большинство программ для Linux работают в этой ОС. Это может быть непосредственно программа из репозитория, или отдельный .deb пакет.
Наличие большого количества пользователей Ubuntu также обеспечивает более широкую поддержку со стороны сообщества, что является обязательным атрибутом для дистрибутива, ориентированного на новичков.
Ubuntu был естественным выбором для нас, так как мы были ранее знакомы с этой ОС. Это позволило нам выполнить более значительный объем работ по разработке ОС в более сжатые сроки.

DD: Каковы наиболее значимые функции Zorin OS, с твоей точки зрения?

AZ: Основными особенностями Zorin OS являются простота использования, знакомый интерфейс и возможность выбора графического интерфейса. Zorin OS по умолчанию имеет интерфейс, похожий на Windows 7, так как именно пользователи Windows 7 являются нашей самой большой целевой аудиторией. Тем не менее, мы не хотим оставлять пользователей других ОС без внимания, поэтому для них мы приготовили уникальный менеджер Zorin Look Changer, который позволяет пользователю выбирать интерфейс рабочего стола между Windows 7, XP и GNOME 2. В версии Premium также предусмотрены Windows Vista, Windows 2000 и Mac OS X. Мы также включаем в дистрибутив и другие наши собственные программы, такие как Zorin Browser Manager, Zorin Background Plus и Zorin Splash Screen Manager, обеспечивающие быстроту и легкость настройки системы.
Другой значимой особенностью Zorin OS является то, что это «коробочное» программное решение. Даже версия Core системы Zorin OS включает все необходимое ПО, которое может потребоваться пользователю, например LibreOffice, видео редактор, графический редактор GIMP, а также все кодеки. Все это позволяет приступать к работе сразу же после установки Zorin OS и обеспечивает плавность перехода для пользователя.

DD: Какие сильные и слабые стороны имеет Zorin OS?

AZ: Zorin OS в первую очередь ориентируется на новых пользователей Linux, большинство из которых приходят с Windows. Это дает нам хорошую стартовую позицию и делает Zorin OS своего рода “воротами в Linux для пользователей Windows”, нацеливая на аудиторию в 90% пользователей ПК. Самыми сильными сторонами Zorin OS являются знакомый пользователю интерфейс, простота использования и «коробочное» программное решение. В отличие от некоторых других дистрибутивов, которые стараются конкурировать друг с другом, переманивая друг у друга пользователей, наша цель – привлечь как можно больше людей в замечательный мир Linux извне, тем самым увеличивая сообщество пользователей настольных версий Linux.
К сожалению, ни один дистрибутив не может удовлетворить требования всех 100% пользователей Linux, и Zorin OS не является исключением. Однако, мы будем пытаться сделать Zorin OS более привлекательным и для опытных пользователей путем внедрения дополнительных функций и новшеств.

DD: Zorin OS сейчас находится примерно на 20-м месте в 6-месячном рейтинге Distrowatch. Ты считаешь это заслуженным местом, или рассчитываешь на более высокую позицию?

AZ: Я думаю, что Zorin OS демонстрирует хороший прогресс в соревновании с другими дистрибутивами, которых уже насчитывается свыше 300 на Distrowatch. Zorin OS удалось достичь такого высокого рейтинга всего за 3 года своего существования. Насколько нам известно, большинство посетителей Distrowatch – это опытные пользователи Linux, которые не любят интерфейс Windows, и поэтому в основном избегают заглядывать на нашу страничку на Distrowatch. По нашему мнению, рейтинг Distrowatch не отражает полную картину, так как большое число наших пользователей приходят к нам с других популярных ресурсов, таких как Linux .com (где мы занимаем первое место среди настольных дистрибутивов!), Lifehacker, PCWorld, Yahoo !, журнал Linux Format и многих других, которые публикуют очень позитивные обзоры Zorin OS. К сожалению, многие новички не знают о существовании Distrowatch, иначе наш рейтинг там был бы выше. Мы считаем, что цифра в 2 миллиона загрузок говорит сама за себя. Мы, конечно же, всегда нацеливаемся на более высокие показатели и стремимся быть на верхних позициях в рейтингах популярности Linux. Мы надеемся, что Zorin OS 6, которая планируется к выходу в ближайшее время, поможет нам повысить наш рейтинг на Distrowatch.

DD: Каковы дальнейшие планы развития Zorin OS? Что нового стоит ждать в следующем релизе?

AZ: Мы планируем выпустить Zorin OS 6 после года разработки, в мае 2012 года. Эта версия принесет много значительных обновлений и улучшений. К радости наших пользователей, мы не будем использовать Unity или GNOME Shell. Вместо этого, мы будем использовать нашу собственную оболочку рабочего стола Zorin Desktop, которая поможет нам предоставлять знакомый интерфейс для новичков Linux. Мы будем использовать панель AWN, что обеспечит несравнимые возможности настройки и поддержку различных вариантов внешнего вида в Zorin Look Changer. Рабочий стол в Zorin OS 6 не должен внешне сильно отличаться от предыдущих версий, но будет гораздо более функциональным! Zorin OS 6 будет использовать значительное количество внутренних элементов GNOME 3, таких, как GTK+ 3, и самое новое и лучшее ПО из мира Linux. Наша следующая версия будет основана на Ubuntu 12.04 и будет обеспечиваться долгосрочной поддержкой с предоставлением обновлений безопасности в течение 5 лет. Мы думаем, что это будет самым лучшим релизом Zorin OS за все время его существования!

DD: Будет ли новый Zorin Desktop ответвлением от какого-то заброшенного окружения рабочего стола, или будет построен на основе современного?

AZ: В действительности ядро Zorin Desktop построено на GNOME 3 Fallback mode. Zorin Desktop полностью отличается и от Unity, и от GNOME Shell, и от Linux Mint Cinnamon. Этот рабочий стол в значительно степени отличается и от GNOME 3 Fallback mode, потому что мы используем AWN в качестве панели и Compiz в качестве менеджера окон (если ваш компьютер поддерживает его. В противном случае он будет использовать Metacity). Мы также добавили наши собственные настройки и ПО для рабочего стола, например, наш популярный Zorin Look Changer, наши собственные графические элементы и прочие новшества. Это должно улучшить общее впечатление пользователя от ОС и выделить нас из толпы.

DD: Что ты можешь сказать о сообществе пользователей Zorin OS?

AZ: Наше сообщество в основном состоит из пользователей, обладающих малым опытом работы в Linux и разработки ПО. Тем не менее, это — потрясающие люди, которые дают нам множество очень полезных советов и идей для разработки новых программ и функций в будущих релизах Zorin OS. У нас также имеется растущее число опытных пользователей и модераторов, которые помогают нам вести наш форум. Наше сообщество оказывает нам огромную помощь по распространению информации о нашей системе, и именно благодаря этому мы стали столь популярными за такое короткое время. Я хотел бы воспользоваться этой возможностью, чтобы поблагодарить этих людей!

DD: Zorin Group базируется в Ирландии. Означает ли это, что количество пользователей в этой стране больше, чем в других?

AZ: Реальность выглядит совершенно иначе. Если посмотреть на нашу статистику загрузок за последние 30 дней, можно увидеть, что Ирландия находится на 75-м месте из 100. Так что у нас не такая уж большая пользовательская база на Изумрудном Острове. В действительности, в Пуэрто-Рико и Йемене пользователей больше, чем в Ирландии! В настоящее время согласно нашей статистике загрузок первые 5 строчек занимают Индия, Индонезия, Малайзия, США и Египет.

DD: Глупый вопрос, может быть, а каковы твои собственные предпочтения среди ОС, рабочих столов, приложений?

AZ: Лично я еще не встречал более удобной ОС, чем Zorin OS, так что здесь нет никаких сюрпризов.
Раньше мне нравилось пользоваться GNOME 2, но все поменялось после разработки и тестирования Zorin Desktop. Я им пользуюсь уже полгода, даже несмотря на отсутствие полностью стабильной версии. Не могу дождаться того момента, когда мы наконец выпустим его для общего пользования в следующем месяце!
Моим любимым приложением является Google Chrome. Когда я не занимаюсь разработкой Zorin OS, именно это приложение я использую больше всего. Этот браузер действительно быстр, удобен и «просто работает»! Ничего удивительного, что это – самый быстро растущий браузер. Кроме Chrome, мне очень нравятся приложения от команды Elementary, например Postler и BeatBox, даже несмотря на то, что большинство из них еще не выпущены в стабильной версии. Они стремятся быть простыми, легкими в использовании и быстрыми, то есть как раз то, что мы должны ожидать от современных технологий. Мы, несомненно, будем интегрировать многие из этих приложений в Zorin OS, когда они перейдут в стабильную фазу.

DD: Читаешь ли ты блог Linux notes from DarkDuck? Что бы ты хотел улучшить или изменить здесь?

AZ: Время от времени я читаю твой блог, когда у меня есть немного свободного времени. Твой сайт рассказывает много такого, что невозможно найти на других сайтах, и я нахожу здесь много интересного. Я думаю, что ты на своем сайте делаешь замечательную работу по пропагандированию Linux.

DD: Чем ты занимаешься, когда не сидишь за компьютером? Чем ты увлекаешься?

AZ: Мне нравится слушать музыку, особенно электронную танцевальную музыку: house, drum & bass и trance. Мой любимый музыкант - Eric Prydz.
Кроме музыки, я люблю играть в теннис, когда нахожу для этого время. Еще я люблю
заниматься фотографией.

DD: Ты много путешествуешь? Каковы твои любимые страны? Какие места ты бы хотел посетить?

AZ: Я путешествую не так уж и часто. Из тех мест, которые мне удалось посетить, мне больше всего понравилось на Тенерифе на Канарских островах. Солнечный климат здесь неповторим, и это - прекрасное место для плавания. Тем не менее, мне нравится посещать новые места и видеть что-то новое. Так как я ни разу не был за пределами Европы, есть еще куча мест, которые я бы хотел посетить.

DD:Есть ли у тебя какие-либо еще проекты, не относящиеся к Linux, о которых ты бы хотел рассказать читателям данного интервью?

AZ: В настоящее время у нас нет других проектов, не относящихся к Linux. Мы решили запустить небольшой проект в области компьютерной техники, который получил название Zorin PC. Это - ноутбук с вращающимся сенсорным экраном. На нем устанавливается Zorin OS и, по желанию, Windows в качестве параллельно установленной ОС. Мы сделали необычный, но обдуманный шаг по комплектации программного обеспечения для 3 вариантов компьютера: Home Edition, Educational Edition и Business Edition. Каждый поставляется с разным набором ПО, предназначенного для конкретных целей. Этот проект в настоящее время приостановлен, так как мы ищем партнеров и дистрибьютеров, чтобы обеспечить его максимальный успех. Это дает нам дополнительное время для шлифовки, чтобы сделать опыт работы с ноутбуком еще более неповторимым.
Глядя в будущее Zorin Group, мы планируем развиваться в более широком спектре технологий и устройств, не только ПК.

DD: Артем, спасибо за интервью. Желаю тебе всего самого наилучшего в твоем бизнесе, а также в развитии Zorin OS!

AZ: Спасибо и тебе за приглашение. Было приятно пообщаться. Желаю тебе огромного успеха в твоей работе.

Artyom Zorin on Zorin OS, the gateway to Linux for Windows users

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:55:00 +0000

Most often than not, the brand has an abstract name. General Electric, FIAT, Airbus, Pepsico, RedHat – all these companies have names which have nothing to do with names of their founders. Although, there are still some cases when person’s name becomes a name of the brand. Let me introduce a person who’s name became a brand. At least, in the Linux world. Please meet: Artyom Zorin.

Because both me and Artyom are Russians living abroad, the interview is available in both English and Russian.
Русская версия интервью с Артемом Зориным.

DarkDuck: Hello Artyom. I think your surname is more famous than you are, because a popular Linux distribution bears it. Could you please tell few words about yourself?

Artyom Zorin: My name is Artyom Zorin. I'm a student from Dublin, Ireland. My parents are ethnic Russians who moved from Ukraine to Ireland many years ago, which explains why my name doesn't sound like a normal Irish one. I have been playing around and working on Linux since 2008 and this led me onto developing the Zorin OS operating system with my brother Kyrill.

DD: You are a CEO of the company which also bears your own surname. What are the company's main areas of interest?

AZ: Ever since our company started off back in 2008 we have always been developing our Ubuntu-based operating system Zorin OS and providing easy access to Linux for new users. We, however, are not just a Linux company but rather a technology company with a strong emphasis on Linux.
We are interested in developing products for devices other than the PC and moving towards serving corporate clients in the future.

DD: Which part of the business is more successful?

AZ: Currently Zorin OS is our most successful product with more than 2 million downloads to date, mostly of our free versions. 75% of this growth has happened in just the last 9 months, which is quite staggering in my opinion.

DD: How did you come to the Linux world?

AZ: I first came across Ubuntu back in 2008. Believe it or not, what actually attracted me most to Linux was the Compiz desktop effects software which I thought was “cool” when I first saw it on YouTube. At the beginning, I was a little bit scared of making the leap, but after my brother installed Ubuntu on our computer, we started to see a lot more advantages to using Linux than simply the desktop effects. We also noticed that many people coming from a Windows environment found Ubuntu rather difficult to use as it was lacking a familiar user interface. Advanced Linux users argue that Ubuntu is simple to use and suffices for Linux beginners coming from Windows but we saw that what this user group really needed was a familiar graphical interface. This prompted us to develop a Linux distribution that resolves this issue to make the transition from Windows to Linux as smooth as possible, a distribution now known as Zorin OS.

DD: How many developers are in the Zorin OS team?

AZ: At the moment, we have two permanent developers: myself and my brother. We also have a few freelance developers who help us from time to time. Our project also relies on the support of the wider Linux community.

DD: Do you promote Zorin OS somehow?

AZ: Due to limited financial resources, we currently do not have any paid advertisement schemes for Zorin OS. Therefore we solely rely on word of mouth, mostly online through websites such as Distrowatch, Lifehacker and your own.

DD: Your business model is very similar to Mandriva: there is a free version of Zorin OS, and there are paid ones. As opposite, there are Canonical with fully free OS and paid support, and RedHat with fully commercial software and support. Why did you decide to go Mandriva route?

AZ: We offer our main software free of charge to help as many Windows users as possible to move to Linux. Unfortunately many Linux users do not realise that the development of such free software requires substantial financial resources, which some developers receive through third party support, sponsorships, donations, sale of products and use of own resources (eg. Red Hat and Canonical). As we are students and have no income, we decided to offer our Premium editions and technical support to our users to encourage them to donate to our project. These donations, although quite scarce, help us to keep our project going.

DD: Why have you decided to use Ubuntu as the base system for your own OS?

AZ: Firstly, Ubuntu contains a lot of easy-to-use technologies out-of-the-box and we wanted to take advantage of them to make Zorin OS as user-friendly as possible, as this is our goal.
Another reason for using Ubuntu was it's large and easily accessible software selection. Windows users want the largest software collection possible at their disposal since they are used to that. As Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution, most software made for Linux is easily available for it, either through the repositories or by .deb packages. The large user base of Ubuntu also amounts to a much broader landscape of available support, which is a must for a beginner-friendly distro.
Ubuntu was also a natural choice for us as we personally were more familiar with this OS so we could get more development work done in less time.

DD: What are the distinctive features of Zorin OS, from your point of view?

AZ: The killer feature of Zorin OS is definitely it's easy to use and familiar interface and GUI options. By default Zorin OS has a Windows 7-like GUI, as Windows 7 users are our biggest target audience. However we didn't want to leave other OS users out in the cold, so we catered for them by creating our unique Zorin Look Changer program which allows users to switch their desktop interface to look like Windows 7, XP and GNOME 2 as well as Windows Vista, Windows 2000 and Mac OS X in the Premium versions. We also include more of our own programs such as Zorin Browser Manager, Zorin Background Plus and Zorin Splash Screen Manager to make the customization of your system quick and easy.
Another substantial feature of Zorin OS is that it's an out-of-the-box software solution. Even the Core version of Zorin OS includes all of the essential software that users want and need such as the LibreOffice suite, a video editor, the GIMP Image Editor as well as all the media codecs. All of this makes sure that you can get to work or play straight after installing Zorin OS to your system for a smooth user experience.

DD: What are weak and strong sides of Zorin OS?

AZ: Zorin OS is obviously centred around new users to Linux, most of whom are coming from a Windows environment. This puts us in a very good position and makes Zorin OS the “gateway to Linux for Windows users”, targeting 90% of computer users. Zorin OS's strongest sides are its familiar user interface, ease of use and out-of-the-box software solution. Unlike some of the other distros which try to compete with each other, cannibalizing users off one another, our goal is to bring more people into the wonderful world of Linux, ultimately growing the Linux desktop community which is great for everyone.
Unfortunately, no single distro can cater for 100% of the Linux user base and Zorin OS is no exception. However, we will try to make Zorin OS more attractive to more experienced users by adding more features and improvements.

DD: Zorin OS is now somewhere around 20th place in the Distrowatch 6-month rating. Is it a deserved place, or do you think it should rank higher?

AZ: I believe that Zorin OS is having good progress in competition between the 300+ distros listed on Distrowatch. Zorin OS managed to reach this high ranking after only 3 years of existence. As far as we know, most Distrowatch visitors are experienced Linux users who dislike Windows-like interfaces and therefore tend to avoid our Distrowatch page. In our opinion, the Distrowatch ranking doesn't reflect the entire picture as many of our users come from such popular sources as Linux.com (where we are ranked as the number 1 desktop distro), Lifehacker, PCWorld, Yahoo!, Linux Format magazine and many others who published very positive reviews of Zorin OS. Unfortunately many newbies are not aware of Distrowatch, as otherwise our DW ranking would have been higher. We believe that the figure of 2 million downloads to date speaks for itself. We, of course, are always aiming higher and trying to be at the very top of the Linux charts. We hope that Zorin OS 6, which we plan to release soon, will help us improve our DW ranking.

DD: What are the plans of Zorin OS development? What new should we expect in the next release?

AZ: We plan to release Zorin OS 6 after a year of development in May 2012. This will bring many drastic updates and improvements. We will not be taking the Unity or GNOME Shell path, to the relief of our users. Instead, we will be using our own desktop environment called “Zorin Desktop” which will continue to deliver our promise of a familiar interface to new Linux users. We will be using AWN as our panel, which will allow for unparalleled customizability and support for our different looks in the Zorin Look Changer. The Zorin OS 6 desktop shouldn't look a lot different from previous versions, but it will be much more awesome! Zorin OS 6 will be embracing a lot of elements from the GNOME 3 software stack such as GTK+ 3 and the latest and greatest software from around the Linux world. Our next version will be based on Ubuntu 12.04 and will be an LTS release provided with 5 years of security updates. We think that it will be the best release of Zorin OS ever!

DD: Will your new Zorin Desktop be a fork of any defunct DE, or it will be built on top of existing one?

AZ: Zorin Desktop is actually based on the core technologies from the GNOME 3 Fallback mode. Zorin Desktop is totally different from the Unity, GNOME Shell and the Linux Mint Cinnamon environments. This desktop also differs radically from the GNOME 3 Fallback mode because it uses AWN as a panel and Compiz as the window manager (if your computer supports it, otherwise it will use Metacity). We have also added our own customizations and software into the desktop such as our popular Zorin Look Changer, our artwork and other improvements to enhance the overall experience and stand out from the crowd.

DD: What would you say about the Zorin OS community?

AZ: Our community is largely made up of users who have little experience in Linux and developing software. Nevertheless, they are a great bunch of people who offer us a lot of very helpful suggestions and inspiration for the development of new programs and features for future releases of Zorin OS. We also have a growing number of experienced users and knowledgable moderators who greatly help us to maintain our forum. Our community also helps out hugely by spreading the word of our project extensively and it's thanks to them that we have become so popular in such a short space of time. We cannot thank them enough!

DD: If I correctly understand, Zorin Group is based in Ireland. Does it mean that Zorin OS has more users in that country than in any other?

AZ: The reality is actually quite the opposite. As we look into our download statistics for the last 30 days, of the top 100 countries, Ireland is ranked number 75, so there isn't a huge user base here in the Emerald Isle. In fact, there are a lot more Zorin OS users in Puerto Rico and Yemen than in Ireland! At the moment, the top 5 countries in our download statistics are India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the USA and Egypt.

DD: It can be a silly question, but what are your own favourite OS, Desktop Environment, applications?

AZ: Personally, I haven't come across any OS that I find more pleasurable to use than Zorin OS, no surprises here.
GNOME 2 used to be my favourite desktop environment, however that changed after developing and testing Zorin Desktop. It has been my choice for more than half a year, even without a fully stable release. I can't wait 'till we finally release it to the public next month!
My favourite application has to be Google Chrome. When I'm not developing Zorin OS, that's the application I use most of all on the computer. It's really fast, sleek and it just works. No wonder it's the fastest growing web browser. Apart from Chrome, I am very fond of the applications created by the Elementary team such as Postler and BeatBox, even though most of them aren't fully released as stable versions. They focus on being simple, easy to use and quick, which is exactly what we should expect from technology. We will definitely be integrating many of these apps into Zorin OS when they will become stable.

DD: Do you read the blog Linux notes from DarkDuck? What would you improve or change there?

AZ: I do occasionally read your blog when I have some free time. Your website covers many topics that you don't see on other websites and I find them very interesting. I think you are doing a wonderful job spreading the word of Linux on your site.

DD: When not at computer, what are your interests?

AZ: I really enjoy listening to music, especially to EDM (Electronic Dance Music) such as house, drum & bass and trance music. My favourite musician has to be Eric Prydz.
Apart from music, I like to play tennis whenever I have the time to. I'm also quite into photography.

DD: Do you travel a lot? What are your favourite countries? Which places would you like to visit?

AZ: I don't travel that often. Of all the places I've been to, Tenerife in the Canary Islands has to be the boss of them all. The sunny climate is second to none and it's the perfect place to go swimming. Nevertheless, I love to visit new places and see new things. Since I've never been outside Europe, there's a ton of places I'd love to visit.

DD: Do you have any non-Linux projects, which you’d like to share with the readers of this interview?

At the moment we don't have any non-Linux projects. We have decided to start a venture in the hardware space called the Zorin PC. This is a rotatable touch screen laptop that runs Zorin OS and, optionally, Windows as dual boot. We have taken an unusual but thoughtful approach to the software side of the PC as we have made 3 different editions of it: the Home Edition, the Educational Edition and the Business Edition, each shipping with different software intended for the user's paticular needs. This venture is currently on hiatus as we are looking for partners and distributors so that it will be as successful as it can possibly be. This also gives us more time to tweak it even further to make the experience even more incredible.
Looking into the future of Zorin Group, we plan to branch out into the broader technology landscape with products aimed at other devices apart from the PC.

DD: Thanks for the interview! I wish all the best to your business and to Zorin OS!

AZ: Thank you very much for having me, it's been a pleasure talking to you. I wish you great success with your work.

Pre-order your own disk with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu or Lubuntu 12.04 NOW!!!

noreply@blogger.com (DarkDuck) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:01:00 +0000

With the coming release of next long-term support version of Ubuntu 12.04 just a week away, many of you already looking for downloading of your own ISO image of the system.
But many of you are not so lucky, and will need to wait longer, because you can not or do not want to create their own CDs with operating system images.
Here we are to help!
You can pre-order your own copy of Ubuntu 12.04 (or Xubuntu, or Lubuntu, or Kubuntu) right now. It means that CD with your favourite OS will be burnt to you as early as possible, and dispatched on the 26th of April, or soon after. Dispatched to anywhere in the world.
How you can get the CD? Go to http://buylinuxcds.co.uk site, purchase the Ubuntu CD from there, and in the PayPal comments state that you want version 12.04. If you want K-, L- or Xubuntu, state it also in the same comment. That's easy.

To help you even further, here is a mini-shop which you can use straight away. It supports PayPal checkout, similar to Buy Linux CDs site.

UK (2.00 GBP):

Ubuntu 12.04 pre-order (UK)
Variation

USA (6.50 USD):

Ubuntu 12.04 pre-order (USA)
Variation

Other countries (4.50 GBP):

Ubuntu 12.04 pre-order (Other countries)
Variation