IT Lure

A Picture-Happy Overview of the Upcoming Ubuntu 10.04

2010-03-07T10:16:00.002+02:00

The recently announced visual rebranding of the world's numero uno Linux distribution caused quite a bit of stir among the tech community and led to rivers of tears, both of joy and of sorrow. While some are delighted to observe the total brownlessness of Lucid, others, more nostalgic, fear that Ubuntu is losing its roots and the drop of originality that was brought by the unconventional choice of colors. And to twist the knife even further in, the window controls were moved aaaall the way to the left side, which for some, is just unbearably Mac-ish.

Yes, yes, I have to admit, there are quite a few elements that resemble Mac's interface, including the (otherwise awesome) purple wallpaper, some of the notification area icons and the Ubuntu logo which is now in grayscale, but what's wrong with that really? It's only Canonical admitting that Mac's general design guidelines are the best on the market and hey, let's just take that perfectly fine skeleton and build on it with our own identity. Yes, I would've loved to see Ubuntu come with 100% original, new design ideas, but I will surely not loathe the company for borrowing some, especially when you can't say that Lucid is a shameless ripoff of any operating system; there are still a lot of things to make it stand out of the crowd. Long story short, I DO like the new face of Ubuntu: it's fresh, it's modern, it's futureproof (we're talking LTS here, it needs to be :) ), it's dynamic, and above all, it stopped looking like a 100-year old wardrobe.

Anyway, here's the short visual tour I've compiled with some of the new things that are coming straight to your Ubuntu machines at the end of April.

The two new themes: Ambiance and Radiance

The installer now automatically detects your location. No more pixel hunting weeee :)

A really nice orange loading bar

The new "Featured" category in Ubuntu Software Center

Yes, it's here, folks! Yahoo! Search will now accompany your first instance of Firefox

Adobe has its own little special place within the Ubuntu Software Center

Gwibber is now included by default and will handle most of your social "needs"

The Nouveau driver is activated, NVIDIA's proprietary one is waiting to be unleashed

Users will be able to purchase music straight from Rhythmbox


The resizing rectangle has quite an inspired look

The new chat theme makes Empathy look less boring

Simple Scan replaced XSane

The separate "Social" area

Finally! An easy to use video editor is available out of the box

The newly included virtual keyboard is easy to use and works perfectly

The new volume control applet gives quick access to the Sound Preferences

The new wallpaper in all its glory!

Distro Hoppin`: Igelle 1.0.0

2010-02-28T22:53:00.000+02:00

Hey, people! Welcome to a brand new installment of the Distro Hoppin` series! I bet you've been waiting for this a long time! Actually I KNOW you've been waiting for this a long time. Not because you were anxiously craving for my writing or anything, but because it's been a friggin` long time since the last hop. Be ashamed of yourself, Danny. Promising to write a post more often than once in a blue moon and going ahead to extend that period to once in an ice age... Tsk, tsk, tsk. OK, insert puppy eyes here and let's move on. I DON'T NEED YOUR FORGIVENESS!

So, what I've got here is a Linux distribution that is based on... Erm... Eh, let me check... just a minute... Erm. It's based on NOTHING! Yes, peeps, you've heard me! Igelle stands proud on its own two feet (or whatever many feet a Linux distro should have) and presents itself as "the world's most flexible operatings system". It comes not only as the desktop version I'm looking at today, but also as an OS for Mobile Devices, Servers and Embedded Systems.

The project's website is pretty darn good organized and offers plenty of information as well as comprehensive documentation and community forums. The logo has a cartoonish feel to it, but looks very nice in its lively orange coat. I'm not sure where the name Igelle comes from, but hey, it's a name.

Having recently reached the venerable 1.0.0 version, what better time to take it for a spin? Igelle is only available as a 32-bit Live CD so there wasn't much to linger upon when I clicked the download button. As the system was fresh out of the distro oven, it took me quite a few retries to get through to their servers and grab the thing by one leg and hold on for dear life! Why wasn't there a torrent available? It's so easy and so much faster once a few seeds get it. Oh well, maybe next time! The whole ISO is less than 600 MBs, in case you were wondering.

My arsenist optical unit gladly accepted my burn command and I was soon restarting the computer with Igelle inside. Unfortunately, Igelle and my machine had a quick fight while loading and decided to not talk to eachother anymore. All I was left with was Igelle's cursor. The desktop would not show at all. Despair!

As I really wanted to see what this system was all about, I pried open my System Tools in Ubuntu and clicked on Sun VirtualBox, which was having some spider web problems due to the ignorance I have shown to it lately. Created a new machine, gave it 1024 MBs of RAM and on I went. This time, Igelle loaded flawlessly in a really short amount of time. Obviously, the experience is not anywhere near the same as running it on a real PC, so I won't comment more on speed, responsiveness, etc.

The Live environment behaved great, but I wanted to see how the installer works so I double clicked the "Install Igelle" icon on the Desktop. As the VBOX HDD was empty, installing was fully automatic and it was complete in 1 (ONE) MINUTE. Obviously, the CD read speed was a non-issue in this virtual scenario, so that must have helped. But still! ONE MINUTE. The first boot brought me to a config screen for setting up the user, timezone and all that jazz. Once again, I had to restart and so I did.

Half a minute passed and I was automatically logged in with the previously created user. The Esther desktop (that's what the DE is called) looks really really nice, starting with the wood-like wallpaper and ending with the original layout. There are quite a few icons already present on the desktop, but they are certainly not useless: My Documents, Add and Remove Applications, All Applications, Help and Documentation, Support Forums, Internet Browser and Visit the Igelle Website. On the top, a transparent panel hosts the Igelle main menu, a quick window switcher, the menus for the active window (like we see in Apple's Mac OS), and your regular tray icons: network manager, volume control, time/date)

The bottom part of the screen looks empty at first sight, but moving the pointer in that area will reveal an animated dock with some more program launchers. Sadly, the icons are kind of low-res, so as you hover the mouse over them, the zoom effect that was applied makes them look pixelated.

All the menus benefit from really nice animations and transparencies, all without any video drivers installed, which reminds me a bit of Enlightenment. You can rectangle-select multiple icons, you can create new folders, all the basic functionalities are there also.

Moving right along, we'll talk a bit about the default application suite that comes with Igelle. And number one on this list has to be the web browser, cause besides air, water and food, geeks need the Internet to survive. Actually, I'm not so sure about those first three... Anyway folks, let me tell you that Igelle comes with a browser that looks very much like Epiphany, the Webkit version, except it's not branded in any way. It's called Web Browser. Yep, just like naming your dog, Dog. But that's totally unimportant. Webpages load fast, there is tab support, zooming features, all the goodies. On the downside, some fonts look reaaaally tiny and/or horribly rendered (though this could be related to the low, 1024x768 resolution of the virtual machine hmm).

For a work or home office environment, there isn't much available by default: Osmo, the personal organizer, a text editor in the form of Gedit, a calculator and that's about it.

Fortunately, Igelle also has its own little repository. And when I say little, I mean little; just a few seconds of scrolling and you're at the bottom of the list. Happily, some of the most popular programs are there: Wine, Transmission, OpenOffice, Pidgin, PiTiVi video editor or Firefox.

As for multimedia handling, Igelle, in its untouched, default form, sucks. Copyright issues prevented the developers to enable playback of certain formats out of the box. But the Application Manager hosted the Gstreamer extra plugins pack which promised to save me from boringness (boredom sounds too correct and I feel a bit rebelish tonight! ARRRR). But it didn't. Or so I thought! Because it did! Confused yet? Ok, installing the package alone does nothing to help the poor media player recognize those damned formats, as there is a little extra step to be done, which I missed the first time, because I haven't read the whole description of the package in which that extra step was explained. It's not hard, it's one simple command that you have to type in the terminal and BAM!, you can enjoy your movies.

As I am not much of a cinematography consumer, most of my favorite movies usually end in about 10 minutes and are hosted on a little site called YouTube, not sure if you've heard of it. What these movies run on though is something that is not included in the Gstreamer extra plugins pack. Yep, it's Adobe's Flash platform. And does Igelle come with Flash support? NO! Oh. And is there a quick way to get Flash through its Application Manager? NO! Well, it's time to get the good clothes out of the closet cause we're heading to the Forums, people. The Forum is not a big place, with only a few threads open and getting to the discussion about proprietary stuff is quick. And so I found out how to install my beloved Flash (actually I hate it, but as long as YouTube runs on it, I kinda have to love it). Again, two simple commands that you can copy and paste from the forum and you're done.

There is also some documentation on how to create packages for Igelle, but I think I'm going to skip that for now.

Well, well, well, Igelle. I just have a feeling this project will develop into something nice as time goes by. It's kinda crude in its current form, but hey, it's built from scratch. If you do try out Igelle, don't be too harsh, remember that creating something out of almost nothing is not that easy. Hopefully the next version will work on my real machine and I will be able to provide more accurate feedback. Still, Igelle was quite fun to explore. It felt like I have discovered a new island after months of hopeless wandering... Thanks for reading and I wish you have the most awesome day ever in your entire life ever. EVER. Happy hoppin`!

Download linky!

Yahoo Search + Ubuntu = Yahoo Messenger for Linux?

2010-02-03T12:50:00.006+02:00

Rather than bashing the hell out of Canonical for its evil, evil attempt to make more money (SHOCKING, I know!), and given my foolish optimism that Mother Nature threw up on me, I prefer to look at the full half of this whole shenanigan (this word is AWESOME btw) glass thing. (the whole shenanigan, in case you are not up-to-date with the news, is that Yahoo will now be the default web search engine in Ubuntu, replacing the unarguably superior Google).

I have been using Yahoo's web services pretty much my entire online life, be it e-mail, Messenger or even GeoCities (GASP!) and I admire the company for what it's done thus far. Unfortunately, my admiration level dropped down a whole lot since I've began my e-journey through Linux. How come, you ask? Well, first of all, Y!Mail still warns me that my OS is unsupported. Seriously now? I mean it works perfectly fine on Linux, just as good as it works on Windows, so why pop that rude message? Rather than trying to officially "support" this exponentially-growing platform, they prefer to absolve themselves from any responsibility and kick you all the way back to Windows.

But! That's certainly not my biggest problem with Yahoo, as that is a one-time message and, in the end, Y!Mail works great. The no.1 pet peeve has to be dealing with Yahoo Messenger. Being the most popular IM service in Romania, sure enough, all my friends are there, so, doh, I connect to it quite a lot. Now, can someone please explain me WHY isn't there a Linux client? I mean there is a truly ancient one (collector's piece, heed my word!) that's still being downloaded like crazy by new Linux users only to find out that it's a worthless piece of.... code, but that's it. Happily, there are some truly awesome folks in the developer community that maintain and constantly improve projects like Pidgin, Empathy, Kopette, Konversation to help Linux users connect to their favorite IM services.

Of course, these are all unofficial apps, and every time Yahoo turns a knob, all sorts of problems arise: buggy file transfers, buddy list issues, or even no connection at all.

What we need is an official Yahoo Messenger client and maybe, just maybe, through this deal with Canonical, Yahoo will start noticing the little people of Linuxland and provide us with one. And don't think that this will only benefit us, as the ads they would serve through their application are sure to be adding up pretty nicely.

Yahoo has all the resources in the world to make this happen. Look at Skype. How come they were able to create such a wonderful client for Linux? Eh... it's purely a matter of actually wanting to do something. At worst, if they absolutely refuse to create a client, they could collaborate with the Pidgin developers to make the interoperability as smooth as possible.

Enough babbling! Here's to Yahoo Messenger for Linux!

Distro Hoppin`: Zorin OS 2.0

2010-01-02T22:53:00.004+02:00

We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Chr... what? The holidays are over? Oh... well. Awkward...

:D Joke aside, I really hope all of you have an AMAZING, EXTRAORDINARY, SPECTACULAR 2010. As late as my wishes are, they are not alone! They come with a brand new Distro Hoppin` episode in which I will take a look at Zorin OS 2.0, which was born on the very first day of 2010. But before I begin, I have to warn you that this is an Ubuntu-based distro and I know that there are a lot of... "people" that hold a grudge against the "U word" and anything related to it. So, shoo, shoo! :)

Test machine specs:

Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GhZ
2 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX5500 with 256 NVRAM
Samsung WriteMaster DVD-RW

Zorin OS comes in a beautifully packaged ~1.4 GB ISO file for both the 32 and 64 bit architectures. I, of course, am using a 32-bit processor (not for long though ohboyohboyohboy) so I got the corresponding image. The live environment booted in about 2 minutes with a rather unprofessional looking logo flashing in the middle of the screen. I wasted no time and installed the system onto my battered HDD. The process is identical to Ubuntu's, except the feature slideshow part, which is understandable, given the fact that Zorin OS looks quite different from Karmic.

As I began to wander through the menus and open all kinds of folders, I couldn't miss the fact that Zorin OS borrows quite a few things from its proprietary distant cousins. The thick bar that occupies the bottom part of the screen was made to look like Windows 7's and not only does it look like it, but it also shares some of its functionality. By default, there are three launchers in there: Firefox, Evolution and Rhythmbox. When opening Firefox, the icon gets a rectangle around it so you know that the application is open. If you want to open another instance, you have to right click the icon and select Launch Application. When you have more than one open, the number of instances will be shown next to the icon and you simply have to hover the pointer over the icon, and select the window you want from the pop-up.

Even the "Start menu" looks like Windows, with the user avatar up top and elements like the search bar and "recent items" reminding me of Vista or 7. But the crisp shades of blue and the elegant icon theme departs Zorin from the Windows land and brings it closer to Mac OSX.

I really used to hate when Linux distros tried to steal the looks and/or functionality of other OSes, but, at the end of the day, many people that come from a life with Windows, need at least some familiarity. I am the complete opposite and I will always choose something that's 180 degrees from anything I know. But hey, for me, computers and software are more than just tools. Aaaanyway, the idea is that I won't try to judge Zorin for these aspects.

The desktop provides a pleasant look with the calm blue wallpaper and the ABSOLUTELY HUGE "Computer" icon sitting on top of the Home folder and the Trash. Unfortunately there was no sign of a desktop switcher. I mean, I understand copying features, but why remove perfectly good, authentic Linux ones? Oh well. You can always add the icon yourself, but it should've been there!

No Ubuntu-based system is complete without the proper video drivers installed, especially when that OS comes with its own set of customized effects that will impress your friends and get the ladies line up at your doorstep. Unfortunately, right after installing Zorin, it surprisingly couldn't find my graphics card. But, a restart later, everything was AOK. Speaking of restarts, Zorin boots fast enough to not have time for a cup of biscuittea (that's what you get when biscuits melt in your tea! biscuittea!)

A really good thing about Zorin is that it comes fully updated with whatever Ubuntu 9.10 pushed since its launch in October, so you won't waste any time looking at a loading bar. Well, at least you would've had some more biscuittea left!

Going back to the looks of Zorin, the developers included a great selection of wallpapers and added some nice transparencies here and there. Oh, before I leave this section, there is a nasty glitch happening when dragging a window between the two workspaces. GUI chaos I tell you, GUI chaos!

But what does Zorin bring new compared to a regular Ubuntu install, besides the look? Well, quite a few things, beginning with out of the box MP3 support, pre-installed Flash, a working Java platform and ending with a couple of useful applications to make your Linux easier to operate.

Wine and PlayOnLinux will help you run the Windows software you can't live without and UbuntuTweak lets you customize Zorin in almost any way you want. There is also "Back in Time", a powerful, easy to use backup application that I highly recommend using. Backup should really become like breathing to us people living inside a computer more and more each day.

Cheese is also available by default and it was a great way to see if Zorin can pick up my Alcatel OT-800's camera as a webcam, which it did, happily. :) The HP Deskjet 3940 printer was also detected and is working fine and dandy.

Kino lets you edit your movies and Firefox is used to browse the ever-growing Internets. :) Oh, the developers made available more than one versions of Zorin OS, for different needs: a Multimedia one which includes 40+ sound and video apps, a Gaming one with A LOT of open source games and an Educational one with, you guessed, edu software! Thumbs up for that. Thumbs down for the fact that you actually have to pay for them.

I would've liked to see Pidgin instead of Empathy in the Internet category, but it seems Zorin followed Ubuntu in that respect. Oh well. There's always the Ubuntu Software Center waiting for me to install whatever my heart desires.

Oh, and talking about Empathy I noticed there are no notifications appearing when I receive IMs. I really found those useful, as I didn't have to open the chat window for every unimportant message. The weird part is that Rhythmbox or the volume control are "blessed" with the nifty pop-ups.

For people with disabilities, Zorin OS 2.0 comes with the accesibility applet starting at boot, so it's easy to turn on various helping features.

The Control Center offers a great place to change various aspects of the system, including turning on the firewall, creating a remaster of a modified Live CD, or mess with the boot process (switching resolutions, using a different usplash theme, etc.).

OpenOffice couldn't have been left out, so if you were worried, stop being worried, it's there. Relax. Jeez.

Zorin went so far with the customization as they also created their own sound theme. I like small details like that.

ZZZZZOOORIIIIN

Well, what can I say... Zorin OS 2.0 is a good distribution, as Frankesteinish as it is. It certainly won't let you down. You get the solid Ubuntu base complete with out of the box extended multimedia functionality and some smashing good looks. As for me, I will still be out there hopping, looking for other ambitious Linux projects and sharing my views with THE WHOLE WORLD. Cause yes, the whole world reads IT Lure. No kidding. Just take my word for it. Ok, bye.

Download Zorin OS 2.0 for 32-bit and 64-bit.

Create Your Own GNOME Background Slideshow

2009-11-24T16:02:00.004+02:00

One of the cool new features in the fresh GNOME 2.28 desktop environment is the ability to use a set of multiple images as your background, images that will transition between eachother at set timeframes. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there's not an easy, in plain view, way of creating your own sets, with your own pictures.

So, I tried to find out how they were created by going to their source directory, which is /usr/share/backgrounds. All the wallpapers were there, but the Cosmos set had a separate directory, as I was expecting. Inside are, obviously, all the pictures that will loop on your desktop once you activate the set, but the key piece of our little puzzle has to be the background-1.xml file. Before we begin editing it we need to operate as root within the folder. To do that, simply open a Terminal, type sudo nautilus, enter your password and a new folder window called root will pop up in a few moments.

Now click on "File System" on the left, navigate to the /usr/share/backgrounds directory and create a new folder. Don't forget to name it according to whatever theme your pictures might have, in my case, "jewel". Proceed inside the folder (sounds fancy, right? :D ) and leave the window open as it is.

The next step is to select the pictures that you want included in the set and copy them. You don't need to open another root nautilus, simply navigate to your pictures directory as you normally do, select the files and copy them. Go back to the administrator-ran "jewel" directory and paste those babies in there.

What's missing now is the xml file to tell GNOME how to handle the images. A bit of a disclaimer first: I know NOTHING about programming, advanced web design or any other thing that has to do with coding. With that out of the way, it's obvious that I stole the background-1.xml file from the "cosmos" folder that was already in there. Go up a level, copy it, go back to your folder, paste it, and rename it to, say... background-2! Thumbs up! :D

What you need to do next is open the file in your favorite text editor. I use gedit, so right click on the file, select "open with" and gedit. I didn't want to mess with the transition speed settings, so it's best to leave them untouched. What we need to change are only the paths to the images. There are two sections for each image: static and transition. In the first static section, replace the path right next to with the path to your first image. To easily copy a path, right click on an image, go to Properties and there it is, in the Location field. You will only need to replace the filename manually. In my case, I replaced this line: /usr/share/backgrounds/cosmos/cloud.jpg with this line: /usr/share/backgrounds/jewel/jewel-01.JPG. In the transition section, you can see that there are two paths, one that leads to the first image and the other that leads to the next image in the set. This part instructs GNOME to transition between the first and the second image in your set. The next section is again, a static one, in which you need to type the path to the second image. The following, "transition" section needs the paths to the second and third image. Hope you're still with me here! :) Now go on replacing the paths until you run out of images. Be careful though, the last section, before the line, has to be a transition between the last image in your set and the FIRST one, so it can loop. You can then remove the extra sections. Sections begin with either or and end with or .

Very important! Be very careful with lower, upper-case characters. Be sure to write the filenames exactly as they are in your folder. I was quite dazzled on why my xml won't work until I realized my images had a .JPG extenstion instead of .jpg. :)

Now save the XML file, right click on your desktop, go to "Change desktop background" and simply drag the XML file inside the Background window. You can also click the "Add" button, select "All files" right above the "Open" button and navigate to the XML file and open it.

A picture is worth 1000 words, right? Well, in this case, the following 15 FPS video is worth 3975000 words! So, instead of having a picture for every step described above, here's a video! I don't even know why I bothered to write the whole thing. Oh well... :) Enjoy!

So... that's pretty much it, folks! Have a great day and come back! I will try to post more than one article/light year from now on. :)

UPDATE 08.12.2009

Ah... the beauty of Linux... I was almost certain that there would be an easier way to flip through a bunch of wallpapers in GNOME. How right I was. The awesome Linux Journal's Shawn Powers posted a "Tech Tip of the Day" showing off a program called Drapes that does just that. So, without further ado, here's the video:

Quick Tip: Update Shortcuts in Ubuntu's Main Menu

2009-10-25T10:33:00.001+02:00

Installing and running most applications in Ubuntu is a piece of cake, no doubt about it, but sometimes, some programs refuse to appear in the Applications menu without you having to restart the session (logging out and back in). Such is the case for Sun's awesome VirtualBox virtualization software. Today I will present you with a relatively quick way to make it appear in the menu without the session restart hassle. There are probably other (better) ways to do this, but it's what I use. Don't shoot me if it's not the best approach. :)

So, after you have installed VirtualBox, go to System --> Preferences --> Main Menu, make sure the "Applications" entry is expanded (click on the little arrow on its left if it's not), go to the "System Tools" menu and there you'll see VirtualBox with a checkmark next to it. Now simply uncheck it, wait a few seconds, and check it back again and voila, you now have the extra "System Tools" entry in the Main Menu, hosting Sun's VirtualBox.

As for some of you words are becoming obsolete, here's a video showing the above steps:

Thanks for tuning in, have a great day!

Tasks and To-Dos with Glista 0.4

2009-10-16T22:02:00.006+03:00

If the memory of humans could be measured in removable media and the best would be a BluRay disc, mine would be somewhere around a floppy. Needless to say, I use my phone's reminder function a lot, especially for important stuff with set deadlines. For other "things-to-do-sometime-in-the-future" I want to use a Task manager application that is as simple as possible. I don't want to set alarms, I don't want to receive an email three days before the cat's litter box is empty, I just want a window in which I can type stuff to do and then "check" them once they're done. As I wasn't really *craving* or in dire need of such software, I haven't actually dug up the web in search of one, so I simply stumbled upon Glista while browsing through the latest deb packages on getdeb.net.

I do hope you have a solid broadband Internet connection, as Glista comes in a whooping 37.8 (almost 38!!) KB .deb package for Ubuntu users. For Gentoo, you can get the ebuild package and, for any other distros, the 134 KB source package is available and ready to be compiled. The size of it alone was a strong indication that this was what I wanted.

Once installed, it found a comfy place inside the "Office" category also bringing along a nifty looking icon. After you launch it, Glista will be "kept alive" through a system tray icon, so clicking X on the main window won't shut it down completely. The interface is dead simple: four buttons on top, the main section in which your tasks will be displayed and a text-entry field at the bottom, followed by a "plus" sign. To save a task, type it in the field, click the plus and BAM! it's there. Quick and easy.

All the tasks are alphabetically arranged, so you'll find the ones you need quite rapidly. I wish though, that there was an option to arrange them by date. Once you complete a task and place a checkmark in the box on the right, the text will become strikeout and the item will move at the bottom of the list. To delete an item, select it and press the big red button (I love big red buttons). All the done tasks can be easily removed with the broom icon.

Sometimes, a couple of words won't be enough and some tasks require more in-depth explanations. For that purpose, Glista allows you to add notes to your tasks by clicking the first icon on top (the clipboard). An extra, larger, text field will appear to let you type in whatever you like. Oh, URLs will automatically be highlighted for easy opening, so that's nice. When you're done, just click the x at the bottom of the text field and it's attached. To view a note, double click on the clipboard icon that appears next to each task that has such extra info.

If you tend to create a lot of new tasks, a bit more organizing is needed, and placing tasks in categories is the first step towards that. Glista keeps it simple: if you want to create a category, go to the add task text field, type it in, place a colon and then type the actual task. Example: "Groceries: Peanut butter jelly!", in which case "Groceries" will become a new category, and "Peanut butter jelly!" will be a task inside that category. So every time you begin a new task with "Groceries:" that task will be added to the Groceries category.

Well, that's pretty much it. What did you expect? 3000 words for a 37 KB app? Jeeeez. :) Anyway, if you want a truly BASIC (keep that in mind) task application, use Glista. If, otherwise, you need pop-ups and reminders and a monkey tapping on your head when you need to renew your car insurance, look elsewhere. I hope you found the article helpful (or at least enjoyable) and I wish you an awesome morning/afternoon/evening/night!

Download Glista from the official homepage, or get the deb package from getdeb.

Distro Hoppin`: PCLinuxOS 2009.2

2009-09-26T16:38:00.002+03:00

I know, I know, it's been a while since the latest release of PCLOS, but I didn't have the chance to test it up until now. Did I enjoy it? Will it find a permanent place in my CD Wallet-of-Fame? Embark on this new epic edition of Distro Hoppin' and find out!

PCLOS 2009.2 is shipped to you as a 690 MB ISO via worldwide servers, ready to be burnt on a single CD. The main edition comes with the not-so-recent-but-oh-so-responsive KDE 3.5.10 so I went with that. The Live environment booted in about 1 minute and 30 seconds - a decent wait - and, happily, the resolution was set at my monitor's native: 1440x900. I immediately reached for the "Install" shortcut on the Desktop and, a few moments later, I was asked to remove any unused video drivers (PCLOS comes with out-of-the-box support for a bunch of GPUs), an automated process once you accept. The rest of the installation is identical to Mandriva's, meaning you won't have any trouble going through the steps. It took about 15 to 20 minutes to get PCLOS on my HDD, after which I restarted the system, removed the disc and chose to boot the new system from the beautifully designed GRUB. Before taking the plunge, have a look at the Crash Test Dummy I call computer.

Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GhZ
2 GB of RAM
NVIDIA GeForce FX5200 with 128 NVRAM
Samsung WriteMaster DVD-RW

The desktop presents itself with an elegant, out-of-your-way wallpaper and a single, thick panel on the bottom. There are initially six shortcuts icons on that panel: the Main Menu, Home, Control Center, Administration Center, Synaptic Package Manager and Firefox. Next to those, workspace selection, the application switcher and the notification area, featuring a nice, easy-readable digital clock + calendar, the Klipper clipboard tool, volume control, network manager and a nifty little arrow that allows you to pull the whole panel off the screen in case you ever need more vertical space.

The theme itself looks good enough, what I don't like is the Vista-like window control buttons. They are nice and all, but come on, why copy? Anyway, that's not a reason to diss PCLOS, so let's carry on, shall we? Who would've thought that KDE 3.5.10 will still be used so late after the 4 series was released... But here it is, boldly setting a solid bridge between the user and the OS. The sheer speed of it, the responsiveness and stability still manages to surpass KDE 4.3.0, at least on older machines.

One of the first things I've tried was my multimedia keys on the very basic (cheap) A4Tech KL-23 keyboard that I have. I was so sure they would work, but my certainty was shattered when realizing the harsh truth: they DON'T work. I've tried configuring the keyboard shortcuts but PCLOS wouldn't want to pick the signals from the keys. I did a bit of digging with the help of my good friend, Google, and stumbled upon this post from Yet Another Linux Blog. (). So I opened Synaptic, looked for KeyTouch and there it was. Once installed, I had to choose the keyboard model and lo and behold, the (approximately) exact same model was in the list! Yuppi! Still, I could only use Play/Pause, Next and Previous, the volume keys were still dead. Fortunately I found a plugin for controlling KMix, downloaded it, expanded the archive, ran the "make" command and imported the .so file into KeyTouch, allowing me to configure the volume keys the way I wanted. Certainly not an out-of-the-box experience, but it wasn't too hard to figure out either.

Speaking of sound and music, the version of Amarok included is 1.4.10. As I am more of a Rhythmbox fan, I fired up Synaptic yet again and was amazed to see the LATEST version of Rhythmbox (0.12.5) available. But, upon downloading the packages, a few errors led me to think there was a problem with the server hosting the repositories, so I went into Synaptic's settings and chose another one from the large stack. Sure enough, everything returned to normal after that. Seeing such an up-to-date application, I wondered what a full system update would do, as Firefox was a bit lagging behind. As expected, there was a large quantity of updates waiting, so half an hour later it was done. And, again, total satisfaction as I launched the brand new Firefox 3.5.3 with all its goodies.

Kopete did a pretty good job at handling my Yahoo account but I was tired of seeing the old version notification from Yahoo whenever I would connect, so I did yet another search for my good ol' friend, Pidgin. Bam! another pleasant surprise: Pidgin 2.6.2. I was starting to really like this distro.

Another application that I use a LOT is Dropbox (awesome online storage service with sync and share capabilities), but I knew that support for KDE was problematic. Fortunately, before trying out the complicated tutorials around the web, I remembered seeing something about Dropbox on the PCLOS homepage. What? Dropbox available in the repositories? You HAVE to be kidding. Nope, they were not. I installed Dropbox with just a few mouse clicks and the app got its entry in the Internet --> Remote Access category. Nice!

Among the bookmarks set by the team in Firefox, one especially caught my attention: App Store. Hmm... sounds interesting. This place allows you to easily install different programs through a nifty little feature recently implemented in PCLOS: apt-url. Sure, the "store" is still rather empty but it works as advertised. Click Install, type in the root password and let Click2Install do the rest.

One of the icons that are present on the Desktop is a folder called "Utilities", that contains a handful of useful... err utilities. :) One can add various locales to the system, create Live Remasters, install PCLOS on an USB drive, repair the bootloader, install the latest OpenOffice.org suite (you have Abiword on the default installation), etc.; overall, a great collection designed to ease some of the tasks that need to be performed on a fresh install. Flash and Java come pre-installed for a complete WWW experience, while MP3s and popular video formats will also play just fine, no extra work involved.

My Canon A550 digital camera was picked up by DigiKam and, though the first few times I couldn't access the pictures on it, once the system was fully updated, it was all working fine. The HP Deskjet 3845 printer is also fully functional (within the limitations that seem to come with every Linux OS) and the HP 2100C scanner scans flawlessly with the help of Xsane. Even the Huawei 3G modem was detected by PCLOS. For a bit of a more interactive fun, PCLOS has a lot of small, casual games but you can also look for and install some of the "big" titles like OpenArena, which worked great on my low-end graphics card.

Final say

I've always felt that PCLOS was receiving too much hype for what it was worth, but man was I mistaken. I love living on the bleeding-edge of software and PCLinuxOS 2009.2 certainly caters to that. This distro deserves its own CD-R. :)

Pick a mirror and download PCLinuxOS 2009.2 from here.

Distro Hoppin`: moonOS 3

2009-09-13T21:40:00.004+03:00

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie... Ah, I love that song. What I also love are Linux distributions that try to make computing a bit less serious and add a bit more “life” into it. moonOS, that recently reached version 3, is one of those distros that can light up your office days. Based on the latest version of Ubuntu (Jaunty Jackalope), moonOS 3 stands up from the crowd by using the artful Enlightenment desktop environment. Ready to download in a 691 MB Live ISO, moonOS 3 can also be taken for a spin straight from the CD without messing your partitions setup. If you do like it and decide it's deserving of your precious GBs, you are, of course, able to permanently install it.

But first, let me introduce you to the specifications of the beast that is my PC. :)

Pentium 4 @ 2.4 GhZ
2 GB of RAM
Asus ATI AH3450 with 512 VRAM AGP
Samsung WriteMaster DVD-RW

Booting the Live environment is quite fast, no complaints there. But being the serious Distro Hopper that I am, I obviously chose to first install moonOS 3 to the HDD and then dive into the experience. Either you used Ubuntu before or you didn't, the installer is super easy and straight-forward. A few steps and you're done, regardless if you choose to use all the space on the HDD or decide to put moonOS alongside other OSes.

Once you are past the pretty bootsplash design, you get to the gorgeous and functional login screen, that unlike Ubuntu's, you can simply click on your username inside a list on the left and only type in your password. But it's quite possible that you checked the autologin box during install, in which case you won't see that screen at all and start straight from the desktop. Well, not exactly, cause the first time you boot moonOS, the Assistant will come up, asking a few questions such as whether you want to enable a root account or if you want “fortunes” inside the terminal.

A few seconds later, Enlightenment loads up and you're ready to explore! The wallpaper is an absolute pleasure to look at. With floral motifs, wavy lines and optimistic greens, your eyes will love it. On the top left of the screen, you'll find a “module” containing three huge icons (Home, Root and Desktop - you'll find the Install to HDD shortcut here) on top of an overview of all the partitions, mounted or not. The three icons are very useful, as Enlightenment, by default, won't let you place any files on the “real” desktop. Right-clicking will open a list with favorite applications, while the left click gives you access to a bunch of app and configuration menus. On the bottom of the screen, a panel (or shelf) allows you to switch between the four workspaces, access the main menu, check the time, increase/decrease the volume or switch between open applications. The right-hand side is occupied by a “dock-like” panel hosting app shortcuts, a nifty calendar, the battery meter and the Trash. It would've been nice if moonOS could actually detect whether you're using a laptop and display that battery meter in those cases only, as it is pretty useless to me. Of course, a right click + remove this gadget easily takes care of that. :) Like all the menus in the system, the dock is nicely animated as you hover the pointer over the shortcuts.

But, as I was opening different applications, I noticed that there are some serious graphical glitches. That's what I get for buying an ATI card. I deserve this! To my defense, this was the best I could get for my ancient AGP slot, so don't judge me too hard. Anyway, at least there are official drivers available for Linux, so I grabbed them, installed them and restarted the computer. Thank God (or any other deity), everything was working fine after that. Well, almost everything... Let me elaborate on that. This “HD” capable graphics card also has the ability to stream sound through the HDMI cable. Problem is, the drivers package also includes sound drivers so, somehow, they messed up the perfectly working on-motherboard Realtek sound device. The result? Stutter and high CPU usage whenever I was trying to listen to a song or watch a YouTube video. And that's not a moonOS issue, mind you, it affects all other distributions on which I have installed the proprietary driver. But, fortunately, digging on the Internet led me to a solution: blacklisting the ATI sound device; all seems to be in perfect order now. Phew!

Enlightenment is a very good desktop environment, but I do have some grievances with the default configuration. First of all, the focus follows the mouse, so if you have two windows open, like an OpenOffice document and an IM window, and the document is on top, moving the pointer above the IM window will “channel” the keyboard input to that. You might find yourself passionately writing a hateful email to your imaginary friend, knock the pointer to the conference you're having with your boss and... DISASTER! :) Then, to bring a window on top of another, clicking inside it won't work, you have to click on the titlebar. But, a trip to the focus settings takes care of all those problems. :) Being as configurable and customizable as it is, you can't really complain too much about Enlightenment.

But let's take a look at the software included in the default moonOS installation. First of all, MP3s and most video formats (including Flash in Firefox) play out of the box. Speaking of Firefox, 3.5.2 is not the latest, but I'm glad that it's from the 3.5 series. Pidgin 2.6.1 lets you voice- and video-chat with your XMPP buddies and also solves the Yahoo connection problems and XChat takes you directly to the official Ubuntu help IRC channel. Exaile handles all your audio files, but the non-functional Last.FM and Shoutcast Radio plugins were a big issue for me, so I had to install Rhythmbox. And how did I do that? moonOS borrows a few things from Mint, including the awesome software manager, here named moonSoftware. User reviews, comprehensive categorization and screenshots make choosing the right piece of software a pleasant task.

We also have OpenOffice 3.1.1 (complete with an inspired splash screen), Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.23, an awesome virtual keyboard and per-application volume control. Thunar 1.0.0 handles file management in a lightweight, yet complete, manner and, to make things easier, the developers have included the “Open Terminal Here” and “Open Folder as Root” scripts in the context menu.

If you happen to get bored with all the green, there are dozens of cool looking themes online, easily accessible via the “Settings → Look → Themes” menu.

Screenshots are an important part of a Distro Hoppin` article, and I was quite disappointed to see that the PrtScr button does not link to the screenshot taking app. But, again, the highly customizable Enlightenment allows you to create key bindings for almost anything that crosses your mind so I simply linked the PrtScr key to the gnome-panel-screenshot command and the ALT+PrtScr combination to the “gnome-panel-screenshot –delay 5” one and I was set. Still, this definitely should've been added by default.

The resource consumption manages to stay within normal limits and 512 MB of RAM should be enough for day to day activities.

As good as the song?

Though you're probably tired of all these Ubuntu-based distros, don't hesitate to give moonOS 3 a try. The Enlightenment desktop environment has matured a lot and can provide a solid production platform if you're willing to forgive its bugs here and there. Also, a big plus is the fact that you can tinker with it in so many ways to best suit your computing needs. Last but not least, it's simply b e a u t i f u l, without asking for a monster machine.

Download links: moonOS 3 and MD5.

Customize SUSE Linux to the Bones with SUSE Studio

2009-08-27T17:16:00.005+03:00

With hundreds of different distributions, each targeting various niches and users, Linux is undoubtedly a very prolific kernel. Being the distro hoppers that I'm sure you are, finding a Linux operating system that could fill almost all your computing needs is the obvious goal.

Many feel that they could create a better distro, but few have the skills (or time) necessary to put their ideas into practice. Sure enough, there are some Linuxes out there that let you create "remasters", but what if you would be able to do all the configuration online, in several quick, easy steps and then download your very own, highly customized distro to the HDD or share it with the world? And most importantly, other than some general Linux knowledge, you basically don't need any other real skills. But enough with the introduction.

Coming from Novell, SUSE Studio is the name of this interesting new project. Before getting too excited, I should tell you that you will build on top of a SUSE OS, be it OpenSUSE or SUSE Linux Enterprise, so don't think that you can take Ubuntu, mix it with a teaspoon of Fedora and spice it up with a bit of Slackware. Regardless, this is the easiest way to create a personalized, yet stable and powerful, Linux.

The first thing you need to do is create an account, ask for an invitation and pray that it will get approved as soon as possible. Once that's accomplished, you can start building the distro/appliance. Step 1: choose the base template, ranging from the micro JeOS, all the way to a full-blown KDE 4 environment. KDE 3, GNOME and IceWM are the other options. 64-bit processors are more and more widespread, so you'll be happy to see support for the superior architecture. Naming your "baby" is the last step on the first page.

The software selection area displays all the available software in OpenSUSE's 11.1 repositories. You will find almost everything you need in there, and if you don't, you can add third-party repositories and even upload RPM packages to be installed on your system. Cool! On the left-hand side of the screen, you have the current state of your Live CD/DVD: total packages selected, used space and download size. This last one is the most important as you will know when you get over the 700 MB CD ISO limit. If you're lost and don't know what software to choose, you can check the "Always install recommended software" box in the recommended category. In my case, I ended up with a 1.01 GB DVD image. There's also a handy search function, enabling you to find specific applications throughout the repositories.

The "General" configuration tab allows you to enable the firewall, configure the network, create users, set passwords or choose the timezone. Next, upload your favorite logo and choose backgrounds for boot, loading and login screens to really make it your own. At this point, I was starting to feel like I was in a Role Playing Game, creating my mighty character. :)

Reading EULAs (End user license agreements) is one of my favorite past-times ever and, upon discovering that SUSE Studio lets me create one from scratch, I became euphoric. OK, I am obviously joking. I have never read an EULA in my life (and neither did you, don't judge me!), but yes, SUSE Studio gives you the ability to add one in your distro. For server functionality, configuring a MySQL database would be the next step. I skipped it altogether, to then find myself inside the "Desktop" tab. Not much to do here, except opt for automatic login for one of the users and, if necessary, add autostart programs. Beware though, you will have to know the command for launching each program. Usually, it's dead simple, like for Pidgin, the command is simply pidgin, or for Firefox... firefox.

If you're creating a virtual appliance or a disk image for VirtualBox, you can set the RAM and Virtual Disk sizes in the The "Storage & memory" screen. If you just want the ISO, don't bother with these settings. The same goes for the "Scripts" section; unless you know what you're doing, just move along.

But say you also want your most important documents to be copied over to a fresh install of your new distro. Easy as pie! The "Overlay files" tab lets you upload single files to specified directories, that will appear in your installation. If you have a folder, simply create an archive out of it, and SUSE Studio will extract it during the installation process.

Finally, select the format of your distro/appliance and click "Build". My 1.01 GB DVD ISO was complete and ready for download after 45 minutes. Three hours later (sucky servers + sucky Internet connection = 1 GB in 3 hours) I successfully booted the OS into VirtualBox. All my favorite applications were there, Pidgin popped up at start-up and my cat (Pinky's the name) earned his geek bragging rights for the day by appearing on the login screen of a Linux distro. Oh, if you choose to create a disk image, you can "Testdrive" the OS right from inside the browser. Awesome, awesome stuff.

The End

SUSE Studio is great in many respects, but especially if you need to deploy a customized desktop or server on multiple machines. Configure it once, use it as many times as you need. Sure, if you don't like SUSE, you won't like the custom distro either. I'm not much of a fan myself, but I do find the whole idea interesting and, more importantly, useful.

Apply for an account right here.

Writer's block? Try Textroom!

2009-08-20T11:46:00.012+03:00

In a world full of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, StumbleUpon and countless other online timewasters, it's extremely easy to let your mind wander to places totally unrelated to actual work. Maybe you're a blogger, maybe you're a short story writer, maybe you are a news editor; whichever the case may be, you NEED to write. I usually do my text editing in simple programs, like Gedit and I've been pretty happy with it so far. Until I met TextRoom.

TextRoom aims to squeeze the last bit of productivity out of you. But let's begin with how you can put your procrastinating hands on this baby. Direct your browser to the project's homepage and choose from the four packages available in the downloads section: .bin, .deb, .exe (rejoice, Windows users!) and .tar.gz. As I'm currently running Ubuntu 9.04, the obvious choice was to get the 386 KB .deb file. The installation was quickly over and TextRoom was patiently waiting for me in the "Office" section of the "Applications" menu. When I first opened it, a black page covered the whole screen and all I could see was a blinking cursor and an elegant gray bar at the bottom. As simple and minimalistic its interface is, TextRoom strikes you with a polished, professional look. Can you say Qt 4.3.2? Yep, TextRoom was created on top of that platform, and you really can't go wrong with Qt.

So I was telling you about that bar on the bottom... The first thing that attracted my attention was the realtime word count on the left. *Over-excitement warning* FINALLY!!! A text editor that has word count in plain sight! Praise the Heavens! OK. So, after performing a small victory dance around the desk, I returned to the computer and started looking for other cool features this editor may have. On the same bottom bar, you have the filename in the center and the current time on the left. That's all. Besides the text, all you have is these three elements. You and your creativity can finally be together, without any intruders.

But is this really all that TextRoom offers? Nope. Pressing F1 will pop up the keyboard shortcuts panel, from where you find out that you can change the fonts, underline words, insert time or date, go fullscreen- or windowed-mode, undo, redo and other basic functions. CTRL+P takes you to the "Options", revealing even more coolness. You can set Word Count Targets and the program will actually display your progress in both "current word count / target word count" and percents. Cool! One can also set deadlines by selecting whichever future date in the graphical calendar or enable a time limit, at the end of which, a pop-up will appear on screen and announce you that you're out of time. Autosaving is another useful feature. Speaking of saving, the formats supported by TextRoom are .txr, HTML and .txt.

As much as I enjoy using this editor, there are still a few things that are missing and could be added. First of all: spell-checking. Typos can easily go unnoticed by a hurried writer, so a discreet highlight or underline won't do much harm to the elegant interface. Secondly, you still can simply exit fullscreen and go Facebooking or YouTubing. An option to keep one locked in the fullscreen mode for a set period of time would be a great cure for the world's most procrastinating procrastinators.

There is also a small bug that I've noticed. The default bottom bar is a bit thinner than what you see in the pictures. Activating the word count target increased the width of the bar by a few pixels and unfortunately, it didn't return to its normal size once I have removed the target. Moreover, though there is an "enable sound" option, TextRoom is totally silent, even when reaching a time limit. Hm.

A few more words...

I just love simple text editors and TextRoom raises the bar a bit higher, leaving me no choice but to use it as my main "canvas". Sure, I still have to copy and paste the text, once it's done, into a spell-checking capable program, but it's a small sacrifice I'm willing to make. If you're a writer and all you need is to write text, without any fancy formatting, give TextRoom a try. Maybe it will help you get over those nasty writer's blocks quicker.

Distro Hoppin`: SAM Linux 2009

2009-08-12T18:22:00.022+03:00

Hello dear readers, and welcome to another exciting (at least for me) Distro Hoppin` adventure. You've most likely seen the title, so you know I'm going to share a bit of my experiences and opinions on SAM Linux 2009.

First of all, I have to admit I really like SAM's logo. And not because it is of an extraordinary beauty, but because it offers quite a lot of information about the operating system. Let me elaborate: you have the PCLinuxOS-like circle, so you know it's based on that, you have the Xfce mouse, so you know it uses the lightweight desktop environment, and, of course you have the name: SAM. All in one little logo. But I probably am giving too much attention to unimportant matters, so let's move on, shall we? :)

As with every distribution, you begin by downloading the ISO image. This time around, its 679 MB "weight" will almost fill a single CD. Once it's safely on the HDD, open up your favorite disc burner and burn away! By the way, if you're planning on starting a distro hoppin` career, I highly recommend using rewritables. Sure, they do wear out in time, but if you keep them in reasonably good conditions, they will save you a lot of $$$ AND desk space. :)

Aaanyway... PCLinuxOS is a truly well done Linux distribution, I'm sure you all agree, so SAM sounded good from the very beginning. It benefits from a Live environment, as 99% of Linuxes do today thus, the first contact with it took place straight on the optical disc. To be able to access the desktop, you will have to guess that the password for the guest user is "guest". Sure, you don't need a diploma for that, but newbies might get confused. Live environments should, in my humble opinion, be loaded automatically, skipping the login part.

First problem: I couldn't connect to the Internet. I clicked the icon in the notification area, typed in my password, clicked again on connect and... nothing. After several tries, I decided it's best to restart the system and try again. Happily, after doing that, it connected automatically. Yay! Internet FTW! Ahem.

The first thing that caught my attention was the "Welcome SAM" icon on the desktop, which acts both as a decent tour of the distro and a quick installation guide. There I found out that the "Install SAM" shortcut was inside the Toolbox folder on the desktop, along with Live USB Maker, SAM IRC Channel (which doesn't work - "Failed to execute child process "xchat" (No such file or directory)." :) ), Video settings and, again, the Welcome thingy.

I went ahead for the installation, by typing in the root password, which is "root" and quickly found out that if you minimize/maximize the window, it closes altogether, so you have to open it again (yes, that includes canceling the ongoing installation). Weird! Moreover, it "steals" focus (during the first few steps) from all other windows, leaving you unable to use the keyboard, for, say... writing an article. :) But if you roll it up (click the arrow pointing up), it starts to behave and lets you take control. As I arrived to the partition setup screen, I noticed that, though not enabled by default, I could select the Ext4 filesystem from the drop-down list, so I said, why not? Ext4 has served me well until now. Unfortunately, after many retries and restarts, SAM would continue to give a mount error, thus the installation couldn't continue. As I soon realized, it only supports ext3 (and maybe others, but not ext4). Once that was out of the way, it went on with the process and in about ten minutes, the system was installed and the grub configuration window popped up. I left those settings as default and restarted the mean machine, anxious to see how this operating system performs.

Before the system was fully loaded, I added an user and chose a root password. The desktop welcomes you with a nice, clean, green wallpaper, a pretty dock-like bar (wbar) that sits on the top and an elegant analogue clock screenlet. Though pretty, wBar has a few visual bugs here and there. Whenever you log in your account, it will be surrounded by a black box. To get rid of it, just right click and it will disappear; certainly, much better without it.

I also noticed, in the top left and right corners, two white lines. At first I thought they were simply some crazy graphical artifacts, but when I hovered the mouse pointer over them, I was proven wrong. The left one is actually the screenshot tool, a handy addition, and on the right, a "Swiss army knife" lets you configure the wbar, the screenlets and change the wallpaper. Well, in this case I'm not too happy about its placement. Why, you ask? I tend to run most of my applications maximized, so I'm used to going straight to the top and clicking the X button whenever I want to close them, without actually looking where the mouse's going, as I know it will land on the X. Well, with the toolbox thingy there, I have to be more careful with the movement of the pointer. But anyway, everything is customizable, so you can place it on the bottom panel, for example, or just remove it. Speaking of the bottom panel, I looked and looked for the volume icon, but couldn't find it, so I had to add it myself. This really should have been enabled by default. On the flip side, I noticed the awesome Parcellite clipboard manager tool, ready to gather all your text copying actions.

The Xfce desktop environment is at its latest, 4.6.1, version, keeping in tone with the overall up-to-date SAM. The software selection is where this distribution really manages to make me happy: Firefox 3.5.1, Pidgin 2.5.8, Mobile Media Converter (you will LOVE this if you watch movies on the go), VLC Media Player, Kino or Opera 9.64.

For office tasks, Abiword is provided by default and should handle most of the things it's fed just fine. If you're more of an OpenOffice guy/gal, you can open up the Synaptic package manager and look for it. What you will find is not the complete package, but a bash script that will download and install the suite for you. Unfortunately, a server error didn't allow for the script to be installed, so I couldn't get OOo on SAM.

Even though I'm running a lightweight desktop environment, it doesn't mean I can't let myself enjoy some eye-candy from time to time. But to do that, I needed the NVIDIA proprietary graphics drivers to be installed. The hardware configuration area didn't help me much so I went back to Synaptic and querried for "nvidia". Sure enough, I found the corresponding drivers for my FX5500 and downloaded them. Fortunately, I didn't have to get my hands dirty and modify the Xorg.conf file in order to activate them, so a logout/login later, my computer was NVIDIA-powered. I opened the PCLinuxOS control center, went to the Hardware tab, clicked the "Configure 3D Desktop effects" button, chose Compiz and it told me I had to logout yet again. I accepted and when I returned, not only did the windows wobble and the menus jiggle, but the window decorations were also replaced by the ones from Emerald. And surprisingly, SAM remained stable and responsive.

The ugly part showed itself when I decided to disable Compiz. After logging back in with it disabled, my windows were decorationless (nice word!) and the effects were still there. Yeah...

But what about hardware support, Danny? Well, I'm happy to report that, through the great bundled HP utility, I managed to setup and configure my Deskjet 3940 printer in no time. Sadly though, I've yet to find a Linux distribution in which the printer would perform as well as it does on Windows with the drivers from HP. Printing in draft mode is horrible and the normal mode is painfully slow. I've also noticed some Lexmark and Epson software in SAM, but you can always use CUPS. The Canon A550 digital camera was recognized immediately and I was offered to import the photos stored on it with gtkam.

In the repositories I found Skype and installed it, just to see if the mic input works properly out of the box. Happily, I was heard crystal clear on the other end of the "line", whereas with Ubuntu, for example, one has to make some tweaking before using the popular VoIP software.

SAM 2009 also comes with a quite interesting backup utility, called Flyback, which lets you schedule backups for selected folders on your HDD.

Most multimedia files, be they audio or video, play fine in SAM, as it comes with all the codecs you need.

Is it worth it?

Well, if you like trying out new distributions, certainly give SAM a spin. Despite its problems, it brings forward some original elements that separate it from the crowd. Plus, it is packed with the latest and greatest software. I'm very curious about how the next release will be though, as the developers said that SAM 2009 is the last version using the PCLinuxOS base.

Download SAM Linux 2009 here!

Distro Hoppin`: Linux Mint 7 KDE Edition

2009-08-05T01:06:00.013+03:00

Ah... Linux Mint! The Ubuntu-made-even-better operating system that everybody loves to praise. And for good reason, in my humble opinion. The latest version of Mint, dubbed Gloria and bearing the 7 suffix, was released quite some time ago, so why am I talking about it? Well, recently, the team behind the project, with Mr. Clement Lefebvre as the leader, made a highly anticipated announcement: "Linux Mint 7 KDE released!".

So good news for all of you KDE fans out there! I still am not part of that group, but hey!, Pardus left quite a good impression on me, so why not try this one too? First of all, see if you have an empty DVD lying around, 'cause the KDE version of Mint 7 (about 1.1 GB) won't fit on a CD. There are plenty of mirrors available for direct download and a seedful torrent, so it shouldn't take too much time to have the image on your hard drive. Once you have it on the disc, it's pretty much a straight-forward job: boot from the DVD, wait for the desktop to load, double click the "Install" icon and go through the easy-as-pie installation steps, identical to those of Ubuntu.

Once I had it installed, I quickly rebooted the machine and admired the simple yet beautiful blue and white, icy kind of bootsplash, perfectly suited for a hot summer day. The first time your desktop loads, it will take a bit more time, so don't worry, it's normal. If you recall, Gloria's default green wallpaper was quite a star when revealed by Clem. If you liked that, you'll certainly like this one. It's basically the same, except it's blue. The same sky, the same water drops, but blue.

mintWelcome, which immediately popped out at startup, is an excellent tool for finding out about Gloria's exciting new features, read the user guide or seek support either on the forum or through the pre-configured Quassel IRC client.

The latest, 4.2.4 version of K Desktop Environment certainly feels more stable and less of a resource-hog than previous ones, so using it didn't make my good ol' single core Pentium 4 machine develop an inferiority complex.

What's the first thing you need to do after installing an Operating System? Make sure it's up to date! So that's what I did. The mintUpdate tool was already working in the background, retrieving all of the 76 updates that needed to be applied. About ten minutes and a rather harmless Plasma workspace crash later, Linux Mint 7 KDE was ready to be explored.

As I knew Canonical didn't bother to update their repositories with the latest version of Pidgin in order to be able to connect to Yahoo, I wanted to see if Mint did something about that. Nope, still at 2.5.5. Before adding the third party source, I downloaded and installed it, just for the heck of it and, surprise, surprise, I was online. Apparently, the Mint team couldn't include the latest version so instead they changed the server in the account preferences. Still, that isn't a permanent solution, as certain features (such as avatars and file transfer) don't work, but it's better than nothing. Oh, and yes, before all that, I've tried connecting with the included Kopete IM client, but had no luck.

If there is one thing that I find highly annoying about Kubuntu-based OSes, it has to be this: NVIDIA drivers installation. Though it quickly recognized my chipset and recommended the 173 series, when I clicked "Activate", the selection grayed out on me and nothing happened. NOTHING! Restart the application, try again, restart the system, try again. Nope. Still no response. Usually, depending on your luck and how the planets are aligned that day, the darn thing will work after a few tries. Luckily, the Minties (is it too wrong if I call the Linux Mint team that? :) ) are probably aware of that issue and included the awesome EnvyNG driver installation program that quickly and smoothly took care of the problem.

One of the applications I love using when running KDE systems is Amarok. Though the latest version is 2.1.1, Linux Mint gives you 2.1, which is just as good really, works like a charm.

When you open the most awesome software manager available for Linux, mintInstall, for the first time, you'll notice that it doesn't take as much time to load as it used to, as screenshots for the most popular applications are preloaded; for the rest, the pics are downloaded as you access them. If you want 'em all, click the "Refresh" button and they'll slowly but surely be loaded. That's a great improvement if you ask me, as waiting several minutes to access the repositories for the first time was a bit frustrating in the previous version. Another important change is the "Featured applications" button which will take you to a small software portal, comprising of applications that are known to be used by a lot of people. Some examples: aMule, Audacity, Skype, Opera, Google Earth of Picasa. This is a great way to put your "computing lifestyle" back together in no time.

Of course, Flash videos, MP3s and most video formats play out of the box in Linux Mint 7, so yay! The bundled Dragon Player, VLC, GNOME MPlayer and MPlayer will provide the means for that to happen. It was a bit sad to see no games available out of the box, considering the fact that the distro had already “spilled” over the 700 MB CD limit, so 1.5 GB instead of 1.1 wouldn't have been such a big difference.

On the office front, there's nothing out of the ordinary: the now old OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, a couple of smaller text editors and a few KOffice 2.0 (great product, by the way) components, such as Krita and Karbon.

If you have kids (I used that instead of children because it starts with a K! Get it? K! From KDE? How funny is that? - don't answer) and you feel that they may be surfing some inappropriate Internet waves, you can call mintNanny and do some good old fashioned domain blocking. But with today's highly computer-literate youth, they will probably blaze past your wall of protection. Nonetheless, a welcomed addition.

Another tool straight out of Mint's laboratories is mintUpload that unfortunately wasn't pre-configured to use the default Mint server. If you use any other upload services, you can add them to this nifty interface too. Beware though, you won't find mintUpload in the applications menu, as you can access it through the right click context menu on individual files.

But there are more hidden treasures in the context menu: image conversion, file encryption, open/edit as root, change permissions, etc. Some true time savers!

The glorious conclusion

Linux Mint 7 KDE is a worthy addition to the Linux Mint family and is much, much better than the previous KDE release. I still prefer the main GNOME version over it, but there's definitely an ascending path going on. Oh, and with the 4.3.0 version of KDE just released, I can't wait until Linux Mint 8!

Update: As Google kindly helped me translate the Russian comment below, I realized I actually did not post any download link for the distribution. Silly me! Oh well, here they are: Direct download and torrent. Enjoy!

Quick Tip: Auto Shutdown Your Linux Machine

2009-07-30T13:36:00.011+03:00

Though I don't have any problems getting myself to sleep at night, I always like to have some music or a podcast or something else to accompany me through those few minutes from the moment I put my head on the pillow and until I "pass out". Of course, leaving the computer on all night long for that is a bit unnecessary so auto-shutdown is the best solution. And on Linux, it's super easy to set up.

But enough with the introduction, here's how you do it.

Open the good ol' terminal and type the following command: sudo shutdown -h -P hh:mm (replace hh:mm with the time in 24-hour format - e.g 22:45), press Enter, type in your password if necessary and that's it. Your machine will shut itself down at the scheduled time. No questions asked, no nothing. If something happens and you want to cancel the countdown, press CTRL+C in the same terminal. If you closed the window in which you initiated the shutdown procedure, type sudo shutdown -c to cancel. Simple!

Buuut, as simple as it is, I know that there are many of you who suffer from severe command-line interface allergy, thus I will also show you a graphical alternative: GShutdown. If you're running a Debian system, you will find it in the repositories, otherwise download a package suited to your distro here.

In GShutdown you can select from three ways to turn off your PC: at a specified time AND date, after a set delay or "now" (a bit useless this last one, no? - except for testing purposes that is :) ). If you simply want to restart or end the session, you can also do that from the bottom drop-down menu. Select the date from the calendar, set the time and press start. Everything should work just fine, but if something is acting up, you can go in the Preferences and manually specify the desktop environment and display manager that you're currently using (if GShutdown fails to detect them) or type in a command to perform before the shutdown procedure begins. Moreover, you can set GShutdown to warn you a few minutes before executing the action, just in case you forget.

Well, I hope this was at least a tiny bit helpful. Now if only the good guys at Canonical would fix the damn PC Speaker bug so the dead won't rise from their graves every time an Ubuntu machine is shut down. But that's another story. :)

Distro Hoppin`: antiX MEPIS 8.2

2009-07-26T14:10:00.014+03:00

After taking a look at Pardus, a full-blown operating system, it's time to return to lighter alternatives. And not that I randomly decided to do so, it's because antiX MEPIS 8.2 was recently announced and I couldn't miss the chance to try it out.

For those of you who don't know, antiX MEPIS is the resource-friendly version of SimplyMEPIS, a great Linux distribution based on the even greater Debian. With a bit of extrapolation, it's obvious that antiX is built upon Debian.

The main difference between the two MEPIS distros is at the desktop level; antiX is using the light IceWM manager, so old computers will feel at least 5 years younger, thus performing much better.

antiX MEPIS can be downloaded from the official website as a 466 MB ISO and can run straight from the CD, leaving your precious HDD partitions untouched. But I didn't want to linger much in the live environment, so I went ahead and clicked the Install button from the antiX menu. When I instructed it to use the whole hard drive (my most important files live in the cloud anyway), it went ahead and deleted all the partitions I had but failed to create new ones. Happily, the installer gives you quick access to GParted. I decided to create only the two mandatory partitions this time around: root (ext4) and swap.

Though the version of GParted that comes with antiX supports ext4, in the installer I could only choose between ext3 and reiserfs, so the partitions were reformatted and the installation process began. About 5 to 7 minutes later, it was already complete and I had to configure some aspects of the OS. Network, system clock and the usual username/password/root password selection. antiX MEPIS was also kind enough to install and configure a bootloader, so I could choose between it and other systems, if they were there.

Once installed, starting the system is very quick, about 30 seconds from the boot menu to the fully loaded desktop. Not the fastest (Puppy is quicker, for example), but you certainly won't have time to make yourself a cup of coffee. The first thing I wanted to change was the weird resolution (for my screen) that was set by default. After a minute of going through the menus, I stumbled across the awesome antiX Control Center which is pretty self-explanatory: a portal, if you wish, to most of your OS settings.

As I looked through the tabs, I eventually arrived at the last one: Hardware, containing my destination: Set Screen Resolution. I clicked on it, typed in the administrator password and surprise, surprise, no 1440x900. Oh well... What to do? The XWindow tab also looked promising so I went back to it: Configure X Server. Yep. This sounds legitimate. Again, administrator password and poof the X-Windows Assistant popped up and within it, the glorious NVIDIA tab, waiting for driver installation instructions from me. I had two choices: nvidia (new) and nvidia (legacy).

Usually, there are three of them, high (latest), mid (173 series) and low (96 series), but now there were only these two. Well, as my GeForce FX5500 certainly doesn't fit in the "new" category, I humbly checked the legacy box, clicked apply and waited for it to download and install what was needed. A few minutes later, I had to reboot the system in order for the proprietary NVIDIA driver to take over... the WORLD!!! (no, not really, just the OS). Everything went fine, but, again, the Holy Grail of resolutions still wasn't listed in antiX control panel. There was only one (easy) thing left to do: open the nvidia-settings. But how to do that if it isn't installed? Open Synaptic (I love it!), search for nvidia, scroll to the nvidia-settings entry, select it, install it, run it. And voila: 1440 was there! Phew! With that out of the way, I was fully prepared to explore antiX MEPIS 8.2.

The desktop is very clean (well, duh, you can't put any icons on it :) ) and welcomes users with an atmospheric image showing some serene sun rays and a bunch of scary looking clouds hovering across a water landscape. In the top left corner of the screen there's some Conky action going on, displaying the Linux kernel version (quite old by the way - 2.6.27), total uptime (aka geek bragging tool), date and time, various system monitors and the free space left on disk.

Whether you right click on the desktop or you open the bottom left antiX menu, you'll get the same options. At the top section: home, App killer (very useful), Screenshot (absolutely horrid, more on it later) and search (I never use search really...). Going further down the line, we see the following: Applications, Games, Graphics, Multimedia, Network, Office, Desktop, System and Help. From what I could gather, extra applications that are installed from the repositories will only appear in the Applications entry, which also has several subcategories. Quick example: I have installed GIMP but its shortcut never appeared in the main Graphics section, instead I could find it in "Applications --> Applications --> Graphics". It's a bit of a mess, but you'll get the hang of it.

As I promised, I will say a few words about the included screen snapping tool, generically named antiXscreenshot. Well, if you take a snapshot two times a year, sure, go ahead and use it. But if you need to take more than 1 in a row, you'll definitely want something else. Why? Because it doesn't remember settings! Not even one. So you open the program, set any delay if necessary, name the image, select the image file type and browse to the directory in which you want to save it. Click ok, wait for the picture to be taken, click ok again and it doesn't pop back up. Oh, no. You have to reopen it and surprise, surprise, you have to set all those things again. Moreover, it doesn't have the ability to rename images in order, so if you forget to change the name field, your snaps will consequently be replaced, leaving you with one lousy image instead of 20. :)

Luckily, it's a Debian system we're talking about here, so you will be able to download and install GNOME's or Xfce's screenshot tools. The web browser that comes pre-installed in antiX is Iceweasel 3.0.11. For chatting, XChat and Pidgin 2.5.8 are there to accompany you.

One of the coolest elements, which I found extremely useful, is the simple, yet powerful audio mixer, aumix. There are a lot of tutorials and forum threads instructing you how to record "stereo mix" in various Linux distributions. Well, with the help of aumix, antiX MEPIS provides the easiest way to do that. Simply click the "rec" button at the left of the main volume bar and that's it! Really, that's it. Start an audio stream, open up Audacity, click record and you'll be able to save it for eternity!

You'll probably want, at some point, to browse the contents of your HDD. To do that, antiX MEPIS provides you with two file managers. If you open the home folder from the quick launch bar, PCMan will open, if you decide to open it from the antiX menu, ROX Filer will pop up. A bit inconsistent, but hey, choice is good!

There are also a few games available out of the box, just to chase away those boring hours: Gweled, Breakout and XMahjongg. For some quality old-school gaming, DOSBox is a great place to start.

Office productivity doesn't have to suffer while you're running antiX MEPIS, and you'll find the Abiword / Gnumeric duo to do a pretty good job at handling your tasks. Of course, you can always install OpenOffice from the repositories, no problem. Your email account will be taken care of by Claws Mail.

If you get bored with the looks of antiX, you can choose from a rather big selection of themes and wallpapers. Speaking of boredom, you will want to maybe listen to some music, or watch a YouTube video... For that, antiX MEPIS 8.2 comes preloaded with MP3 support and the latest version of Adobe's Flash Player integrated in the web browser. If you're like me and your music collection comprises handful of titles, you'll be happy to hear that the included Streamtuner is a great place to look for radio stations, be they political debates or the newest Rap tunes. Once you find a station to your liking, double click it and XMMS will connect to it.

Other than that, you have the Transmission BitTorrent Client, gFTP, a DVD player, some programming tools, backup software, CD/DVD burning solutions, Fluxbox as the alternative window manager and many more.

The verdict

I am really enjoying the time spent with antiX MEPIS 8.2. It's speedy, it's responsive, it has plenty of useful tools, it looks as good as an IceWM system can look (oh, I forgot to mention... I absolutely love the icons!) and it's very flexible. Good stuff, really! :)

Distro Hoppin`: Pardus Linux 2009

2009-07-19T10:01:00.012+03:00

Conclusions should end an article, not begin one, but I have to say this from the start: Pardus 2009 is one of the most impressively well-done Linux distributions that I've put my hands on for a loooong time. Coming from Turkey, Pardus Linux 2009 was released on the 18th of July and to be honest, my knowledge about this particular operating system was limited to recognizing its logo and knowing the fact that it has Turkish origins. That's pretty much it.

I absolutely love loading unexplored, lesser-known distros, but, most of the times I am quite disappointed and return to the big names, mostly because they come with all the features and functionality I need straight out of the box (or just very easy to add). Needless to say, I wasn't quite so optimistic about Pardus, especially given the fact that it came with the K desktop environment (KDE). Certainly, it is at its latest 4.2.4 version but my previous experiences left a bitter taste.

Obviously, I can't ditch an operating system without first trying it. Reboot time! Pardus doesn't benefit from a Live environment, so be prepared to modify your partitions before getting a glimpse of it. The main color that will accompany you during the installation process and many parts of the OS is a beautiful, smooth dark red, surely inspired from Turkey's flag.

The first thing you will want to do is change the language to English when the CD bootloader appears, as the default Turkish one will automatically be activated in 10 seconds. (I've just been informed by a reader that there is also an international ISO available which defaults to the English language) If you're from Turkey, disregard that. :) The next steps are super easy to go through: keyboard layout, timezone selection, user creation and administrator password input. Partitioning can be done either manually or you can let Pardus handle all the work, either by using the whole HDD or resizing existing partitions to make some room. Ext4 is used as the default filesystem and Ext3, Reiserfs and Xfs are also available. The last step is a quick overview of all your preferences, and, if everything looks OK, click Begin Install and make yourself a quick espresso while Pardus does its job.

With the system installed permanently on the HDD, I was congratulated for a process that a six-year old could easily do. :) Anyway, I thanked the developers for their kind words and procedeed to the mandatory reboot.

KDE is a bit slow to load the first time, but it's not that bad. Even before I could start snooping around, Kaptan Desktop popped up. What's that, you ask? It's a really awesome tool that allows you to configure a lot of aspects of the system in a single run: themes, menu style, wallpaper, desktop search and more.

No matter where you are in the system, you will know that you run Pardus and not some generic distro. The folder and file icons are customized, the menu button is customized, even the ethernet connection icon is different, displaying two blinking lights, green and red, whenever there's network activity.

Let's move on and check out Pardus' software selection. I was delighted by the fact that the default web browser is Mozilla Firefox... 3.5.1!! YAY! Up to date software for the win! And not only that, but it also comes with the latest Flash plugin from Adobe and a really nice, minimalistic theme.

OpenOffice 3.1.0.6 and GIMP 2.6.6 have personalized splash screens that add to the consistent feel of Pardus. Google Gadgets, though already present in the Internet category, couldn't start because of the js-script-runtime module that failed to load. As Pidgin is the only IM client that I can live with in the Linux world, I was pretty disappointed to see only Kopete present. But it was a great time to see how I can install extra programs from the repositories. Pardus handles PiSi (meow!) packages which can be found through the "Package Manager" graphical frontend. There aren't a truckload of programs, quite a small number actually, but, for 99% of the tasks you will need to do, they are more than enough.

By now, I was able to assess the performance of my machine, and honestly, Pardus has to be the fastest KDE 4 distro. Granted, it's still kind of slow with a lot of applications active (I have a pretty old computer...) but I can wholeheartedly say that I'm actually enjoying KDE.

Upon entering the Display control panel, I was recommended to install the 173 series Nvidia drivers for my GeForce FX5500. A trip to the package manager and a logout later and I was ready for some eye-candy. Yep, the desktop effects were automatically enabled; I especially like the beautiful transparency applied to the bottom panel and the blueish drop-shadow of windows. And happily, it desn't even grind my computer to a halt, as it performs reasonably well.

Pardus picked up my USB-connected digital camera immediately after plugging it in and the HP printer was automatically configured so I was ready to view and print my images in no time. Another big plus for Pardus.

Multimedia files, including MP3s, WMVs or MOVs can be accessed from the moment you install the OS, so you won't have to worry about searching and installing suitable codecs. You also have many players to choose from, such as: SMPlayer, GNOME MPlayer, Dragon Player, Amarok or JuK.

Final thoughts

The fact that Pardus made me actually enjoy using KDE 4 is by itself an indication of the overall quality of this operating system. It's easy to install, easy to configure, 100% up-to-date and more importantly, very stable. I've used many distributions that shipped with ages-old software "for improved stability" that performed much worse than Pardus. Hopefully, the future will bring a bigger software repository and maybe support for other desktop environments.

Turkey, you've got yourself one of the finest OSes out there!

Oh, for more information and downloads, visit the Pardus Linux official website.

Ubuntu 8.04.3 (LTS) Released

2009-07-17T00:02:00.011+03:00

Don't you hate when you have to reinstall a Linux distribution a few weeks before the next release comes out? If in the first month or so, the clean installation can be used almost right away, with only a few updates to be downloaded and applied, as time passes, the update pile gets bigger and bigger so the usual 10-minute install transforms into a time consuming process. Add that to a really low-speed Internet connection, and you've got yourself plans for a whole afternoon.

The regular version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution doesn't benefit from maintenance releases, but it's not that big of a deal, given the fact that every six months a new version comes out. But Canonical also has the LTS version of their operating system, offering three and five-year support for desktops and servers respectively, so, in this scenario, regular updated ISOs are almost mandatory.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS received yesterday, on the 16th of July, the third maintenance update. Thus, Ubuntu 8.04.3 images can be downloaded from the official mirrors.

Steve Langasek of Ubuntu:

"80 post-release updates have been integrated, and a number of bugs in the installation system have been corrected. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS."

And here are some of the more important changes made to the Live and Alternate CDs for both desktops and servers:

The persistent mode on the Live CD now works properly;
Solved the GPT/MBR syncing problem on the latest Intel-powered Macintoshes;
Handling of UUIDs on existing swap partitions during the installation process was fixed;
Shortcuts to SMB shares were fixed in Nautilus;
Fixed a connection problem with the latest ICQ protocol;
Assigning new users a name that is already used as the name of a group is no longer possible;
Fixed a kernel oops in the NFS client.

For more details and the full list of updates, check Steve's announcement.

Click here to download Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS (Hardy Heron) or the latest and greatest 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

Love Trains? Play OpenBVE!

2009-07-06T18:15:00.011+03:00

One extremely boring day, I was frantically looking for something to entertain me, at least for a little while, so I did the obvious thing: I opened up Ubuntu's Add/Remove application and started looking through all the software available for installation. As I reached the "Games" category I suddenly realized that it's been a while since I checked on what's new in there, mostly because I knew that, apart from a few "big" titles, the list was populated by casual, simple, uninteresting games; yep, gaming on Linux is still lagging behind.

Anyway... I was scrolling down the list, almost ready to give up when a name popped out of the "crowd": OpenBVE. As this alone couldn't really spark any real interest, the one-line description put quite a big smile on my face: "Train/railway simulator compatible with 'BVE Trainsim' routes". No, I'm not a train geek, I don't own thousands of dollars worth of miniature trains and tracks and I don't need an extra room for storing my carriages collection. Moreover, I know almost nothing about how a train really works, but hey, you don't need all that to like trains. If you're a Windows users, you have quite a few titles to choose from, Trainz and Microsoft Train Simulator being the most popular.

But on Linux, this is the first time I hear about this type of game, so I was definitely very anxious to try it out. Checked the box, clicked apply and in a few moments, OpenBVE 1.0.2.0 appeared in the Games category. When I opened it, a window popped up, letting me set what needed to be set before starting the game. As I am aware that simulations can have a really steep learning curve, I went to the "Customize controls" tab to familiarize myself a bit with the way this game is controlled. Seeing how almost every key on the keyboard was being used for something, I was this close to shutting it down and starting a game of Mahjongg. Fortunately, upon taking a closer look, you will realize that you'll need only a few to simply start the train.

OpenBVE has three difficulty levels: Arcade, Normal and Expert. The second is the default one, so I sticked with it. As it turned out, depending on this level, the game will either take you by the hand and guide you through the stations or will let you figure out everything by yourself. The "Options" tab in the configuration window allows you to change the language, manually set resolutions for both window and fullscreen modes, modify some quality settings like anisotropic filtering or viewing distance, and enable or disable certain elements that add to the realism of the game: collisions, derailments or topplings.

Moving on, the next step was to select a track and get going already! Unfortunately, you will be a bit disappointed by the fact that there is only one route available in the default installation. But, for the sake of diversity, you'll be able to choose whether you want sun, clouds, rain, day, night, etc. Also there are three levels of detail: low, medium and high. Speaking of the graphics, you shouldn't expect too much, especially given the fact that this project is completely free and open source. Still, most of you will find the 3D game detailed enough to be a pleasure to spend hours sliding through the beautiful countryside.

After you've selected the desired route, a whole bunch of details about it will appear on the right side: a short description, the map with all its stops and the gradient profile. Besides a route, you will also need a train (no kidding!). While the game will suggest one to best suit the track, there is really only one choice "out of the box". Once that's all done with, click start and, in a few moments, you will hear the serene nature sounds and find your train sitting quietly in a station, ready to leave once all the passengers board; the imaginary passengers that is - they have no graphical representation, but I assume you don't stop and open the doors just to let fresh air get inside the train. As you would expect from a simulation, your goals are pretty straight-forward: arrive in time (not later, but also not earlier), try to stay within the speed limits and don't cause discomfort to your passengers.

The train has four speeds: P1, P2, P3 and P4 and three brake levels: B1, B2 and B3. There is, of course, the neutral position and an emergency brake that will bring your train to a halt in the shortest amount of time. Press F and your train will go forward, press B and your train will go back. With Q you go up a notch, with Z, down a notch. As I found out just when I was approaching the next station, a train needs a LOT of time to stop. Unsurprisingly, my first run was disastrous, with me failing to stop at the platform almost every time and having to back up. How do you know where exactly to stop? Well, when you get closer to a station, a vertical bar will appear at your right and as you approach the stopping area, a line will and gradually go down towards the center of that bar; the closest to the center you stop, the better. Once the train's stopped, the doors will open and you will have to wait for the passengers to enter. In the normal mode, this is done automatically, but if you're playing on Expert you will have to take care of all the little things.

Another help you get from the game is the fact that a speed warning will appear on the screen, telling you to slow down and showing the speed limit as well as your current speed. On "Expert", only the "real" track signs will offer information about the active limits. Though undoubtedly fun, going full speed through tight turns will eventually lead to your train derailing (still fun, I know). You can play OpenBVE either from the default, cab view which can be panned around with the arrow keys, or choose an exterior camera - train or track mounted. Once you arrive at the last station, you can quit the game and see how well you performed through a panel that logs every little mistake that you've done.

If you're tired of Alien Arena or Sauerbraten, OpenBVE is a breath of fresh air and can provide hours of relaxing gameplay, regardless of your "train knowledge". Though the default package offers only one track and one train, new content can be downloaded from the Internet. Either way, you should definitely try this one out. You're not a Linux user, you say? It's ok, OpenBVE can also be installed and run on Windows platforms too! As this project is still under heavy development (there are a few bugs here and there), I expect many, many improvements to be added to this great looking, beautifully sounding, accurate train simulation.

For downloads and more information, visit the OpenBVE homepage.