What If Prince William And Kate Middleton Were Linux Fans

Today is great day in the UK. Day of another Royal Wedding.
Not only because this is just another Bank Holiday in this country. But also because this day continues monarchy. Hopefully Prince William and Kate Middleton will have baby soon, who can inherit British throne.
I actually don't know if William and Kate are Linux fans or not. Maybe they even have not heard about this great operation system.

But let's imagine they are great Linux lovers.
How can this change Royal Wedding ceremony?

• bridal bouquet is arranged in the form of Ubuntu's logo
• groom wears Fedora during the ceremony
• bridesmaids wear Red Hats
• procession to and from the church follows Debian spiral
• church entrance is in form of Arch
• little green gecko is bride's pet, and it presents at ceremony
• Puppy is groom's pet, and it presents at ceremony too
• guests are served with Mint tea
• teapots are in the form of FreeBSD logo
• ceremony ends up late in the night with fireworks in the form of Mandriva stars
• whole ceremony costs just one Cent to UK taxpayers

Huh, the last bit is definitely just a dream.

Can you suggest any more ideas for ceremony? If you and your partner are going to be married soon, will you be using any of the ideas in your ceremony?

Linux Mint XFCE Roller Coaster

I have been trying to use Broadcom 4311 WiFi card on most Linux distro I have tried so far. This card is built into my Compaq C300 laptop. I think it became my idee fixe at some point. Especially when I was taking Debian-based systems for review.

Just few days ago I wrote about my happiness after achieving my long-term desire with Linux Mint XFCE. This distro is based on Debian Testing. I managed to activate and use Broadcom 4311 there in Live mode!
Did it make me stop?
I have another laptop at home - Toshiba L500. It has Realtek 8191SEvB WiFi card. I know that Linuxes based on Ubuntu 10.10 are working correctly with this WiFi card. I have written about this already (1, 2, 3). As long as I had USB stick with Linux Mint XFCE on it, I decided to give Debian another go.
USB stick is in the port. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB.
Let's go!

Blessed by Trinity...

I am long established fan of KDE3 (Trinity). There might be 2 reasons:
1) My first ever Linux was SLAX which is based on KDE3.
2) I prefer old-school menu style with one column in main part with branches for each of them. When I see several columns in main menu I quickly get lost in navigation. It's like Win95 style compared to Win7 style. Or KDE3 compared to Mint Menu or KDE4 in some Linuxes.
That's why every Tux which is blessed by Trinity is interesting for me. That's why I am very thankful to Sirius Lee who gave me some more ideas in the comments to Pardus review.
You can guess now that I'll talk today about KDE3 implementation. But  what will be the root? Never guess! The root of KDE3 will be... Ubuntu! Yes, today my guinea pig is Trinity Kubuntu. It is developed by KDE3 fans from Pearson Computing. These guys produced Trinity images for all Ubuntu versions since Intrepid. My choice is for latest version - Maverick. There are 2 options available: CD (682 Mb) and DVD (1.8 Gb). Decision was made for CD version, which was later "burnt" to USB stick using Ubuntu (Kubuntu) Startup Disk Creation tool. Persistence was requested during the "burning" process.
Looks like everything is ready. Key is in ignition. USB drive is in the port. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

There Are More Than 100 Subscribers Now On This blog!

Last week was pretty much full of news around this blog. Most of them were linked to our 6-months anniversary.
Is there anything important left for this week?
Yes! It happened today.
You know that many people read this blog often. Some of them subscribe to this blog, and they are most loyal visitors. Of course, you may follow me on Twitter or Facebook. But most common subscription method is e-mail or RSS feed. I use FeedBurner tool for this.

Today Feedburner showed me wonderful picture. There are more than 100 subscribers now! To be exact, 101.
Isn't it great success?
I think it says that my posts are interesting and useful to my readers.
Of course, this is tiny amount compared to subscription list of other bloggers. Martik has about 300 subscribers, go2linux - more that 1600.
Do you want to join ? There is a link to RSS feed on the right. Just below you can subscribe via e-mail.
And, of course, Twitter and Facebook options are still available.
All these subscriptions will cost you nothing. They are FREE!

If you want to check current number of subscribers (and position on other ratings), please scroll to the bottom of the page.

9 Steps To Happiness in Linux Mint XFCE

Linux Mint team works hard on making Linux as much user-friendly as possible. They even managed to improve usability of Ubuntu which holds position because its high degree of userfriendliness.

Linux Mint is not just one system. I would say that Mint is more like approach to interface building which can be applied to a range of systems/desktop environments/windows managers. Sure enough, most known Linux Mint version is based on Ubuntu with GNOME. That was just a beginning. I have already written my thoughts about this Linux Mint version.

But every beginning has its own story. Mint team also released KDE, LXDE and XFCE remixes. All of them were based on Ubuntu. Were... Until recent.

Another twist in the story started with LMDE which stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition. I have also reviewed that release in my past. LMDE, as opposite to all previous Mints, was based on Debian. Mint team applied Mint ideology, menu and everything else to pure Debian. Of course, GNOME was the core of LMDE. That could not continue for long, and Mint team decided to go further. Result was... Linux Mint XFCE. What does it mean to us? Mint's elegance and user friendly interface multiplied by XFCE performance? Or Mint's overload of tricks multiplied by XFCE complexity? That's what I wanted to check when I first heard of Linux Mint XFCE.

Current version has number 201104. Is version number relevant? I do not know because Linux Mint XFCE is based on Debian Testing, which is rolling release. It uses Debian's repositories.
Before testing Linux Mint XFCE, it has to be downloaded. You may be surprised, but wonders starts right at the downloading phase! Linux Mint XFCE weights 958Mb. This is more that SalineOS (926Mb) and far more than XFCE-based Xubuntu (696Mb).
Unetbootin lovely helped me to "burn" the Linux Mint XFCE image to 1Gb USB stick. I activated persistence in Unetbootin "just in case", even though I had barely 30M of free space on the stick, and Unetbootin only promises persistence for Ubuntu-based distros.
Finally, I am ready to set off to another adventure with Debian-based distro. Has it become my idee fixe recent time - to make Debian based Linux to work on my Compaq laptop? I don't know...
Reboot. Choose to boot from USB.
Let's go!

Voting Results

I announced a poll on this blog about a month ago.
The question in the poll was What is the most interesting part of this blog?
It is time now to announce results.

Here they are:

As you can see, most of the readers prefer to see what is this blog about: reviews of different Linux distributions. Another part wants to see HowTos related to different aspects of working with Linux. And the rest voted for Video HowTos.

I want to say Thank You to all those who took part in the poll.

I'll try to mix the topics on my blog and show you reviews, howtos and videos in the mixture proportional to the poll results.

Another poll will be announced soon.

Stay subscribed!

How Much of Linux Can You Get for 0.01 GBP?

You know that modern Internet life is all around search. Search facility is "a must" on all respectable resources. Even my blog has search facility - just look at the right column.
Sometimes search can give you some weird results, as was with me recently.

I was looking at Amazon site for some books about Fedora, just wondering if there are any decent readings about this Operation System. For some reason, Amazon's search engine threw a link to the list, which had nothing to do with Fedora. That was an offer of OpenSuSE 11.3 DVD. Not only the link itself surprised me, but also the price. The offer was made for 0.01 British Pound including postage costs. You can understand that one penny does not cover even cost of DVD creation, not talking about postage, Amazon and credit card processing charges.
These guys not only offer OpenSuSE for ridiculous price. You can also get Ubuntu, Kubuntu, OpenOffice - all for 0.01 GBP.
Just out of curiosity, I ordered that DVD with OpenSuSE.
What was the result?