Mageia-cal Win Over Humanity

I like Humanity in form of Ubuntu. I like KDE. That's why Kubuntu was my favourite distribution almost from very first sight on it. It was version 10.04 LTS, which I got on official CD from Shipit. You can still order a copy of that CD from Buy Linux CDs site.
Since then I made couple of upgrades: to 10.10 and 11.04.
First upgrade to 10.10 was little bit painful, but tolerable. There were some bugs which needed fixing before system was usable again.
Second upgrade to 11.04 was much worse. No, it does not mean that system became absolutely unusable. But there were 2 bugs which annoyed me a lot.

• First is problem with desktop effects. They are automatically disabled each boot and cannot be brought back on. Kubuntu complains on performance reasons, but I see nothing unusual happening. 
• Second is shutdown problem with network drive mounted. It is the bug described here.

Few months passed since 11.04 release date, and bugs are still here. That made me look into alternatives to both Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

vs.

After some consideration, replacement candidates were found. First is to replace Kubuntu, and it will be Mageia. Second to replace Ubuntu, and it will be... Wait, one step at a time.
So, I decided to move away not only from Kubuntu, but also from .deb-only concept on my PC.
Mageia is a new distribution brought up on the remainings of Mandriva. I have already reviewed Mageia in Live mode, and was more than pleased.
It is time to start installation now! Yes! Let's go!

This Blog Now Has PageRank = 4

Another week started with good news for me and for my blog.
Do you know what PageRank is?
Wikipedia says

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine... with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.

Until now this blog had PageRank either "n/a" or "0", which meant site was not considered by Google as important.
Situation changed today.

This blog has PageRank = 4 now.
You can check yourself using Google's PareRank Checker.
Of course, this is not only me who deserve "Thank you" for this achievement. But also you. You like the blog, make visits, mention it on external sites and so on.
If anyone has anything to comment or congratulate, please feel free to leave your comments underneath!

One More Guest Post

I like when somebody comes as a guest to my blog.
I like make visits too.
Both these events fall under category of guest posting.
It is time for me to make another visit. This is a visit to the very respectable blog about Linux: www.go2linux.org.
I made a visit there already in February. That time I showed you and audience of that blog Where 3 times 3 is 8.

Today I am talking about new desktop environments: Unity and Gnome 3: What is good and what is evil?

Welcome to read!

101

Image by twicepix

This is post #101 on this blog.
Don't believe it?

Musix in the air

Linux world is huge. Seems like there are more different distributions then stars in Debian galaxy. Some of them are generic, some of them are not. I have already made couple of reviews of Linux-based Operating System specifically created for creative people. They are brothers in blood: Dynebolic and Puredyne. It would be incomplete set if I just stopped at number 2. Number 3 is much more appalling. That's why today's review will be also dedicated to creative Linux.
This Tux was born far-far away from many of you: in country of football, beef and tango. Do you know which country I mean? Yes, that is Argentina.

This Tux likes music very much, that's why parents named it Musix. Of course, music is not his only hobby, but... more on that later.
This Tux likes freedom most of all, that's why it has nothing which does not conform with Free Software Foundation rules. It is one of a few which are endorsed by this organisation. I have already reviewed some other 100% free OSes from same list: gNewSense and previously mentioned Dynebolic. Musix is so much free that even standard Linux kernel is not good enough for him. Musix features Libre version of kernel instead.
Latest version of Musix was released in November 2009 and has index 2.0. It's image weights about 1.3 Gb, which means it cannot be burnt to CD-RW or to 1 Gb USB stick. That's why I decided to give another option a go. It was my third attempt to run Live OS this way, and previous two failed. Third time lucky, and Musix was "burnt" to HDD using Unetbootin.
Reboot. Choose Unetbootin from boot menu. Let's go!

Testing Strategy

This blog runs for few months already, and soon will change number of posts to 3-digit number.
Is it a good time to tell you what I am doing here at all? Probably most of my permanent readers already know, but...

PC-BSD: Devil With Human Face

This blog is mostly about Linux. You can guess it from the name: Linux Notes from DarkDuck.
Linux world is huge. But it is not the only world of Operating Systems on the Open Source Software universe.  I have already visited "neighbours" from another world, world of BSD: FreeSBIE. That time I was impressed with both stability, speed and size. That's why I decided to have more reviews of BSD-based systems.
Today I will make another visit to same world.

PC-BSD is another system based on Berkeley System Distribution. It is targeting personal computers, as you can guess from it's name.
Official page of PC-BSD lists several mirrors where you can get distribution. ISO file of PC-BSD 8.2 weights 3.4 Gb.  The problem with file size it that I could not download it from any official mirror. All attempts to download it either via FTP or HTTP ended in timeout message after 30, 50 or 80% of download. Finally, I dowloaded it from torrent site. When I was downloading, there were more than 100 seeders in the warm, but only 1-2 could actually feed me the file. Unfortunately, I do not have USB stick big enough to get the ISO image onto. That means I had to use DVD-RW.
Anyway, all the troubles with getting the image are in the past. Image is downloaded. DVD-RW disk is burnt and placed into the drive of my Toshiba L500-19X laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from DVD. Let's go!