4311 reasons to beat Green Gecko, or How I killed Live Tux

If you're still not aware, Green Gecko is logo of openSuSE distro.
My acquaintance with it was even shorter than with Mandriva.
From the list of available packages my choice was OpenSuSE 11.3 LiveCD with GNOME environment.
Amazing, but, official OpenSuSE site seems to have a tool to create LiveUSB from disk image. Similar to Mandriva Seed. That's fine, except for some technical detail. Disk images of OpenSuSE are distributed in .iso format while the tool requires them to be in a .raw format. Little inconsistency which makes the useful tool useless. Finally I burned iso-image to CD.
First try is with modern Toshiba laptop. Insert CD in a tray. Reboot. Choose boot from CD.

Let's go!

Last Tango with Manny Tux, or Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

One of my previous posts was about Mandriva Linux Spring 2010.1.

That time I booted this system from pretty old 1Gb USB flash drive.
The results were not as nice as they could be.
Manny Tux showed herself in slow mood.
After some thoughts I decided to give Manny another try. This time I took brad new 2Gb flash drive for experiment.
So, “burn” iso drive to USB stick with Mandriva Seed. Reboot. Select USB boot option. Let's go for second round!

Customers are always no.1

There is nothing as rewarding as "thank you" from the customer.
I had a customer recently who bought a Linux CD.
That's what I get as response from him:

downloading is one thing but burning it on to disc is another. quickly you can find yourself with dud burns and grumpy old computers.

you offered the service and delivered with no issue and it worked "out of the box" - no hassle.

thanks for the service.

i spent a couple of pounds that day and got a spread of linux operating systems that brought live back to 2 old xp machines

--Gareth, Pembrokeshire

If you want to join the team of happy customers, welcome to Buy Linux CDs page to place an order!

EH8QF2W3NU4H 

Meeting the Puppy, or Tux in canine skin

It is time now to talk a little about the cute little puppy.

Of course, I am not going to talk about animals here. We are talking about Puppy Linux.
I heard about it for the first time long before the first acquaintance. Many sites and articles about "pocket" Linux-systems, referred me to this animal.
My first meeting was with version 5.1.1, which had been released just days before this acquaintance.
Download the image of the CD-ROM. It is only about 130M. Burn it. Reboot. Choose to boot from CD. Let's go!

Cooking the Manny Tux... Slowly...

Today's post will be brief.
My first acquaintance with Mandriva was brief too.
Mandriva site has a unique opportunity to download the full installer of Linux on a flash drive. Called Mandriva Seed.

I say "unique opportunity" because it is the only developer of complete (not pocket) distribution which has own tool for this. At least one I am aware of. Of course, there is a utility at pendrivelinux.com site that allows you to copy almost any distro to flash drive. But pendrivelinux is a third-party developer with respect to the distributions themselves.

Okay, I digressed a little.
My guinea pig was Mandriva Linux One Spring 2010.1 with the KDE4 shell. The process of copying the distribution on a flash drive took just a few minutes. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

3 reasons to drop penguin and no reasons to pick up another

SLAX

I’ve written a few words about SLAX disappointments earlier.
1) First issue was not so significant for me. This is inability to work properly with Russian letters in file names on NTFS-partition and a mapped network drive at the same time.
2) The second, more serious, is instability of SLAX file system.

How to Get South African Humanity on the Hard Disk

There is a lot more for me and you to learn!

Just heard that Ubuntu 10.10 was released few days ago!

Such a miss from my side not to mention it earlier!

How to put a system in a pocket?

I wanted to introduce myself to Linux for a long time.
Back in a year 1999 I downloaded the Linux distribution (imagine the amount of CD to download via dial-up connection!), and I bought yet another disk with Linux. I even managed to install it on my computer then. All the "acquaintance" ended at the doorstep of terminal mode. I failed to launch even a slight semblance of a graphical interface. Linux only found keyboard and display from the whole range of devices I had. Mouse and, moreover, an external modem were out of the question. Of course, once upon a time I worked with DOS and Norton Commander, but still the mentality of late 90s have already been solidly busy with Win'95. So, first acquaintance failed.