We are 6 months old!

Hooooorrray!

This blog is 6 months old today!
When I started it in October 2010, I did not think that it will last so long. Looks like I get in rela love with both Linux and blogging about it. I hope you enjoy reading what I am writing to you here!
What was done in these six months?

• More than 60 posts
• More than 25 different Linux distributives
• 2 guest posting on another blogs
• 1 guest posting in this blog
• And we are now a team of 2 authors!

Having published this post, I let know to all of those who wants to take part in our contest: there are good news and there are bad news.

• Good news are that you now exactly know answer to the first question of contest. First existing post was published six months ago, on the 14.10.2010
• Bad news are that you only have few hours to find answers to other questions and send me an e-mail, as required by competition rules.

Good luck to all of you!

Is CentOS 5.6 Better Than 5.5?

CentOS is free operating system which is based on source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RHEL itself is non-free open source project which has 2 free "relatives".

• Fedora acts as sandbox and test polygon for RHEL developers. Technologies from Fedora eventually got their way to RHEL.
• From another side CentOS is based on the existing RHEL and uses its source code with minimal changes. In spite (or because of) being free, CentOS is widely used on server market.

Because of its nature, it is very clear that CentOS is mostly oriented to server market. But CentOS can also be used on desktop  computers and laptops.
I have already reviewed CentOS 5.5. That time I fell under impression that CentOS came from 20th century, at least in terms of user interface design.
New version 5.6 was released recently. Should I check what is new? Sure!
So, image is downloaded from torrent. It weights just enough to get to one CD, so CD-RW was burnt. I am usually reluctant to burn CDs in KDE's default K3B, but this time I tried this option and was nicely surprised that CD-RW was burnt without any issues at all.
Disk is in the drive. Reboot. Choose to boot from CD. Let's go!

Moonstruck with...

MoonOS

From DarkDuck:  This is the first post of new author of this blog: Diogones. He is student at University of Colorado and also fan of Linux. I hope you'll like his posts. So, ladies and gentlemen, please applause! DIOGONES!

 One of the most admirable elements about Linux is, once the community has become comfortable with a distro, another one appears to disrupt the status quo. Mint arose out of a desire to create an improved version of Ubuntu; Salix was developed to make Slackware more user-friendly. While these distributions are often argued to be mere spin-offs, and not true distros, they deserve mention for their unique adaptation to an already established distro.

 MoonOS is one of these noteworthy distros. It may be an obscure distribution, and it might not be genuinely original, but Moon is too interesting to be ignored. Based upon Ubuntu/Debian, MoonOS takes the comfortability, ease of use, and user-friendly aspect of Linux's number one distro, and gives it a more distinctive feel, reminiscent of the Mac's OS X.

Contest Is Still Running

Hello to all my readers!

Do you want to win 4Gb USB stick?

I'd like to remind you that contest is still running on this blog.

You have few days left, because list of participants will close this week (oooops, I have just gave you another clue to get correct answer to contest question...)

I'd like to remind to all those readers who joined mailing list, Twitter account or Facebook page that you only participate in contest when you send me e-mail with answers. Please see contest rules for details!

Do I Have Bad Karma for Debian?

Do I have bad karma to run Debian? I have 6 posts about Debian so far, and only one of them relates to full success, where I was able to run a full-power Debian on my laptop. Maybe I myself and Debian are just creatures of different worlds and we cannot live together?
Let me try one more time.
This time my attention will be taken by Aptosid. This is Debian-based distributive, slightly adjusted by team of developers. It is based on Debain Sid, which is classified as unstable sandbox. How unstable it is actually? Let's see.
Aptosid offers several options of its distributive: KDE-full, KDE-lite and XFCE. My choice this time was for KDE-lite version, which fits to USB stick. Latest release of Aptosid is dated February 2011 and has code 2011.01.
So... iso is downloaded and "burnt" to USB stick using the Unetbootin tool.
Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

3-in-1: How 3 Old Friends Can Be Found In Same Place

Can you ever expect that three of your oldest friends which belong to different companies can be found in the same place? Difficult to imagine, isn't is? It's like accidentally finding your best school friend and your best colleague in your favorite pub just across the road from your home. Dream!
Same happened to me recently.
My first blog post back in October 2010 was about SLAX system. SLAX is like first love: you remember it forever.

Hey, can anybody still claim he does not know answers for Contest questions?

Post about SLAX was soon followed by post about Puppy. I felt in love with Puppy from the first sight. It's a pity I had to remove it from my HDD to replace with Debian Squeeze.
SLAX is based on Slackware.
Puppy (at least v.5.1.1) is based on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.
They are definitely from different companies.
What do they have in common? They both can wear same clothes: KDE 3, Trinity.
Trinity is default Desktop Environment in SLAX. As for Puppy, Trinity was used in Puppy's additional package which I wrote about here. Actually Trinity is my third old friend. I wrote recently that I prefer KDE to GNOME, and that love started from KDE3 in SLAX.

And now imaging how I was surprised when I told there is Linux Operating System which combines all three! This is Puppy SLAX remix.
It was announced on the forum post. Disk image weights less than 300 Mb, but you still need to spend about an hour to download it even on high speed Internet connection because sending server limits downloading speed to about 100Kb/sec.
Anyway, image is downloaded and burnt to CD-RW. It's time to reboot. Let's go!

4 Lessons Which Bodhi Linux Taught Me

Ubuntu is not the oldest distributive on the Linux landscape. Moreover, it is not standalone one, and it is based on Debian. But Ubuntu and its derivatives became the most used Linux in the world, bringing Linux to the level when non-geek users can get benefits of this OS.
I have mentioned already that Ubuntu has huge number of derivatives. The Wikipedia page contains impressive list of them, but even that list is not full.

New star appeared on the Ubuntu sky recently, and this star is called Bodhi Linux. Version 1.0.0 was released at the end of March, just a week ago. Everything new is interesting. Hopefully, not only for myself, but also for my readers. That's why I have to try this new operating system.
Bodhi Linux image weights less than 400Mb, which puts it into the same line as Puppy and SLAX.
While testing Bodhi Linux, I learnt 4 lessons which I'd like to tell you about.