A Few Thoughts on Why Businesses Resist Migration to Linux

With the upcoming release of Windows 8 in October, the computer world appears to be divided in its opinion of Microsoft’s new operating system. Following the release preview of Windows 8 a few months ago, some are excited about the new interface, while others feel it was built only to be more convenient for tablet or touchscreen users. If Windows 8 turns out to be another Vista, Linux is expected to eat another inch more of Microsoft’s market share.

Despite being an open source system, Linux received less support from users as it is known to be harder to navigate than Windows. It gained popularity only with developers and computer geeks because they had the freedom to tweak the code to suit their preference. But Linux has made great strides over the years. Where Linux was previously limited only to servers and supercomputers, now more users are daring to use the system in their laptops and desktops. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said in the business environment. Why are businesses resisting the change?

1 000 000

I can officially announce now: I have joined the club of millionaires!

Unfortunately, that 1 000 000 does not mean $1 000 000. This only means a million of pageviews on this blog.

I announced a contest for the readers of my blog, and the only task was to send me a screenshot showing the value 1 000 000, or the nearest, on the pageviews counter.

I am happy to tell to all of you, that the prize, a book, will be sent to my winner who lives in Germany. Here is the screenshot he sent me.

1 000 000

Thanks to all my readers! Hope you like what I do for you!

Taming of (open)mamba - part 1

DarkDuck (Dmitry) has his reasons for testing a Linux distro from a live CD session. However, I prefer to test the installed version of a distribution, even if it's only for a short period of time. When he informed me he was testing openmamba, I looked for some information about it. The Distrowatch page says that it "uses APT for RPM and Synaptic as its package management tools." I felt this was right up my alley, as PCLinuxOS, my chosen distro, also uses APT for RPM and Synaptic. I downloaded the same KDE4 version on DVD that DarkDuck did and installed it to a VirtualBox VM.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

Back in May 2011 I ran a very simple contest: you had to fix the moment when the visitors' counter on this blog showed the 100,000.
It's time when the counter is close to another, more interesting value, and it is time to announce yet another contest.
The rules are the same as they were last time, except for the value you need to show on the screenshot: 1,000,000

Number 300

You may believe, may not, but this is the post number 300 on this blog!

Yes, there are 300 different articles now published here. Most of them are Linux and FOSS-related, the majority being the reviews of the different Linux distributions. Very few are not directly about Linux, but more about the life of the blog.

So, another threshold has been passed. Where do we go next? Let's see! Life is an unpredictable thing, you know!

But, I can tell you for sure, something big is coming at this blog! Stay tuned!

Three LXDE-based distributions: race them face-to-face

I am in a very interesting situation. Some time ago, I promised myself to stay away from LXDE-based distributions. At the same time, I wrote about three of them in the last 6 weeks.

Can I compare them somehow? Probably yes. Let’s do it.

WattOS R5: Not Ideal, But Still Nice

I heard about this OS from couple of my readers, who left the comment on the blog posts. They mentioned this OS as the extreme light one.

It looked interesting for me, and that is why I decided to try myself.

WattOS is an operating system based on Ubuntu. Yes, I really hear right now from many of you: Oh no, yet another Ubuntu spin! Please, stop groaning, read on.

The project has as its purpose to create an OS which can be used on very old computers. That's why they want it to be really low in resource requirements.

I downloaded the distribution's ISO file from their site. The latest version WattOS R5 was released in February 2012. R5 simply stands for Release 5. The ISO file size is about 693 Mb.

When the ISO file was on my laptop, I used Unetbootin to create a Live USB.

So, the USB stick is ready and plugged into the port of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!