Meeting the KDesktop from Alt Linux

What do you know about Russia?
Vodka? Bears on the streets? Siberia?
Any more stereotypes?
Let me give you another one: Linux.
Yes, Linux!
There are people in Russia, there are computers in Russia, and of course there is Linux!
I have written about at least 3 Russian Linux distributions already: Simply Linux, Alt Linux and Agilia Linux all were born in Russia. To be honest, Simply Linux was born as part-time project of Alt Linux team member and since then moved fully onto Alt Linux team.
But Simply is not our today's topic. I have already written about it recently.

Instead, let's again look at Alt Linux. Why? They have released new version of their system recently, and it is very interesting to know what it has to offer.
ISO Image of Alt Linux 6.0 KDesktop (that is official name of the version) weights more than 4Gb and available for both 32- and 64-bit platforms.
Because of the size of the image, I went for DVD-RW route to start it.
So, disk is ready and is in the drive of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from optical drive. Let's go!

Do you think that this blog needs a forum?

Re-settling Mageia and Debian

Those who closely follow my blog already know: I have recently changed my lapop. It was due to unresolvable hardware issue: hinge on the old one became broken.
Old laptop had 4 inhabitants on its hard disk: Windows XP, Mageia 1 KDE, Linux Mint XFCE and Debian Squeeze GNOME.
I wrote about my experience how old installed systems behaved themselves in their new house.
Next task for me was to re-install all Linux systems which I had. I did not plan to re-install Windows XP for two reasons:

• it behaved itself pretty well and did not show any glitches
• I use it too rare to bother.

Another part of the plan was to replace one of inhabitants: Linux Mint XFCE left the league and new Salix 13.37 XFCE joined quadro-boot landscape.
So, I left with 2 more systems to tell you about: Mageia and Debian.
Follow the link to read how they felt during and after re-installation.

Pardus 2011.2: new version or service pack?

Pardus is very interesting distribution.

• It is developed in the country not very famous on the IT frontline - Turkey.
• It is supported by government organisation, and at the same time remains unbiased and free.
• It uses its own package management tools.

Even having these oddities, this distribution gains popularity. As per recent voting, Pardus got just below 5% of votes for best KDE-based distribution. More than monstrous Mandriva or newborn Mageia. Not bad, isn't it?

Interesting enough, Pardus team makes new releases even more often than Canonical with its Ubuntu. We have seen version 2011 released in spring, than 2011.1 released in summer time. Just 2 months passed away and here it goes! Please meet: Pardus 2011.2.
To be fair, Pardus 2011.2 is not major release, but rather a bugfix update. Release notes tell you about this.
As before, Pardus is distributed as ISO image which "weights" about 1.3Gb. Official Pardus Wiki recommends using either Mandriva seed or dd command to create Live USB. Unfortunately both methods failed for me. After some attempts I dropped an idea of Live USB and burnt DVD-RW.
So, disk is in the optical drive of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from DVD. Let's go!

Users voted for best KDE-based Linux distribution... again!

Was it a clever step for me to start voting for the best KDE-based Linux distribution?
I don't know...
Anyway, a month ago I announced voting results. You can review that post here.
Strange enough, announcement did not stop votes. Other way round, number of votes almost doubled during last month!
Is it a good reason to make another announcement of voting results? Yes, it is.
So, what is the best favourite KDE-based Linux distribution, voted by visitors of blog Linux notes from DarkDuck?

Is Salix XFCE 13.37 better than 13.1.2?

Nobody can argue there are 2 major Desktop Environments now in Linux world: GNOME and KDE take lion part in installed Linux desktop systems. Most Linux distributions are released with at least one of them available.
But since system requirements for resources of KDE and GNOME are rather high and growing, there is more and more space for lighter desktop environments like LXDE and XFCE.

I have written a review of Salix XFCE 13.1.2 not long ago. It was a chance for me to get closer to this wonderful Slackware-based distribution. That time I promised to try installed version of this distribution once I have new laptop to fiddle with. The time has come!
Salix XFCE has 2 versions available for download now: 13.1.2 is the only with Live mode, that's why I tried it in my previous article. But newer version 13.37 is also available for installation. This version was released in mid-May 2011. It weights less than 700Mb, so I downloaded it and burnt onto CD-RW.
Let's see how Salix XFCE 13.37 behaves itself on my new laptop Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505.
Reboot. Choose to boot from optical drive. Let's go!

Does Tux Like to Move House?

I wrote about a week ago that my laptop which served me for almost 5 years got broken. These were bad news for me.
That laptop hosted all of my quadro-boot systems. Of course, none of inhabitants suffered during the breakage, but they could not live their full-bodied life without window to external world which is laptop's screen.
Recent days brought me some good news. I managed to get the replacement.
This means all inhabitants had to move house.
I previously had similar experience when I tried to replace motherboard and processor in the desktop computer keeping same disk with Windows. It was somewhere in late 1990s. I don't remember whether it was Win95 or WinNT, but result of the move was disastrous. I had to reinstall the system from scratch.
Did things change since that time? Let's see...