Entries from September 2010 ↓

As the World Turns

I am not talking about the soap opera that ran for 54 years, I am talking about the crazy world of open source distributions. OpenSolaris is on its deathbed. Mandriva employees forked a new distro, and openSUSE may be sold to VMware. OpenSolaris problems are not new, but the latter two within the past week, along with the last episode of the long running soap.

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Linux Mint 9 Xfce or LXDE?

Another round in the battle between Xfce and LXDE. This time the distro is Linux Mint 9. So far, the Xfce desktop has lost two rounds in a matches with LXDE on the same distro. It has lost both the free memory battle and the quality of distribution battle. On this last round, who is going to be the winner?

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A Quick Look at Lubuntu 10.04

Talk about spartan, Lubuntu keeps the desktop totally clean. Does minimal mean more memory? How far does Lubuntu take the minimalist approach?

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Updated to openSUSE 11.3 KDE

I was going to switch to LXDE on the Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, but clicked the update option in a state of exhaustion. The result was a clean update for openSUSE 11.2 to openSUSE 11.3, but I still have the KDE desktop. Do I restart with a fresh install to get the  LXDE desktop, or just work with KDE?

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Selecting a version of Linux

While I was playing with PCLinuxOS LXDE this morning, I ran across this really cool site for choosing a Linux Distribution. The test is fast, and the results are interesting. When I selected RPM as the preferred package format, it recommended openSUSE 11.3 as a best fit. I took the test again, and changed the package format to DEB, Linux Mint 9 was recommended. For the followers of my blog, you know that my number #1 choice is openSUSE followed by Linux Mint 9. Go ahead and take the test, and see what it recommends for you.

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A Comparison of LXDE and Xfce on openSUSE 11.3

Instead of writing two separate posts, I am consolidating my notes into a single post. Besides, the install is identical, as it is just a matter of desktop selection during the install process. Testing various distributions on a multi-boot machine has its problems, and there are always a few gotchas with every distribution. If every thing was perfect, I wouldn’t need to write about it.

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