Poll: What’s your favorite distro?

You can leave a comment telling us why.

Conky.

I was wondering if there were any system monitor like the DSL one. I like the simplicity of this monitor and its minimalistic aspect.

I discovered conky and I could customize any thing I liked because conky has a lot of options to monitor your disks, RAM, network, swap, etc and pass any command to it

There are some screenshot in the official conky website. Take a look at mine

Conky with Tilda

Conky with Tilda

Apt-build: Optimization for Debian!!!

Apt-build is a package that lets you compile the packages from scratch and optimizing them. It approaches all the advantages of apt. There are many options, unfortunately not as much as in Gentoo’s Portage package system.

For unfeared users, there is an options that recompiles the entire system.

Tilda: A FPS-like console

Tilda is a console emulator intended to imitate the look and feel of the FPS games consoles.  I don’t use Tilda for this reason but it’s perfect to use as an embedded console into your desktop. I firstly used Eterm but it was not able to copy and paste form GTK 2.0 applications so I searched another terminal.

Look at the screenshot below.

Tilda

Tilda

OpenOffice.org 3 released

OpenOffice 3

OpenOffice 3

Finally, OpenOffice 3 was released on Monday. I had not posted it yet because my Internet connection didn’t work.

The biggest improvement of this version is the support for Microsoft Office 2007 file formats. However some magazines have said OpenOffice is not a full upgrade and it could be considered the 2.5 version

There is a huge load in the OpenOffice web site so you can experiment some troubles downloading the new version.

OpenBSD says Linux is rubbish

I

s known that since many years the OpenBSD developers – especially Theo de Raadt – have said they are very sad because Linux is so popular and It’s a real garbage. They are the best in the world, OpenBSD is simply the best free OS.

I’m not saying OpenBSD is a bad OS. I have read much about it and its cool features but it’s very security focused and is more useful in servers and networks, therefore a little hard to use as a desktop system.

I’m annoying about that commentaries because Linux is used in almost every environment, it’s  stable and secure (not as secure as OpenBSD) and used in more than 50% of the best computers on Earth.

Are those commentaries provoked by envy?

I don’t know.

Sources:

http://www.techspot.com/news/17867-Linux-is-rubbish-says-OpenBSD-advocate.html

http://www.top500.org/

How to install e17 in Debian sid

I recommend to install e17 only in Sid. The reason is that the official e17 packages are in the experimental repository. There are several repos for e17 but in my personal experience I prefer the official ones.

To add them you need to add these lines to your sources.list (you can use any server)
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
#If you want to use the sources
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free

Then edit your /etc/apt/preferences (create if needed) and add these lines


Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release a=experimental
Pin-Priority: 600

Then issue apt-update && apt-get upgrade and apt-get install -t experimental e17

Enlightenment: The next generation Desktop Environment

Enlightenment 17 (e17) is a powerful, but almost unknown, windows manager. It has been developed  for a while and it’s has not been released yet. Nevertheless, it’s lightweight, powerful, highly customizable and with a little bit of work very beautiful. I have to say I got enlightened because of the eye candy you can get without sacrifice up too much resources. E17 can run in less than 100 Mb with animations, shadows, etc.

You can take a look to my screen.

My e17 screen

My e17 screen

Why did I choose Debian?

I started to use Linux with Ubuntu but I quickly changed to Debian over Ubuntu (and the another distributions) by several reasons.

1 Package Management: APT just works, and works well.

2 Number of Packages: The biggest package pool all over the open source world makes APT even greater.

3 Tradition, maturity and stability: Over 10 years of development have became Debian in one of the most stables and matures OS.

4 Release Cycle: Many people complaint about this, but I think the 3 different versions (stable, testing and unstable) of Debian give you the chance to elect the grade of security and stability you need in environments where they are crucial and avoid lots of bugs that appear in distros with only a release and a fast release cycle.

5 Multi use: Debian can be used in almost all kinds of computers, since cellphones to supercomputers.

6 Debian is a wider project that not only works on the base of the Linux kernel but works on the FreeBSD, NetBSD and Hurd kernels.

Why did I choose Linux?

That’s a main point. I’ve have almost a year using Linux but I have tried it a lot and now I can share my experience and tell us some of the characteristics I found:

Fully customizable: From setting your menu bar transparent to build a new system from scratch you can customize Linux in any way you want. The only limit is you!

Stable: Linux (and in general all the *nix OS) is very stable. A big part of the 500 top supercomputers use it and it’s used by many of the most powerful server. Source .

Eye candy: Linux and the huge amount of Desktop environments (without mentioning the composition managers – Compiz, Beryl, etc) make Linux a very beautiful system.

Fast and lightweight: Linux is really a resource saver alternative compared to commercial OS like windows. The other day, I was looking at my school’s computers stats and i could observe that Windows, with the default theme, IE and Office open, uses (wastes) more than 512 MB of RAM while Linux uses less than 200 MB (even a lot less, depending of the DE). Also, Linux is very fast – it’s used by the most fast computer ever (IBM Roads runner). Do you need another fact?

Linux is Free: I think it is the most important factor. It’s not about any technical consideration, it’s about your freedom and your right to know more about the software you’re using.

I know there are some things that must be improved but I’m sure Linux will become better each day.