They say a picture is worth a thousand words. This picture speaks for itself. Yes, its fugly. What the heck are those 3 bloody orbs ?

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Couple of days ago, Mozilla released the second Beta for the third version of their immensely popular browser, Firefox. Now generally I stay away from beta versions of software, but when Subbu told me it’simproved a lot over the first beta, I just rushed to download it & try it out.

Let’s have a look at the new features of the Second Beta:

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Ubuntu Gutsy has been receiving a huge amount of hype and fan fare recently, and I’ve been following Gutsy closely, from Ubuntu Fridge’s 10 Rocking Features in 10 Days to fellow bloggers and Linux users posts on Gutsy. Naturally after their Feisty launch, expectations were high(from my side). Now I’m not Ubuntu’s biggest fan(I’m a SuSE fellow, Novell haters, meh!), but I appreciate what Ubuntu has been doing for newbie Linux users in general.
I was patiently waiting for the December issue of CHIP magazine and picked it up immediately when it hit the stands, ripped apart the packaging and took out the DVD(yup, that’s right CHIP this month had a bootable DVD of Ubuntu Gutsy ) and started about installing it. Launching into the live environment took a good 2 minutes, uncharacteristic of Ubuntu.
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KDE Developer beineri writes in blog about the general confusion among people between KDE 4 and KDE 4.0. To quote him,

The last feature release of KDE is just over a year old, is well maintained and gains selected features about every two to three months. Still people long for the first release starting with the number 4 often called “KDE 4″ – which is wrong. Let me try to disambigue: “KDE 4″ refers to the whole life-time of the KDE 4.x based framework, like “KDE 3″ does for now five years and six KDE 3.x releases. The “KDE 4.0″ release will be just the first one in the “KDE 4″ cycle.

“KDE 4″ can be compared to “MacOS X” (although it will be an evolutionary update rather than as revolutionary as MacOS X was compared to System 9). “KDE 4.0″ can be compared to “MacOS X 10.0″, which was far from complete in term of frameworks and functionality compared to today’s current MacOS X 10.4 release. The same will apply for KDE 4.0: not all features and goals the developers envision for KDE 4 will be implemented for KDE 4.0. The most important ones will be sorted out and will, some changes are possible and will be implemented later during KDE 4 and a few will turn out as impossible or even undesired.

There will be users (and young editors) who don’t understand the difference of KDE 4 and KDE 4.0 and will call KDE 4.0 incomplete or a disappointment because it will not do all stuff they read about KDE 4 will be able to do and who expect the release cycle and development cycle to be something like “Microsoft Vista”: a big dump of changes containing some new features to live with the next five years (and a lot of new features the competition introduced in the last five years).

KDE 4.0 will for sure not take full advantage of the potential of KDE 4 platform. Akonadi, Phonon & Co will show their power only as more backends and plugins become available. Can you remember when kparts and KIO slaves became essential in your daily work (eg fish slave creation)? It weren’t the x.0 releases introducing them. Also KDE 4.0 will not contain all or the complete imminent frameworks of “KDE 4″. Like much of the “social semantic desktop” functionality will be added only later, even beyond 4.1 – Nepomuk is a several year research project and nobody knows today what the final specification will be.

Indeed, he is right. KDE has come a long way. And the releases have made it a very good Desktop Environment. With the first release of KDE 4.0 soon on the horizon, it’ll be interesting to see how usable the first release is and what sort of improvements further releases would bring out

When I got my Dell Inspiron, the first thing that I wanted to do was install openSUSE 10.3 on it. After all openSUSE has been serving me well all these years! Because of time restrictions and office workload being too much, I couln’t do it. So when the weekend arrived, I decided to install it!

             Since I dont have an Internet connection, downloading it was out of the question, so I had grabbed a copy of last month’s Digit magazine which had a Bootable openSUSE10.3 version on it. Initially I was weary, especially with the partitioning and the bootloader settings(I’ve done this lots of times, my hesistation was because of Dell MediaDirect occupying the first partition of the HDD. But then I just threw all fear and caution out the door, inserted the DVD and booted up my laptop.

             The green “Welcome” openSUSE splash screen is just awesome and put me in the right mood. After clicking on next couple of times, I ran into trouble. The installer’s partitioning tool informed me saying the NTFS partition could not be resized, as there were inconsistencies in the filesystem and informed me to do a file system check.

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Yup! Finally my laptop is here, delivered to my office at OMR, Chennai! After all those hassles(read this and this post to know more!)  I received it 12 days after my order was registered(ie, the day the amount was realized). In case you’re wondering, my Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1520, featuring an Intel Core2Duo Processor T5250@1.5GHz, 2 GB RAM, a 160GB HDD and (my most cherished component) nVidia 8600 mGT w/ 256MB RAM(although Windows and DXDiag reports 512 MB RAM, hmm). I’ll have a review on it shortly, both on Windows as well as Linux.  So keep reading in! (PS: Was playing Oblivion till 2AM yesterday , it looks :shock: @ 1280×800 with texture size set to large, all details set to Max, and HDR enabled(AA was disabled, though, the same ol’ Oblivion caveat)

In an interview with the IT news magazine, InformationWeek Linus Torvalds speaks on where Linux is heading in 2008. He says that he is very gung-ho about solid-state drives, expects progress in graphics and wireless networking, and says the operating system is strong in virtualization despite his personal lack of interest in the area.

Here’s an excerpt of the interview:

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“Penguin Pete” gives 10 reasons as to why the command line is far better than GUI. And yeah, I do agree with him. Something as simple as installing as application is a lot easier! I mean c’mon tell me, which is better, telling someone to type “sudo apt-get install xxx” or “Click on the Button, Click on system, click on utilities, click on install” etc. Wouldn’t you agree? I prefer the command line way–not because it’s geeky, because it saves you a lot of time!

Here’s his reasons:

• Keying is faster than mousing.
• It’s easier to both give and get help.
• Repetitive stress injury comes from the mouse, not the keyboard.
• Commands are standard where GUIs are not.
• Commands are more powerful.

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This for all those guys who don’t know which linux to try. These are the ones that had us awed at their usability and features.

Aditya’s Picks:

• Ubuntu
• Xubuntu
• Puppy

My Picks:

• openSuSE
• Kubuntu
• DreamLinux

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