One great thing about Linux is the furious 6 month development cycle that most major distributions use. That’s right, no matter if you use Ubuntu, Mandriva or Fedora you will get a fresh bleeding edge version of the operating system twice a year. The fresh releases have loads of bugs on the release date, then they are maturized for a few months and once the projects get the stability up, it is time to install or upgrade to the next bleeding edge version. Unfortunately there are also distributions that do not offer this excitement. One of these distributions is the PCLinuxOS, usually abbreviated as PCLOS.

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While the hype around PlayStation 3 is considerably building up, due to improved games selection and price cuts, one of the potential killer features of the console has not received too much media attention. Future will show if I am correct, but Sony’s strategic decision to allow Linux installation on the console may turn out to be a ace in their sleeve. Linux makes it possible for any capable coder to develop software on the might PS3 hardware, which makes it more of a HTPC than just a game console. One killer application that made Xbox 1 eventually a success, was the XBMC - the Xbox Media Center. While Xbox 360 remains to be a closed enviroment, the possibility to develop PS3 software on Linux should result in some excellent applications developed for the platform.

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Viruses have not made the headline recently. While the Internet is the main medium for the viruses to spread, the network enables the antidote to spread rapidly as well. Anti-virus software can update their virus definitions online, which has made large scale computer virus epidemics rather rare these days. Many new PCs feature an anti-virus software as a standard feature, but unfortunately the PC packages are often shipped with a limited trial offer - most common seems to be a 60 day license of the Norton Internet Security. What to do when the license runs out? Well, don’t worry as there are some high quality anti-virus solutions offered for free.

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Stability is very often used as a marketing factor for Linux, or considered as something that gives Linux some edge over Microsoft Windows systems. As usual in Linux vs. Windows debates, many overstatements are made, and some people seem to think that Windows does nothing but crashes and prints out blue screened error messages. In reality there are many sides to this story, and the answer is far from obvious. So here we go mythbusting Linux part II: Linux is more stable than Windows.

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The legal position of the world’s number one torrent tracker and a website is again tested. The prosecutor of Sweden is about to file a suit against The Pirate Bay for accessory to crime and conspiracy to break copyright law. What do you think, are they criminals that should be convicted, or perhaps heroic Robin Hood’s of the Internet age?

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The question of which operating system is faster is often heard in Windows vs. Linux debates, but unfortunately it is very common that total crap is said or written about it. What is surprising about it that even information sources that you might consider somewhat professional can be totally wrong in their beliefs, or just fail to be objective while passionately debating for the operating system they favour. Couple of days ago I saw Desktoplinux.com making a statement that OpenSUSE or PCLinuxOS 2007 require far less resources than Windows Vista or XP. So which one is really the best performing or least resource hungry?

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…as if there ever was a real war in between these two formats. The Blu-ray camp had a much better offering to begin with, but Toshiba decided to challenge them anyway with the HD DVD. Toshiba had one edge over Blu-ray, and that was the production and/or transition cost from DVD to high definition technology, which is supposed to be significantly cheaper with HD DVD. But if Toshiba and HD DVD camp had an ace in their sleeve, unfortunately for them the Blu-ray camp and Sony had the remaining three.

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Gotta give credit for the gOS. In no time they are able to produce a Linux distribution that raises a huge hype and also made it to the Wal-Mart shelves - and to customers’ homes. Actually gOS is not an independent operating system, but a remastered version of Ubuntu Linux. The main difference is that they replaced the Gnome desktop environment of Ubuntu with Enlightenment, which is supposedly easier on the system resources and provides Macintosh OSX like bling for the visuals.

To be honest for some time I have been bugged by Ubuntu and Canonical. They managed to get significant user base and the most recent wave of desktop Linux hype is greatly due to Ubuntu’s success. They put a lot of effort in productization of Debian into a end-user friendly desktop environment, but in my opinion they do a half-ass job. While Ubuntu is very good and a solid platform, they have chosen not to polish the user interface and desktop environment at all. Their plain vanilla Gnome configuration combined with the brown/orange theme is anything but appealing.

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It is quite important to regularly update the firmware of your DVD recorder. Firmware updates can significantly improve the recording quality of your recorder and add compatibility for more DVD±RW media. Basically the firmware contains a database of media types and the settings/tunings for the specified media, that the recorder will use as you burn discs. Typically if the disc is unknown to the recorder, the recorder will apply a generic recording tunings, which often leads to sub-optimal burn quality and/or less than maximum recording speeds.

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As one of the new features of BitBurners is that we are now Linux friendly. Our web servers have always been built on free open-source Linux technology, our tech admin uses Linux as his primary operating system, and I use it as my secondary system on my IBM Thinkpad T41 laptop. From now on we will start bringing the Linux aspect to our content as well. I spent a lot of time trialing and testing Linux distributions during the year 2007. My goal was to find a suitable free operating system for my 2nd hand laptop. In the process I tried just about every popular distribution, but now in late December I finally feel like I have a winner.

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