The initial impression of Fedora is very good - the new Plymouth boot scheme loads the system up very quickly, and without any flickering or unnecessary ‘geek talk’ shown on the screen. Instead there is a simplistic animation of the Fedora logo which greets you prior to the login screen - this gives a nice touch to the distribution. The post-boot visuals are not bad either, and Fedora comes with a pleasant dark blue tone and is one of the better looking desktops on the Linux market.

As the headline suggests,  Fedora comes with the very latest stuff that the world of free software has to offer. But unfortunately the edge leaves the distro bleeding on the release date. The included Firefox version is 3.5 beta 4, which means that a number of Firefox add-ons will not work on day 1, until the Firefox 3.5 is out and add-ons updated. Also the configuration of the browser leaves a bit to be desired, as it doesn’t have clue what to do with many common file formats, such as .PDF files as an example. Hell, even the “Open containing folder”-feature in the Firefox download manager asks for the associated helper application.

Fedora is also one of the more strict distributions regarding the licensing of the software components. This means that no support for proprietary formats (such as the MP3) is included, and neither is Adobe Flash for the browser. The former disadvantage is however tackled quite nicely with the automatic codec finder that finds, downloads and installs the required software for media playback. Installing Adobe Flash on the other hand required a visit to the command line interface.

After spending a few days with the installation and configuring the system for our personal preferences we found ourselves using the command line way more than we have with Ubuntu, openSUSE and other new user oriented desktops. Luckily Fedora has some excellent documentation and communities online, which makes finding support very easy - I would say Fedora is second best in this field, only topped by Ubuntu.

So who should use Fedora? As a bleeding edge and short life cycle distribution, it is hardy the ideal server environment. It offers a very nice desktop environment, but requires a bit more manual tuning than some of the competition. Performance wise it is very typical, with similar system resource consumption that Ubuntu and others. FOSS purists will enjoy the fact that no proprietary code is included. Overall I would recommend Fedora to someone who has already learned the basics of Linux and can do a bit of work on the command line. The relation to RedHad is a terrific asset for anyone interested in learning Linux for a professional career, as RedHat / CentOS has a lot of commercial and corporate users. If you are looking for the quick jump from Windows to Linux, you should probably look elsewhere.

You can grab your copy from: fedoraproject.org

A new version of ConvertXtoDVD has been released, version 3.6.4.

Recent changes include:

• new image filter
• new translations
• new VSO updater included
• minor menu template corrections
• preparation for 2 pass encoding coming in Version 4

I started off by giving the KDE4 live CD a whirl and I was pleasantly surprised. This is the first KDE4 distro that seems somewhat usable to my eyes. The stupid desktop plasmoid was gone and the desk top arrangement look very familiar for an ex-KDE3 user. Like always with Mandriva, and unlike Ubuntu, the visual appearance is very pleasing with rather bring blue design, beatiful desktop login animations, wallpapers and so on - this is something that Mandriva has always done well. However the Kicker menu was disappointing as always:”K-K-K-K-K….” - when do the KDE developers realize that starting every application name with a “K” looks retarded and is just bad for usability?

Over to Gnome version then and I ended up also installing the desktop and cofiguring it for my daily needs. The Gnome environment is also nicely designed with pleasant theme and graphics. The default theme “La Ora” comes in many colors if the default color scheme is too bright for you. Interesting thing in comparison to Ubuntu  is that with the same basic configuration on my veteran Thinkpad T41 laptop, the Mandriva cosumes roughly 30-40 megabytes less RAM. My laptop has 1GB RAM so this usually is not a concern in web and desktop use, but this could make a difference if your PC has 512MB or less. If you want to use the ever lighter weight LXDE desktop you can do that by installing the meta-package task-lxde as using it shaves down the memory consumption further ~20 megabytes. I also tried Mandy on a Thinkpad X31 / 384MB and it was pretty responsive and perfectly usable. Besides memory footprint the overt all responsiveness is good and my subjective evaluation is that Mandriva is noticeably faster than the latest Ubuntu in desktop usage.

Mandriva also uses a 6 month release cycle so the changes in between versions are not too big. They introduced better boot speed, just like Ubuntu, and all the applications and components have been upgraded. Unlike with 2009.0 release, I did not immediately notice any serious bugs or flawed functionality. In addition to a good visual design and nice responsiveness, Mandriva also has the benefit of the Mandriv a Control Center system administration features, which would be a great addition to any distro (it’s open source, why nobody besides PCLOS is adobting it?). Mandriva traditionally has had a top notch hardware detection,  and everything was installed correctly in 2009.1 as well (Unlike Ubuntu Jaunty which installs incorrect graphics acceleration settings for old laptop ATI Radeon cards).

So if you are looking for some distro hopping I can warmly recommend to give the latest Mandriva a whirl - especially if you are looking for a KDE4 based solution, but their Gnome offer totally fine as well. You just might end up liking it.

Mandriva can be downloaded at: www.mandriva.com

The most obvious improvements in this release are the notification system (see Shuttleworth’s blog) and improved boot speed. The notifications bring new uniform notifications of various system events for the end user, such as network connections/disconnects, volume changes from hot keys and so on. I see this as an improvement in terms of usability and visual appeal. The notes itself are somewhat dark in colors, perhaps to match some of the new themes better - on the other hand they don’t quite match with the classic Human theme which still is the default. The boot process on the other hand has really become faster - I did not clock the difference, but it is very noticeable. Also I have to give credit for the new Gnome login screen which actually looks good (and also has rather dark toned colors).

Speaking of visual appearance, Since Shuttleworth’s vision to improve the looks of Ubuntu, they have been releasing some darker themes. The Ibex introduced theme ‘Dark room’, and the Jaunty comes with ‘New wave’ and ‘Dust’ themes. Event though I have always hated the bizarre brown/orange theme of Ubuntu, I have to say that these new additions don’t really improve things. I don’t know what is it, but somehow they don’t feel complete or polished enough - the final touch is missing. And I also don’t understand that whats the obsession with rather dark color schemes? The new wallpaper, even though it should matter as it is easily changed, deserves a special recognition: It is the lamest Ubuntu wallpaper in a while. I quite liked the more artistic approach of Ibex’s or Hardy’s wallpaper, but this new one goes back to the Ubuntu tradition of delivering some kind of lame, meaningless, brown stripes on screen. Why is it so difficult for Ubuntu to make a polished looking release? The first impression is everything in attracting new Linux users.

However thing that most concerns me about this new release is that it seems to be contain some rather big showstopper grade bugs. My Thinkpad T41 using Jaunty acts very slow and the screen redraws seem to bring CPU load to 100%, making the whole system rather painful to use. Overall your mileage depends on your hardware, but I always find it surprising when some distro doesn’t correctly on this oldish laptop - that is because generally the Thinkpad’s are possibly the best supported laptops for Linux, and on the other hand this laptop has flawlessy worked on a HUGE number of distributions (for exp. all Ubuntu’s starting from Feisty), so it is always interesting when someone still manages to break the compatibility with this hardware. The CPU usage bug is reported by many, there seem to be a lot of problems with WLAN/WPA2 and more…you can track the bug squashing work by having a look at Launchpad.

Overall it is a typical Ubuntu release. Brings something new, but nothing ground breaking and is very similar to the previous relese. In this release the changes are perhaps more apparent than in the previous two (Hardy, Ibex).  The maturity to my eyes doesn’t seem as good as it was with the Ibex on day 1, so I would give it a few weeks to improve until installing or upgrading. I really don’t see why they stick with the 6 month release cycle as it obviously is too short to introduce anything significantly new, or to stabilize software. I find it somewhat paradoxical that actually the previous release Intrepid Ibex is now in it’s prime. But give Jaunty a month or two, and the huge  user base of Ubuntu will guarantee that the most common bugs are found and fixed, and Jaunty evolves into a nice stable release - just before Karmic Koala hits the servers…

If you can’t wait, you can grap it from Ubuntu.com

Comodo is actually quite famous for their excellent free firewall software. Especially power users will enjoy it’s configurability and options, which all are nicely laid out on a well designed GUI. It is also pretty well pre-configured as it recognizes the most common Internet applications (most browsers, instant messengers…) and categorizes them as safe application, thus not alerting the user. In case of an unknown application attempting to connect an alert is show. Interesting addition in the latest version is ThreatCast database, where Comodo  collects user’s responses to firewall alerts and aims to classify more files based on that - as we see in the screenshot, the FileZilla FTP client however was still unknown to the system (which is somewhat surprising?).

Comodos’s suite also has so called proactive defence features, branded as DEFENCE+. This is basically application behaviour blocking and authorization - the fireall will alert users on various application behaviour events. For an example application installations or application attempting to modify or launch another will cause a DEFENCE+ alert. Personally I find this kind of protection somewhat intrusive, and I doubt that it is very good for inexperienced PC users either, since the user has to have some knowledge whether an application should be allowed to do it’s thing or not. Anyway, the feature is there if you want it - I dont.

Conclusive anti-virus tests are impossible to conduct without a sufficient virus database and fortunately my PC is clean, so this part of the software suite is more difficult to evaluate. The good news is that Comodo’s real-time scanner doesn’t seem to be resource hog. I would guess it would fall to the similar category of Avast!, but this is purely subjective evaluation. I also tried the latest AVG recently, and it seemed to drag down the system much more than these two. What I would like to see is more options for the real-time scanner - personally I like to limit scanning to file system write operations only for improved file read and execution performance. Why? Well, a first thing a virus will try to do is to replicate and infect files, which is a write operation. This is of course somewhat less secure, at least theoretically, but it will improve the performance, but as said such options are not available.

I Googled around for anti-virus software benchmarks, but it seems that not too many conclusive ones are performed on Comodo. This report published by VirusInfo suggests that Comodo’s detection rate is somewhat mediocre. It is well below the best performers, but delivers similar detection rates than Sophos, Trend Micro or McAfee. Personally I don’t see this is as a huge concern. The virus database seems to receive updates almost daily and these days information of major virus infection outbreaks is so rapidly distributed on the Internet that I have little doubt that Comodo wouldn’t update their database rapidly if such event occurs.

Overall I am very pleased with Comodo. It delivers an excellent firewall and a decent anti-virus in one integrated package and does it without destroying computer’s performance - and it’s free. If you want to play it extra safe you could just use their firewall-only solution and combining it with Avast!, which seems to deliver a bit higher detection rates, but then you would lose the benefits of an intergated solution. At least be sure to check out COMODO’s offer before going shopping on the security market.

Download Comodo Internet Security: CLICK HERE

• Antivirus - powerful protection against infection
• Firewall - enterprise class protection against internet attacks
• Defense + Host Intrusion Prevention System

Author: Comodo Holdings BVI
License: Freeware
Download: http://personalfirewall.comodo.com

With GNU/Linux, however, the story is different. For over a decade, columnists and bloggers have been explaining how GNU/Linux isn’t ready for the desktop — and, despite all the progress in the operating system over the last ten years, the arguments haven’t changed much. Moreover, increasingly, they’re outdated when they’re not based on complete ignorance. In fact, I often get the impression that those who pontificate on GNU/Linux’s inadequacies have never tried it.

The article is nice reading, but Bruce however makes some pretty strange suggestions while busting these myths, like suggesting GIMP as a replacement for PhotoShop, while the former doesn’t even support CMYK color pallette which is a real blocker for most imaging professionals. Bruce also writes that no Windows “migration tools exists”, while the popular Ubuntu distribution actually has one integrated to the installation process.

Anyway read and judge for yourself - this is always a fertile topic to debate about:

The GNU/Linux Desktop: Nine Myths

Preconditions

• A USB pen drive (or a memory card reader with a card inserted) with sufficient capacity. The size of the files will increase during the AVCHD conversion process,  so make sure your drive is bigger than the intended video file. NOTE: the drive has to be formatted with the FAT32 filesystem. You can format the drive in My Computer - just click right mouse key on the drive letter and choose Format.
• Matroska .MKV video file with AVC (h.264) video and AC3 audio streams.
• A .SRT subtitle file with exactly matching name for the .MKV video.
• mkv2vob software. Download from here and install
• Recommended reading: Read our AVCHD guide for more detailed information.

Configuring mkv2vob for AVCHD - USB output

Couple of options need to be set in the mkv2vob Configuration tab to enable the AVCHD output.

1. Set the Output type as AVCHD - USB. In this mode the mkv2vob creates a folder \AVCHD\ and the AVCHD file structure as sub-folders. The \AVCHD\ folder must be placed to the root of the USB drive in order to PS3 to recognize the video.
2. In order to get the subtitles, tick the Load Subtitles from file. Note that the .SRT subtitle file name must be EXACTLY the same as the name of the .MKV video file. So if you have My_TV_series_episode_1.mkv you must also have My_TV_series_episode_1.srt.
3. There are two additional subtitle options to choose: Overscan Compensation and Large Subtitles. The Overscan compensation feature places the subtitles slightly higher in order to avoid them being cut of on some TV systems. Large Subtitles increases the size of the subtitle font. For my HDReady 32″ Samsung television I prefer to have the Compensation on and Large subtitles disabled. Try it out on your own system to see which is the best setting for you. On 40″ FullHD televisions the Large subtitles may be a better option for good readability.
4. Set your Subtitle Language and Audio Language.
5. Video Transcoding should be left to automatic - mkv2vob will apply the re-encoding of the file if needed. The Transcoding Codec is x264 for AVCHD complicancy and best image quality.
6. In AVCHD - USB mode you can leave the File Splitting to None. In this mode the mkv2vob creates standard compliant output automatically.

Using mkv2vob

Using mkv2vob is very simple as it is only a matter of choosing the input file and defining the destination folder for the output

1. Click on Source file / Browse and point to your .MKV video file. Rememer to have the matching .SRT subtitle file in the same folder as the video.
2. Click on the Destination Folder / Browse and point the desired destination for the AVCHD output
3. Click Add File which adds the file to mkv2vob the queue, immediately processing the 1st file in the queue. As seen on the picture the test file subtitle_test.mkv is AVCHD compliant and only needs to be muxed with the subtitles into the AVCHD format. This process is very fast and takes only couple of minutes. If mkv2vob detects non-compliant characteristics in your file, it will re-encode the content. This will take a lot of time, but quarantees that your video actually works with your console.

Copying the files to the USB drive

Now the final step is to copy the resulting \AVCHD\ with subdirectories to the USB drive, which of course is only a matter of dragging and dropping the folder using Windows Explorer. You can also configure the mkv2vob output folder straight the USB drive, but this feature has one design flaw within mkv2vob - at least with the version 2.4.5, the mkv2vob outputs a folder structure of \video_file_name\AVCHD\ which the PS3 does not recognize as the AVCHD folder must be located at drive root. This is very easy fix though, as you can just browse to the USB drive in Windows and move the AVCHD folder to the root level of the drive.

Now eject the USB drive from Windows, unplug it and stick it to your PS3. The console recognizes the AVCHD content and the video is playable as it would a be a video disc. Very convenient! Enjoy your High Definiton video!

Preconditions

• Matroska .MKV video file with AVC (h.264) video and AC3 audio streams.
• A .SRT subtitle file with exactly matching name for the .MKV video.
• ImgBurn software. Download from here and install.
• mkv2vob software. Download from here and install
• Recommended reading: Read our AVCHD guide for more detailed information.

Configuring mkv2vob for AVCHD output

Couple of options need to be set in the mkv2vob Configuration tab to enable the AVCHD output.

1. Set the Output type as AVCHD - Disc. Note: There is also an option to use AVCHD - USB which is used for saving and watching AVCHD content on a USB disc. We have not tried this yet, but we have received reports that it is working well also. USB -AVCHD playback will covered with another guide on BitBurners.com in the near future.
2. In order to get the subtitles, tick the Load Subtitles from file. Note that the .SRT subtitle file name must be EXACTLY the same as the name of the .MKV video file. So if you have My_TV_series_episode_1.mkv you must also have My_TV_series_episode_1.srt.
3. There are two additional subtitle options to choose: Overscan Compensation and Large Subtitles. The Overscan compensation feature places the subtitles slightly higher in order to avoid them being cut of on some TV systems. Large Subtitles increases the size of the subtitle font. For my HDReady 32″ Samsung television I prefer to have the Compensation on and Large subtitles disabled. Try it out on your own system to see which is the best setting for you.
4. Set you Subtitle Language and Audio Language.
5. Video Transcoding should be left to automatic - mkv2vob will apply the re-encoding of the file if needed. The Transcoding Codec is x264 for AVCHD complicancy and best image quality. When recording the AVCDHD content on disc, there is no need for file splitting. Note: If you use the AVCHD - USB feature, the USB stick has to be formatted in FAT32 format with has a maximum file size limite of 4GB and therefore the splitting feature needs to be enabled.

Using mkv2vob

Using mkv2vob is very simple as it is only a matter of choosing the input file and defining the destination folder for the output

1. Click on Source file / Browse and point to your .MKV video file. Rememer to have the matching .SRT subtitle file in the same folder as the video.
2. Click on the Destination Folder / Browse and point the desired destination for the AVCHD output
3. Click Add File which adds the file to mkv2vob the queue, immediately processing the 1st file in the queue. As seen on the picture the test file subtitle_test.mkv is AVCHD compliant and only needs to be muxed with the subtitles into the AVCHD format. This process is very fast and takes only couple of minutes.

Burning the AVCHD disc with ImgBurn

After the mkv2vob has completed processing your video files, you will have the following directory structure in your destination folder:

D:\video_file_name\BDMV
D:\video_file_name\CERTIFICATE

The recording process for AVCHD or Blu-ray disc is not very different from regular DVD recording. In AVCHD / Blu-ray file structure there are two root level folders to record, and the file system must be set to UDF 2.50.

Perform the following steps:

1. Add folders ..\BDMV\ and ..\CERTIFICATE\ to be recorded
2. Under options choose File System UDF 2.50. Note that this change is persistent, and will be effective next time you start ImgBurn, unless reverted before that. Also be sure to have Recurse Subdirectories checked.
3. Optionally tick the Verify option of you want some security that the disc is readable.
4. Click the button to start recording
5. The ImgBurn may prompt you to auto correct file systems settings - accept the proposed change. It will also prompt you for a Volume Label, where you may enter a title for the disc if you wish.

Watch the recording process go, and after it is done you are ready to watch AVCHD/Blu-ray on your PlayStation 3. Just slip in the disc and the PS3 will recognize it as a video disc, and auto-start playback. Under Options menu (triangle) you can now enable/disable subtitles as desired.

Enjoy your AVCHD high definition video!

So what does Mint have so special that it has been able to gather a major userbase and an active community? The trick is that Mint strikes hard to the weak spots of Ubuntu, while relying on it’s solid base and maintaining binary compatibility. The improvements that the Mint developers have made are obvious from the first boot into the system - Linux Mint makes the Ubuntu suck a whole lot less.

First of all Mint fixes the ugly desktop theming that Ubuntu is often criticized for. You can’t find a single pixel of the original Ubuntu brown/orange looks in Mint. Instead you are greeted with a rather conservative but pleasant grey/black theme with pastel green highlights. The Gnome interface has been rearranged to a single bottom panel, which is definitely easier to consume by people migrating from Windows. The original Gnome menus have been replaced with a Mint menu, which is somewhat of a mix-up in between openSUSE Kickoff and a traditional Windows XP style menu arrangement. With these changes Mint is very easy to use and welcoming for people with little experience on various Linux desktops.

Another feature which is welcomed by new Linux users is the inclusion of most critical proprietary software elements that one needs for everyday basic usage. These include Sun Java, Adobe Flash and support for a number of proprietary audio and video formats. This means that a vast majority of the world’s top web pages and services work out of the box and so do your music and video files too. Mint also introduces a set of small Mint-specific tools like the MintUpload FTP client and a slightly different package update manager. However, my gut feeling is that the importance of these little tools is a lot smaller in comparison to the out-of-the-box confifuration done right. While the Linux hardcore always remind me that you can customize Linux to be whatever you want, I’d still say that more than 95% of people settle to what ever is shown after the first boot. They may change the wallpaper but thats about it and that’s why the first impression is most important.

While Linux Mint seems to be targeted for the newbies by design, I have to say it has the weirdest start-up wizard popping up of the first post-install boot.  Yes, the first things that Mint asks for the user after installation are 1) Should the root account be enabled/disabled 2) Should there be fortune cookies shon in the terminal. I really can’t decide whether to cry or laugh when I see these questions on my laptop screen. The root account issue is obviously a very important one, but does the 1st time Linux user know anything about the significance of using ’sudo’ or ’su’? The fortune cookies on the other hand are the most insignificant feature ever in an operating system - fine, if the Mint developers like them, so put them in your distro. If not, then get rid of them, but why on earth you have to bug the new users with such a stupid question? Oh well, I guess no distro is perfect.

Overall it is safe to say that Mint delivers a lot of added value on top of Ubuntu. It looks better, feels better and sounds better on your tongue. It offers one of the very best out-of-the-box experiences on the market, while relying on the stable Ubuntu/Debian core. I been watching the website, releases and the community every now and then, at so far it has been making a good progress release after release. The Alexa statistics graph below gives you an idea how it matches up against the contenders (click on the graph for more details). Mint is definitely one project to keep on eye on in the future, and let’s hope that it doesn’t fade away as the years go by.

Find out more about Mint at: http://www.linuxmint.com