Windows 7 vs Linux Compiz

Sat, 9 May 2009 23:33:17 -0400

I found an interesting article on the web regarding the New windows 7 vs Linux Compiz at http://thebeezspeaks.blogspot.com/2009/05/windows-7-makes-me-laugh.html.livepage.apple.com I felt the author made had made some interesting points. The best one being the Compiz video below posted on youtube almost two years ago. Well if a picture is worth a 1000 words, then how many words is a video worth. I hope you enjoy the side by side comparison and draw your own conclusions

Linux in the HAM Shack

Tue, 7 Apr 2009 00:08:31 -0400

For those of us that have an interest in both Linux, and Ham Radio, there is no better podcast than “Linux in the Ham Shack”. The host of this informative podcast are Richard KB5JBV and Russ K5TUX. I was fortunate enough to find their podcast during their Premier first episode late last year, and have enjoyed every episode since.

One can only imagine how excited I was when Richard and Russ asked me to join them for this week’s episode, an episode where they would be reviewing Crunchbang Linux during their live taping on uStream. The episode was taped tonight, and we had several listeners in the chat room.

I would enjoy telling you all about this podcast and what we covered, but thought you would rather enjoy listening to the episode yourself. We will post a link here to episode twelve of “Linux in the HAM Shack” once it is on line, or you can go directly to the “Linux in the HAM Shack” website http://blacksparrowmedia.com/lhs/ and download the episode.

*Update: Click here to listen to Episode 12.

I hope your enjoy this episode and become a regular listener like myself.

I would like to once again thank Richard and Russ both, for asking me to join them. I enjoyed our on air time and look forward to listening to the episode myself once it available online.

73’s

Bob
wd4bob

Crunchbang Linux 8.10.02: A lightweight distro

Sun, 5 Apr 2009 11:55:40 -0400

Recently we purchased an Asus Eee PC 1000h for our portable use, (it is tuff to beat the form factor of these netbooks) but struggled to find a Linux distro that worked with the hardware. We tried a few of the eee pc linux distros, but struggled with the desktop environment they provided, until we found CrunchEee a version of Crunchbang, made specifically for the eee pc. We were impressed.

Crunchbang Linux is an Ubuntu based distribution featuring the lightweight Openbox window manager and GTK+ applications. The distribution has been built and customised from a minimal Ubuntu install. The distribution has been designed to offer a good balance of speed and functionality. CrunchBang Linux is currently available as a LiveCD; however, best performance is achieved by installing CrunchBang Linux to your hard disk. (Crunchbang wiki)

Here we will review CrunchEee version of Crunchbang: To install on our Eee PC (no cd drive) we first downloaded the iso from the Crunchbang website then used UNetbootin to set up our flash drive for the install. If you have never used UNetbootin for Linux downloads and installs, we highly recommend you give it a try. We’ll give a detail review in a later post.

The installation went flawlessly as expected with a Ubuntu based distro. Now to the first boot: All hardware worked with no need to look for drivers to get things working. The CrunchEee edition uses the Array kernel that has been optimized for the Eee PC. The Array kernel is still a work in process, but seems to build all the necessary modules for the Eee PC hardware.

You will be greeted with a very simple desktop environment, no desktop icons, or menu bar. We did enjoy the one desktop item, Conky. Conky is a system monitor that can display several running processes, cpu usage, hard drive space used, battery life, just to name a few. It is very flexible and configurable, once you spend time modifying the conky.rc file. I found the Crunchbang forums extremely helpful in setting up my conky.rc file. The forum provided tips and tricks as well as other users configuration files, making a personalized display very easy. This was our first experience running conky, and we very impressed. Prior to this our desktop was very cluttered with different widgets to provide all the same info conky provided, in a very simple clean display.

There is no desktop menu like one would expect to find with Gnome or KDE, just a right click any where on the desktop opens the menu with all your programs. Unfortunately newly installed program are not added to the menu. You add programs to the menu by editing a xml file. To find the xml file, just right click on the desktop, go to Preferences > Open Box Config. Once there it is easy to add programs to the menu. Although I do like this set up, as it allows me to decide were programs will appear in the menu, it could be confusing to first time OpenBox users who install a new program and expect it to now appear in the menu.

Crunchbang by default installs several proprietary codecs and includes VLC and RhythmBox for media play back. Flash is installed by default as well, so no need to download anything to view the all important YouTube videos! This is a nice touch, your system ready to go out of the box. gPodder is installed by default as well. gPodder is a great little program to download and organize of all your podcast. gPodder allows you to upload you podcast download list, so adding you podcast to multiple machines is quick and simple. No more need to find all the rss feeds!

Being a Debian/Ubuntu based distro there are thousands of programs ready for download using apt-get or synaptic.

After two months of daily use, I can say the speed and stabilty of CrunchEee is second to none, and is a great distro for the Eee PC. It may not be for beginners, but for those of use that have been using Linux for awhile this is a distro that deserves a look.

Linux, Ham-Radio, tech, news & reviews

Windows 7 vs Linux Compiz

Linux in the HAM Shack

Crunchbang Linux 8.10.02: A lightweight distro