Right after Ubuntu's fifth birthday it was time to celebrate once more, because a Karmic Koala was released, and it brought with it a lot of reasons to upgrade. If Ubuntu 9.10's smart looks haven't convinced you yet, maybe the fast boot times and overall enhanced performance will. You still don't know what Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is all about? Then read on, we will clue you in.While writing this review, I tried to put myself in the "shoes" of a new Ubuntu user. This meant that I didn't go on to installing my favorite programs or setting up everything as I like right after installing the operating system, but inst... [read more >>] Mandriva is one of the most mature Linux distributions out there and, in time, a very loyal community was created around it. Innovation and ease of use have always been the top priorities for Mandriva, and this can be seen in the team's effort to bring exciting new features with every release. Coming six months after the previous version, Mandriva 2009 Spring is a great treat for any Linux geek. Before diving deeper into our review, take a few moments to go through the hardware configuration upon which we've tested Mandriva Linux 2009.1 One for a period of two weeks: [tablec][row][col]· AMD K8 nForce 250Gb Motherboard &mi... [read more >>] In only a few years of existence, Ubuntu reached a very high level of popularity. With the slogan "Linux for human beings," Canonical clearly aimed to provide a smoother transition for the regular desktop users who wanted a change in their everyday computing experience. Though some may question Ubuntu's true contribution to open-source innovation, one cannot deny its important part in popularizing GNU/Linux and freeing a lot of users from proprietary software restrictions and high costs. Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) respects the established six-month release schedule and provides enough reasons to make you update from older versions... [read more >>] We all love music, and I'm willing to bet money on that any given day of the week. I'm positive nobody could argue with me when I say that there's not a single person in this world who hasn't spent at least a few hours listening to their favorite tunes. That's one of the reasons I'd like to tell you about a very nice music player that I stumbled upon a few days ago named Last.fm. The main highlight of this application is that it's a radio music player, it doesn't play anything stored locally on your computer. This is its primary purpose, to provide a useful interface for you to bet... [read more >>] After a hard day at work, you decide to relax and play a nice game on your Linux system. As you don't want anything too complex that could require a lot of attention, you decide to find a game that's simple and fun to play. Based on the fact that Tux, the penguin, is the most popular guy in the Linux world (besides Linus Torvalds, of course), you could try Extreme Tux Racer, a very popular racing simulation game where you drive... Tux! You control the popular penguin as it slides on the mountain, to catch as many herrings as possible. Also, you will have to finish the race in time, or you'll lose.The game menu is nice, packed... [read more >>] It is well-known that the hardest choice is made when you deal with a varied offer, in which every item is said to be the best. This situation is familiar to most computer users who nowadays have plenty of solutions to any of their needs or desires. Supposing that you want to surf the web, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror and others are waiting for you to make a choice; same goes if you want to edit some documents, where applications such as AbiWord Text Processor, OpenOffice Word Processor or Kword compete in becoming your favorite editor. How do you think things work when it comes to media players? Yes, you're right, exactly the same. If y... [read more >>] In the last couple of years, multimedia support in Linux has evolved quite nicely. Nowadays, modern distributions provide software for playing, editing or remastering video and audio files, several cool games with complex and modern graphics have already got released and I'm sure many more will follow. At this evolving rate, it shouldn't take very long until Linux will provide at least the same level of multimedia support as Windows or, why not, even excel it.The newest addition to my multimedia software collection is a tool for generating video DVDs from video files on the hard drive. It also supports various useful features such... [read more >>] |