Nifty new distro and nice wifi manager for linux
It's 2008, and I was quite happy to see both Missouri and West Virginia win their bowl games, although I was hoping they would both win their final games and face each other in the BCS bowl. Of course, if I had written that here in my blog days before that final weekend I would have jinxed them for sure. WVU had a decent chance against Pitt even close to the end since the game was fairly close, but they failed to finish any of their drives with a TD. Why did they look so much better against Oklahoma than Pitt? It's hard to imagine.
But moving on to more geeky matters, the latest distro I have tried and now installed on one of the older systems in my office is the brand, spanking new PCLinuxOS "MiniMe" 2008 LiveCD. This is a 300MB download that runs as a LiveCD but also includes an installer for installing PCLinuxOS on your hard drive. There are not too many applications included, but since you have Synaptic and an internet connection, you can install whatever you like once the quick installation is complete. The LiveCD runs very quickly and has excellent hardware detection and does include both NVIDIA and ATI video card drivers. The installation ran very quickly and easily on the old Dell Optiplex GX1 I installed it on and it runs like a champ. I had tried the PCLinuxOS based SAM before and liked it quite well, but I never installed it anywhere since it ran so well as a LiveCD! The MiniMe's Install PCLinuxOS icon was too tempting and since the Optiplex had a spare Linux filesystem partition just sitting there with a rather old MEPIS installation there, I could not resist the urge to overwrite it with a fresh new copy of PCLinuxOS. I must say the PCLinuxOS version of KDE is much lovelier than the older KDE from my ancient MEPIS install and it runs just as fast if not faster. They definitely make installation and configuration of the system easy, and all their tools are just so pretty!
So right now as I type this I have four different systems running Linux in my office, one running MacOSX and nothing running Windows! My Dell Latitude laptop is running Ubuntu 7.10 and I have switched it's network management tools from the default Network Manager that comes by default with Ubuntu with wicd which many people have mentioned as being superior for WPA encrypted wifi connections. I am only running WEP both at home and in the department, but I thought I'd try wicd, and I have found it much easier and much more reliable at grabbing a wireless connection. And, yes, it is prettier too.
I am amazed to sit in my suburban house in a typical residential neighborhood of single family homes now and see eight different wireless network SSID's floating around. When I first set up my wireless network about 4 years ago, there was just me and one other access point available. Now they are everywhere. And with my son and his wifi enabled Nintendo DS (plus the old laptop he uses), and with our Wii always online, we can sometimes have 4 or 5 wifi devices connected on our own home network. I'm amazed our half brain dead cat isn't surfing the net somehow...
But moving on to more geeky matters, the latest distro I have tried and now installed on one of the older systems in my office is the brand, spanking new PCLinuxOS "MiniMe" 2008 LiveCD. This is a 300MB download that runs as a LiveCD but also includes an installer for installing PCLinuxOS on your hard drive. There are not too many applications included, but since you have Synaptic and an internet connection, you can install whatever you like once the quick installation is complete. The LiveCD runs very quickly and has excellent hardware detection and does include both NVIDIA and ATI video card drivers. The installation ran very quickly and easily on the old Dell Optiplex GX1 I installed it on and it runs like a champ. I had tried the PCLinuxOS based SAM before and liked it quite well, but I never installed it anywhere since it ran so well as a LiveCD! The MiniMe's Install PCLinuxOS icon was too tempting and since the Optiplex had a spare Linux filesystem partition just sitting there with a rather old MEPIS installation there, I could not resist the urge to overwrite it with a fresh new copy of PCLinuxOS. I must say the PCLinuxOS version of KDE is much lovelier than the older KDE from my ancient MEPIS install and it runs just as fast if not faster. They definitely make installation and configuration of the system easy, and all their tools are just so pretty!
So right now as I type this I have four different systems running Linux in my office, one running MacOSX and nothing running Windows! My Dell Latitude laptop is running Ubuntu 7.10 and I have switched it's network management tools from the default Network Manager that comes by default with Ubuntu with wicd which many people have mentioned as being superior for WPA encrypted wifi connections. I am only running WEP both at home and in the department, but I thought I'd try wicd, and I have found it much easier and much more reliable at grabbing a wireless connection. And, yes, it is prettier too.
I am amazed to sit in my suburban house in a typical residential neighborhood of single family homes now and see eight different wireless network SSID's floating around. When I first set up my wireless network about 4 years ago, there was just me and one other access point available. Now they are everywhere. And with my son and his wifi enabled Nintendo DS (plus the old laptop he uses), and with our Wii always online, we can sometimes have 4 or 5 wifi devices connected on our own home network. I'm amazed our half brain dead cat isn't surfing the net somehow...
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