Coffee, Jazz and Commentary

This past month, I purchased a new laptop as my new primary machine and eventually will be my sole machine as I cut down on my inventory of IT equipment. The laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L305-S5944, and has 2GB of system RAM, and a 250GB hard drive.

The first thing I did was to create restore DVDs, and then immediately replaced Vista with PCLinuxOS 2009.1, a Mandriva derivative developed at Houston, TX.

Thankfully, the repositories include the latest version of Opera, which I was able to download, install and use.

The new laptop came out of necessity as my then current desktops and laptop were fast becoming obsolete in terms of being able to replace hardware when needed. While this may be OK for now, should something happen a year or two from now, this may become a problem.

Over the past two years, the system requirements for mainstream Linux distributions have increased two fold.

Fedora still has a 192MB requirement since version 6, and still requires 192MB at version 11. The true requirements for a Linux distribution depend largely on which desktop environments you have installed.

GNOME still has a 256MB minimum requirement, but 512MB is more of a realistic requirement for any kind of performance, and that depends upon what features of GNOME you have installed and are active.

KDE 3.5.10 is the latest (and final) version of the KDE 3 series. This version, like GNOME, can run on 256MB, but 384MB or larger is required for performance.

KDE 4, however, requires 512MB minimum, and preferably 1GB of RAM for performance, and that is if you do not have many features activated. A fullly featured KDE 4 installation requires 1GB to 2GB for performance.

All of this is the state of today's major desktop environments. That is not to say that you cannot install other environments like XFCE, LXDE (unofficially called KDE Lite because of its KDE-like functionality and lightweight system requirements), Fluxbox and WindowMaker.

Next year at this time, Linux distributions containing KDE and GNOME may require 1GB of RAM to install either of these desktops. This is one reason why I purchased a new laptop.

PCLinuxOS is a Mandriva derivative that happens to be one of the easiest to install and maintain, especially for a person like me who lives a busy lifestyle, but wants a Linux distribution for everyday use...and it's Made in America.

Score one for Yahoo (and the consumer market) for rejecting the "offer you cannot refuse" from Microsoft.

I am taking the Cybernightlife project to the next level by establishing a podcast site at MyPodcast.com. This will allow me to use the Audacity audio file editor to create podcasts, then with the wi-fi connection, upload episodes to the MyPodcast website.

No sooner did I mention about checking Linux Pro Magazine in my last post than I find out that the magazine has released OpenSUSE 10.3 on its DVD-ROM.

This is the version of Linux I was really waiting for when I ordered the DVD-ROMs. Now that I am quite satisfied with Fedora 8, now I have to make a decision. I could have both Fedora 8 and OpenSUSE 10.3 on the same machine.

One of the things I like about OpenSUSE in general is that Novell makes connecting through dialup really easy. The KInternet utility, which is exclusive to OpenSUSE allows for one click connections to the Internet, which makes it convenient for anyone who wants to go online.

What is really interesting is that once you have used OpenSUSE, and explored other distributions, you will almost always end up coming back to OpenSUSE. This is because Novell has a lot to offer.

Last night, I upgraded Fedora to version 8. This is the best verion of the Red Hat sponsored distribution to date. To get opera running, all I needed to do was download the current version of the

compat-libstdc++

RPM package.

The night before, I purchased a Tevion MD85618 flexible keyboard. This is an interesting gadget, made of industrial strength rubber with embedded electrical components. Unlike other keyboards, you can actually fold this keyboard over. The keyboard does not come with a Windows driver on CD-ROM. But that does not matter. This keyboard is a standard ACPI-compliant keyboard with multimedia keys.

Best of all, the multimedia keys work well with Fedora 8 (running the GNOME 2.20 desktop) out of the box.