Why I Choose PCLinuxOS

There’s been quite a few postings and articles on new users and Linux flourishing during the past year. The reason I believe this to be is that desktop Linux is approaching or has arrived at the tipping point where it can gain mainstream adoption. People are seeing Linux as a viable alternative to Microsoft. My wife recently had me nuke the dual boot computer and go with Linux due to Windows Media Player 11 restrictions set to come out when it is released. Her main concern is being told by companies how she should be able to listen to her music after she’s bought it…kinda like buying a car and the dealer tells you where you can drive it and how you can. She’s in the process of converting all her mp3’s to ogg’s to 1) save space and 2) because they sound better and are in a free format. Thus far, she’s not missing Windows.

Many blogs also have taken up this topic and, when determining the best Linux desktop, gushed about Xandros, Freespire, Ubuntu, and MEPIS. The thing I find odd is that they forget the little guy that’s outpacing all the others…and that little guy is PCLinuxOS. Let’s take a look at a few reasons why PCLinuxOS is, IMHO, the best Linux flavor for new users.

Continue reading “Why I Choose PCLinuxOS”

Inside MyPCLinuxOS


I’ve been extremely busy during the last month supporting and starting projects for PCLinuxOS. For those of you who may not know, I am the webmaster for http://mypclinuxos.com. What I desired when creating the site was a place that the community could come to help make PCLinuxOS better. Not that it wasn’t good on its own…it does just fine. Just that I wanted the community to feel more a part of development and to have them take pride in the distro.

I’m really impressed with the way the community has responded, not only to the creation of mypclinuxos, but also to the organization of the site. I’ve tried very hard to provide any open source tool available for web based project development for everyone that I could provide in a shared host environment. Heck, I’d even configure tomcat on my home Linux box and put it out there if they needed it. Why do I do this? Why do I do this for free? How do I do this for free?

Well, let’s get into it shall we? Inside the start of MyPCLinuxOS…

I started Yet Another Linux Blog a few years back to chronicle my search for the perfect desktop distribution and to house many tips and tricks that I had in my arsenal and also that I had run across on the web. I found PCLinuxOS after my wife determined that it was the best Linux desktop available last year while participating in my Linux experiment. It completely replaced the SimplyMEPIS install I had on every computer in my home and it also replaced the disks I hand out to friends.

I laid low in the PCLinuxOS community, checking out the pulse by forum lurking. I hung out in IRC using an alias that no one could trace to TKS (the nick I used at the time) nor my current nick of devnet. I tried to really grasp what community I had got myself into. After I determined that the community was fantastic…I was ready to give back.

See, I started a fan site for SimplyMEPIS and had my efforts dashed by various sources. I had been an active member of the MEPIS community in the early days of the distro and it was amazing how fast those I considered my ‘community family’ turned on me when my opinion differed from theirs. So when I decided to support PCLinuxOS, I was VERY careful about what I was getting myself into. I couldn’t be happier with where I am at and where the distro is at today. I see the popularity for this distro going through the roof and I’m in for the ride. So it’s very nice to be a part of something like PCLinuxOS and to have gotten in on the ground level as a contributor.

One of the areas that I see PCLinuxOS hurting the most is in the internationalization arena. I truly believe that if we made PCLinuxOS available for install in as many languages as Ubuntu or OpenSuSe does, we’d be right up there with them in popularity and userbase. As it is now, PCLinuxOS is released in English only. MyPCLinuxOS has many people forming teams right now to change that. If you’d like to see PCLinuxOS in different languages both for the installer and LiveCD, head over to MyPCLinuxOS and join up with our team to help us do so. That’s it for now. I’ll have more updates about MyPCLinuxOS and what’s going on there in the future.

PCLinuxOS Magazine Releases Initial Issue!

Normally, I don’t like to rehash the news. However, in this case, I’m a member of the contributors and the admin/webmaster of both development sites for the magazine…I feel a bit inclined to let everyone know about it 😀

“It is my privilege to announce on behalf of the team members of the PCLinuxOS Magazine Project sponsored by MyPCLinuxOS.com, the September 2006 introductory issue is available for download! We’ve put a lot of
effort into producing a quality magazine made for the community, by the community.

Contained inside are many articles written for the
PCLinuxOS community and a few for those interested but not yet using
it. Some highlights include:

  1. An interview with Susan Linton of Tuxmachines.org
  2. An RPM Tutorial for beginning users
  3. Hunting rootkits with Rootkithunter on PCLinuxOS
  4. Much, Much more!

Please note that the magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license unless otherwise stated on the articles themselves. By
downloading this magazine you must acknowledge and accept this license agreement.

We’ve released the magazine in two versions in pdf format. We designed the magazine for viewing in KPDF but other viewers will work as well. The two formats of the magazine are Viewer Default (VD) and Presentation Mode (PM). Viewer default will display the magazine in the default mode your reader is setup with and Presentation
Mode starts in full screen.

 

PCLinuxOS Editor-In-Chief, Archie, has further explanation of the downloads:

“The following files are best viewed in KPDF. Other readers, such as Adobe Reader, Ghostview, XPDF can also be used. The following instruction is based on using KPDF.

PCLinuxOS_Mag_200609_PM.pdf is initially in presentation. Moving pages forward is as easy as clicking the left mouse button. To go back a page, the user just right-click the mouse button. And exiting the Presentation Mode is not harder than pressing the ESC key.

A user can also hover the mouse cursor on the top of the screen and there will appear some navigation buttons. On the top left-hand side are the blue forward and back buttons; on the right-hand side is the exit button.”

Head over to the downloads section to download the latest issue of the magazine. Thanks for your interest in PCLinuxOS! If you feel you’d like to contribute to future issues, please check out the contribute link in the main menu. You can also drop us a line via the contact link in the main menu. If you have any suggestions, comments, or letters to the editor feel free to submit them this way or send an email to mag@mypclinuxos.com. Thanks and enjoy!

PCLinuxOS Magazine Download

Digg this Announcement!

LinuxWorld Powered by Windows Part II

Some of you may remember a previous blog entry I penned that looked at Linuxworldexpo.com. In that entry, I discussed the fact that the website linuxworldexpo.com for the LinuxWorld Expo 2006, one of the largest Linux trade shows in the world, is powered by Windows Server.

Some comments on this article when it hit the newswires at Lxer were that it was spotted previously by a site member. I revisit some articles from time to time just to clean up appearance and layout (since I’ve migrated site themes, been doing this quite a bit) and I noticed that Linuxworldexpo.com isn’t the only website that is powered by Windows. LinuxWorld leaves many of its sites to be powered by Bill and the gang:

  1. Linuxworldexpo.co.uk (previously reported by theregister)
  2. Linuxworldexpo.com (netcraft report)
  3. linuxworldexpo.com.au (netcraft report)
  4. linuxworld.idg.se (netcraft report)
  5. linuxworldchina.com (netcraft report)
  6. linuxworld.dk (netcraft report)
  7. Linuxworldsummit.com (netcraft report)

Some of these sites above aren’t live… but most of them are from the same netblock, Level 3 Communitcations, Inc. Some side info to note: Level 3 is having SEC problems currently and the Yahoo Finance Boards are a hoppin with various messages with some predicting a huge fall and others comparing it to Worldcom. Now back to our subject. We’ve identified the netblock, but let’s get a bit deeper and find out other information.

A quick “jwhois linuxworldexpo.com” yields the following information:

Registrant:
International Data Group, Inc. (DOM-373431)
5 Speen Street Framingham MA 01701 US
Domain Name: linuxworldexpo.com Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com

Administrative Contact:
International Data Group, Inc. (NIC-14208833) International Data Group, Inc.
5 Speen Street Framingham MA 01701 US
legal@idg.com +1.5089354686 Fax- +1.5084244807
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Donna Moschella (NIC-14208849) IDG World Expo Corp.
3 Speen Street Framingham MA 01701 US
donna_moschella@idg.com +1.5084244801 Fax- –

Created on…………..: 1998-Sep-30.
Expires on…………..: 2007-Sep-29.
Record last updated on..: 2006-May-17 11:10:55.

Domain servers in listed order:

DNS1.EMARKMONITOR.COM
DNS2.EMARKMONITOR.COM

MarkMonitor.com – The Leader in Corporate Domain Management

A quick lookup on markmonitor.com and we see that it’s not really a host per se…but a domain management service provider. I did a quick search for Linux on their site which yields no results. This quick search doesn’t really tell us if LinuxWorld has a choice in the matter of hosting…it seems they’re given a platform on which to run via MarkMonitor.com through the Level 3 netblock. Taking a look at NetworkWorld, their parent company, we find a Linux Host? That’s a bit odd. Their old parent company IDG.com was always running on Windows but it seems they should have a choice for themselves (Linux and Windows hosting platforms) since their parent company is powered by Linux right? Are they letting their services purchased expire? Are we set to see mad changes for Linuxworld domains? Who knows. We can only comment on the current.

So one would hope that LinuxWorld would have the ability to ‘choose’ what platform to run on. It seems that this may not be the case. As stated, some of these sites don’t resolve aka they have no public face and resolve to nothing. If you’re an avid Linux enthusiast and think that any Linux News site should ‘walk the walk’ when they ‘talk the talk’ then LinuxWorld might be one of the places you avoid…at least until they can show that they deserve to wear the Linux name by hosting on Linux. Afterall, what would Microsoft.com hosted on Linux be? A laughing stock one could bet.

I do recall a time when LinuxWorld was one of the only magazines and sources for enterprise Linux news. It seems they’ve gone downhill quite a bit…according to alexa.com, their traffic has dropped through the floor during the past year. Not only that, but since the relaunch around the first part of June 2006 in which they were put under new ownership from Network World, they’ve had little activity on their website. For example, look at their <sarcasm>wildly active forums</sarcasm>…spammers don’t even try hard to post there…and why would they? Is anyone reading it?

Interestingly enough, macworldexpo.com is also running on Windows, which is silly to me as well. Oh well, life is full of conundrums right? Perhaps LinuxWorld being powered by Windows is meant to be? Who am I kidding! Roast those turncoats! lol.

Devnet

Statistics and Trends of an Old Friend

Statistics are something I love. AWStats is my friend. We go out on Fridays and I buy it shots of Jack at the local tavern. Seriously though, statistics are something I generally love to look up and ponder…mainly because with statistics, time is a huge factor and in business time is money. So, if one can learn from past statistics to save oneself time and effort, business can benefit…which explains my interest.

I recently moved and during the move found a couple of old hard drives. Dusting off and installing one brought back some memories…it contained an install of SimplyMEPIS 2003.10, which was my second install of that particular OS. This got me thinking…I wondered what benefits MEPIS garnered from my old, defunct enthusiast site mepislinux.org? At the time and shortly thereafter, no benefits were clearly visible. In fact, with my somewhat loud depart from the MEPIS community, there were many claims that both my site and I did nothing for the distro.

With Google Trends, statistics are at my fingertips. Using this site, I’m able to look back in time and see if my old 12 page review did any good at all to help MEPIS along…I was very surprised to see that I was part of the highest surge MEPIS has made to date according to Google Trends.

Continue reading “Statistics and Trends of an Old Friend”

What’s Up With the New Look?

As you might have noticed, we have a new look currently. This theme is a temporary one as I build the next one from scratch. I’ve been theme shopping for the last couple of months and noticed that there isn’t a whole heckuva lot to choose from that a million people aren’t using already. So the only way that I can make sure that Yet Another Linux Blog is unique is if I do the theme myself. Of course, this means that I have to learn a whole new set of .tpl files, new CSS calls, and start sketching things out on a sketchpad that I haven’t bought yet 😛

If anyone has any feedback on the current theme, please let me know…I can change it pretty easily or hack it to pieces on a whim.

I’ve been somewhat busy having launched http://mypclinuxos.com as a PCLinuxOS projects site to assist the PCLinuxOS development team with various projects and to provide the community with a platform on which to develop their own projects. Therefore, I haven’t had a ton of time to blog as of late. I should be back to a normal schedule within the next month or so. If not, this blog might go dormant for a while until I am able to relenquish my administrative duties at mypclinuxos.com. I have a review of a server distro I started a few weeks ago, but I haven’t finished it yet. Hopefully, I will be able to get that review out in the next week or so. I won’t hold my breath, I’ve got a ton of stuff going on at the projects site that keeps me oh so busy. Thanks for reading and sticking with me through the lean parts of this blog. Cheers.

Devnet

Creative Commons License
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.