Tux Reports News

The number of distributions continue to grow each day - but have you wondered where the names come from? Rami provides a quick look at the etymology of several distributions.

Tux Reports Forums from the 2000-2003 time frame were reinstalled. The forum software was upgraded to vBulletin 3.7.0 Beta 3 - providing social groups.

I added the first social group - Decade Enthusiasts. This is open to anyone who has used Linux for over a decade.

Maybe we need to get the distribution forums cleaned up, too. Any volunteers?

Choice is an important requirement for small businesses. Choice to offer select products, to market to a niche, to hire, to fire, and choice to expand. Small businesses also need the choice to install a PC that handles the immediate tasks. Linux provides this choice.

According to DesktopLinux: The first thing we can say about the Linux desktop in 2007 is that there are more users than ever. The Linux Foundation 2006 survey had fewer than 10,000 people signing in. This year more than 20,000 Linux desktop users reported in.

Yes, choice is the reason.

David M Williams explains the ASUS Eee subnotebook brought Linux to the masses.

The first impression of the Eee is that it

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) will be available as a configuration option on Lenovo notebooks some time during the 4th Quarter.

This is good news for Linuxers. The Novell-Lenovo agreement should create a lift for the operating system. Interestingly, Lenovo targets the enterprise while the Dell-Ubuntu agreement focuses on the consumer.

Red Hat’s announcement today of a delay in the Global Desktop Linux is probably helpful to Ubuntu. I recall years ago a debate about Debian-based distributions and Red Hat based distributions. Red Hat distributions flourished while a new Debian version appeared to lag. Now, we have the opposite situation.

One of the attractive features for Ubuntu is the documentation. For example, sections for Windows users are available. Additionally, simple documents for using Synaptic or Apt are clean and well written.

Years ago, installing Linux was half the battle. Now, keeping the Linux distribution on the desktop and easily updating applications is key to success.

How many Linuxers are holding their breaths and wondering if the Dell deal is the highlight for Linux sales? Here are a few thoughts.

Approximately ten years ago, Linux was a nice operating system to rejuvenate an older desktop but the system was intentionally cryptic and not user-friendly. Means to cover up the command line exist now but the true power of the OS is getting under the hood. Are people really interested in the command line? Maybe after figuring out the grep command or simply setting up an installation, people keep downloading different distributions in hopes to find the best one for themselves. But do they stick with the OS or just keep downloading?

After setting up an installation, I tend to desire more. And the more I play with the Linux distributions, the more power is desired and older desktops become undesirable for Linux. Does this hold true for everyone?

Maybe Dell’s offerings will spur interest in other Linux distributions. After all, live cds can help people try some distributions easily - download - burn - and boot.

Maybe Dell’s offerings will spur hardware sales. Will someone purchase a machine and realize more RAM will speed up the processing? Will video card sales increase?

Will Dell’s offerings influence the market in the same manner the old Microsoft Windows’ upgrades used to influence hardware sales?

Years ago, a Dell Red Hat Linux offering at the Enterprise level was a big deal. Now that consumers are able to get the OS, will a niche market become larger?

64 Studio is just not your normal Linux distribution. No. This distribution is designed to help creative people work with multimedia, while staying within the Open Source model. The Debian-based distribution is perfect for Linuxers who desire power (64-bit) and multimedia applications.

According to the FAQs:

64 Studio is a collection of software for digital content creation on x86_64 hardware (that’s AMD’s 64-bit CPUs and Intel’s EM64T chips). It’s based on the pure 64 port of Debian GNU/Linux, but with a specialised package selection and lots of other customisations. It will be marketed to hardware OEMs in the creative workstation and laptop markets as an alternative to the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, or OS X Leopard on Apple hardware. You can browse the current default package list.

Make sure you download a version, create a partition, and try out your skills.

Has your site disappeared from the Internet? Maybe you changed hosting companies. Maybe you changed the Name Servers using GoDaddy’s tools. Do not worry. Two websites are invaluable in helping diagnose DNS troubles.

1. DIG on Kloth.net is a service providing the same information as nslookup. This tool helped me determine the DNS on NS1.TUXREPORTS.COM was set to an improper IP number for Chem Hints. At the same time, NS1.PRIMARYDNS.COM had not released the DNS. Therefore, people surfing the web would not find the site.* The DIG utility (domain information groper) is a unix tool, which can be used to gather information from the Domain Name System servers. It is part of the ISC bind nameserver software package.
2. DNS Report is a service providing information on the parent, NS, SOA, MX, Mail, and WWW. The site allows two free reports.

Both tools contain enough information for diagnosing why a site has “disappeared” from the Internet. Just remember to wait for DNS propagation after you have made changes.

Live Writer is my preferred blog authoring tool. Posts may be done quickly and arranged so that they are placed on multiple sites. Yet, getting vBulletin and Live Writer to work together has not been possible until I found the WordPress-vBulletin Bridge modification on vBulletin.org. The modification allows any post to WordPress to be copied to the correct forum. Comments are also linked to the forum.

Installation was very easy. The bridge file was uploaded, configurations were completed per readme instructions, and synchronization was started. All new posts are now synchronized between WordPress and vBulletin.

My next task is to get WordPress to work properly on a Windows server and change ChemHints from Community Server to WordPress.

Update: Posting to the forum did not work. Apparently Live Writer does not trigger the synchronization. I also forgot to enable HTML in the forum. Oops.