Low Cost Computing

openSUSE 11.1

Bill — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:04:58 +0000

I put off upgrading my primary laptop, until yesterday. I finally upgraded to openSUSE 11.1. It is a triple-booted machine, so the upgrade include installing Simply Mephis 8.0 and Ubuntu 8.10. I really wanted to install Debian 5.0, Mandriva 2009, and openSUSE, but had a few problems. I did discover a new trick. On ancient Dell [...]

Easy Multi-boot Systems

Bill — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:41:29 +0000

There are easy ways to do things, and there are hard ways. My Dad used to tell me that I spent more time figuring out the easy way, than it would have taken to do it the hard way. Ah, but the next time around, the easy way paid off. When it comes to multi-booting, [...]

Knoppix 6.0

Bill — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:50:19 +0000

Knoppix is Live CD, and they were one of the firt to produce a Live CD. I have use Knoppix in the past as a quick way to demonstrate Linux. My initial reaction to version 6.0 was “how far they have fallen.” The automatic boot into Adriane with no instructions on how to boot straight [...]

Xubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid)

Bill — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:15:36 +0000

Xubuntu 8.10 is Ubuntu 8.10 with Xfce as the graphical desktop. Even though LXDE is lighter, there are reasons to use Xfce as a desktop manager. Each graphical desktop manager comes with a set of packages for the common, and not so common tasks. Each graphical desktop manaager comes with its own menu structure for [...]

Window Manager versus Graphical Desktop

Bill — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:03:32 +0000

Linux / UNIX systems are based around the X Window System. To avoid confustion, we need to clear distinquish between login managers, window managers, and graphical desktops. Each plays a role in creating the desktop environment. While they may be the same, I separate login managers from windows managers. Login Managers You don’t need a graphical login [...]

Xfce versus LXDE

Bill — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:07:00 +0000

Who is the lightest of the lightweight desktops? Is there enough difference to be worth the switch? What are the pros and cons of having multiple choices in desktops? I installed Xubuntu on a Micro TransPort ZX with 256 megabytes of memory. As the name sort of implies, Xfce is the desktop for Xubuntu. For machine [...]

Choosing a Desktop

Bill — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 00:32:27 +0000

Linux doesn’t give you one graphical desktop, it gives you a choice between a lot of different graphcal desktops. Of course, you can run Linux in a pure text mode, which is fine for servers, but not for a workstation. The top two graphical desktops are KDE and Gnome. For systems with only 256 megabytes [...]

Which Linux Distribution?

Bill — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:46:59 +0000

According to Distro Watch, there are over 300 distributions of Linux available. I am not going to cover all 300 distributions of Linux. I leave that task to those who have much more patience and time than I. The Linux distributions that are going to be covered in this blog are: Ubuntu - Definitely the most [...]

The Test Environment

Bill — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:55:47 +0000

Since this blog is about budget computers, it is appropriate to define the environment that I am using to evaluate both the hardware, and the different Linux distributions (distros in Linux speak) used. This post will define the four computers used for testing the software. None of them are new, and only one of them [...]

Scrounging for Cheap Computers

Bill — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:59:50 +0000

Find a cheap computer is like a treasure hunt. Using the guidelines from the previous search, it is time to dig out the treasure map and start searching for that great deal. So where do you start searching: Do you have an existing computer that is no longer useable for any supported version of Microsoft Windows? One [...]