Slackware 13.0 and Jibbed 5.0.1 Live CD

Yesterday I downloaded the new Slackware 13.0 32 bit DVD (there is also a 64 bit implementation). I have not installed it yet, but I plan to do that some time during the next week.

Slackware was the very first distribution of GNU/Linux software that I ever used. It was quite familiar to me because I was an active UNIX system user prior to that, and I would frequently download and use various GNU utilities - tar, gzip, and GNU Emacs in particular, on my UNIX systems.

As I was typing, I just received notification that my download of the Jibbed 5.0.1 Live CD is complete. Jibbed is a Live CD implementation of NetBSD, and it contains a pre-packaged XFCE desktop implementation. For those of you who have used NetBSD or OpenBSD before, you may know that the standard NetBSD and OpenBSD do not include any window managers or automatic setup for X, though there are procedures that do allow you (on your own) to install and configure a rich assortment of applications, including X and many window managers. I generally do not have the time available to spend configuring them, though I have done so in the past. But this pre-configured setup might be a quick and handy way to use NetBSD (possibly on the fly).

At the very least, I intend to test this out on my Virtualbox OSE setup.

Hope to be trying BSDAnywhere 4.5 soon

I previously downloaded a copy of BSDAnywhere, but this time I wanted to save the ISO image on my removable USB disk drive, where there is plenty of free space, so that I can reference the ISO image directly in Virtualbox OSE and run a virtual instance of BSDAnywhere 4.5.

I plan to do that today.

Canabix Linux distro starting up, checking it out

Canabix Linux distro starting up, checking it out
I recently found out about a new Linux distro that has not yet been released: Canabix. Like UNIX, this name seems to be a play on words, like “What have you been smoking”?

The people involved in the early activities for this upcoming distribution mostly come from the sidux community. Not long ago there were serious sparks flying between the existing developers and a developer who left the project entirely over disagreements concerning the use of administrative add on tools.

The Canabix project, at least at this juncture, seems to have none of those kinds of arguments. If anything, a lot of joking takes place.

I look forward to adding what I can to this new community.

Using Virtualbox OSE to test distributions

The speed at which I can evaluate and test out distributions has been greatly improved since I started using Virtualbox OSE. On one hand, you do not get quite the performance you get with a native implementation, but you do not have to either burn a CD, DVD, or USB stick to install, or go through the additional steps to boot an ISO image directly from the disk, so you can very quickly get at least an initial impression of a distribution just by running them in a Virtualbox OSE implementation.

Some of them work better than others. I can, for instance, get a true full screen implementation of sidux when I run it in a Virtualbox OSE instance, and the performance of sidux also is quite a bit better than many of the other distributions, one of the best that I have experienced since I started using Virtualbox OSE, in fact.

That is not a great surprise to me, since sidux always works well for me anyway, but what did surprise me is that at times I have seen a fresh sidux instance start up on initial boot faster than the smaller, lighter antiX that I also regard so highly. I have not quite figured out why that is, except to say that however sidux is set up, it is near optimal for use with Virtualbox OSE.