I must be crazy!

I have been doing a lot of software research, but I have ended up staying up most of the night! If I get tired tomorrow or the next day, I have nobody to blame but myself! I did find quite a few interesting sites over night, including some highly opinionated and charged columns - MadCarters was one of them. I think I have read it before, but not recently.

Been using SimplyMEPIS more often

I like using SimplyMEPIS as a base desktop system. For me, it tends to have all the software I need for routine activities already correctly configured for me. For other uses, especially testing and experimenting, I use Libranet as my base system. Libranet has long been my favorite desktop software. But since I sometimes mess it up and it takes a while to get things fixed properly, it sure is nice to have another solid desktop system handy, and that other system is SimplyMEPIS.

Downloaded aLinux Friday, checked it out today

I installed aLinux (formerly Peanut Linux) today. It installed cleanly and ran cleanly, but the choice of Web browser leaves something to be desired. As configured, the Mozilla Web browser, a test version, terminates whenever you attempt to select fonts. Not a good first impression.

Tested two distros tonight

I got Chubby Puppy 1.04 with Mozilla and Open Office, and I also got Klax KDE 3.4.2 this evening, burned and tried each of them, both of which are Live CD desktop systems.

Chubby Puppy, in spite of its name, is very small and compact, bloated only slightly by the presence of two well regarded large applications, the complete Mozilla browser suite, and Open Office, the most complete free and open office software suite. To say that Puppy is fast is an understatement. It is the fastest desktop system that I have ever used.

Klax KDE 3.4.2 is a concept Live CD, intended primarily for the purpose of testing out KDE 3.4.2. It works VERY well, certainly well enough to handle by browsing needs for the past hour or so.

Distros, distros

I like testing distros.

Ended up getting the latest SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1-1 instead

Instead of installing White Box Linux 4 or Lineox 4, I downloaded and installed the latest release of SimplyMEPIS. This release simply has a few bug fixes and updates to the previous release. It is really easy to install and I did not feel like a long installation, so I downloaded the single ISO image, burned it, loaded the Live CD, and away I went. Then I clicked on the Install Me icon, indicated which disk partition I wanted to use, told it to retain the contents of /home for me, to install the GRUB boot loader in the root partition instead of the MBR, to create user accounts masinick and root and to set the password for each, and to retain the existing local time zone. That was it, installed quickly, and I am already using it. I also used a Konqueror browser briefly as I was doing the installation, but then I went off onto another system and ran Konqueror from PC-BSD, a KDE based spinoff from the FreeBSD project.

This baby is done, I now have an upgraded MEPIS installation and it is working fine.

White Box or Lineox next?

I have had a good week testing out Puppy Linux 1.0.4 and Kate OS 2.1 before that. Live CDs are easy to run and you can test out their basic functionality and actually use them rather quickly, which is what I have done.

I am hoping to have a bit more time to test out either White Box Linux, Lineox, or both. Each of these distributions are Red Hat Enterprise Linux based distributions, but neither of them are directly produced by Red Hat, they are created from the Red Hat source code by two completely separated and unrelated groups.

More details later.