Why Use Linux?

- Myth 1: “Linux is hard to install”
- Myth 2: “Linux does not recognize my hardware”
- Myth 3: “Linux is too complicated to use”
- Myth 4: “There are no applications available”

Funny. It’s been 6 years since the first time I used linux as my daily OS, and I always found windows is lot harder to install. Not to mention the default applications that come along with the installation. What do you get from default windows installation? nothing.

Jason Dyok wrote nice article entitled Why Use Linux?
For you who still unsure about using linux, you should read it.

Etymology of a Linux Distro

Ever wondered where your favourite linux distro name comes from? Find yourself. Great list.

Unable To Mount NTFS External Drive

Have you ever wanted to mount your external drive, but your linux box refused it? Most likely it was caused by you forgot to unplug / disconnect your external drive while you were in windows. Apparently, windows didn’t unplug / disconnect your external drive when it was turned off.

The logic way is restarting to your windows box, then unplug / disconnect your external drive. But it sucks. Why would we need to go to windows? The right way is using ntfsfix.

ntfsfix 

So, if your external drive is in /dev/sdb1, it would be,

ntfsfix /dev/hdb1

Wine 1.0

Wine will reach version 1.0 on June 2008, Wine’s 15th birthday. It’s been targeted to run 4 (yes, four) application smoothly.
- Photoshop CS2
- Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer 97 and 2003
- Microsoft Word Viewer 97 and 2003
- Microsoft Excel Viewer 97 and 2003

Why only 4?

Users are encouraged to test their favorite apps with the release candidate builds and report any problems they find, regardless of whether their apps are on the list of release criteria. If the fix is easy, we’ll try to do it.

The app db lists 1227 platinum applications, so it may seem disappointing that WineReleaseCriteria only lists four applications as “must run well”. The problem with expanding that list is that each new app adds a huge amount of testing to each release.

If you can provide an automated test case for your favorite platinum app, so that we can just run it without any manual work, we can add it to the list. Just post a link to your automated test script to wine-devel. One possibility is to adapt existing automated installer scripts such as the ones at http://wpkg.org/ or http://unattended.sourceforge.net/

– Wine Release Plan

Kudos to all Wine developers. Now, if you let me, I’m going to play Football Manager 2008. Oh, on wine, of course.

Linux is Heavily Used in hollywood Animation

Another example that linux is very powerful. Linux Journal has an article on how Tippett Studio using linux for their movie, The Spiderwick Chronicles. They’re using mac desktop, but running linux as it’s OS. Nice

Make Your Linux Runs Faster

Drastically Speed up your Linux System with Preload.

Preload is an “adaptive readahead daemon” that runs in the background of your system, and observes what programs you use most often, caching them in order to speed up application load time. By using Preload, you can put unused RAM to good work, and improve the overall performance of your desktop system.