PCLINUXOS

After much distro hopping I have settled for something new to me, pclinuxos. This was truly an out of the box experience. I was quickly able to connect online via wifi unike previous distros which didn't recognize my Broadcom wireless card as quickly or as effortlessly as I would have liked. I am using the KDE version pclinuxos 2010 and I am loving it. It has some goodies installed that took me a while to download and get going with other distros. What goodies am I referring to? I am referring to Compiz, Emerald, Smooth tasks and Dropbox to name a few. With other KDE distros I couldn't get Compiz and Emerald going but I quickly found a method through the pclinuxos forum. I was surprised that it worked, it had to some how it was pre-installed, but like I said I couldn't figure it out before. In my opinion the best part of this distro has to be mylivecd. I put linux on a few computers and it was mainly so the user can let their kids play tuxpaint, gcompris and childplay. Every time I put linux on a system I would have to download these apps so they can use them. No need to do this anymore. I made my own live cd with these softwares already installed. My cd ( its really a dvd) even has a few extra things I like which is great. I can give this disk out to anyone I choose so they can see how great Linux is. This distro even has a repository speed tester. Its freakin awesome, it tests your repositories and lists them from fastest to slowest. I get top speeds every time I install something in the synatptic package manager. To tell you the truth the only thing I installed on my system were some games, wallpapers and plasma themes but other than that this distro has everything I need. In case you are wondering. I have been using linux for about 4 years. I am by no means an expert but I would consider myself a little bit above average. I don't usually write on my blog but something urged me to do it this time just so I can spread the word about Linux and this wonderful distro.

I saved a laptop with Linux!

Recently one of my co-worker's laptop had some issues. The hard drive died and the cd drive wasn't working so there was no way to reinstall Windows on it. After about a month with help from one of the IT members the laptop still wasn't working. So when I was asked to help I brought in a USB drive that booted Kubuntu Linux live. Bam! The computer booted! My co-worker was shocked that I got the laptop running. He installed Kubuntu on to another USB drive since his hard drive was dead. After the installation he tried to burn a cd and it worked! He was even more thankful. So how did this all end? Well, he bought a new hard drive and sadly reinstalled Windows XP. He said I saved him $600 in repairs. I got a free lunch plus respect.

DON'T HAVE OUTLOOK? USE THUNDERBIRD

Do you need an email client ? Don't spend money on Microsoft Outlook. Try Thunderbird. It's from the same people who gave us Firefox. It's completely free. It has add-ons for themes and other things to make it more customized. Try it out. Check your email provider's help section to get the information to setup the settings so it downloads all your emails and sends them. Get it here.

USE FIREFOX

Use Firefox as your web browser. It's faster than Internet Explorer. You can customize it with add-ons. Try the personas add-on to change the theme of Firefox. I also recommend using Downloadthemall. Its an add-on that speeds up your downloads. Give it a try!
http://www.mozilla.org