Varun Kashyap has a good article over at makeuseof.com to help teach yourself Linux.

Go here to get the goodies –>

Phoronix has created its own live Linux distribution to run with their Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. From the Phoronix site:

PTS Desktop Live is a Linux distribution designed to provide a free software platform for carrying out system tests and hardware benchmarks in an automated, reproducible, and effective manner. PTS Desktop Live is designed around the Phoronix Test Suite with the operating system
itself consisting of a stripped down Linux environment, then built upon that is the Phoronix Test Suite with its test profiles and suites. This distribution is not a standard Linux desktop with the normal throng of packages. Testing with PTS Desktop Live is intended to be via a Live DVD or Live USB (i.e. flash drive or memory card) environment. PTS Desktop Live makes it very easy to deploy the Phoronix Test Suite across an array of systems, isolates any software differences when seeking to perform hardware comparisons, and is designed to be very easy to carry out these Linux benchmarks even for a first-time Linux user.

Get the new PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 here.

Okay this Mono thing is getting hot. Really hot.

You would think that anyone in the FOSS community would stay away from anything Microsoft, but it seems there are more Miguel Icazas out there than we’d like to think. There are groups of people in Ubuntu and other distros that want to make Mono a default when installing a distro. Many distros already install Mono by default. If you have Tomboy Notes on your Linux system, you have Mono.

Some are saying that Microsoft in conjunction with Novell is trying to push this into Linux distros (via programmers) as a patent boobytrap to be used later by Microsoft to crush Linux. As Richard Stallman puts it:

“The patent danger to Mono comes from patents we know Microsoft has, on libraries which are outside the C# spec and thus not covered by any promise not to sue. In effect, Microsoft has designed in boobytraps for us.

“Indeed, every large program implements lots of ideas that are patented. Indeed, there’s no way to avoid this danger. But that’s no reason to put our head inside Microsoft’s jaws.”

–Richard Stallman

I don’t use Tomboy or any other app that uses Mono.If you want to find out if you have Mono on your system, go to the command line and type:  which mono

It will probably be in someplace like usr/bin/mono.

To get a better idea what is going on with this Mono battle and Microsoft/Novell misdeeds, go to Boycott Novell .

There seems to be a rumor going around that Microsoft has killed the Linux Netbook Market. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

This summer HP and Intel among others will start selling better netbooks with Linux on them. They will have much better interfaces and will have more ram and bigger hard drives than the XP models. HP will introduce the HP Mini 110, that runs Ubuntu Linux 8.04 with HP’s easy to use Mi (Mobile internet) desktop interface and Intel has announced the beta of Moblin 2.

The HP Mini:

Read the complete article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols over at ComputerWorld.

Well, here I am taking another shot at blogging. I’ll try to stick to the Linux, web graphics, technology subjects but I’m just as liable to rip through with rant every now and then.

I live way out in West Texas with the tumbleweeds and pumpjacks and rattletailed cottonheads, and some of the best people I’ve ever met. There are many good stories to be told from out here so I’ll try to give you some of those too.

I like Linux and use it as my full time computer. It can be pretty difficult to get Linux CD’s here so to help with that I’ve created another site to quickly get Linux into the hands of those who want them.

Enjoy and come back often…

Phil