kepo-ing Zz85

Ok, even if you are not a linux fan, downloading (and uploading) them is a good use of your unlimited broadband internet connection. (about 400MB to 4GB for each)

Here’s are few interesting distros worth (which I never mentioned before) mentioning since I tested them on my recent linuxs downloading.

* MPX Live CD
MPX live CD - MPX: The Multi-Pointer X Server
MPX is a hack which allows multiple mice and cursors to be used together on the same screen and window. Its pretty cool to add on extra mouse to use them together.especially when a new usb mouse nowadays is such affordable product. The Live CD is modified from Ubuntu Drake.

* Sabayon Linux 3.2
Sabayon is a Italian desert consisting of eye yolks and well this explains the nice yellowish wallpaper for this live gentoo DVD. Here’s a showcase of several cutting edge linux technology.

Beagle, the search everything as you type, not snoppy but linux’s version of Apple’s spotlight create in Mono is integrated in the “start button”.

Beryl, is the eye candy like Mac’s EXPOSE, or Vista lookinglass, provides 3D desktop switching, plus customisable visual effects when dealing with windows.

Gentoo notorious for its compile times, Sabayon provides a compile free installation for you to try out gentoo. While you can try to see how much more speed you get in gentoo, you can then start to find out if you like using portage - install applications using emerge and see if you love compiling and optimising.

* Arch Linux
“a lightweight and flexible linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple”. A interesting distro with their philosophy to make linux simple and fast. It solves many problems that is evident in other distro, and downside is that you have to learn more about linux, and feel the barebone shell with its package manager “pacman”.

Their official packages optimized for the i686 and x86-64 which seems to be good community backing for easy updates, installations, yet are fast and stable builds to run the best out of your hardware.

* Accelerated Knoppix
Germany and Japan being the advanced countries who build maglev (Magnetic levitation) trains, here are the combinations of what they can do for linux. Knoppix, one of the or maybe earliest Live CDs around, uses Debain and KDE. This German project have introduced many to linux and its applications, and save many windows installations with its all-in-one-problem-solver-CD.

The special thing on its CD or DVD, is that its compressed so, much more can be placed inside the CD, extracted on the fly when you boot from it. 2GB of stuff on a normal CD, and 8GB on a normal DVD, so the downside is that it seems slower to boot up from it.

Comes this Japanese project who notice that there’s a pattern when accessing the compressed filesystem. They create a profiler to examine that, then rearrange so that the CD can be read sequentially too increase its boot times. The result, Accelerated KNOPPIX, which boots up half the time of knoppix live CDs, and from what I tested, in 1 min times. Downside, you got a customised japanese version of knoppix, but if you understand icons and shell, its not a problem.

* ?Ubuntu
I think I’ve mentioned Ubuntu before although I’m not sure. Started by the first African in space, making vast improvements on Debian, to provide a desktop usable to everyone, great community support, and ships to you if you wanted the CDs. new flavors are out, Kubuntu for KDE environment, Xubuntu for slim, resource friendlier XFCE desktop, Edubuntu for educational purposes.
The latest is 6.10 nicknamed “Edgy Eft”, not so bleeding edge and stable many have commented so 6.06 LTS “Dapper Drake” is their recommended. Unless you are waiting for their next release for “users wanted goodies” in March or April this year, make a fresh installation somewhere to test its Upstart feature in 6.10, which many users report 30+ seconds boot timings, a reason less to switch over.