4.25.2012

SliTaz 4.0 Review - Small but fierce


SliTaz is awesome. I've used it in the past during its 3.0 days, and since then I already found it fascinating. If you haven't heard of it, here's a short description of the distribution, provided by their website:


SliTaz GNU/Linux is a free operating system working completely in memory from removeable media such as a cdrom or USB key. It is light, speedy and fully installable on a hard drive



Sounds familiar? That's because Slitaz belongs to the minimalist family of Linux distros, which Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux are part of. Slitaz is a tiny ISO (~30MB) and loads into RAM on boot, making the Live session about as fast as a hard drive install. Although other distros could do the same, usually they're too big to fit completely. Slitaz, on the other hand, is small enough to fit even in 128MB of memory, making it the right match for that old computer sitting in the basement.


Slitaz 4.0 was released on April 10th, and I promptly downloaded it. Finding that no one (at least in Distrowatch) ever reviewed it, I thought I'd show my appreciation for this distribution and do it:

4.22.2012

DuckDuckGo: the search engine that packs a punch!

***I am not associated with DuckDuckGo by any means at all. This post, my entire domain likewise, is my personal opinion.***

While it's easy to find alternatives to many things in the realms of computing - for example, hardware, applications, ISPs, OSes - there are a few things that usually remain overlooked for most users. Most of these are related to the Internet somehow. For example, email services, news feeds and search engines are things that usually are not compared or swapped by users in a regular basis, mostly because they pretty much fully resemble their competitors' services. In this post, I will do something unusual, and show an alternative search engine that I've been using for a while now.

4.09.2012

Linus Torvalds refused to work for Apple: so what?

I saw this article a couple of weeks ago but didn't care too much to post something about it. I've been seeing, however, a lot of praising still going on about this, despite being posted a good two weeks ago, and the actual thing happening more than a decade ago, which triggered my ranting muscles. In the article, OMG Ubuntu editor Joey Sneddon writes, and I quote:
[...] Imagine: no Linux would have meant no Ubuntu, no ChromeOS, and no Android; the entire ecosystem of technology could have been dramatically changed by acceptance of this one job offer. [...]