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:

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.

5 Shitty reasons to use Linux

This post is not about the bashing of Linux, or why you shouldn't use it. It is, however, about weak or otherwise vague reasons that a few Linux "users" give when asked why they chose it. As you read on, take a minute and reexamine your timeline of Linux usage, and see if any of these apply - you may wanna rethink them. If you're an aspiring Linux user, ask yourself why you wanna use it. If your answer contains any of these, I'm not saying that Linux isn't for you, but rather that you can't bitch about it later when you start using.

Support LXDE now!

GNOME has always been my desktop of choice, despite even the recent shocking changes that it underwent. This preference, however, has just been toppled down. I've always favored the lighter applications, and I got to know LXDE while testing PeppermintOS. Back then, I thought of LXDE as nice, but lacking in features in comparison with GNOME - it left the impression that it was still unfinished. However, within a little less than a year of personal use, LXDE has finally overcome its last hurdle to become my standard, preferred desktop environment.

Review of Featherweight Browsers

Browsers, if anything, are the greatest paradox within computer programs. As much as people need them to obtain information (compare clicking a link to using 'wget' or 'curl'), they are the easiest doors to be exploited by attackers, and resource-heavy by comparison. However, browsers do evolve with these issues, and are constantly working on them - except that savvy users are never really satisfied. So one of the key terms for Browsers today is the concept of "lightweight." Every modern browser available for download today refers to itself as lightweight. The only problem is that nobody knows its exact definition.

Firefox and Chrome(-ium) are both decent browsers in my opinion, and call themselves light. In truth, however, they support everything you can think of. The outcome is the standard recipe web-browser which takes a good 100MB off the RAM to run your favorite page, and a couple more to load a full browsing session. This may be adequate to you, provided you have the memory to spend, but it's kind of a waste to burn this much just to view a few tabs of content just to search something in Google. Hence, a lightweight browser isn't enough. It's time to dig for something deeper, a featherweight browser.

One reason to use Linux Mint over Ubuntu

This post will make heated arguments no matter what, so let me go ahead and shove the disclaimer in your face: I do not favor either Linux Mint or Ubuntu. If anything, I had more experience using Ubuntu than Mint, but I acknowledge both distros as great. That said, let's move on.

I recently went back into distro-hopping, getting to test several LiveCDs unknown to me before. The motivation was that my friend requested my help to fix his computer, and I decided to try new tools for the job. In previous distress calls, I carried with me two Rescue media: a USB drive containing Ubuntu 11.10 and a CD containing the latest KNOPPIX release (6.7 I think). I've always used the Ubuntu USB unless the Computer couldn't boot from it. It's faster, snappier and is overall simpler. However, with the recent popularity boost of Linux Mint shaking the Distrowatch hierarchy, I decided to finally bite the bullet and make a LiveUSB. And while I was at it, I also downloaded Fedora 16 and GhostBSD.

Here is the short answer:

Transformers 3 is a disgrace.

Trilogies tend to start off as the shit, and end up shitty. Lord of the Rings was like that, and so were the Spiderman movies. Sometimes this happens because producers pack as much awesomeness as they can for the first one (since they don't know if they will make a sequel) that the latter come out watered down in comparison. This trend is not limited to movies, though. Many video games also suffer from that, just look at Valve Software's Half Life series: