Review: PCLinuxOS 0.92

Well as promised here's my first look at PCLinuxOS 0.92 LiveCD. I've been using it now for about a month, and I have to say I'm really impressed with this distribution. It picked up all my hardware, without it being necessary to manually configure my NIC (an annoyance I've had with knoppix). The feature that excited me the most is there was a version that came with NVidia drivers so I can run OpenGL stuff right out of the box so to speak. There is also an ATI specific download. Nice feature on Textstar's part with the optimized video drivers. I've basically only played around with it so far, but I can tell you so far I'm impressed with what I've tested out.

The first thing you notice right away is the overall look and feel of the interface has been upgraded.
Here's the desktop (Notice the start menu. Looks suspiciously like another company's colour scheme doesn't it ;-) that's okay though I won't hold it against them )


Now a little walk through of said start menu.

Here we can see all the categories setup.
Amusement, Applications, Configuration,Documentation,Multimedia,Networking,Office(Interesting Logo ;-) ), and Terminals
Let's look at the Amusement Menu, which is subdivided into Arcade,Boards,Cards,Strategy and Toys in standard KDE style.

In here we have some KDE standards: KAsteroids,KBounce,KFoulEggs,KGoldrunner,Klickety,Kolf,Ksirtet,KSmileTris,KSnakeRace,KSpaceDuel,KTron
Next under boards:
The classic monopoly-like game Atlantik, KBackgammon,KBattleship,KBlackBox,Kenolaba,KMahjongg,Kreversi,KWin4,Shisen-Sho
Under Cards:
KPoker,Lieutenant Skat,Patience,Potato Guy (A person favourite of my kids),PySOL
Under Strategy:
KAtomic,KJumpingCube,KMines,Kolor Lines,Konquest,KSokoban,SameGame
Under Toys:
AMOR (Another of my kids favourites, much to my chagrin ;-) ),Kodo,Komposé,KTeaTime (One of my favourites),KWorldClock,XEyes

Next we have the Applications Menu, which consists of the sub-menus:
Accessibility,Archiving,Communications,Development,Editors,File Tools,Finances,Monitoring,Monitoring,Publishing,Sciences,Text tools
First the Accesibility menu.
Which has XMag which is a screen magnifier for seeing impaired folks. A very handy app indeed.
The next menu is Archiving which has two sub-menus:
Cd burning, and Compression
Under Cd burning we have GnomeBaker which admittedly I've never used, but the next option K3B I've used extensively and I absolutely love. I like this cd/dvd burning app better than Nero. (Yes it's available for Linux)
Under Compression we have Ark which I've used for zip files in earlier versions of KDE admittedly this was flakey at best with KDE 3.23 and earlier so I strictly use the commandline version of zip with those older versions. I've yet to test out Ark on this version of KDE to see if it works better. I'll let you know in a later post. konserve is an app I haven't checked out yet, so I'll be posting a review of it later probably with the review of this version of Ark.
Next we have Communcations:
Which has two entries: KdeprintFax which I've used in earlier versions of KDE very useful program, and of course it's counterpart KFax.
Next Development:
I was disappointed that KDevelop was missing from the Development environments, but understand why it was left out on the live cd. I have a serious temptation to make a LiveDVD version which includes this package. In this menu are two sub-menus: Development environments, and Tools
Under Development environments we have IDLE,Qt3 Designer,Qt Linguist
which admittedly I've not used, as most of my development lately has been in Netbeans, as my new project is written in J2SE 1.5.0.
Under tools:
Cervisia which is a fairly well made UML tool, I used to use it until I discovered ArgoUML,Gdb a debugger,KBugBuster,KCachegrind,Kompare,KUIViewer,Umbrello another UML tool I've used this one too, but I still like ArgoUML better.
Next Category: Editors
In here we have:
Kate - a classic KDE text editor
Kedit,KHexEdit indispensible for programmers (and hackers ;-) ),KRegExpEditor I want to check this out as I suspect it will be useful for certain search functions in my Java programs,KWrite my favourite editor,Xedit.
Next we have: File tools
In this category we have: Emelfm,File Manager - Super User Mode (useful more than I would like :-( ), Find Files,KRename,Krusader,Krusader - root mode,KTnef
In the Finances section we have the Quicken-like KMyMoney handy for home finances, but not really an accounting program.(;-) see my previous post)
In this category we have:
Gkrellm,HP Printer Toolbox,KDiskFree,KJobViewer,Kleds Keyboard Applet,KSysGuard,KWiFiManager,KwikDisk,Mtink,NetApplet,Xconsole,Xkill,Xload,Xrefresh
pretty much standard fare here
Under publishing we have:
Ghostview, and KGhostview the XWindows, and KDE postscript viewers, KPDF an open source PDF viewer,XDitview
Under Sciences just one category Mathematics and a scientific calculator here. I'm geeking out what can I say, nerdy things like scientific calculators excite me!
Under Text tools we have Font Selector,KCharSelect (Handy for international characters)


I'll present the rest of the menus in a later post. Hope this gives you a good overview of the latest version of PCLinuxOS though.

Until next time-NT

Where's the cross platform accounting apps?

One thing that has really irked me over the years, is the lack of cross platform accounting applications. The only one I've come across that actually is capable of some of the more advanced functions I need in an accounting applications is Quasar. It's not a bad little app, but it has some bugs, that make it a little less usable than it could be. Which is too bad, because it's made right here in Canuckland, or try this if you're francophone ;-) I have actually used this program, and it's useful in that I can actually produce reports with it that my accountant can use. (although usually that's me :-D )

I decided to do something about it, and have begun writing an accounting package in Java that should run on anything that supports the Java Runtime Environment 1.5.0. Sometimes referred to as the JRE. This means it will run on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, AIX, even PocketPC or PalmOS.

The program is coming along nicely, I should have a preview of it available in a month or two. I'll post more as details become available. I still owe everyone a review of PCLinuxOS so I'll try to get that up by the end of the week.

Until then...NT

After a long hiatus comes...Netbeans 5.0 Preview

Hey. I'm not dead yet. Just got the procrastination bug, and it got a little out of hand. Anyways have a new post for you. I just installed the latest stable version of Netbeans.

It installed flawlessly, and even picked up my 4.1 project stuff. (Not that there was much there)







After installing I created a application link on my desktop and le voila! new icon !! After double clicking I was treated to this, a fairly familiar looking screen, with some new menus up top. For now I just leave you with this screenshot to look at, at a later post I will go into more detail with Netbeans 5.0 as I've had a chance to play with it, also look forward to a review of PCLinuxOS 0.92 an excellent Live CD based on Mandriva from Textstar.