Monthly Archive for August, 2010

Clonezilla – a monster backup utility.

Ah, the first of the month — time to back up my data to optical media, my NAS, Dropbox… And this month there’s a new tool in my arsenal. It’s called Clonezilla.

Developed at the National Center for High Performance Computing in Taiwan, Clonezilla will make a byte-for-byte, partition-for-partition copy of whatever you tell it to. And of course it’s free — even better, it’s been released under the GPL for everyone to benefit from…

Gigolo – it mounts what it’s told to.

Anyone using the GNOME desktop environment with their Linux distribution will probably be using Nautilus as a file manager as well. Among other handy features — like tabbed windows, for example — Nautilus has support for mounting Samba shares (like my NAS) built-in.

As I’ve chosen the more lightweight Xfce for my netbook the default file manager isn’t Nautilus but Thunar — a very capable app in its own right, but without any Samba support…

Back to the ‘buntus.

Over the past week I’ve been giving the latest and greatest KDE desktop a play on my desktop machine, and the lightweight PCLinuxOS ZenMini a trial on my netbook. As of this morning, I have nuked both drives and put Ubuntu proper on the desktop and Xubuntu on my Eee PC…

Amarok – KDE’s killer app?

Say what you want about KDE, but I don’t think the merits of its default music player, Amarok, would be argued by those who have tried it. I’ve got version 2.3.1 on my installation of openSUSE; let’s see what all the fuss about!

A kwick tour of Kubuntu Netbook Edition.

Just for kicks I installed Kubuntu Netbook Edition on my Eee PC. What follows is a brief visual overview of what you can expect should you do the same.

Note that this isn’t the latest and greatest KDE but rather the latest and greatest Kubuntu (10.04.1), with version 4.42 of KDE. I tried to invoke the netbook workspace from an installation from the KDE 4.5 Live CD but it repeatedly crashed my machine so I installed Kubuntu for netbooks instead…