🏷️ linux

If you are interested in trying out linux and don't have any experience with Linux systems, I would suggest checking out Suse 9.3. It comes with lots of free programs such as word processors, instant mesasging and email programs, internet browsers such as firefox and konquerer, flash player, image editors, drawing programs, a 3d modeling package, spread sheet, pretty much anything you could possibly need, even games. Best of all it is free. There is even a live CD so that you can try running the operating system from a CD before you commit to installing it.

You can download it here

I also have CDs and the DVD version if anyone wants to try it but can't download it. There are also many other versions of linux.

Open SUSE has ported open SUSE to the power pc platfrom.

from

"Back in the good old days, we had a boxed product for PPC, the last release was SL 7.3. Later than we focused on the POWER hardware from IBM and released only server products, as SLES7, SLES8 and SLES9. All of this products were in internal use on our Apple hardware, but we were unfortunatly not able to release something officially to the public. Now we are back ;-) "

--uncutsaniflush

One of @terry and @matthew's gripes with linux when we had it on the main home computer two years ago was that we didn't have a music player that rivaled the power of itunes.

In comes amarok It is a full featured music player with an included library search and best of all, it looks up the lyrics and cover art for each song on a lyric database.

I think this is the first ime I have seen a music player that fetches lyrics and I love that. You can also contribute lyrics to songs that arn't found in the database.


You can totally customize the way it looks. I fyou had tried this player before the latest version uses an sql database to store mp3 data makign it much faster. I love it.

@paul mentioned that he is going to install SuSE 9.3 on his "supercomputer"[inlink]paul,3759[/inlink] which reminded me of some open source news:

Just this month, Novell who owns SuSE open-sourced the distro and a public beta of SuSE 10.0 as well as previous releases of SuSE are available for download

This is the first public beta for SuSE in the history of the distribution.

SuSE calls itself the "world's most usable Linux distribution" but, of course, usability is in the eye of the beholder. One of the best features of the distro is YaST which makes the distro easy to install and configure.

p.s. in case anyone is confused this journal entry was written by @uncutsaniflush. @paul graciously has allowed me the priviledge of co-writing the computer journal with him.