Update

Ok I’m back from Spain. Not much else to say really, I have nothing to write about as of yet.

However news to be excited about: KDE 4.1 is to be released in 2 days, so what’s so special about 4.1?

Well many people found that KDE 4 was either buggy or lacked functionality and the KDE developers admitted this. I haven’t really looked into KDE 4.1 but I heard it’s suppose to be suitable for common use.  Now it would be awesome if KDE 4 became mainstream not only is it pretty and shiny but apparently 25% faster than KDE 3. Which would be a godsend for my laptops 1.5 GHz processor; although the core 2 duo is pretty powerful it could still be faster.

2 week break from blogging

I’m having a 2 week holiday in Spain. So I’m probably not gonna make a post until I get back. In theory I suppose I could make a few posts as I am taking my laptop and I’m sure theres a wi-fi hotspot somewhere. But I highly doubt I’ll get a good opportunity to post and besides I wouldn’t know what to write anyway.

In other news I may start a new blog about my personal life. Since this seems to have become the number one stop for video game and linux reviews. Hell perhaps the first post of it could be about my holiday.

Your neighberhood nerd BulletSpawn

Signing off

Pardus 2008 review

I’ve tried many user friendly distributions such as Ubuntu, Mandriva, Mint, Pclinuxos… but there’s always been a reason for me to switch. In absence of Pclinusos 2008 I decided to try Pardus 2008 exactly one week ago…

Installation

Unfortunately the Pardus 2008 disk is not a livecd which means that installation is mostly a shot in the dark. Strangely the defualt language is Turkish but those with a keen eye will find that pressing F2 at boot will give an option for English (and many other languages). The actual installer itself is among one of the most intuitive I’ve seen although not by far as most installers nowadays are a simple case of clicking next. Shamefully the install takes approximately 30 minutes, It seemed a bit quicker than that but its still a far cry from the 10-15 minute installs of most modern distributions.

Aesthetics

Upon first boot your greeted with a first run wizard called ‘Kaptain’ which does a great job of helping you get everything running and afterwards my defualt desktop looked somewhat like this:

My defualt desktop

Every Pardus install will look different due to the easily customisable Kaptain however I wanted to further customise this install and I ended up with something like this:

I’ve never had such a beautiful desktop before. It’s mainly thanks to the highly versatile control centre ‘Tasma’ which is best described as an improved upon kde centre:

Tasma

Package management

By default Pardus comes installed with everything the basic user could need Firefox, Openoffice, Amarok, Kaffeine; which is all I need. However if there’s anything else you need to install you can use the Pardus package manager ‘PISI (Packages Installed Successfully as Intended).

PISI

Personally I still prefer Synaptic to PISI but there’s no denying that PISI is still exellent in its own right. The repositories are fairly complete they have everything you could ever need in them although you may be dissapointed as it doesn’t have as much ‘choice’ as more popular distributions (i.e. it doesn’t have at least half a dozen video players). Unfortunately there is only one Pardus server from which I draw average speeds of about 300KB/s which despite being fairly fast doesn’t utilise my full bandwith as I usually get speeds of approximately 1200 KB/s.

Multimedia support

Multimedia support is extremely important and luckily I havent found any multimedia flaws with Pardus yet. All my music is handled with Amarok which plays all my MP3’s, Ogg’s and WMA’s. All of my video files are handled by Kaffeine which i’ve tested with avi’s and wmv’s, Pardus can even play DVD’s out of the box:

DVD playback - Silent hill

Flash and Java are also installed out of the box so I can happily surf around sites like youtube.

Speed/Stability

Pardus 2008 is probably the fastest distribution I have ever used. Its quite nippy on my mediocre 1.5 GHz processor. I’ve also never experienced any crashes or slow-down. If speed is your thing than Pardus is the ultimate desktop distro.

Conclusion

Pardus 2008 is everything I could of asked for it looks good, plays all my multimedia, it’s super-fast/stable and it’s so easy even a Mac OS X user could easily adapt to it. Pardus has taken over my linux partition at the moment I consider it the best distribution available at this time; I won’t switch distribution anytime soon perhaps I may use Pclinuxos 2008 for reviewing purposes but it’ll be hard to top pardus 2008.

Condemned 2 officially gave me nightmares

I rented Condemned 2 approximately two weeks ago and due to the large amount of cheese I ate last night I had a horrific nightmare of a game I thought i put behind me two weeks ago…

(note: from here on I will document what I remember of my nightmare – please excuse any bad writing or grammatical mistakes as this is merely the rambling of a slightly traumatised teenager)

My entire dream was like a section out of Condemned 2 including the creepy atmosphere, my point of view, the way I moved…just generally the whole shebang was exactly like Condemned 2. Along with a few other refugees I was hiding in a hotel to keep away from the violent (zombified?) men, I found a few of them had infiltrated the hotel so I took it upon myself to shotgun my way through them, after a long bloody and truly horrifying battle I died and respawned in the room where I started except this time there were more of those horrific monstrosities of men, after going through a cycle of creeping around the hotel on edge, mutilating already mutilated guys, then respawning worse than I started. Eventually the whole hotel had become these beastly (zombies?). I had to gun down my friends with some rather conveniently placed guns and ammo, i found a large guy talking to a normal child and with my bolt-action rifle shot him through the head; afterwards he came running at me still with the bullethole in his forehead, I frantically reloaded and repeatedly shot him in the forehead but each shot only gave him another freaky hole and more blood dripping down his face which he spat at me inbetween punches and strangling. Eventually he grabbed my gun and started shouting at me as I desperately left-hooked him in the face all to no effect.

After that I woke up, dripping with sweat and soaked with fear, although it may not sound scary when told trust me it freaked the hell out of me. Anyone who’s played condemned will know the fear of the game, just try to imagine it being real and you can understand my traumatisation.

no pclinuxos yet, try pardus 2008 instead!

Well we got to July 1st without the latest release of pclinuxos so I was wrong again.

However I have found a promising distribution: Pardus

Pardus is quite low on distrowatch however after managing to find the English part of their website (by default both the website and distro are in Turkish although an English option can be selected) I have found a solid distribution. So exactly one week from now I will post a review of Pardus 2008; this will be my most professional review yet (by that I mean it will be split into categories and have screenshots).

My test machine:

generic Philliips laptop

1.5 GHz core 2 duo

2GB ram

Realtek sound card (older distributions generally do not support it)

Intel GMA 965 graphics chipset (Intel GMA x3100)

Review criteria:

Hardware support

Multimedia support

Speed/Stability

Ease of use

Aesthetics