Review: Pinguy OS 13.10 Beta 3

Main Screen + GnoMenu

Several weeks ago, I reviewed a couple of distributions in the span of a week. I initially thought one of those reviews would be of Pinguy OS, but then I saw that I had last reviewed Pinguy OS when it was at version 12.04 LTS, so I figured I would only review LTS releases. Then the lead developer of this distribution asked me in a comment on another post to take a look at Pinguy OS soon, and I thought I would do that much earlier this month. Then of course this blog went down and didn't reappear until a little over a week ago. Now I can finally review Pinguy OS. I've reviewed it enough times (even in GNOME 3/Shell guise) that I can safely skip the introduction. I will say though that this is labeled as a review rather than a preview because there will never be non-beta releases of non-LTS versions. I tried Pinguy OS as a live USB made with MultiSystem (because for some reason using UnetBootin produced a non-bootable live USB system). Follow the jump to see what it's like.

Revisited: Linux Mint 16 "Petra" KDE + Xfce

KDE: Main Screen + KDE Kickoff Menu

Aaaaaand...we're back! This blog had been taken down for about 2.5 weeks and didn't come back up until late last week. Because of that, I couldn't make use of the extra time I have during IAP to post any of the reviews or other stuff that I wanted to do. Now I have to sort of make up for lost time and do & post those things. That starts with a review of the latest KDE and Xfce editions of Linux Mint. I tested both as live USB systems each made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what each is like.

FOLLOW-UP: Gibbs Entropy and Two-Level Systems

As a follow-up to this post, I'm going to briefly discuss what two statistical mechanics professors (who shall remain nameless) I talked to about this had to say. For those who don't remember or are too lazy to read through, the issue is that a new paper publicized by the MIT news office claims that by adopting a view of entropy as per Gibbs as opposed to Boltzmann, negative temperature can be removed from statistical mechanics. I pointed out many issues I had with the arguments for that, and I would thereby cast doubt on the paper and premise as their wholes. Follow the jump to see what information I was able to learn after talking to those professors. (It appears that rendering LaTeX on this blog no longer works right after the takedown, so I'm enclosing any useful LaTeX formulas in dollar signs for you to copy and paste into a LaTeX renderer, if you so choose. The rendering of LaTeX in past posts is inconsistent, just as a heads-up.)

Back Online After Malware Issue

You may have noticed that this blog was inaccessible for the last 2.5 weeks. That's because it, along with a whole bunch of other blogs on Blogger, was apparently hit by malware (though I don't know whether that really happened or if it was a false flag). Anyway, this blog is back online, and I intend to get back to writing in this space as I had originally planned. In the meantime, I'm going to be carefully backing up all the data here.