Featured Comments: Week of 2011 January 16

There were a few posts that garnered a handful of comments, so I'll try to post most of them.

On Megabytes and Mebibytes

Reader T_Beermonster said, "how did you create your 900MiB partition and did you put a filesystem on it? Firstly you probably didn't actually get a 900MiB partition because most tools by default end up rounding to "cylinders" and giving you a bit less. Most linux filesystems by default are set up to reserve 5% of space for the root user - so that makes available space 855MiB as a user. depending what sort of jiggery-pokery is used to make the iso into a bootable USB a couple of MiB may not be enough room for manoeuvre. It could even be something as simple as a script expecting a partition size of 1GiB or greater and just not completing," later adding, "You could try using tune2fs to get rid of the 5% reservation of space - the partition is effectively going to be used as read-only anyway. tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdg1 replace sdg with your usb device and use su or sudo as you prefer. That will give you an extra 45MiB to play with on a 900MiB partition. Which may be just enough - I should really go and look at the sizes of the mint iso's. I doubt the journal is taking up much room but you may want to consider going for an unjournaled fs on that partition given the read-only nature. The tune2fs trick is worth remembering in general anyway, particularly if you have a separate / and /home. /home doesn't need to reserve any space for the superuser and 5% of a 1TiB partition is 51.2GiB that would otherwise be sitting unavailable."

Review: Trisquel 4.0.1 LTS "Taranis"

Reader jai ho had this, among other things, to say: "I have tried Trisquel 4.0 and instead of going with gnome i have tried the LXDE version of Trisquel...The LXDE version uses Midori if i remember correctly...And is using gnash and the yuoutube video played correctly and all the flash adverts worked correctly... the only issue with gnash is with that i was not able to play facebook flash games ... i tried streaming music also and it worked correctly in some sites and not in other... i am really impressed with the Trisquel in short..."

Revisited: 3 Newbie-Friendly KDE Distributions

Reader Debianero suggested, "You've forget Debian6 with KDE4 (look for the CD image ending in -kde-CD-1.iso). The release will be around Feb, 5-6."
Commenter Sylvain said, "Which edition of Mandriva Linux do you use ? One, Free or powerpack ? For Pardus, why not using the latest version ?"

That's all for this past week. At the end of this coming week, I'll be going back to college for my second semester, meaning there'll be quite a bit less activity here. That said, I will try to have one post out every week. Remember, if you like the material, please continue subscribing and commenting!

Review: Trisquel 4.0.1 LTS "Taranis"

Main Screen + Main Menu

I've read a couple of reviews of Trisquel GNU/Linux, an Ubuntu-based distribution which aims to remove as much non-free (i.e. proprietary) software from the kernel and distribution as possible. There are a couple other distributions that do this, like Slackware-based Kongoni, KNOPPIX-based Musix, and Fedora-based BLAG. However, as stated by Jim Lynch in his review of Trisquel 4.0 LTS "Taranis", quite a few of these other pure-free software distributions, such as Musix, BLAG, and DYNE:BOLIC, share a few common features which all conspire to turn off potential new users: incomplete/amateurish websites, too much talk about "overthrows" of proprietary software or free software "revolutions" (to the detriment of promoting the features of the OS itself), and less-than-user-friendly DEs/WMs (e.g. WindowMaker). It seems like using these distributions would be like wearing a cilice (also called a hair-shirt, a shirt medieval Christian monks used to wear with rough animal hair on the inside; the monks used to wear these to repent by causing themselves physical pain) — good for the soul and conscience, but not very comfortable and not something I would want to do. By contrast, Trisquel (whose code name for this release is, ironically, "Taranis", the Gallic thunder deity) has a very professional-looking website, uses a well-tailored implementation of GNOME, and touts the benefits of free software and of using Trisquel without getting preachy or heavy-handed. Taking the previous analogy further, it seems like using Trisquel would be more like wearing a comfortable jacket. Seeing the website and presentation of the distribution didn't turn me off, so I decided to proceed downloading the ISO file of the standard edition.
As this is an Ubuntu derivative, there's really no point in testing the installation procedure. What I'm looking for is compatibility with my hardware as well as the overall quality of the live session. Hence, after the download finished, I made a live USB system with UnetBootin, rebooted, changed the boot order in the BIOS, and went on my way. Follow the jump to see the results of that.