After laying-off a significant portion of its employees, is Mandriva going to remain a viable distribution? While many distros, including Mandriva, are furiously working on their Spring 2011 releases, Mandriva announced a two-week slip from their previously announced release dates. As a compensation, Mandriva gathered up its packages from its 2011 development repositories (called "Cooker"), and released a pre-alpha 2011 TP (Technology Preview) iso. The coming Alpha version is due to be released February 14 with Alpha2 slated to be released February 28. So, here's a quick report on the Technology Preview release, and how things are shaping up.

Well, folks, she died on me. That failing hard drive finally gave up the ghost, so things will be a bit slow around Tuxmachines today.

I think my hard drive is going out. It's been a while since I bought one. I used to really like Maxtor, but I think they were bought out. By who? I bought a Western Digital a couple years ago and it didn't last too long. So, what are your opinions of the best, as in sturdy, dependable, and long lasting, hard drives today?

I've been chugging along happily using Sabayon for about six months or so, but once again, the urge to update to the latest and greatest bit me on my asterisks.

After several months of developing and testing and two release canditates (RC1 and RC2) Pandora FMS 3.2 has been published.

The last day of this year in Southern Oregon is sunny, clear, and cold. Sitting here and basking in the morning sun streaming through the window mitigates my foul mood regarding the state of printers.

To All My Democrat Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2011, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere . Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

To My Republican Friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I upgraded the Enlightenment packages post beta 3 for PCLinuxOS which fixes an ordering issue that was present in the beta 3 library release. itask-ng is still acting a bit funky when trying to drag and drop but ordering through the setup menu works good. This update will appear shortly in the Synaptic Package Manager for those who have Enlightenment installed.

Tex

Sorry about that coupla hours downtime. The cable was down.

I finally got around to getting some torrent links setup for the PCLinuxOS 2010.12 isos. They are currently available at the following locations.

http://torrent.ibiblio.org/doc/191/torrents

and

http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrents&category=262

Happy Holidays!
Tex

We uploaded some freshly baked ISOS for PCLinuxOS to the repositories. They are gui hot and delicious. PCLinuxOS 2010.12 holiday CDs are now available for KDE 4, Gnome, LXDE, XFCE and Enlightenment desktops featuring the latest updates from the PCLinuxOS software repository. All CD features kernel 2.6.33.7bfs kernel for maximum desktop performance. Nvidia and ATI fglrx driver support.

I finished up packaging Enlightenment E-17 Beta 3 desktop. There still seems to be a few bugs in some of the non-core libs but overall a good release from the Enlightenment developers. This update will appear shortly in your Synaptic Package Manager if you have the Enlightenment desktop installed on PCLinuxOS.

Happy Holidays from Team PCLinuxOS

Tex

Ha ha, saw this headline and was going to rush to post it.

What a night. We went down yesterday due to hardware failure in the server.

The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the December 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. In the December 2010 issue:

* e17: An Overview
* e17: Beginner Desktop Tweaks
* e17: Shelves & Drawers Explained
* OpenOffice 3.2, Part 7: Letters & Labels
* Monitor Your System With GKrellM
* Alternate OS: Kolibri, Part 1

As of today, the latest release in KDE's 4.5 series is 4.5.4, which adds a bunch of stabilization and translation updates on top of 4.5. PCLinuxOS users in general are encouraged to upgrade to 4.5.4. This update is available through the Synaptic Package manager if you have KDE 4 installed.

Tex

Updated both PCLinuxOS KDE full and mini isos to 2010.11 with the latest updates through yesterday. This brings in KDE 4.5.3 on the isos, Firefox 3.6.12, Thunderbird 3.1.6, Digikam 1.6.0 and Pidgin 2.7.7 just to name a few of the updates. This should make it easy for users new to PCLinuxOS as they won't have so many updates to perform to get to current status.

QuakeSpasm

Getting old games to work is tricky sometimes. But sometimes it's still possible.

If you've had difficulty finding a good binary that still works for quake 2 try Yamagi Quake 2. Just follow the instructions there cuz they work perfectly on modern Linux systems. Yipppeee!