Everybody seems to be jumping into the tablet business. And why not? Together with smartphones, they are the hottest-selling devices on the planet. And those powered by Android hold top market share. A relatively new name in the tablet-space is PengPod, made by Peacock Imports, a Florida, US-based outfit. The PengPod tablet runs Linux on ARM/Allwinner SoC hardware. So instead [...]

The GNOME 3 edition of ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 has been released. ROSA Desktop Fresh is the latest line of Linux desktop distributions from ROSA Laboratory, a software solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia. This is a community-supported edition from ROSA Lab developers that has not been officially sanctioned by ROSA Laboratory, though there is an ongoing discussion to make [...]

If you are running a rolling-release distribution, this short article will likely be of no use to you, but if you are running an installation of Mageia 2, you’ll learn that is brings good tidings, when it comes to upgrading an existing installation of Mageia. But before we get to Mageia, let’s spend one paragraph and a screen shot spot [...]

Chakra is a desktop distribution forked from Arch Linux. Not too long ago, it was one of my favorite desktop distributions, even made my list of the Top 6 KDE distributions in 2011. But problems with its graphical package manager, and the fact that latest releases do not even have one, has seen it drop off my list, at least [...]

PC-BSD is a multi-purpose distribution of FreeBSD. The last stable release is PC-BSD 9.1. Development and releases tend to be slow and infrequent, and it does not get as much press coverage as Linux distributions. I have been reviewing its major releases since this website was launched, though I’m yet to review the last stable edition. But that review is [...]

Linux Lite is a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu. It is uses the Xfce desktop environment, a desktop environment known to be suitable for low-end computers. The latest update, Linux Lite 1.0.4, was released just today. It ships with Steam client for Linux, the popular game distribution platform, installed. Because of the memory requirements of Steam, don’t expect to run [...]

Linux Deepin is one of my favorite desktop distributions. A Chinese distro that is based on Ubuntu Desktop, it is not just a rebranded Ubuntu desktop, but offers a desktop computing experience different from that of its parent distribution. Its graphical package manager, music and video players, and a cool screen shot tool, are original to it. While previous editions [...]

I think most people read about the “Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy Award” via a blog post from the Mozilla Foundation, publisher of the Firefox Web browser. The title of the blog post is “Mozilla Recognized as Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy.” It’s important to note that the keyword term here is “Internet Company,” because the study is [...]

A new USB stick-sized Android SmartTV from Sanko Co., Ltd of Japan features a quad-core 1.2 GHz Freescale i.mx6 processor. I think that’s more power than any other device of its type that I’ve come across. With it, you can turn any TV with the right connectivity into an Android device or TV. It supports Google Play, Japanese input (it’s [...]

Cinnarch is a desktop Linux distribution based on Arch Linux and using the Cinnamon as the default and only supported desktop environment. Like Arch, it follows a rolling-release development model, which is an install-once-and-update-forever model that ensures that an installed system will never need to be reinstalled, even when a new version becomes available, except for those instances when, for [...]

The smartphone and tablet computer fundamentally changed how the masses use computers (yep, the smartphone is a computer). They are the great success stories of the last few years. In 2013, Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker, stands a good chance of being at the fore-front of another great success story, if it can deliver. The company’s brand new computer, the [...]

It was lobbying by the GNOME devs that made GNOME 3 the default on Fedora, but now it seems that somebody has had enough. That somebody has proposed making the Cinnamon the default desktop environment on Fedora 19. I don’t blame him. I’ve always been of the opinion that as far a desktop computing goes, and how people interface or [...]

VIA Technologies, Inc. has just announced two new incarnations (Paper and Rock) of the APC, an ARM-based computer that runs a customized Android 4.0 operating system. The first incarnation of the APC was just a basic motherboard targeted mainly at developers, but the APC Paper, the more expensive of the two, brings something slightly different to the table. Both share [...]

Security is a very important factor in my choice of distributions and software solutions, and I tend to hold a very strict view of what it means from a modern computing standpoint. In one sentence, my stance on security is this: A sound and complete security posture has to take both physical and network security into account. Anything less will [...]

Now that Fedora 18, aka Spherical Cow, has been released, users of Fedora 17 will likely be gearing up to upgrade. Before this latest release, upgrading an installation of Fedora requires a procedure that’s not very elegant. With Fedora 18, the recommended upgrade tool is called FedUp (FEDora UPgrader). It is, by design, a lot more elegant than what it [...]

SolusOS is a desktop distribution based on Debian. It is co-founded by a couple of guys who were involved with Linux Mint Debian Edition. The sixth alpha of SolusOS 2 was released yesterday, with the final stable edition scheduled for release at an unspecified date. This is my first look at this distribution, and if you this article is your [...]