Initial impressions of Windows 10
31st October 2014Being ever curious on the technology front, the release of the first build of a Technical Preview of Windows 10 was enough to get me having a look at what was on offer. The furore regarding Windows 8.x added to the interest so I went to the download page to get a 64-bit installation ISO image.
That got installed into a fresh VirtualBox virtual machine and the process worked smoothly to give something not so far removed from Windows 8.1. However, it took until release 4.3.18 of VirtualBox before the Guest additions had caught up with the Windows prototype so I signed up for the Windows Insider program and got a 64-bit ISO image to install the Enterprise preview of Windows 10 into a VMware virtual machine since and that supported full screen display of the preview while VirtualBox caught up with it.
Of course, the most obvious development was the return of the Start Menu and it works exactly as expected too. Initially, the apparent lack of an easy way to disable App panels had me going to Classic Shell for an acceptable Start Menu. It was only later that it dawned on me that unpinning these panels would deliver to me the undistracting result that I wanted.
Another feature that attracted my interest is the new virtual desktop functionality. Here I was expecting something like what I have used on Linux and UNIX. There, each workspace is a distinct desktop with only the applications open in a given workspace showing on a panel in there. Windows does not work that way with all applications visible on the taskbar regardless of what workspace they occupy, which causes clutter. Another deficiency is not having a desktop indicator on the taskbar instead of the Task View button. On Windows 7 and 8.x, I have been a user of VirtuaWin and this still works largely in the way that I expect of it too, except for any application windows that have some persistence associated with them; the Task Manager is an example and I include some security software in the same category too.
Even so, here are some keyboard shortcuts for anyone who wants to take advantage of the Windows 10 virtual desktop feature:
- Create a new desktop: Windows key + Ctrl + D
- Switch to previous desktop: Windows key + Ctrl + Left arrow
- Switch to next desktop: Windows key + Ctrl + Right arrow
Otherwise, stability is excellent for a preview of a version of Windows that is early on its road to final release. An upgrade to a whole new build went smoothly when initiated following a prompt from the operating system itself. All installed applications were retained and a new taskbar button for notifications made its appearance alongside the existing Action Centre icon. So far, I am unsure what this does and whether the Action Centre button will be replaced in the fullness of time but I am happy to await where things go with this.
All is polished up to now and there is nothing to suggest that Windows 10 will not be to 8.x what 7 was to Vista. The Start Screen has been dispatched after what has proved to be a misadventure on the part of Microsoft. The PC still is with us and touchscreen devices like tablets are augmenting it instead of replacing it for any tasks involving some sort of creation. If anything, we have seen the PC evolve with laptops perhaps becoming more like the Surface Pro, at least when it comes to hybrid devices. However, we are not as happy smudge our PC screens quite like those on phones and tablets so a return to a more keyboard and mouse centred approach for some devices is a welcome one.
What I have here are just a few observations and there is more elsewhere, including a useful article by Ed Bott on ZDNet. All in all, we are early in the process for Windows 10 and, though it looks favourable so far, I will continue to keep an eye on how it progresses. It needs to be less experimental than Windows 8.x and it certainly is less schizophrenic and should not be a major jump for users of Windows 7.
Command line mapping of network drives
5th September 2007Mapping network drives in Windows usually involves shuffling through Explorer menus. There is another way that I consider to be neater: using the Windows command line ("DOS" to some). The basic command for creating a mapping goes like this:
net use w: \\yourserver.address
To ensure persistence of the mapping across different Windows sessions, use this:
net use w: \\yourserver.address /persistent:yes
Here’s how to set up a mapping that logs in as a different user:
net use w: \\yourserver.address password /user:you
The above can include domain information as well and in a number of different forms: domain\username is one.
To delete a mapping, try this:
net use w: /delete
List all existing mappings:
net use
This is a flavour of what is available and Microsoft does provide documentation. Issuing the following command will bring some of that on the command line:
net help use
Network Assisted Storage Distros
2nd November 2023For a long time, I was under the impression that any operating system catering for Network Assisted Storage servers either came with the devices or was based on BSD. A review in Linux Voice changed that understanding and a spare PC was set up using OpenMediaVault.
Previously, I had tried FreeNAS with no success because the installation CD’s that I had made would not boot up the machine, most likely because it did not have an Intel processor. FreeNAS is now TrueNAS but the BSD basis remains and that puts it into the UNIX, so it is listed among those rather than these Linux-based options.
This is based on openSUSE and it displays its reason for existence in its name. Thankfully, it is as easy to use as it intends to be and there is more on this in a Linux Magazine review.
This largely is a commercial offering, though there is a community edition as well. Support for the latter apparently is lacking, which tells its own story.
After positive comments from Linux Voice, I went and gave this a go. It is based on Debian, so there was a certain familiarity with the underpinnings anyway. Once I had watched a video on YouTube, the interface became clearer and I was able to make it work as it should. There are plugins too, so functionality can be extended with the likes of ownCloud and other tools. OMV-EXTRAS.ORG has a good selection that adds to the ones included in the standard installation. It still runs my cold backup system (it is switched off when no backups are being made) to this very day.
It may sell itself more as being a cloud server but it also can act as a NAS too and it is good to have a range of possibilities. The file system is BTRFS rather than EXT4, which normally is used with Linux, but that is done with the intent of offering features comparable to ZFS for more solid file storage.
It is the File Server variant that would power a NAS, but it does look like that are a lot of interesting other possibilities available from the website; there are ones for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla!, for instance. Debian is the basis for this one too.
A little look at Windows 8
6th November 2011It has been a little while but I have managed to set up a VirtualBox virtual machine in order to take a look at the Developer Preview of the next version of Windows, something that I and others continue to call Windows 8 though Microsoft has yet to confirm the name. When I tried the installation before, it failed on me but that may have been due to having an earlier release of VirtualBox on my machine at that time. 4.1.14 has a preset for Windows 8 and I also happened to notice that it can create virtual hard disks that can be used with competitors like VMWare, Parallels and Virtual PC too. It’s an interesting development but I am left wondering why you’d need to do that when VirtualBox runs on most platforms anyway.
To get back to Windows 8, the installation ran near enough without any intervention apart form stating the language you wanted to use, U.K. English in my case. Starting up the operating system gains you a lock screen that you need to get out of the way so you can log in. It can be dragged out of your way or you can double-click on it or use the carriage return key to get rid of it. Quite why someone thinks it’s a good extra is a little beyond me when a log in screen would suffice. Logging in gets you the new start menu or, as I prefer to think of it, screen. By default, there are a good few Metro apps installed though I decided to rid myself of most of them.
Regarding those apps, one irritation could be that there isn’t that obvious a way to switch away from them to something else. Thankfully, ALT+TAB does seem to work and it has the most instantaneous effect. Otherwise, using the Windows key or hovering over the bottom left corner of the screen to get the menu that brings up the start screen. From the PC user’s point of view, I could see this needing a little more thought because it took a little while for me to figure out what to do. Closing Metro apps isn’t an option either unless you resort to the Task Manager to do so. Microsoft appears to want to leave them open from the point at which you start them until the PC is shut down. It’s a design decision that leaves me unconvinced though, particularly when thoughts of rogue apps running riot on a system come to mind. Then, a stop button could be handy.
There is no start menu as we have come to know it anymore with the start screen replacing it. However, it is possible to limit what’s on there to the software that you use most often an rearrange panels as you’d like them to be. Apart from hosting shortcuts for starting applications, it also acts as a task switcher like the task bar in Windows 7 and there is one of those in Windows 8 too when you jump to the desktop; handily, there’s a panel for that too. Installing Firefox added a panel to the start screen so a little thought has gone into such a common situation and that’s just as well. Still, there’s more work to be done because, currently, there’s no way of changing the background colour of the start screen without resorting to a hex editor or third party tools. Still, you can pick your own picture for the lock screen so things are not all locked down on you.
A preview of IE 10 is included and, apart from the occasional artifact when displaying one of my websites, it seems to work well enough as does Windows Explorer. However, apart from these and a smattering of Metro apps, the Developer Preview does feel barer that previous versions of Windows. However, it does appear that applications like Notepad, PowerShell and the Command Prompt are on there but you need to search for these. That also means that you know about them too so I’d suggest a better way of browsing the applications that are available too. This is one of the weaknesses of Ubuntu’s Unity interface and you need to search in the Dash to find them. Just starting to type in the Metro start screen (and other screens too, it seems) in Windows does trigger the completion of a search box much like what happens in the GNOME Shell Activities screen on systems with GNOME 3. While it’s good to see good ideas being reused from elsewhere, Microsoft might do well to note that you still can browse lists of applications in GNOME 3 too.
Shutting down Windows 8 also seems to be more convoluted than is the case with Windows 7. Logging off and then powering off from the log in screen is one approach and that was my early impression from GNOME 3 too. With the latter, I later was to discover a status menu plugin that added in the option where it was accessible or that using ALT key when clicking the status menu when the plugin wouldn’t work would do what I needed. Without logging off from Windows 8, you can do a shut down using the sidebar that appears on selecting Settings from the menu that pops up on hovering near the bottom left corner of the start screen or the Start button of the task bar of the desktop. Then, look for the power icon and select what you need from the menu that clicking on this icon produces. Of course, you may find that the ALT+F4 key combination when issued while on a clean desktop is the cleanest of all.
All in all, the Developer Preview of the next release of Windows looks fairly usable. That is not to say that there aren’t things that need changing. Apart from this being an early sight of what may be coming to us Windows users, it isn’t unknown for Microsoft to roll back on a radical move to make it more palatable to the user community. After all, it has to watch how it treats the corporate market too. The strong possibility of there being alterations is one thought that needs to be shared with those who are inclined to be losing their tempers at the moment and I have comments with unpleasant language out there on the web (none of that here, please, by the way). As for me, I like to look ahead in order to be forewarned about what’s coming my way in the world of computing. What I have seen so far of the next Windows release is reassuring though there are roughnesses such as PC shutdown and Metro app switching but Microsoft cannot commit commercial suicide either so these have to be fixed. It seems that the world of Microsoft operating systems is in flux with the company’s keeping a firm eye on the world of mobile computing with tablets being a major concern. Others may disagree but I can see Windows 8 working well on conventional PC’s and that’s no bad thing.
Taking a camera on a walk…
24th July 2007On Saturday, I happened to be in Jessops and overheard a salesman emphatically state that you don’t buy a camera for its specifications but for the photos that it produces. While his tone of voice was a touch condescending and he seemed to be putting down a DSLR, he was essentially right. Nevertheless, the specifications do help you get the images and they have to be seen in that light. For instance, having on-board sensor cleaning may save you from having either to clean the thing yourself or send the camera away for the professionals to do the needful, a much safer option in my view. And there may be occasions where image stabilisation is very useful, low light wildlife photography for instance. Yes, there are features that I consider surplus to requirements, like live viewing and movie capture and that is very much due to my buying cameras to make photos. The salesman in question would surely have agreed…
Sunday saw me head to the Lakeland Fells for some walking and a spot of testing of my new Pentax K10D. The details of the walk itself are not for here but for my hillwalking blog and that is where you will find them. While making my way from Crewe to Windermere, I perused the manual looking particularly for information pertaining to functions that I actually use, I should really have done this beforehand, but distractions meant that I hadn’t got around to it. I had to wade through something designed for a new SLR user before I got to what I consider the important stuff. Though this may be a bit irritating, I can understand and accept why they do it this way; we were all new users once and they are hardly likely to want to know about things like aperture priority, raw file capture, ISO control and such like straight away.
What do I think of it then? Let’s start with first impressions. It is definitely smaller than the Canon EOS 10D it accompanies in my possession. That said, it is not too small and there is a decent grip hosting the shutter release button and the camera on/off switch. It also feels well-assembled and reassuringly weighty, an important consideration given that it will see the outdoors a lot. A discussion of the features most relevant to me follows.
On the subject of switching on and off, the camera is set to go into a sleep mode after a second of inactivity but it reawakens quickly when needed, the trigger being half-depression of the shutter release button. In fact, the camera does reawaken much faster than my Canon as it happens and where the delay is a constant source of some irritation. It might sound strange but the on/off switch is also used to activate the depth of field preview, something that no SLR should not have. The location may be unusual, but maybe the designers thought that having shutter release and depth of field preview next to each was a logical way to do it. From a camera operation point of view, there is certainly something to that way of thinking. Behind the shutter release, you’ll find a screen that is a reminder of film SLR’s and it conveys information such as battery life, number of exposures remaining on the card and exposure details (aperture & shutter speed).
Staying on the subject of screens, the one on the back of the camera is larger than that on the Canon. As is customary for these, it allows replay of photos taken and access to the various menus required to control the camera’s operation. In comparison to the Canon, which is essentially a one menu affair with a thumb wheel controlling scrolling and an OK button at its centre to perform operations, the Pentax has a more elaborate system of submenus: one each for recording, playback and set-up. The playback menu is where I found the setting that makes the camera highlight areas of underexposure and overexposure during image playback. This is something that I missed with respect to the Canon until I happened upon it. Camera cleaning is located on the set-up menu and the camera is now set to clean the sensor every time that it is turned on. Why this is not enabled by default is a little beyond me, but the designers might have thought that a vibration from the camera on turning it on could have resulted in a load of support calls. The same submenu also hosts memory card formatting. The recording submenu is where I set the camera to deliver RAW DNG files, an Adobe innovation, rather than the default JPEG’s. There are other options like RAW PEF files, Pentax’s own format, or RAW and JPEG simultaneously, but my choice reflects my workflow in Photoshop Elements; I have yet to stop the said software editing the DNG files, however. With all these options, it is fortunate that there is a navigation wheel whose operation uses arrow buttons to get about. While on the subject of the back screen, there are further settings that are accessed with the FN button rather than the Menu one. These include ISO, white balance, shooting mode (single, continuous, timed and so on) and flash. The only setting that I changed out of this lot was to set the ISO to 400; I prefer to feel that I am in control.
Returning to the camera’s top plate, the exposure mode dial is on the left-hand side, which is no hardship to me as this is in the same place as on the Canon. There are no scene modes, but the available exposure modes are more than sufficient: fully automatic, program, sensitivity priority, shutter priority, aperture priority, shutter and aperture priority, manual, bulb and external flash synchronisation. A few of these need a spot of explaining. Sensitivity priority is no one on me but it is a consequence of the ability of DSLR’s to offer a range of ISO settings; the aperture and the shutter speed are varied according to the ISO setting. Shutter and aperture priority is like manual exposure and is the inverse of sensitivity priority: set both aperture and shutter speed, and the camera will vary the ISO setting. Both of the foregoing assume that you let the camera set the ISO but my setting the thing myself may have put paid to these functions. Shutter priority and aperture priority are, as far as I can tell, their usual selves. For all exposure modes, the thumb wheels at the front and back of the shutter release handgrip set apertures and shutter speeds where appropriate and this arrangement works well.
Mounting on the same column as the exposure dial the metering mode selector and here is where I see more options than my Canon, which has only full and partial multi-segment metering. With the Pentax, you get spot and centre-weighted metering in addition to the default multisegmented variety. Spot metering is definitely very useful but capturing the reading is a multitasking affair: half pressing the shutter button and fulling pressing the AE lock one at the same time. In contrast, Canon’s partial metering is a more convenient single button operation meter and retain facility. Pentax would do well to learn from this.
The focussing mode selector is found on the left of the body next to the lens coupling. I am used to having this on the lenses themselves, so this is a new arrangement for me and one to which I can easily become accustomed. In fact, it is easy to find it while composing a picture. The modes themselves are manual focus, one-time autofocus and continuous autofocus; the last of these is for focussing on moving objects.
I could go further, perhaps overboard, with a discussion of the features of this camera but I draw a line at what’s here. Yes, it is useful to set the focussing point and activate image stabilisation but the above are what matter to me and its performance in the photo making department is the most important aspect. That neatly brings me to my appraisal of how it performs. With inspection of the first few images on the review screen, I was a little disappointed to see how dark the foreground was in comparison to the sky. When I brought everything home as I always do, I found that things weren’t necessarily as they appeared in the field. The Pentax more usefully offers histogram review and highlighting of any areas that are either underexposed or overexposed. It is these functions that I will be using in reshooting decisions while out and about with the Pentax and the same can be said for how I currently use the Canon. In fast changing lighting, the AE lock technique was a bit irritating but I am certain that I will get better at it. The autofocus doesn’t always lock onto the subject, especially in tricky lighting, so manual focussing is a definite necessity and is more useful more for landscape photography, in fact. Nevertheless, the autofocus did do well most of the time and my Sigma lenses have done worse things on me. All in all, I am happy with the K10D and will continue to use it. I have got some decent photos from my excursion and that, as that Jessops salesman would agree, is the main point of a camera.
Automatically enabling your network connection at startup on CentOS 7
15th August 2014The release of CentOS 7 stoked my curiosity so I gave it a go in a VirtualBox virtual machine. It uses GNOME Shell in classic mode so the feel is not too far removed from that of GNOME 2. One thing to watch though is that it needs at least version 4.3.14 of VirtualBox or the Guest Additions kernel drivers will not compile at all. That might sound surprising when you learn that the kernel version is 3.10.x and that for GNOME Shell is 3.8.4. Much like Debian production releases, more established versions are chosen for the sake of stability and that fits in with the enterprise nature of the intended user base. Even with that more conservative approach, the results still please the eye though attempting to change the desktop background picture managed to freeze the machine. Other than that, most things work fine.
Even so, there are unexpected things to be encountered and one that I spotted was that network connectivity needed to switched on every time the VM was started. The default installation gives rise to this state of affairs and it is a known situation with CentOS from at least version 6 of the distribution and is not so hard to fix once you know what to do.
What you need to do is look for the relevant configuration file in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ and update that. Using the ifconfig command, I found that the name of the network interface. Usually, this is something like eth0 but it was enp0s3 in my case so I had to look for a file named ifcfg-enp0s3 and edit that. The text that is sought is ONBOOT=no and that needs to become ONBOOT=yes for network connections to start automatically. To do something similar from the command line, CentOS had suggested the following:
sed -i -e ‘s@^ONBOOT=”no@ONBOOT=”yes@’ ifcfg-enp0s3
The above uses sed to do an inline (and case insensitve) edit of the file to change the offending no to a yes, once you have dropped in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory. My edit was done manually with Gedit so that works too. One thing to add is that any file editing needs superuser privileges so switching to root with the su command and using sudo is in order here.
Ditching PC Plus?
28th June 2007When I start to lose interest in the features in a magazine that I regularly buy, then it’s a matter of time before I stop buying the magazine altogether. Such a predicament is facing PC Plus, a magazine that I been buying every month over the last ten years. The fate has already befallen titles like Web Designer, Amateur Photographer and Trail, all of which I now buy sporadically. Returning to PC Plus, I get the impression that it feels more of a lightweight these days. What Future Publishing has been doing over the last decade is add titles to its portfolio that take actually from its long established stalwart; Linux Format and .Net are two that come to mind and there are titles covering Windows Vista and computer music as well. Being a sucker for punishment, I did pick up this month’s PC Plus and the issue is as good an example of the malaise as any. Reviews, once a mainstay of the title, are now less prominent than they were. In place of comparison tests, we now find discussions of topics like hardware acceleration with some reviews mixed in. Topics such as robotics and artificial intelligence do rear their heads in feature articles and I cannot say that I have a great deal of time for such futurology. The tutorials section is still there but has been hived off into a separate mini-magazine and I am not so sure that it has escaped the lightweight revolution. All this is leading me to dump PC Plus in favour of PC Pro from Dennis Publishing. This feels reassuringly more heavyweight and, while the basic format has remained unchanged over the years, it still managed to remain fresh. Reviews, of both software and hardware, are very much in evidence and it manages to have those value-adding feature articles; this month, digital photography and rip-off Britain come under the spotlight. Add the Real Word Computing section and it all makes a good read in these times of behemoths like Microsoft, Apple and Adobe delivering new things on the technology front. I don’t know if I have changed but PC Pro does seem better than PC Plus these days.
Battery life
2nd October 2011In recent times, I have lugged my Toshiba Equium with me while working away from home; I needed a full screen laptop of my own for attending to various things after work hours so it needs to come with me. It’s not the most portable of things with its weight and the lack of battery life. Now that I think of it, I reckon that it’s more of a desktop PC replacement machine than a mobile workhorse. After all, it only lasts an hour on its own battery away from a power socket. Virgin Trains’ tightness with such things on their Pendolinos is another matter…
Unless my BlackBerry is discounted, battery life seems to be something with which I haven’t had much luck because my Asus Eee PC isn’t too brilliant either. Without decent power management, two hours seems to be as good as I get from its battery. However, three to four hours become possible with better power management software on board. That makes the netbook even more usable though there are others out there offering longer battery life. Still, I am not tempted by these because the gadget works well enough for me that I don’t need to wonder about how money I am spending on building a mobile computing collection.
While I am not keen on spending too much cash or having a collection of computers, the battery life situation with my Toshiba is more than giving me pause for thought. The figures quoted for MacBooks had me looking at them though they aren’t at all cheap. Curiosity about the world of the Mac may make them attractive to me but the prices forestalled that and the concept was left on the shelf.
Recently, PC Pro ran a remarkably well-timed review of laptops offering long battery life (in issue 205). The minimum lifetime in this collection was over five hours so the list of reviewed devices is an interesting one for me. In fact, it even may become a shortlist should I decide to spend money on buying a more portable laptop than the Toshiba that I already have. The seventeen hour battery life for a Sony VAIO SB series sounds intriguing even if you need to buy an accessory to gain this. That it does over seven hours without the extra battery slice makes it more than attractive anyway. The review was food for thought and should come in handy if I decide that money needs spending.
Never undercutting the reseller…
23rd October 2009Quite possibly, THE big technology news of the week has been the launch of Windows 7. Regular readers may be aware that I have been having a play with the beta and release candidate versions of the thing since the start of the year. In summary, I have found to work both well and unobtrusively. There have been some rough edges when access files through VirtualBox’s means of accessing the host file system from a VM but that’s the only perturbation to be reported and, even then, it only seemed to affect my use of Photoshop Elements.
Therefore, I had it in mind to get my hands on a copy of the final release after it came out. Of course, there was the option of pre-ordering but that isn’t for everyone so there are others. A trip down to the local branch of PC World will allow you to satisfy your needs with full, upgrade (if you already have a copy of XP or Vista, it might be worth trying out the Windows Secrets double installation trick to get it loaded on a clean system) and family packs. The last of these is very tempting: three Home Premium licences for around £130. Wandering around to your local PC components emporium is an alternative but you have to remember that OEM versions of the operating system are locked to the first (self-built) system on which they are installed. Apart from that restriction, the good value compared with retail editions makes them worth considering. The last option that I wish to bring to your attention is buying directly from Microsoft themselves. You would think that this may be cheaper than going to a reseller but that’s not the case with the Family Pack costing around £150 in comparison to PC World’s pricing and it doesn’t end there. That they only accept Maestro debit cards along with credit cards from the likes of Visa and Mastercard perhaps is another sign that Microsoft are new to whole idea of selling online. In contrast, Tesco is no stranger to online selling but they have Windows 7 on offer though they aren’t noted for computer sales; PC World may be forgiven for wondering what that means but who would buy an operating system along with their groceries? I suppose that the answer to that would be that people who are accustomed to delivering one’s essentials at a convenient time should be able to do the same with computer goods too. That convenience of timing is another feature of downloading an OS from the web and many a Linux fan should know what that means. Microsoft may have discovered this of late but that’s better than never.
Because of my positive experience with the pre-release variants of Windows 7, I am very tempted to get my hands on the commercial release. Because I have until early next year with the release candidate and XP works sufficiently well (it ultimately has given Vista something of a soaking), I’ll be able to bide my time. When I do make the jump, it’ll probably be Home Premium that I’ll choose because it seems difficult to justify the extra cost of Professional. It was different in the days of XP when its Professional edition did have something to offer technically minded home users like me. With 7, XP Mode might be a draw but with virtualisation packages like VirtualBox available for no cost, it’s hard to justify spending extra. In any case, I have Vista Home Premium loaded on my Toshiba laptop and that seems to work fine, in spite of all the bad press that Vista has gotten for itself.
More Linux Distributions
21st September 2012
If a certain Richard Stallman had his way, Linux would be called GNU/Linux because he wants GNU to have some of the credit, but we’re lazy creatures and we all call it Linux instead. What still amazes me is the number of Linux distributions that are out there. This list captures those that do not fit into other lists that you can find in the sidebar, so do look at the others as well.
Many fit into the desktop and server computing paradigms while a minority are very distinctive. It is easier to write about the latter than the former, though personal experiences do add to any narrative. It is tempting to think that everything has become static after more than thirty years, yet that may be foolish given the ongoing flux in the world of technology. Only change is ever a constant presence.
More in the Way of Privacy
The controversy about security agencies eavesdropping on internet communications has upset some and here are some distros offering anonymity and privacy. Of course, none of these should be used for unlawful purposes since there are those in less liberal countries who need invisibility to speak their minds.
It is harder and harder to create a Linux distro that is very different from the rest, but this one uses application virtualisation for added security. You can organise your software into different domains so that you work more securely when moving data between applications from different domains.
There is more than a hint of privacy-mindedness in this distro when you look long enough at what it offers. Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce desktop environments are part of the offer and there is added software for extra privacy and security.
This is an option for those who are worried about being tracked online. All internet connections are sent via the Tor network and it is run exclusively as a live distro from CD, DVD or USB stick drive too, so no trace is left on any PC. The basis is Debian and the distro’s name is an acronym: The Amnesiac Incognito Live System. For us living in a democratic country, the effort may seem excessive but that changes in other places where folk are not so fortunate. The use of Tor may not be perfect but it should help in combination with the use of different sessions for different tasks and encrypting any files. There even is an option to make the desktop appear like that of Windows XP for extra discreteness of use.
Most Linux distros that have enhanced security and anonymity as a feature are not installable on a PC, but that exactly is what’s unique about Whonix. It’s based on Debian but all internet connections go via the Tor network. The latter is called Whonix-Gateway with Whonix-Workstation being what you use to work on your system. It may sound like being overly careful but it has me intrigued.
Entertainment
In many ways, these are appliance distros for anyone who just wants an install-it-and-go approach to things. That works better with dedicated devices than with multipurpose machines, so that is one thing that needs to be kept in mind.
The idea behind this offering is what it offers console gamers. Legacy games and peripherals will work and there even is support for Raspberry Pi as well.
The main purpose of this distro is to offer a home for the KODI entertainment centre on PC and Raspberry Pi devices. It follows from the now defunct OpenELEC project, which ran into trouble when developers’ voices were not given a hearing.
The acronym stands for Open-Source Media Centre and there is KODI here too. Though the distro also is based on Debian, one is tempted to wonder why anyone would not just install that and install KODI on top of it. The answer possibly has something got to do with added user-friendliness for those who do not need to deal with such things.
Mandriva Offshoots
Mandrake once was a spin of Red Hat with a more user-friendly focus. In the days before the appearance of Ubuntu, it would have been a choice for those not wanting to overcome obstacles such as a level of hardware support that was much less than what we have today. Later, Mandrake became Mandriva following litigation and the acquisition of Conectiva in 2005. The organisation has declined since those heady days and it became defunct during 2015. Its legacy continues though in the form of two spin-off projects, so all the work of forebears has not been lost.
It was the uncertainty surrounding the future of Mandriva that originally caused this project to be started. Beginnings have been promising, so this is a one to watch, though you have to wonder if the now community-based OpenMandriva is stealing some of its limelight.
Of the pair that is listed here, it is OpenMandriva which is a continuation of the now-defunct Mandriva. Seeing how things progress for a project with user-friendliness at its heart will be of interest in these days when Debian, Ubuntu and Linux Mint are so pervasive. Even with those, there are KDE options, so there is a challenge in place.
Anything Russian may not be everyone’s choice given the state of world affairs at the time of writing, yet this still is an offshoot of Mandriva so it gets a mention in this list. Desktop environment options include KDE, XFCE and LXQt and there are various use cases covered by a range of solutions.
Others
Not every distro falls in the above categories, and some that you find here may surprise you. There are some better-known names like openSUSE that go their way.
Aside from the founder’s dislike of ISO disk images for whatever reason, this distro has its own eccentricities. For example, it is container-friendly, runs in memory as root and much more. This is branded as an experimental distro, and it is that in many ways.
This project creates respins of openSUSE for the sake of a more refined experience. For instance, there are live booting ISO images as well as inclusion of media codecs. There is plenty of choice too when it comes to desktop environments.
From what I have seen, this project seems to be supporting the same needs as Arch, albeit with all software needing to be compiled, so there’s more of a DIY approach. The wiki also comes in handy for those users.
Billing itself as a lean independent distribution focussing on QT and KDE, this is built from the ground up without any dependence on other distros. Some tools, like pacman, naturally come from elsewhere in this otherwise standalone offering.
Here is another distro apart from Ubuntu that has an African name, the Zulu for big chief this time around. It came to my notice among the pages of the now defunct Micro Mart magazine and uses MATE, XFCE, Enlightenment and KDE as its desktop environment choices.
SuSE Linux was one of the first Linux distros that I started to explore and I even had it loaded on my home PC as a secondary operating system for quite a while too before my attention went elsewhere. Only for a PC Plus cover-mounted CD, it never might have discovered it and it bested Red Hat, which was as prominent then, as Fedora is today. When SuSE fell into Novell’s hands, it became both openSUSE and SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition. The former is the community and the latter is what Novell, now itself an Attachmate Group company, offers to business customers. As it happens, I continue to keep an eye on openSUSE and even had it on a secondary PC before font resolution deficiencies had me looking elsewhere. While it’s best known for its KDE variant, there is a GNOME one too and it is this that I have been examining.
There was a time when this was being touted as an Ubuntu killer but it never seems to have made good on that promise. Recent troubles within the project haven’t helped either, especially with a long wait between releases.
This Turkish distro recently got reviewed in Linux Format and they were not satisfied with its documentation. It does not help that the website is not in English, so you need a translation tool of your choosing for this one.
Though there also is a spin using the MATE desktop environment, this distro is perhaps better known as the home for the Budgie desktop environment. All of this is for computing and not its business or enterprise counterpart. There is nothing to say against that and may make it feel a little more friendly.
The name sounded similar for some reason and I reckon that’s because Samsung has smartphones running Tizen on sale. The whole point of the project is to power mobile computing platforms with only the mention of netbooks sullying an otherwise non-PC target market that includes tablets and TV’s. It’s overseen by the Linux Foundation too.