Here’s a great article for home PC users who are a bit interested in taking a look at Linux – Mandriva Linux 2006 for home users.

It’s accessible to non-geeks, and if you do want to have a look at this whole Linux and free software thing, take a look.

Having said that, Mandriva isn’t the only way to go. I’d recommend Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora for home users (probably in that order).

And, if you find it interesting, please do leave a comment.

I apologise for the lack of updates, but I’m really busy at the moment – the exam season is coming.

Until the exams are over, updates won’t be very frequent, but I’m planning to blog about the release of SUSE Linux 10.1 on Thursday. It’s going to be grrrr-r-eat.

See you soon.

The newly announced name for the Nintendo Revolution – Wii seems to be making some waves within the Nintendo community.

Personally, I don’t like it. I can just see kids asking their parents “Can I have a Wii?” and the unsuspecting parents agreeing, not having realised that they meant the Nintendo console.

Wii? What kind of a name is that for the Nintendo Revolution? Read up on it now, I’ll be back tomorrow to discuss a bit more.

First of all, sorry for the long wait, I’ve been busy with lots of important stuff recently and haven’t had time to post.

Remember that review of Fedora Core 5 Test 3 I promised? Well, I have recorded a little screen demo type thing just to show anyone that hasn’t played with Fedora 5 what the installation process is like. I’ve tried to only cut it where necessary (to keep it in a reasonable timescale). You must also remember that the install’s running a bit slow because it is running inside a VMware virtual machine.

Check out the video below, and comment if you like it. I may well do a future video on how to add the cool stuff to Fedora (like Flash Player, MP3 support, Sun Java and Real Player for example) later on, if this one is interesting.

I’ve been doing a bit of playing about with OpenSolaris Belenix (yet another Unix-based OS, but this time based on Sun’s commercial Solaris product). If you’re interested, I got it off the cover DVD of the latest edition of Linux Format (Issue 79).

I’d really love to get stuck in to OpenSolaris and do the old Apache, PHP and MySQL compile to get myself acquainted with the system, but at the moment I can’t seem to get a network connection. At all.

And that is a shame as it means I can’t really run a web server. I’ll keep you posted.

First of all, yes, I cross-posted again. I’m sorry, but that story was big and I couldn’t be bothered rephrasing it just for this blog.

Now, onto the subject of RenameIt. Now I’ve been needing to do some batch renaming of photos recently on Windows, so I thought I would build a batch renaming tool. Yes, I could have downloaded one of the many already built freeware ones, but, where’s the fun in that??

So I set about using Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition to make a batch renaming application which would be fully open source under the GPL.

And my result can be downloaded, both an installer and the VB source files. Enjoy, and if you like it, post a comment. It does need the .NET Framework 2.0 installed to run. No, it’s not cross-platform, but Linux has many open source batch renamers (KRename, for example), and I don’t yet have a Mac.

Get the installer here.
Get the source code here.

Apple have officially released Boot Camp, a public beta version of a patch to make Intel-powered Macs to run Windows. Yes, you read that correctly, Apple released a patch to run Windows on the Mac.

The patch works a bit like the hacked-up bootloader for Windows XP, developed by some enthusiasts to try and get Windows running on some Macs, which was largely a success. Boot Camp, however, provides a GUI (graphical user interface) for installing Microsoft Windows alongside Mac OS X. From the official Apple press release:

Available as a download beginning today, Boot Camp allows users with a Microsoft Windows XP installation disc to install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac®, and once installation is complete, users can restart their computer to run either Mac OS® X or Windows XP. Boot Camp will be a feature in ‘‘Leopard’,Â’ Apple’Â’s next major release of Mac OS X, that will be previewed at Apple’Â’s Worldwide Developer Conference in August.

So in Mac OS X Leopard, you will have a dual boot system built directly into the Mac operating system. Apple go on to say that:

“Apple has no desire or plan to sell or support Windows, but many customers have expressed their interest to run Windows on Apple’Â’s superior hardware now that we use Intel processors,” said Philip Schiller.

This seems quite a big step to take for Apple, who seem to be embracing the idea that people will switch to Mac if they can run their Windows applications at the same time. Robert Scoble (a Microsoft employee) seems to think that Apple are listening to bloggers, and have made this decision as a direct result of what people want, thinking it might boost Mac sales.

Will it boost Mac sales, and get more people using Macs? Or will people just buy nice-looking hardware to run Windows on? It seems only time will tell what this momentous move by Apple will do for it, or against it. No official word from Microsoft about this yet, but I’ll follow up when there’s news.

[Cross-post at Gizbuzz]

OK, this is really starting to irritate me now. I’ve been playing around trying to get Apache’s mod_rewrite to behave and I’m having no luck, I’ve Googled and visited about every single mod_rewrite tutorial there is, so I’m starting to lose patience now.

I’ll get there eventually.

According to the Unofficial Windows Vista Weblog, the EU aren’t happy about some of the new integrated features planned for Windows Vista. You can read that story here (I wrote this one at Gizbuzz), here (the Vista Weblog) and here (Yahoo News).

To be honest, I think that the Vista Weblog have blown this a little out of proportion. I think that it might be likely that Microsoft be forced by the EU to remove some of the new bundled features of Windows Vista (perhaps Windows Defender, their anti-spyware client?) just for Europe. As I mentioned, they were forced to do this before, with Windows Media Player, and ‘N’ versions of Windows XP were released in Europe without WMP. If anything comes of this story, it will be that Microsoft might have to do the same thing again with the disputed features (probably Windows Defender, or Windows DVD Maker or one of those new programs).

However, the EU might be a little more harsh about it, and say that they must remove the features for all copies of Vista shipped in the EU, and have the bundled products sold separately.

Anyway, it remains to be seen, and this story might still be speculative. So there’s your warning, don’t rely on these sources to be 100% accurate (I’ve already said this in my post).