How about those specs:

• 1.2 GHz Via C7-M Processor ULV
• 512 MB DDR2 533MHz SDRAM Memory (maximum is 1 GB)
• 30 GB Hard Disk Drive
• 7″ WVGA TFT Display for 800×480 resolution
• Via Unichrome Pro IGP Graphics
• Via High Definition Audio
• 802.11 B/G
• One 10/100 Ethernet Port
• DVI-I Port
• 2 USB 2.0 Ports
• 4-in-1 memory card reader
• 0.3 MP Webcam (not a typo, zero point three megapixel)
• Headphone/Line out port
• Microphone/Line in port
• Set of stereo speaker
• Touchpad
• 4 cell lithium ion battery
• 2 pounds
• Up to 5 hours battery life
• gOS Rocket OS based on Ubuntu
• Software includes Google Apps integration

Desktop is clean and has easy-to-read icons for popular Web-based applications and shortcuts to applications like the music player. Kinda like OS X, but not as elegant of course.

Additional Pre-installed and Linked Software:
Mozilla Firefox, gMail, Meebo, Skype, Wikipedia, GIMP, Blogger, YouTube, Xing Movie Player, RythemBox, Faqly, Facebook and OpenOffice.org 2.3 (includes WRITER, IMPRESS, DRAW, CALC, BASE)

CloudBook next to an Eee PC 4G Surf

Geubuntu 7.10 “Luna Nuova” is only the second release of the distro, which seems to trace Ubuntu’s release cycle. As the version number suggests, Geubuntu 7.10 is based on Ubuntu 7.10, from which it borrows the kernel and user conveniences like the restricted-drivers management utility.

Geubuntu is an installable live CD, but it can also be installed on top of an existing Ubuntu distro by installing specific packages from the Geubuntu mirror. Currently there’s only a 32-bit ISO available. To run Geubuntu on 64-bit hardware you’ll have to take the longer route of first installing a 64-bit version of Ubuntu and then getting Geubuntu packages that are compiled for 64-bit platforms.

Installing from the live CD requires about 1.5GB of disk space. The distro booted smoothly on all the computers I tried it on, including a 1.3GHz Celeron and two dual-core desktops, with a 2.0GHz E4400 and a 1.8GHz E6300. Geubuntu isn’t short on applications; some of the most used apps it includes are the Firefox Web browser, Pidgin instant messenger, Eclair and VLC media players, and the GIMP image editor. To keep its requirements low, Geubuntu bundles AbiWord word processor, Gnumeric spreadsheet, Orage Calendar, and the Thunar file manager instead of more resource-intensive office suites. If you want to install more apps you can use the Synaptic package manager.

Very usable desktop

The first thing you’ll notice about Geubuntu is its speed. Despite being based on Ubuntu 7.10, it runs well on older hardware like my Pentium Celeron 1.3GHz laptop. This is because Enlightenment isn’t as resource-hungry as Ubuntu’s default desktop environment GNOME, which Geubuntu doesn’t bundle.

Geubuntu boots into the visually stunning Sunshine theme created by its artist developer. The desktop sports panels at the top and bottom of the screen. To maximize the desktop real estate, the top panel folds over the top when not in use. The bottom panel, though minimal, is fully loaded with menu and application launchers, virtual desktop switcher, and applets like clock. I like its animated marquee-style auto-scrolling list of application launchers, which prevents the panel from taking too much space.

In addition to being visually stunning, Geubuntu’s Sunshine and Moonlight themes both have animated bits. Depending on the theme, a sun beam shines down from the sun or an Enlightenment logo appears on a large Moon and reflects in rippling water after regular intervals. Users can easily (and almost instantaneously) switch between the two themes at a click.

Of course this bling would be useless if it came at the price of usability. But that’s what I like about Geubuntu. It’s a stunning distro that’s also very usable, thanks to an assortment of components. Of note are two Xfce components, the Xfce panel and the Thunar file manager. These are complemented by bits and pieces from GNOME, such as the GNOME bar and applets like the network manager and the search applet.

Watch out for bugs!

The components that make this distro usable also introduce a few noticeable bugs, since they were not designed to interact with each other. And Enlightenment is still under heavy development and has several bugs of its own. Despite bundling Thunar file manager, Geubuntu relies on Enlightenment’s file manager, fm, for displaying desktop icons. However, you can’t mount or unmount removable devices or browse their files using their desktop icons; for that you need to use Thunar.

Also, when running Geubuntu from the live CD, the distro doesn’t log out without complaining that some task is taking too long to complete, giving you the option to either wait or continue with the logout. According to a post on the forums, it’s the Xfce panel that seems to be causing this and the developers are working on a solution. Strangely, once you’ve installed Geubuntu to the hard drive, it logs out without complaining.

This isn’t the only discrepancy between the live and installed versions of the distro. When I first installed it, the desktop didn’t display the top panel. I tried logging out, restarting the computer, killing and restarting the panels, but nothing worked. But reinstalling the distro brought back the panel.

Secondly, my PCMCIA wireless card, which worked from the live CD, didn’t work from the installed version. On the dual-core desktop, the distro picked up the wide-screen monitor and correctly booted into its 1440×900-pixel resolution. It failed however, to activate the wireless card, even after i installed the correct drivers via NDISwrapper. Also the splash screen that comes up while the distro boots is only visible when the distro boots from the disk. Live CD users get to stare at a blank screen during boot, which can be a little confusing for new users.

Some of the components under the Moonlight theme retain traces of the Sunshine theme, such as the semitransparent terminal window. If you run into any other errors, refer to the online documentation to check for a solution, if it’s a known bug.

Conclusion

Despite being a young distro with just two releases under its belt, Geubuntu delivers a visually stunning desktop without compromising functionality. As a double benefit, the components it uses to blend functionality with bling have modest hardware requirements. This makes the distro perfectly suitable for older computers.

Built atop Ubuntu, the distro has a solid, well-tested base. Its unique mix of components from desktop environments Xfce and GNOME on top of the under-development Enlightenment environment introduces several bugs, but the developers are working to iron these out, and have already tackled several between the first two releases. I’d recommend this distro to desktop users with aging hardware, and to users who haven’t tried Enlightenment before.

What exactly is Puppy Linux?

If you dont know what am I talking about…read this:”Puppy Linux is the Slackware 12 based Linux distribution designed especially for low-end computers and because of its small size (80-100 MB) it can run from live CD or from USB stick”. It is based on Slackware than it doesn’t mean that it is a clone of Slackware but it is totally a different distribution from base. And if you run this from USB stick then it will transfer caching and flush data to RAM in every 30 minutes and hence will not affect your USB.

Whats new in 3.00?

Here is the list:

1. All base packages upgraded, including glibc v2.5, gcc v4.1.2, GTK v2.10.13.
2. Application upgrades (incomplete list): pptp v1.7.1, Isomaster v1.1, KP2 v0.2 (gray), Pbdict (zigbert), pure-ftpd (getnikar), trashcan (disciple), Pbackup v3.0.0 (zigbert), Network Wizard (Dougal, tempestuous, BarryK), JWM v2.0.1, Xvesa Wizard (gray, BarryK), Burniso2cd (BarryK), Busybox v1.6.1, TkDVD v4.0.6, various small utilities (gray), Pidgin v2.0.2, SeaMonkey v1.1.2, Xorg v7.2, Unionfs v2.1.2, Pfind v2.4 (zigbert), PDF-printer v0.8 (jcoder24), WakePup2 (john doe, dgi), v1.6.9pre7, NoteCaseHomeBank v3.5, Universal Installer (BarryK), Pmirror v0.2 (zigbert), PRename v0.6 (plinej), partview (PaulBx1).
3. Massive improvements achieved with new boot and shutdown scripts, including pup_save file custom naming, frugal install into a subdirectory, correct recognition of multiple pup_save files at bootup, pup_save file resizing.
4. New kernel: 2.6.21.7, configured with ‘tickless’ option. Initrd.gz is now a cpio archive.
5. NetSurf web browser v1.1 as our internal HTML viewer.
6. True flushing for Flash drives (andrei, BarryK). Finally.
7. Also a great number of bug fixes.

Resources:

For more information on Puppy Linux go here
For announcements and release notes click here
Download the ISO image from here (size=97.63 MB)

Some screen shots:

Here I put some Puppy Linux screen shots for you to see[Obviously ].

It’s been a whole month when I’ve investigated the new environment called KDE 4. Honestly I wanted to wait till “Beta 3″, which should have appeared on 5th October. But as you all can see it has never happened. On the IRC channel #kde4-devel I was informed that the “Beta 3″ should have been tagged yesterday but unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be true. Not waiting any longer I made my mind and I have updated the SVN and have run the cmake.

First glance

Right after running the KDE you can tell at once that new wallpaper is far more beautiful than the grey old one and the marvelous contrasting flower is well matched to the bottom bar. Unluckily it does nothing more than displaying the clock. The taskbar despite the fact it was on the bar didn’t display processes and all the effort I made to add there any applet or the Pager was in vain, and ended with a complete crash of the bar. The only thing I succeeded in was to put there the Kickoff menubar.

Kickoff – the new KDE menu

The first appearance of Kickoff was in SUSE Linux 10.2 as a new menu for KDE. The icons were arranged in five categories: Favorite, Applications, My Computer, Recently used, Leave. There is nothing more than the search box that helps you finding applications and documents. It’s too early to discuss about the new KDE menu even talking about its appearance. IMHO I wish that the searching engine wouldn’t be based on Nepomuk or Strigi. I’d like to mention that it is only the initial version of this menu in KDE.

Kget – is still surprising

I’ve talked about this program a lot so far. Even now there has changed a lot of stuff, not only the appearance but the functionality. I’ll shortly remind that Kget is the download accelerator that provides you quequing, placing files in a specific directory chosen by some criteria. This version is enriched with the Transfer Graph applet, which shows you the graph of the download speed of current file. It’s the third applet like this. The first two are: Pie Graph and Bar Chart.

Plasma – new applets

I’m used to some sort of nice rule. All the time I check the state of KDE 4 I meet new Plasmoids – so is now. The first one is the old well-known Network Monitor which transformed from two flushing monitors to the graph that shows the traffic flow.

The next two applets are quite new. The first one is the System Monitor. This applet in the intention of the creators will inform you about the state of the main parts of your PC. In the future you can expect for reading ACPI information such as temperature or fan speed. Unfortunately at the moment the applet tries to perform only the usage of the disc space.

Today the best applet I’ve tried was the Color Picker. It helps you to “pick” the color of any pixel on the screen. Using the standard tool, the “pipette”, you are provided with the color in a few color formats. Very interesting feature it seems to be the probe history that shows a few earlier tries.

KWin Composite – defaultly enabled

It seems that KWin Composite effects are defaultly enabled. You can notice shadows under windows and the animated windows’ minimization. There are also available features from Compiz Fusion that pointing at the left top corner of the screen you are starting something similar to Scale plugin. Switching between windows using Alt+Tab displays thumbs of the windows. Quite interesting is the fact that KRunner looks different from when the Composite effects are disabled.

KSysGuard – the system guard

The System Guard has also changed its appearance by the new background under the graphs.

KStyle / KWin – styles and decorations

It is a rule that I always look very carefully at the appearance comparing Oxygen with Bespin (the unoffical style). IMHO Oxygen still seems too less contrast. I think authors are deserving of credit for continuous improvement. From the last version they improved the appearance of tabs and the highlightment of elements and buttons. The scrollbar turns to green under the mouse point. But still it is far away from mockups in the Internet.

At last the buttons have tooltips. Now you don’t have to think which button closes the window

Dolphin and Kate – the new appearance

It is the high time to see how some applications look like in Oxygen. I’ve tried the file manager Dolphin and the text editor Kate.

Amarok – at least there is some noise!

At the end I’ve checked my favourite audio player. The best way to describe it is to say “sometimes better. sometimes worse”. This time I couldn’t manage to make a collection, not even play one mp3 :/ But instead I could connect to Jamendo and listen to their songs. Thanks to that you can see how the Amarok looks like.

This article is a direct translation of text published on author’s blog: KDE 4 rev 723381

Interestingly, some of the most frequent queries included “Google,” “Microsoft,” “sex,” “cow” and “Liverpool.”

1. Firefox – I started out with Mosaic, then Netscape. For years I was an Internet Explorer user but then Microsoft dropped the ball and the Mozilla team ran with it. Firefox is stable, extensible and fast enough. One of the killer features that made me defect was the tabbed browsing. Of course most web browsers now have that feature. Firefox plus Greasemonkey takes an already rockin’ browser into a world of its own.
2. ScribeFire – One of my main jobs is writing on blogs. This means lots of linking, bookmarking, making notes and of course the actual writing. I would say using Scribefire I can do it all in half the time. Scribefire is a Firefox plugin that provides blogging tools including a centralized word-like text editing interface.
3. Skype – Many of my calls are long distance as it is rare for me to have a client in the same country as I live. Skype makes these calls free or much cheaper and allows me to roam around and not be tied to a land-line. With my trusty headset I might look like a geek but I can hear and be heard right across the globe.
4. Fastmail – While many people swear by the free Google GMail my web email service of choice is the paid service at Fastmail. The main advantage is as well as having a web client you can also access your email using imap, allowing me to sync my desktop client and see in a web browser exactly the same email store.
5. WebDav – Talking of web based storage, a fantastic way to get your files on the go is WebDav. Drag and drop your files and folders just like you were working locally. Check out your web host to see if this is an option.
6. SSH – This is an extremely nerdy choice but it has been a life saver in the past. SSH allows you a secure command line login to your remote server. On Windows of course you can use Remote Desktop, and other platforms will have VNC, but when the proverbial hits the fan you can rely on SSH and old school commands to get the job done.
7. WordPress – I love WordPress, I wouldn’t recommend any other blogging platform for the individual or small team. But WordPress can be so much more than a blog! Use it for publishing your corporate website, internal project documentation, team collaboration, making notes, bookmarking, even as a discussion platform.
8. Photoshop – There are cheaper options. I will probably never use even half the features. Photoshop still rules. There is little it can’t do, and if you wander into any design studio you can be sure there will be at least one machine running it. Productivity means being able to do what you need to do well and fast. Once you have learned it, Photoshop makes that happen for working with images.
9. BlogBridge – I need my RSS feeds and I need them with me. While many people can argue in favor of their fave web clients I keep returning to BlogBridge happily time after time. It is a Java based desktop application so works wherever Java works and stores your feeds offline so you can read on the train, in the air or bus home.
10. Flickr – Flickr for me is more than just an online photo gallery, it is a photography archive, a community and a source of royalty-free images (Creative Commons Licensed pics). It’s useful, fun and a constant source of education.