Change of direction after long absence

Hi,

For years I kept this blog going by writing about technology in general and Linux operating systems in particular.

But as we grow older, we change and our interests change and we follow new directions.

My new direction has been... outdoor.

Basically, in the years since I last wrote a Linux review on this blog, I have spent a lot of my free time - practically all of it, really - outdoors.

I have become a fanatical fly-fisherman and bushcraft fan, I have spent hours walking our Border terrier puppy, Jess, through fields and woods, I have taken up traditional crafts like leatherworking and wood carving.

And, as always, I have taken photographs along the way.

Photography has always been a passion of mine, even back when I was spending all my time installing and reviewing computer operating systems.

But the advent of decent cameraphones, Android software and allied websites has meant I now take more pictures than ever before, as I always have my HTC Desire HD with me, wherever I am.

That's why I'm going to shamelessly plug my Lightbox photo blog - http://stevenelawson.lightbox.com/ - and hope that those of you who used to follow my writing here on The Red Devil will also follow my photographic journey through life.

I will also probably start writing for this blog again soon, but with a change of emphasis.

I should point out, however, that not everything has changed.

This blog entry, for example, was written on my old test PC which has, for some time now, been running Lubuntu, as is my Acer laptop. And what a damn fine OS it is, too!

Some things never change ;-)

Ubuntu and Unity

So, I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 and I would be quite enjoying the experience - except I hate the Unity interface with a passion (seems I'm not alone in this regard).

So I changed my default desktop environment to LXDE.

There... that's better. A proper desktop again. Nice.

Apple iPad: A short review

HAVING spent three days in the company of an Apple iPad, I thought it might be helpful to give a more considered verdict on the gadget everyone is talking about.

The Good...

The minimalist, industrial-sleek design makes iPad hugely desirable - guests at the Auchrannie Hotel on Arran, where I was staying at the weekend, were eyeing it covetously.

The screen display is beautiful: Fonts display better than on any other device; full-frame photographs look stunning; apps look superb; ebooks look far, far better than on a Kindle and have the added benefit of colour for illustrations.

Battery life is very good.

The on-screen virtual keyboard is surprisingly effective but you wouldn't want to type more than a short email on it, because the lack of tactile feedback makes typing a strangely hesitant affair, even for someone who spends his life at a keyboard.

Setting up the Wi-Fi is idiot-proof easy.

The operating system: Like the advert says, 'You already know how to use it'. It's intuitive and doesn't get in the way of letting you do things - plus, there's only one button!

The app store: It's by far the best of its kind, with a fabulous selection of free or paid-for apps. If you can imagine doing it, there's an app for it.

The Bad...

It's expensive. iPad's starting price is £429 and the 64GB model that I had costs a penny shy of £600 - and that's without 3G. Add a 3G SIM and it would be £699.

Remember that lovely display? Well, outside you can't see it on anything but the dullest of days.

Connectivity: I mentioned Wi-Fi and 3G, plus there's a charging/data cable for connecting to your PC. But there are no USB ports or memory card slots, so if you want to transfer content to your iPad you will need access to your Mac or PC running iTunes. Holiday snaps on your digital camera? Wait until you get home and pray you don't lose your camera. Which brings me to..

iTunes: Let me make this absolutely clear, if you want to get anything onto your iPad - songs, photos, videos, you name it - it HAS to go through iTunes (or, in the case of photographs, via Apple's £25 digital camera connector add-on). And iTunes isn't great - it's clunky and over-complicated.

Apple's lockdown mentality: Everything has to go through iTunes because Apple want to control how you use your iPad. And, of course, they want you to buy all your music and videos and software from the iTunes store.

Lack of multiple-application functionality: There's a free app on the store called Uzu which perfectly demonstrates this problem. Uzu allows you to create amazing, firework-like displays of exploding particles - my kids loved it - but it's crying out for a musical backdrop. But you can't do two things at once on an iPad, so forget everyday computing habits like leaving your email running while you surf the web.

Verdict...

iPad is beautiful, brilliant and very seriously flawed. So seriously, I wouldn't buy or recommend buying one.

Trisquel 3.5 and Truly Free Software

WHAT price do you put on a principle?

Some people put their principles before their lives, dragging the whole of the human race along with them to a better place.

But those are the really big, spotlight principles, like freedom of speech, equality and justice.

What of the less well-known, less glamorous principles, like the freedom to use and modify computer software in any way you choose, so long as you make your modifications available to everyone else?

Without delving too deeply into the murky world of free software licensing, here is what the Wikipedia entry for 'free software' says:

"Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and that manufacturers of consumer-facing hardware allow user modifications to their hardware. Free software is generally available without charge, but can have a fee.

In practice, for software to be distributed as free software, the human-readable form of the program (the source code) must be made available to the recipient along with a notice granting the above permissions. Such a notice either is a "free software licence", or a notice that the source code is released into the public domain."

We Linux distro users like to think of ourselves as supporters of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), but I wonder how many of us have PCs running on operating systems which actually contain proprietary - ie non-free - elements?

I know it's something I am guilty of - both my desktop PCs have Nvidia graphics cards, and both have the non-free Nvidia 3D drivers installed.

My excuse? One machine runs dual screens and configuring them without that proprietary driver is a nightmare - heck, it might even be impossible.

The other PC (my test machine) is linked to a hideous, widescreen monitor with a troublesome 1366x768 resolution, and only Linux Mint and Ubuntu have managed to get the display correct 'out of the box'; in most other cases, the Nvidia driver just makes life less fraught.

Life is so often about compromises, and these are mine. I wouldn't say I am totally comfortable with them, but in the greater scheme of things I can live with them by trying to redress the balance in other ways.

But what if you are one of those highly principled people who are unwilling to make even such a small compromise? Where do you go for an operating system which meets your admirable standards?

The Free Software Foundation, set up in 1985 by FOSS advocate Richard Stallman, has a list on its website of those GNU/Linux distributions which meet its strict freedom standards.

One of the distributions on that FSF list is Trisquel, which recently reached version 3.5, codenamed 'Awen'.

From the project's Distrowatch page we learn that:

"Trisquel GNU/Linux is a 100% libre Ubuntu-based Linux distribution with support for the Galician language, as well as Spanish, Catalan, Euskaraz and English. Its main purpose is to provide an operating system for a varied audience, including home and office users, educational institutions, multimedia workstations, etc. The project is developed by the Universidad de Vigo and sponsored by the Council for Innovation and Industry of the regional government of Galicia, Spain."

In a short video on the project's homepage, leader Ruben Rodriguez makes no bones about the fact that the Trisquel developers are having to work increasingly hard to strip Ubuntu of those elements which fail their freedom test. (If you have problems watching the Trisquel 3.5 launch video on the homepage, it's also here).

I suppose, however, that Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical's move toward Linux desktop dominance, and the means by which they should achieve it, are a matter for a whole different article. Any takers?

Anyway, back to Trisquel, whose name, incidentally, is taken from a Celtic symbol, known as a triskelion or triskele, consisting of three interlocking spirals. The project's logo contains three interlocking Debian spirals in a nod to Ubuntu's, and therefore its own, parent. (The project's repositories switched from Debian to Ubuntu with the release of version 2.0 in 2008)

Here are some brief details on the new release from the project's homepage:

"This release is a fully free Ubuntu 9.10 derivative that includes extra software, better multimedia support, more translations and a faster configuration. For this release we used Ext4 for the root filesystem and XFS for the home one, to have a balance between speed and usability. Some important features include a much faster boot process and the ability to encrypt the home directory.

All packages were updated, including:

Linux-libre kernel 2.6.31

Xorg 7.4

GNOME 2.28

OpenOffice.org 3.1.1

Mozilla-based Web Browser 3.5"

If you want a clearer idea of how Trisquel differs from its parent distro, then consider the four freedoms rule which lies at the heart of everything the Trisquel project stands for:

Freedom 1: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

Freedom 2: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.

Freedom 3: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

Freedom 4: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

If it doesn't meet all those criteria, it doesn't get in Trisquel.

Trisquel comes, like most Ubuntu derivatives, as an installable, live CD. It also uses its parent's ubiquitous installer and, on my test machine, it picked up the existing Ubuntu Lucid Lynx beta 1 installation and offered to tweak the partitions and install Trisquel alongside it, which I duly accepted.

Out of fairness to both the developers and myself, what follows are my EXACT experiences so far, reported chronologically, with the installed version of Trisquel.

When the login screen appeared the first time I could tell straight away that the screen resolution was off. As the screenshots below show, the post-install, default desktop resolution was wrong, too. It's 1024x768 when it should be 1366x768, so all my fonts and icons look squashed.

This wasn't a great surprise: As I mentioned earlier, the combination of the 15.6inch Acer widescreen LCD and Nvidia 7050 graphics card has thrown all-but-two recent distros. It's normally just a question of installing the proprietary Nvidia driver, either manually or through a distro's repository, to fix this issue, but in Trisquel this wasn't an option - for this review I was sticking to the free software rules.

Remember, this PC has Ubuntu 10.04 on the first partition and, even though it's beta 1, the screen was set up perfectly without my intervention even BEFORE the installation of the non-free Nvidia driver.

I posted a query on the Trisquel forum about the resolution problem and although I received a few replies, none was really all that helpful - no disrespect intended, but the answers didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. There's also very little in the way of helpful documentation on the Trisquel wiki about how to fix the problem.

(Incidentally, the software updater ran on my first boot offering me 23 upgrades - the majority were lib files - so I installed them all just in case.)

Having been here many times before, I set about first checking which drivers were installed: Synaptic reported that the 'nv' driver was on board and, while it offered the more experimental Nouveau open source driver, the warnings about its current instability were warning enough for me.

So, time to dip into the xorg.conf file and do some hand-editing (after backing up the original file, obviously - been there, got caught out like that before!).

For starters, the refresh rates for my monitor were wrong - only slightly, but you never know - so I changed them, then I added the correct resolution to the default colour depth. I saved the new file and a quick reboot later the resolution was still wrong.

Second time around, I changed the driver from 'vesa' to 'nv', rebooted and got a series of error messages which began with 'Ubuntu is running in low graphics mode - Failed to load module 'freetype', failed to load module 'type 1, No devices detected'.

I was then offered four options: Run in low graphics mode; Reconfigure your graphics; Troubleshoot the error; or Exit to console.

Choosing to reconfiguring the graphics, I was offered the option to: Use default configuration; Create a new configuration; or Use a backed-up configuration.

I chose each of the options in turn, and each failed and I was returned to the original four-options screen, where I chose to troubleshoot the error, then edited the xorg.conf and replaced 'nv' with the original 'vesa'.

Interestingly, at no time during this little trip through various console screens was Trisquel mentioned - all the errors were Ubuntu errors.

Now back in low graphics mode at the desktop, I rebooted and was back in my original 1024x768 resolution desktop. Which all meant half an hour spent going round in a big circle, only to return to my original, unsatisfactory position!

Oh well, time's pressing, time to plough on with the review. Gladly, my sound was working fine, so I decided to tackle some multimedia tests - after all, if truly free software is going to face problems, it's going to be in tackling multimedia files, with their wealth of non-free codec and plugin issues.

Trisquel's Mozilla-based web browser contains three main plugins: Totem, IceTea Java Web Browser and SWF (Flash). On the YouTube website, video playback was patchy and inconsistent, to say the least, but I was able to view a couple of videos and the sound was fine. I had even less luck on the BBC's iPlayer website, where no videos would play at all. Surprisingly, though, movie trailers on the Apple website played perfectly, which is often a major failure for many distros.

An audio CD was detected and I was offered the option of playing it, and others by default, in Rhythmbox. It played perfectly.

Less successful, however, was my attempt to play a commercial DVD in Movie Player, where I was given a most unhelpful error message - give us a clue, guys.. WHY won't it play?

Moving on now to the Moovida Media Centre application which is found in the Sound and Vision menu. This is my first experience of Moovida, and on launching it I was told there were 12 new plugins and 23 updates needing to be installed. OK, I installed them - but at no time was I told exactly WHAT I was installing - I hate it when software does this.

Further, there's no dialogue telling you what is going on, just a brief message telling you to reboot the program. I did, then inserted a DVD (Shawshank Redemption, if you're interested) and got a warning box saying that DVD playback was still experimental in Moovido - no kidding, it played, jerkily and in black and white! With no sound!

So, I think it's fair to say that multimedia in Trisquel 3.5 is something of a mixed bag, which is actually a bit better than I was expecting.

On a more superficial level - and assuming you have more luck with your screen than I did - Trisquel is quite a nice looking distribution; the desktop wallpaper is nice and everything in the menus and panel is clean and tidy, but it could do with a lot better documentation for new users - there are plenty of free software-based links bookmarked on the web browser, but little else can be found to explain the distro's philosophical leanings.

My experience with Trisquel has so far been a frustrating one. I can see there is a lot of potential in it and I am, despite my expressed weakness for full graphics capabilities, keen to adhere to the rules of free software as much as possible.

But I return to my opening question: What price are you willing to pay for freedom?

In my case the amount of hassle involved in fixing my screen resolution - and the sheer fact that it's just not right in the first place - means that Trisquel is not yet in a state where I'm finally tempted to make a full commitment to free software; turning my back on my dual-screen CrunchBang setup just isn't going to happen. Not yet, anyway.

Get the various versions of Trisquel here

EDITOR'S NOTE: I'm somewhat mystified by the appearance of the screenshots on this post. The originals show the desktop on my Acer x163w as being horribly squashed and stretched - exactly as things looked on screen - but when I view these screenshots on my other PC via Google Chrome they appear perfectly acceptable!

If anyone has any bright ideas about how this happens to be so, I'd be very interested to hear them.

Red Devil

Interview: CrunchBang Creator Explains Switch to Debian Sources

MY fondness for CrunchBang Linux is well documented, so when the release of the first alpha version of the next generation of this fine UK-based distribution was announced I was excited, to say the least.

Regulars on the CrunchBang forum have known for some time that distro leader Philip Newborough was considering ending his creation's Ubuntu foundations, moving instead to being built from Debian.

So it was no real surprise when Philip's release notes for CrunchBang 10 'Statler' revealed:

"The first alpha builds of CrunchBang Linux 10 “Statler” are available now. For the first time, CrunchBang is being built with Debian sources, as opposed to Ubuntu.

The LiveCD build process has changed. Previous versions of CrunchBang were built using the remastersys project, this has now been dropped in favour of using the Debian Live Project.

CrunchBang builds now take place remotely on a VPS provided by Linode. The VPS, Dr. Bunsen, is funded by generous sponsors to the project.

The CrunchBang 10 alpha 1 builds were completed on the 16th & 17th of March 2010 and contain all package updates available at the time from the Debian Squeeze repositories.

What's new?

This is a new start for the project and a lot has happened. In fact, too much has happened to be able to reasonably detail in full. So instead, here is a short list of the main changes:

A completely new build process.

Switched from Ubuntu to Debian sources.

Now uses a customised Debian text installer, available from the LiveCD boot menu.

Now available with either a default Openbox or Xfce4 session. The new Xfce offering has been designed to mimic the original CrunchBang Openbox experience, i.e. a minimal desktop with right-click system menu and predefined shortcut keys for popular applications and commands.

Available for 32 bit and 64 bit architectures, with the 32 bit offering available in i486 and i686 optimised kernel flavours.

Now includes a minimal set of pre-installed applications. The application line-up will be revised over future releases."

As a Debian fan I'm excited by this change, but I wanted to know a little more about what motivated Philip to make the switch... so I asked him. What follows are my questions, followed by his unedited answers.

RD: What is it about Debian Squeeze that you prefer over the latest Ubuntu?

PN: For myself, it is not really a question of what it is about the Debian Squeeze release in particular, but more a question about the different approaches taken by the Debian and Ubuntu projects. Unlike the Ubuntu project, Debian does not have a commercial sponsor with any commercial interests. This was never an issue for myself, until recently when Canonical seem to have become less of a sponsor and more of a governing party; I know this is debatable, but I believe that some of their recent decisions might not necessarily have been made with the best interest of their users/community at heart.

From a less political perspective, the Ubuntu project is geared towards producing a polished end-user system. The Ubuntu developers make changes to Debian packages to achieve this goal. These changes often cause problems for derivative projects such CrunchBang. Therefore, the obvious thing to do to negate these problems was to make the switch to Debian.

Also, I would not like for anyone to misunderstand my words and so I think I should point out that I do not think there is anything wrong with the Ubuntu project. As a full Ubuntu member myself, I believe that the project has admirable goals. I am particularly in favour of the Ubuntu Code of Conduct document, both because of what it stands for and because of what has been achieved because of it.

Something else that I also want to make absolutely clear is that I do not have any personal issues with any of the Ubuntu members or developers with which I have ever conversed with online, or met in meatspace. They have all been the best of people.

RD: What advantages will it bring for the CrunchBang community?

PN: Interestingly, the CrunchBang community is not really confined to people who use CrunchBang. Our community is made up of people who use various different distributions. I think the one common interest that brings us together is our love of experimenting with Linux and having a little fun whilst doing it.

I can honestly say that the best thing to come out of the project has been the CrunchBang forums. There are some really talented, friendly and knowledgeable people on the forums and it is a pleasure to be able to go there every day and share ideas.

Regarding what advantages the switch to Debian will have for the community, I cannot say, but early feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and nearly everyone on the forums has embraced it.

RD: What technical challenges does it represent for you as a distro leader?

PN: Blimey, "distro leader" sounds a bit serious! Regarding the technical challenges, as you know, Ubuntu is a Debian derivative and so technically there is not a huge difference between the two systems.

In fact, it could be argued that there is only one system and Ubuntu just adds a level of abstraction, and patches! Seriously though, the main challenges for Statler have been in the build process.

CrunchBang images were previously built using the Remastersys Tool, which involved manually creating each build from a minimal CLI installation. This obviously has some limitations, such as being very time and labour intensive.

CrunchBang is now built using the Debian Live Project. Basically, the difference is like night and day. All CrunchBang builds now take place on a remote system and are fully automated. Refining both this new way of working and the actual build process remains the biggest technical and fun challenge.

RD: Also, I was wondering why you had decided to introduce an Xfce version alongside the Openbox version? I found the Xfce option a little strange, personally, especially when I read that it will be set up in such a way as to mimic the Openbox version - I couldn't help wondering why you would bother when you already have a much-loved Openbox version anyway, and Xfce is in no way a lightweight desktop environment?

PN: Firstly, I disagree with your statement about Xfce. I use Xfce daily and find it to be very light on resources and very snappy. I have to be careful now, because I do not want to offend anyone, so I will just say that I think some Xfce based distributions, such as Xubuntu, may have added to the general consensus that Xfce is not a lightweight desktop environment.

I think a lot of the criticisms aimed at Xubuntu are unfair, the Xubuntu developers are doing a fantastic job, but at the same time I do think there are some distributions which implement Xfce better.

I do not think the Xubuntu devs are at fault for this; having spent time on the Xubuntu devel mailing list, it is easy to see that the developers are often having to concentrate on providing fixes and workarounds to issues caused by changes made to packages by Ubuntu devs who are working on the main GNOME desktop edition.

I have often thought that Xubuntu would do better as a project if it added a level of separation from Ubuntu, such as having its own packages repositories.

Anyhow, as for CrunchBang's Xfce edition, I think the main idea behind it is to maybe shake-up some common misconceptions about how an Xfce desktop environment should look and behave.

For example, I think it is strange that you think it is strange that CrunchBang would offer up an Xfce version which mimics CrunchBang's Openbox version, when often you find other distributions offering up Xfce versions which mimic GNOME sessions.

Personally, I think Xfce provides an excellent environment which is lightweight and extremely flexible; this is made somewhat obvious by how simply it can be customised to look and behave like CrunchBang's original Openbox session. If you, or any of your readers have yet to try it, I would encourage you to give it a whirl, you never know, you might be pleasantly surprised!

Thank you, Philip, for explaining your thinking in such clear, honest terms.

Statler is still very much a testing release so Philip strongly advises against installing it on a production machine, but for anyone wishing to try it out and maybe contribute useful findings, it can be downloaded from here.

It's way too early in the development process to be reporting on Statler's development but I have both the Openbox and Xfce versions sat in my Downloads folder and will be taking an early look-see - particularly at the new Xfce version - with a view to doing a full review of the full release version later.

PCLinuxOS 2010 Beta 1: A First Look

NOT wishing to pass full judgement on a distro until it has reached its final release stage - it is not fair on the developers - I nevertheless thought it might be useful to offer some early, 'First Look' observations about PCLinuxOS 2010.

Rather than base my first impressions on a live CD session or a virtual machine, I decided to do a full install of this first beta release on a 10GB test partition in my Acer desktop machine.

Generally it has been a pleasant and pleasing experience. PCLOS and me go quite a way back - I think the 2007 version of this Mandriva/Mandrake-based distro spent longer on my hard drive than any other distro before or since, with the one notable exception being CrunchBang.

Having gone through some internal turmoil in recent years, PCLOS 2010 sees the distro getting back on track, but in my opinion there still seem to be some areas requiring attention.

In particular, the KDE menu needs rationalising somewhat, and the developers really ought to decide whether they're going to use the excellent PCLOS Control Centre or the System Settings to manage their distro.

This latter point is illustrated by the screenshot below; how is someone new to PCLOS to know where they should go to administer their new distro when both areas contain links to the same things? One 'point of entry' is all that's required, two is simply too confusing.

I'll come back to the point about the main menu shortly, but first let me talk you through getting PCLOS installed.

It uses the familiar DrakLive installer from Mandriva which is at least as good as Fedora's installer but possibly not quite as simple and user-friendly as Ubuntu's. Like both these other mainstream distros, the installer can be run from a live CD environment.

I selected my 10GB partition and had the installer format it with the ext4 filesystem. The actual installation is very quick and painless but I was surprised that, when it came to the bootloader installation, PCLOS didn't detect Mint 8 installed on my main partition and I was forced to add it manually.

The post-install routine is very straightforward, just your usual root and user setup, and I was pleased though not surprised to find my sound and networking (wired ethernet) all pre-configured upon first boot. PCLOS has a long, proud history of excellent hardware detection and wasn't at all fazed by my Acer x163w's annoying, 1366x768 widescreen resolution.

It also recognised my modest Nvidia 7050 graphics and installed the 190.53 driver for me automatically, which is always appreciated!

Time now for a good look around, and I was immediately struck by the rather lovely KDE 4.4.1 default desktop which looks polished and highly professional (but then PCLOS has always been one of the best-looking distros).

I really dislike KDE 4's side-scrolling menu so I was delighted to see that the developers have gone for the old KDE 3 style setup, with the newer version available as a right-click option.

But there are some odd decisions on what is placed where in the new menu structure: For example, why is the Epson Printer Manager in the 'Monitoring' section and not in the Printer section which is the next one down in the list?

And why are there so many system tools listed in 'Configuration' when the logical place for them is in either the Control Centre or the System Settings... which brings me back to that earlier point: Guys, pick one or the other, but not both.

'Packaging' is another menu entry that stands out - what is wrong with 'Software'? I know lots of distros list 'packaging' in their menus, but that doesn't make it right. We're trying to help people here, not hinder their learning of a new operating system.

OK, now I'm down off my high horse, it's time to look at the good stuff - and there's plenty of it.

For example, for whatever reason I'm not sure, but the PCLOS team don't include the OpenOffice.org suite in their default packages but they do include a very handy little script - it has a menu entry 'Get OpenOffice' - which not only downloads and installs the whole suite but also the Java packages required to achieve its full functionality.

This is the first time I have come across this kind of thoughtful approach and it is much appreciated.

Equally good is PCLOS 2010's integration of Google Gadgets, which gets you a nice desktop bundle up and running in the merest flash.

Looking through the various menu sections reveals lots more interesting stuff, like the system tools for tidying up and maintaining your distro: BleachBit gets rid of unnecessary files, Sweeper system cleaner tackles temporary files, Duplean cleans out the duplicates.

In the 'Internet' section there's the terrific little social networking tool Choqok plus Umtsmon, which is useful for setting up 3G mobile devices.

I'm slightly puzzled but pleased nonetheless to see THREE file managers included - Dolphin is the default but there's also the old-school Emelfm and old KDE favourite Konqueror on board.

Removable media such as USB memory sticks are handled very well, appearing in the KDE panel pop-up reserved for handling such devices and you're presented with a variety of options on what you wish to do.

PCLOS 2010 played my test audio CD in Kscd without any issues but the Dragon media player fell over twice when trying and failing to play my commercial DVD movie; I suspect this was probably linked to the absence of the libdvdcss, though I must admit to not yet having checked this out.

So, the early signs for PCLOS 2010 are very good - menu issues aside - and I'm very much looking forward to the full release.

Read the full release announcement for PCLinuxOS 2010 beta 1 here

News: Opera Mini 5 Beta for Android Unveiled

NORWEGIAN browser firm Opera have struggled to make a major impact on the desktop dominance of Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, and even newcomer Google Chrome is gaining more publicity on the web.

But one area where Opera stand a good chance of gaining ground is in the mobile web space.

This week the company released a beta version of their Opera Mini 5 browser for the Android platform, part of a strategy to extend the software to high-end smartphones.

Opera Mini was originally designed for relatively low-powered mobile phones, and uses the Java ME platform supported by many feature phones. But Opera has more recently been adding support for handsets running the Windows Mobile, Android or iPhone operating systems.

I used the earlier version of Opera Mini, v4.2, on a Symbian-based Nokia N97 for some time and found its speed quite welcome on such a slow platform.

Opera Mini 5 adds a number of new features to Mini 4.2, including tabbed browsing, a password manager, improved touchscreen support and a feature called Speed Dial that presents a visual grid of frequently visited websites.

That famous Opera speed comes from the fact that the browser requests web pages via Opera's servers, which compress them and pre-process them - Opera claim compression reduces transfer time by about two to three times and I can well believe it.

Here's a selection of phone and screenshots sent to me by Opera's press office:

I'll be installing Opera 5 Mini beta on my HTC Hero in the next few days and taking it for a spin. To download Opera Mini 5 for Android, visit m.opera.com/next on your phone's browser or search for it in the Android Market.