linux | Anurag Bhandari

OpenMandriva Association logo contest is live now

Posted on January 25, 2013March 27, 2019 — Leave a comment

OpenMandriva, an association formed to create a community-based Linux distro sponsored by Mandriva SA and ROSA, is now a registered non-profit organization in France. The progress over at OM is going pretty well, and now they need a logo for the association.

Yesterday a logo contest was launched by OM, which will accept user-submitted designs that’ll be later put up for voting, and the best submission will be selected as OM’s official logo.

Think you have what it takes to make the logo for an open source association? Then head over to openmandriva.org for contest details. 🙂

The mighty impressive Slax 7

Posted on January 9, 2013March 27, 2019 — Leave a comment

I was so impressed with the latest iteration of my oldest favorite mini distro, especially its KDE implementation, that I immediately wanted to make Granular’s next release look like and as fast as Slax. Slax 7 comes loaded with all the bare essentials that actually make sense. Plus its ability to run from a USB drive without much efforts makes it a winner to me.

Everything just works, very straightforwardly. It has a lot of stuff packed in a small size of 220MB, which is a marvelous feat (made possible by use of compressed/packaged modules). But it may or may not detect all of your hardware correctly. For me, it didn’t recognize my WiFi module, which I got working by installing the necessary firmware files (look here for instructions). My laptop’s (Synaptics) touchpad performed fine, but its vertical edge scrolling didn’t. I corrected that using the command synclient VertEdgeScroll=1.

Raspberry Pi looks delicious

Posted on September 5, 2012March 27, 2019 — 4 Comments

A geeky thing for the geeks, but generally touted as an educational device – that’s what Raspberry Pi (wiki) is in simplest words. It has pretty much the same hardware configuration as did my first PC. And now that it’s finally out in the wild, it’s perhaps every geek’s dream to extract the hell of the maximum juice out of it. Engadget came up with a nice article about putting the thing to good use: housing a Linux distro! And that too a GUI one (LXDE)! Now that really got me drooling. If I could get my hands on this cheap sweety (just $25!), the first thing I’ll do is… install Linux, what else. 🙂

Raspbian running on Raspberry Pi. Photo Credit: Engadget

Mint 13 Screenies

Posted on June 22, 2012March 27, 2019 — 6 Comments

Here’s the fast, beautiful thing on my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. 🙂

A new init system in Linux

Posted on November 15, 2011March 27, 2019 — Leave a comment

It was bound to happen some day. The existing init system in use by most of the present Linux distros is really not leveraging the performance capabilities of modern hardware to the fullest. Spawning processes one-by-one to get the system up and running costs a lot of precious time, when it is possible to do more in less time using the power of multi-core processors.

It was a welcome surprise to read about this new thingy systemd in the Q&A section of last week’s DistroWatch Weekly. I’m really looking forward to a faster future. 🙂