Years ago when I first started examining if you could in fact run an entire OS off a single USB stick (meaning not external hard drive), you could with “biz card” sized Linux distributions such as Damn Small Linux and Puppy Linux. These distros are still available today and still actively developed. The reason people chose these over full-sized...

A truth: About once a year, someone proclaims very loudly that Linux is Dead with a capital "D" and that Microsoft, once again, is kicking the crap out of it in terms of market share. This year’s honor goes to Robin Harris at ZDNet with the article Windows kicks Linux to the curb. Personally speaking I don’t think there’s any real way...

One of the big perks of using a Linux distribution is having a choice of what window manager you want to use. You can check out what’s available for Linux window managers and desktops here. The one I’ll be concentrating on is fluxbox, a window manager. Fluxbox is one of the lightest window managers you can use for a graphical Linux environment. To...

I’m writing this from Ubuntu 8.04 in a live session (booted from USB stick). This *nix distribution runs well, does what I want it to do and runs just fine without complaint. Let’s forget the fact that it’s super-awesome-cool I can just pop in a USB stick, boot Ubuntu, run it, connect to a wireless network with no problems at all and do my...

Over the weekend I was at the Wal-Mart picking up a few things and noticed over in the electronics dept. they had 2GB Sandisk USB sticks on sale. $12.88 a piece. Cheap enough as far as I’m concerned so I bought one. I had 2 purposes for buying the stick.It’s better than the 512MB I have (one can never have too much space). I wanted to try out a...

There are times in the live chat were I’m asked what Linux distribution is used most. While that particular question can’t be readily answered, the site www.DistroWatch.com will to a degree indicate what distributions are being downloaded most. On that site, scroll down and look to the right. You will see a “Page Hit Ranking” which by...