Ubuntu 9.04

It’s an unscheduled stop today on my never ending distro tour. I had planned to look at Chakra Project next as regular readers will know, but due to a strange series of events I ended up sidestepping onto the recently released Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. So, it would seem odd of me not to take a decent look and see what improvements have been made in the last 6 months. The last time I looked at Ubuntu in depth was actually 12 months ago with the 8.04 release. I found it to be a solid enough but somehow lacking a little in ambition. Would Jaunty jump forward with new features? I decided to find out…

Vital Stats:
Distro base – Debian
Packaging – .deb (Managed by the mighty Apt)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.28-11-generic
Default Desktop – Gnome 2.26.1 Read the rest of this entry »

Arch logo

After many broken promises and much procrastination, I finally made it onto Arch Linux and that’s where I’ve been for the past couple of weeks now. I had a failed attempt at Arch last year when my hard drive died; not Arch’s fault in any way, but since then I haven’t really had a chance to get back to it. It’s a distro a lot of people tell me about. The Arch fans are always really passionate and enthusiastic in describing it to me; so I figured it was high time I found out for myself what all this fuss was about…

Vital Stats:
*Remember Arch is a rolling release so these just the versions I had at the time*
Distro base – None. It’s a custom distro
Packaging – .pkg.tar.gz (Managed by Pacman)
Linux Kernel – 2.6.28-ARCH
Default Desktop – Doesn’t exactly have one. I installed Gnome 2.26 Read the rest of this entry »