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Mandriva 2010 Spring was released July 8, 2010. It comes with kernel 2.6.33 (2.6.33.5-desktop586-2mnb), KDE 4.4.3 and Firefox 3.6.6. It actually comes with tons of applications. Its a pretty good distribution, I particular like the functionality where it removes any unnecessary packages during the installation. I haven't seen this in Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, PCLinuxOS, Mint, OpenSUSE nor CentOS. What follows is a series of screen captures installing this distribution. Figure 1. Boot menu Figure 2. Language, this will be the language that will be used by the system. Figure 3. License agreement, of course click Accept to continue if you are happy with the agreement. Figure 4. Timezone, this will be used to show correct local time. Figure 5. Allows you to select the correct time, on some machines the BIOS can be set to localtime or UTC. Figure 6. Select appropriate keyboard for your system. Figure 7. Start of the Wizard for installing the rest of the system. Figure 8. Part

Some PCs have internal speaker that can be used by Windows to produce beep sound. This was inherited from old systems when sound cards were not common place. Windows produces beep sound on many cases. One being when user presses enter key on a treeview control or an enter key on a textbox control. This is used to alert the user that the input is not acceptable for the control with the focus. But when you are using "SendKeys{System.Windows.Forms.Sendkeys}" to simulate keystrokes, this can get annoying. To disable this beep sound in Windows XP (should be applicable to Windows 7), open Device Manager (devmgmt.msc if you are cli buff). From the View menu, select Show hidden devices. See figure below. Figure 1. Show hidden devivces. Then drill down to Non-Plug and Play Driver/Beep, then open properties dialog. Figure 2. Traverse to the Beep device. From the dialog window, goto Drivers tab then click on "Stop" button. This should immediately disable the device

I have documented in another post that Google Chrome cannot be installed in CentOS 5.5 due to Linux Standard Base library is outdated. I would expect differently with PCLinux OS as it is trying to get as updated as possible to the extent that the distro is releasing new version quarterly. Here is the version of Chrome that I am trying to install: [root@localhost Downloads]# rpm -i google-chrome-stable_current_i386.rpm warning: google-chrome-stable_current_i386.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 7fac5991 error: Failed dependencies: lsb >= 3.2 is needed by google-chrome-stable-5.0.375.127-55887.i386 As you can see, it complains that lsb needed by the package is 3.2 but what is installed is 2.0.x. [root@localhost Downloads]# apt-cache show lsb-release Package: lsb-release Section: System/Base Installed Size: 19233 Packager: Texstar Version: 2.0-5pclos2007 Depends: bash Provides: lsb-release = 2.0-5pclos2007 Architecture: i586 Size: 1 MD5Sum: Filename: Summary: Lin

I have been using Ubuntu for a while and I pretty much like it most of the time. It has the latest and the greatest and it looks nice too, at least that's the way I perceived it. In fact, back in Ubuntu Intreprid I played around installing a minimal Ubuntu . This time around, I would like to install a pretty much stripped down version of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, it is kind of a minimal install that still looks like Ubuntu. Install method has not changed much since Intreprid actually. Without further ado, let us get our hands dirty. Okay, download the latest minimal iso from Ubuntu . You can always download it from the mirrors, I find USC  mirror to be quite fast. While download is busy, let us configure our guest Ubuntu machine in VirtualBox. Here is what I have: General Name: ubu1004mini OS Type: Ubuntu System Base Memory: 512 MB Processor(s): 1 Boot Order: CD/DVD-ROM, Hard Disk VT-x/AMD-V: Enabled Nested Paging: Enabled Display Video Memory: 12 MB 3D Acceleration: Disabled 2D

In this blog post, I have documented how to install minimal Ubuntu 10.04 in VirtualBox using netinstall. The good thing with netinstall is that the initial download is pretty small, around 13MB, but the total time to install the whole package takes a little longer. If you have fast pipe, you can instead download alternate ISO. This link will download a copy from University of California, Santa Barbara. Using this ISO should get you up and running quickly into a fully working Ubuntu desktop. Just for the uninitiated, boot VirtualBox guest machine using the ISO as download above. You should see a screen same a below. Figure 1. Boot screen of the Alternate installer. Select your language here, my case, I have selected English. Figure 2. This is the main, menu driven, console interface. Press "F4 Modes" here. Figure 3. Select "Install a command-line system". This should bring you back to a screen the same as Figure 2. After selecting the mode, press [ENTER] on

PCLinux OS releases new distribution quarterly, at least that is how it looks right now. Last time, I did a screen capture of PCLinuxOS KDE . The latest release came around July 2010 (I believe it was released 08July2010). This time around I will document installing GNOME. This can be helpful for folks who are distro hoping but don't have the time yet to install it. Figure 1. This is the boot screen. It looks geeky and pretty nice. Figure 2. Splash screen. Figure 3. Keyboard layout. Select the physical layout of your keyboard not your current location. Figure 4. GDM login screen. Select "guest", password is "guest". Figure 5. This is the PCLinux OS GNOME desktop. Dark theme with applications you have come to expect from a regular full Linux distribution. Figure 6. Double-click(run) on "Install Licecd". Root password is "root". Figure 7. PCLinuxOS Installation Wizard introduction screen. Figure 8. Hard disk partitioning. Default shoul