Thursday, 30 October 2014

Netrunner Linux: Two Versions One Vision

Early Wednesday morning, I couldn't sleep past 06:00 hrs, so I decided I'd give Netrunner a try, a Linux distro based on Manjaro Linux, which I had downloaded the previous evening. Netrunner has two versions based on two different distros. One is the stable version, based on Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, the other is a rolling distribution based on Manjaro 0.8.10 "Ascella", with KDE. In short, Netrunner offers one desktop, KDE, in two different editions... two versions, one vision. 

Monday, 27 October 2014

Elementary My Dear Watson

The first thing you notice when booting Elementary OS, called Freya, version 0.3 Beta 1, is how pretty it is. It's a beautiful piece of work, with a light gray and whitish modern interface and an eye-pleasing bitmap for the background, called "Blueprint".

You have a dock at the bottom which you can configure, but not extensively. It works very well and can be resized and made to look white, dark, or transparent. You can easily remove icons by right-clicking them and un-checking them to make them disappear. If you make a mistake and make the wrong one disappear, you can always use the menu, on the top left of the screen, to restore that icon by dragging it back on the dock. The doc also acts as a task manager, with a pointer below the icons to show which program is sunning. All-in-all, well thought out design.