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Ditch Those CD's! A Guide To Using USB Flash Drives

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New reader inspired article up:
Ditch Those CD’s! A Guide To Using USB Flash Drives
Page 1 – Article Intro, Flash Drive Booting, Advanced USB Drive Formatting
Page 2 – Install Windows 7 or Windows Vista From A USB Flash Drive
Page 3 – Install Windows XP From A USB Flash Drive
Page 4 – Install a Linux Operating From A USB Flash Drive or Boot from one or more Linux Live CD’s on a USB Flash Drive
Page 5 – Utility And Rescue Bootable USB Flash Drive
Page 6 – Portable Apps And USB Flash Drive PC Toolbox
Page 7 – What I Use & Other USB Info

New Article Up – Using VirtualBox 4

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Using VirtualBox 4

The purpose of this article is to introduce the average PC user to VirtualBox. Terminology may be simplified to make it easier to understand for the non-Geek.
This article contains 3 sections and covers installing VirtualBox Hosts and Guests under Windows and openSUSE.
VirtualBox is virtualization software that runs under most modern operating systems. What this means in layman’s terms is that you set up an environment that pretends to be an actual computer, this is a “virtual machine” ( VM for short). With that virtual machine you can run another operating system in a window just like you would run another program. For instance, if you are using Windows 7 you could run Ubuntu in a window at the same time (see screenshots below for examples). To be clear, only the machine (computer) is virtual, you are actually running this other operating system.
The advantages of using virtual machines are many. For the home user these would include trying out new operating systems and the ability to run programs from different operating systems.
You can run many Windows games under Linux, or use Microsoft Office. You could try the latest Windows 7 SP beta, test new programs, tweaks, and configurations. You can try the latest Linux distros in an environment that is more realistic than a Live CD.
My favorite way to use VirtualBox is to run Windows under Linux. More specifically, I run Windows XP and 7 under openSUSE 11.3 (more on this later).
Security is also an advantage. The main operating system is separate from the one running on the virtual machine. For the most part viruses, malware, crashes, bugs, etc. are all contained inside the OS running in that VM. This of course does not relieve you of the responsibility of using safe computing habits. Lets say you download a file that contains a virus while under an Ubuntu VM and then run that file in Windows you could get infected.

Ubuntu 10.04(LTS) Released

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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long-Term Support). This release incorporates the Desktop Edition and the Server Edition. The Server Edition can be used on physical servers, on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), and on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud. Codenamed “Lucid Lynx”, 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.
We are also pleased to announce Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Edition, which is not a long-term support release.

Official news post.
Ubuntu Home Page
Kubuntu 10.4 is also out.
Short reviews: ARS Technica, Desktop Linux Reviews

Ubuntu 9.04 Released Tomorrow (April, 23rd, 2009)

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Ubuntu 9.04 will be released tomorrow. I’ve been trying out the Release Candidate a bit over the last few days. Here is a brief rundown of my experience:
– Downloaded the x86 Live CD and ran install from there.
– I swapped in a separate drive instead of dual booting. I used ext4 for the test. Ext4 is fast but I cannot recommend using it because as far as I know the only disk imaging program that can do ext4 right now is Clonezilla (live-cd) which I’ve not had time to test. I’m a little unsure about ext4 because from what I understand many seem to think it is just a interim step towards btrfs. It should be noted that Fedora 11 and openSuSE 11.2 will feature ext4 also.
– On first boot I installed the Nvidia 3d drivers, rebooted, and then installed updates and rebooted.
– Those who know me know that I do not like the Gnome desktop. Next I installed KDE desktop, Kubuntu. Why not just install Kubuntu? Because there are more tools and features available when you install KDE along with Gnome. To install Kubuntu, open a terminal and type, sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop , answer yes to any questions. At some point you will be asked which desktop you want to boot from, choose KDE. When finished reboot.
– Software – Enabled all sources in Synaptic then I installed: NTFS Config (to properly access my NTFS drives), Samba and KDE Samba tool (kdenetwork-filesharing), Thunderbird, a whole host of KDE apps. I uninstalled evolution, games, apparmor, IRC/messaging clients.
– Multimedia
Go here and follow the instructions:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu
Next. Sorry but I don’t like Amarok 2, it just isn’t polished enough yet for me. Fortunately there are others who feel the same. If you want Amarok 1.4, go here and follow the instructions (note – you should uninstall Amarok 2 first):
https://edge.launchpad.net/~bogdanb/+archive/ppa

I’m pretty satisfied with Jaunty Jackalope. Everything seems to work well so far. I will post more in the next week or so, after I get time to install and configure the final version. I’m not sure If I will keep Ubuntu around or not, only time will tell. Fedora 11 looks very interesting and will be released May 26th. OpenSuSE 11.2 will be not be released until November unfortunately.