Back home to Linspire

Having been round the houses with Linux systems I've eventually ended up back with Linspire. Recently I've tried openSuse, PCLinuxOS, Fedora, Sabayon, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Xandros, Elive and Dreamlinux. With each distro there have been issues with usability and performance. Most of this stems from my laptop hardware, the awkward components being an MSI mini-pc wireless card with an RT2500 chipset, ATI video chip. There have also been struggles getting my laptop to suspend or hibernate.

Of the distros that have really captured what I want out of a linux distro these all seem to have issues:

Fedora - no wifi
Sabayon - no wifi
Mandriva - no wifi
Ubuntu - no suspend
Elive - no wifi
Dreamlinux - no wifi
PCLinuxOS - ati driver issues
Xandros - old software packages

So I burned the latest Linspire, installed it and set to work tackling the issues I was getting. And I think I've managed to sort them all. Wi-fi works perfect, ati graphics card is using the fglrx driver without issues, suspend to RAM works perfect.

In an ideal world I'd be dual booting with Slackware but Slack is somewhat lacking with the RT2500 chipset.

Picasa on Linux comes of age

I personally really like using Picasa as a photo manager. I was overjoyed when Google released a version for Linux, even if it utilised Wine. It was really convenient for me as I use a lot of the web facilities and applications that Google produce

However I was a tadge peeved that Picasa for Linux didn't include an uploading facility. So peeved I moved all my pictures to Flickr.

But now moving from openSuse to PCLinuxOs I discover that the new Picasa client for Linux has the upload feature fully implemented. Time to start uploading to PicasaWeb again.

A big thank you to Google.