SLAX is a small, live Linux distro, based on Slackware. It aims to be light, friendly and useful. It's meant to fit onto antique USB thumb drives and run well on old hardware.

This may be of interest to people who are upgrading from an old laptop etc and think that because it struggles with windows it's destined to lay dusty in the loft. My dad gave me his old Toshiba A80. A fairly humble machine by todays standards and was struggling to run XP with the additional virus checkers and the myriad of background tasks and system tray applications which seem necessary to do the simplest of tasks these days in M$ operating systems.

when I started using Linux four years later, I was told that with Linux I didn't need to defragment my filesystems anymore, since Linux filesystems don't get fragmented in first place. At that time it left me puzzled, but after a few years of using Linux without defragmenting my filesystems - and without any problems! - it seemed defragmentation was something antique. Nonetheless I still wondered how on earth it was possible the 100k+ files in Gentoo's portage system - updated every time I synchronize the portage tree - didn't fragment my filesystem. Or was my filesystem fragmented and did I not know?

IT solutions companies have been generating lots of buzz regarding thin clients basically since the early 1990s, but have yet to really penetrate into many suitable environments.

The policy requirements for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution include the structure and contents of the Debian archive, several design issues of the operating system, as well as technical requirements that each package must satisfy to be included in the distribution.

Three months after Google released an "early look" at version 1.5 of its Android mobile operating system, a newer version has made its way into the eager hands of developers. Dubbed Donut, the new alpha version brings a raft of new features to 'Droiders.

I was so excited this morning as I will now have the new version of Ubuntu 9.04 on my system. I had used the beta and rc and was happy with the way it worked. So I was anxious to see what the final version was really like. Now, just a little background, I switched to Debian 5 previously because I was tired of bugs an problems with Ubuntu.

I recently upgraded a friend of mine to Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop for his five-year-old Acer laptop with 512 MB of RAM. I installed the latest stable version of Ubuntu and he immediately fell in love. What came next was a bit of a shock.

By the end of 2004, I'd been running Debian ‘testing’ on my laptop since around early 2003, but after 6-8 months of woody, I was backporting far too much and I couldn't spare the time for upkeep. At just about that time, a thing called ‘warty’ was released.