Gutsy Gibbon up and running

I might be one of the last people to write a review to gutsy gibbon the Ubuntu 7.10.I had it running on my Compaq E733 AU laptop with AMD Athlon 64 bitX2,1 Gigs of Ram and 120 GB HDD and NVedia graphics card.Despite the good support of linux by the Nvedia hardware, I had a hard time bringing up the XServer.

Well after popping in the live cd,it took some time to boot into the command line after 3 failed attempts to bring up the xserver.
You will also be prompted to select a suitable monitor for your system, I tried 2-3 configurations and then selected 1024 option which worked fine.It added the following lines to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Failsafe Monitor"
Vendorname "Compaq"
Modelname "Compaq 1024"

Then I did a restart of the gdm /etc/init.d/gdm restart,in order to restart the Gnome display manager.Once the Live CD is up, you can click on the install icon and follow the steps easily to install Ubuntu on your system.

Now once we boot into our Ubuntu system for the first time after installtion, specially the HP/Compaq Laptops with Nvedia graphics cards, will get an option of installation of device drivers that are restricted through the "Restricted Drivers Manager". This will automatically detect your Nvedia hardware and give an option of installing the propritory device drivers.This will make it download the drivers and installation.

Once this is done you can enjoy all the 3D effects provided by the system.You can do a right click and goto "Change Desktop Background".There you get an option of "Visual Effects".You can activate the default Compiz Fusion by selecting "Extra" inside the visual effects.

Gutsy comes with a default desktop search option and all the software is quite stable.It is fast and breathtaking.Gutsy is just what you need to Install for an great desktop experience with maximum ease.

Debian Etch - Power + Reliability Simplified

Debian 4.0, the latest release of Debian Codenamed Etch is a cut above all the distros in many ways. Debian has always been known for reliability and robustness.Thanks to it's amazinly large relaease cycle (indirectly a huge testing cycle) followed by the Debian community.It is not a Joke to release a distro packed with 18,733 Packages which include mostly free packages and yet is the almost the most stable OS system on the earth.

It now includes a GUI Installation which can be started by writing the command installgui on the starting prompt just after we pop in the Disk 1 of Installation.Mind you this OS has 3 installation DVDs and yet has very modest system requirements.You can easily bring your old hardware to life using this.I used an old Celeron laptop with 195 MB of RAM(thats what windows showed me) and 20 GB of Hard Disk and the guess what, the Graphical installation was an Oomph !! The speed was breathtaking, almost matched a P4 or a centrino processor and I can say the same thing for the post installation stuff.It was pretty comfortable to install and configure software on the system.Synaptic Package manager works as if you are talking to it,just order to install some software and it asks you to pop in the CD with the number,and its done.

Once everything was done I was satisfied with the system speed and tried some database applications on it.I tried running MySQL server over it,but the everything was just fine.(I have faced a Lot of problem with Memory usage with SQL Server running on a machine).I never faced such problems here.

We here deploy our production apps also in Debian and Never faced OS related isses.Debian Etch Rocks.