Pros: An impressive amount of technology and connectivity crammed into an impossibly small package. The fanless design, modularity, and easily accessible innards.
Cons: fit-PC3′s impressive functionality comes at a price. The most basic model will set you back $328 — and that’s without shipping and VAT.
More info: fit-PC3 homepage

Follow @LinuxUserMag

Right from the start, it’s apparent that fit-PC3 is not your run of the mill computer. The machine itself is really — and we mean really –small. It’s roughly the size of a portable CD player (remember those?). Wrapped in a die-cast housing, fit-PC3 feels solid and robust, and obviously can withstand harsh treatment. Probably the most impressive feature of fit-PC3 is its fanless design, where the entire housing acts as a giant heat sink. This is, indeed, a marvel of thermal design which ensures that even under heavy load fit-PC3 never gets uncomfortably hot.

Considering its diminutive size, fit-PC3 is not a bad performer. The machine is powered by an AMD G-series Embedded Fusion APU featuring a dual-core 64-bit processor and Radeon HD 6xxxx GPU combo. Our particular model came with an AMD G-T40E 1.0GHz processor and a Radeon HD6250 graphics card, backed up by 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM. While this is not the most powerful fit-PC3 configuration available, it handled pretty much all the tasks we threw at it with aplomb.

fit-PC3 is available in several configurations. Our model featured 4GB RAM, a Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n card, a 4 USB FACE module (more about this later), and no hard disk. The most basic model — called fit-PC3 Value Barebone — comes with no embellishments at all, so you have to add RAM, a hard disk, a wireless card and other components yourself. Thanks to the well thought-out design, stuffing fit-PC3 with additional components or upgrading existing parts is an absolute breeze. To access the hard disk bay, you need to remove one standard screw. The bottom plate of the housing is held by four screws, and removing the plate gives you access to all the machine’s components.

Another fit-PC3 highlight is its low power consumption. According to official documentation, the fit-PC model based on the T40E APU consumes just 7W when idling and up to 15W under full system load with dual head display. These numbers refer to fit-PC3 running Windows 7, and we would imagine that they will be even lower with Linux.

For such a small device, fit-PC3 sports a mind-boggling array of ports. On the back of the machine, there are two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, two eSATA ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a dual-head display HDMI connector, a DisplayPort, and a digital 7.1 S/PDIF connector. The port galore doesn’t stop here: a swappable FACE front module boasts four extra USB ports. FACE stands for Function And Connectivity Extension module, and it’s a unique feature of fit-PC3. Currently, only a few FACE modules are available, but CompuLab (the company behind fit-PC3) provides complete documentation and reference designs for creating third-party FACE modules. fit-PC3 is optimized for running Linux, and certain fit-PC3 configurations come with Linux Mint preinstalled.

Since our model didn’t have a hard disk, we added a 64GB SSD and installed Lubuntu 11.10. The installation went without a hitch: all hardware was recognized automatically, and the system duly prompted us to install a proprietary graphics card driver. All in all, fit-PC3 is an impressive little machine, indeed. Its small form factor, modularity, fanless design, and low power consumption make it a perfect machine for a variety of uses.

The only niggle is the price: the most basic Value Barebones model costs 328 US dollars. Add to this shipping, VAT, and the cost of additional components, and you are looking at a rather hefty price tag. That said, its innovative design and remarkably high-end features don’t come cheap, but you do need to decide for yourself whether they justify the price in your specific circumstances.

Verdict: 4/5
fit-PC3 has a lot going for it: diminutive size, solid housing, fanless design, and a slew of ports. Built around the AMD G-series processor and the Radeon HD 6xxx-series graphics card combo, the little machine is a decent performer, too. But fit-PC3 is not cheap – the price you pay for having cutting edge PC tech in such a tiny package.

Follow @LinuxUserMag

Follow @LinuxUserMag

Analyzing and reverse engineering malware is a difficult task, which should be meticulously done in an isolated environment with specialized tools. In the last few years an interesting Linux distribution has surfaced with the aim to bring malware analysis to the masses. REMnux is the brainchild of security consultant Lenny Zeltser, who recently announced version 3 of his specialized Linux distribution, full of open source tools for analyzing and reverse engineering Flash malware, obfuscated JavaScript, shell code, malicious PDF files, and so on.

Zeltser makes the REMnux 3 release available as a VMware virtual appliance and as an ISO image of a Live CD. The idea is to run the distribution in a virtual machine and then analyze the malware in its isolated environment. REMnux 3 is a trimmed-down version of Ubuntu 11.10 with a hand-picked treasure chest of useful malware analysis tools and is using LXDE as its lightweight desktop environment.

While you could certainly use any general-purpose Linux distribution and install all the tools you need, REMnux offers a convenient pre-chosen collection of malware analysis tools. Most of these tools are meant for examining malware files. For instance, for Flash there’s the SWF disassembler and assembler Flasm, the SWF decompiler Flare and various handy utilities in SWFTools, all of them meant to be able to understand how a particular piece of Flash malware works.

There are also a lot of tools for JavaScript analysis. REMnux has Firefox with some useful extensions like the web development tool Firebug, a User Agent Switcher to fool malicious web sites, and JavaScript Deobfuscator that can handle scripts that are obfuscated and generated on-the-fly. There are also some stand-alone programs to help with JavaScript deobfuscation, such as the Rhino debugger, the Chrome JavaScript engine d8, Windows Script Decoder, jsunpack-extractjs and js-beautify.

Another domain in which REMnux shines is PDF analysis, with powerful tools like the Origami Framework, PDF X-Ray Lite, peepdf and pdftk, as well as pdfid.py that scans a PDF document for different types of keywords, allowing you to identify documents that contain (possibly malicious) JavaScript code or actions.

And if you want to delve deeper, REMnux also includes some tools to analyze shellcode and examine suspicious executable files, as well as the Volatility Framework for memory forensics. But REMnux is not limited to analyzing malware files: the network protocol analyzer Wireshark is also available, as well as fakedns to redirect “phone home” traffic from malware and a couple of tools that simulate network hosts with arbitrary services, which comes in handy when analyzing the behavior of malware in networks.

An annoying shortcoming is that only the graphical tools are listed in the LXDE application menu, which means that most of the tools are not visible in the menu to explore. So if you want to know whether REMnux includes a specific command line malware analysis tool, you just have to try it or look it up in the cheat sheet. A distribution like BackTrack has a better solution for this, as it includes menu items for command line utilities that open a terminal window with the tool showing its usage info (e.g. with the –help option) when you click on it.

Fortunately, REMnux includes a shortcut to the aforementioned cheat sheet on the desktop background to get you started, which lists some general commands and gives an overview of the available tools. The distribution has also set up some convenient aliases for commands in ~/.bash_aliases. The other shortcut on the desktop background opens FreeMind with a template for a mind map for your malware analysis report, which is to remind you to go through the process in a methodical way. Thanks to this guidance of REMnux, analyzing malware has never been so easy.

Verdict: 4/5
While you could certainly use any general-purpose Linux distribution and install all the tools you need, REMnux offers a treasure chest of useful tools to analyze PDF, Flash, JavaScript or other malware. The distribution is not as user-friendly as it could be, but the cheat sheet and the mind map will get you on track in no time.

Follow @LinuxUserMag

Follow @LinuxUserMag

Pros: A fast GUI provides quick access to a range of tools, with a PPA option for existing Ubuntu users
Cons: Some tools need a bit of tweaking, while there’s little to differentiate the package from other live CDs
BackBox Homepage

It’s fair to say that there’s no shortage of penetration testing and forensic analysis toolkits – often characterised as ‘hacking toolkits’ – available today. Since the launch of classics including the Auditor Security Collection, a Knoppix-based distribution that would eventually morph into the popular BackTrack, almost every mainstream distribution has gained its own spin-off forensic kit; but what makes BackBox different?

A relative newcomer to the scene, the first release of BackBox was back in September as a project of the Italian Open Soluzioni web community founded by Raffaele Forte. Now on its second major release, BackBox has grown rapidly and offers plenty of scope for both amateur and professional use.

Based on Canonical’s Ubuntu distribution, itself derived from Debian, the latest build of BackBox isn’t exactly bleeding-edge – it’s still using the 2.6 kernel tree in both the x86 and AMD64 flavours – but it does contain an impressive collection of tools. It’s also surprisingly slick; from its lightweight yet attractive Xfce desktop environment to its multi-language live CD boot menu – which includes a ‘forensic’ mode that works to prevent accidental writes to a host system’s drive that could jeopardise evidence gathering activities – BackBox exudes professionalism in an area that all too often goes for glitz and glamour in an effort to attract the ‘script kiddies.’

That’s not to say BackBox is without fault: some of the tools, such as the collaborative documentation web app Dradis, require a daemon to be started before they will operate; if you’re not familiar with the apps you’d be forgiven for overlooking the entries in the ‘Services’ menu, which will leave you staring at error messages wondering where you went wrong.

Despite this, the general experience of using BackBox is pleasurable; there’s a wealth of utilities on hand covering a range of activities – split into Information Gathering, Vulnerability Assessment, Exploitation, Privilege Escalation, Maintaining Access, Documentation & Reporting, Reverse Engineering, Social Engineering, Forensic Analysis, VoIP Analysis, Wireless Analysis and Miscellaneous categories – but it never feels as though anything has been crammed in without aforethought.

It’s also good to see some general-purpose software making the grade; while many forensic live CDs offer only the tools needed for the job, BackBox includes IRC chat software, the AbiWord word processor, Gnumeric spreadsheet, several web browsers, a media player, and even a tool for addressing a scanner connected to the host system.

As with rival forensic and penetration testing toolkits – and we’re specifically thinking of BackTrack here, from which BackBox gets its name – the CD contains tools for analysing both wired and wireless networks, and utilities for recovering or modifying passwords from both POSIX-compliant systems and Microsoft Windows for those who work in a heterogeneous environment.

Impressively, the BackBox team has thought to create a Personal Package Archive – PPA – containing the tools and utilities distributed with the BackBox live CD; as a result, it’s possible to add the exact same tools to an existing Ubuntu-based system without having to replace your day-to-day OS with BackBox. It’s a good idea, and one we’d like to see other specialist distributions copy where possible.

While some of the tools are sadly restricted – such as the open source intelligence gathering package Maltego, which is provided as the free Community Edition with limits on the number of results it will offer – these are few and far between.

It’s true that BackBox is a new project, and currently suffers from a somewhat erratic release schedule, but the distribution is quickly shaping up to be a serious alternative to established forensic distributions like BackTrack.

Verdict: 4/5
BackBox isn’t perfect: beginners may find themselves puzzled over tools that require daemons not automatically started on bootup, but it holds a wealth of power for those willing to learn. The inclusion of general purpose software is also welcome, and the existence of a PPA for adding the live CD’s tools to a desktop Ubuntu install seals the deal.

Follow @LinuxUserMag

Pros: Good community behind it. Lots of desktops and applications.
A good way of demonstrating desktop Linux.
Cons: Beyond using it as a demonstration appliance, you’d have to be a
Gentoo expert. A bit unwieldy for every day use.
Gentoo Homepage

First released in 2002 and based around source code rather than pre-compiled binary packages, Gentoo has become famous for the flexibility it offers. However, the Gentoo live DVD is a different beast altogether, leveraging existing Gentoo technology to provide a ready-made desktop that boots from removable media such as a DVD or a USB flash drive. It’s a comprehensive system with a wide variety of applications along with a selection of the current desktops. The disc includes current versions of Gnome 3, Xfce, E16, Fluxbox, LXDE and XBMC and KDE4, and there is a distinct bias towards KDE applications and desktop applications in general.

If you’ve used a recent build of KDE4, you’ll already have an idea of what to expect from the KDE4 desktop. As with most of the desktops environments on the disc, the backdrop contains icons for: the bug tracking system, installing Adobe Flash, a link to the Gentoo IRC channel, a link to the support forums and the user handbook. Those icons give a clue to one of the advantages of the lineage of this distro: it’s the product of an established community.

With several desktops and such a huge set of installed applications, this thing’s a monster. Exploring the application launcher confirms what we expected, this application load-out is extremely broad. On the one hand, this means that this might be a viable complete desktop system in situations in which adding additional applications via the package manager is inconvenient. On the other hand, there is a lot to wade through, including a lot of smaller, slightly obscure KDE applications (KBruch, the fractions tutor anyone?). Amongst the more mainstream applications, there’s quite a lot of redundancy and overlap. For example, there are at least five fully fledged web browsers, and this holds true for every category of application.

There is no GUI hard disk installer included with this live DVD, and this fact won’t surprise long-term Gentoo users as even the regular distribution relies on manual installation from the command line. It is, however, possible to carry out an installation from any working Linux installation, including the Gentoo live DVD. The fact remains that the lack of a GUI installer is at odds with what people have come to expect from a live distro.

The way in which it handles persistent storage of user data is an important feature of a live distro. Again as there is no GUI for doing this in Gentoo, you’ll have to set up the partitions and create the needed file by hand. Although, the location for the file is quite flexible. Once persistence is up and running, it should be possible customise the distro using Gentoo’s Portage package management system that fetches source code packages ready for compilation. Frankly, it’s for time-served Gentoo enthusiasts only and probably not the intended focus of the live DVD.

A live system from the developers of one of the most techy DIY distributions was always going to be a strange animal. It might sound a bit mean-spirited to point it out, but although Gentoo is a well established distro, it’s not as well known as some of the others. Consequently, if you want to install it or begin to modify it, you have to be familiar with the the Gentoo way of doing things. It’s important to remember that in the case of a desktop distro, you might, for example, be forced to give a non-expert instructions over the phone, and that just isn’t going to work in the case of Gentoo.

Verdict: 3/5
In theory, this live DVD image could be used to provide a Linux desktop on portable media, but its bulk and relative inflexibility mean that it wouldn’t be our first choice in that role. It is however a first class portable demonstrator of what desktop Linux can offer. Existing Gentoo experts will probably be pleased with it.

Follow @LinuxUserMag

Pros: A clever idea. Easy to use for end-users as it looks and works like a traditional desktop
Cons: Installation is tricky. Documentation is disorganised. Still feature-poor compared to 1.8
eyeOS Homepage

Although eyeOS is technically a web application, conceptually it blurs the line between an application and an operating system. Unlike Google’s office offerings such as Google Docs, eyeOS offers a full desktop, complete with movable windows, alongside a suite of applications. What’s more, the system is extensible, and developers are free to create their own applications for the system and to modify the open source version of the project. At the time of writing, version 2.5 is the latest official release and 1.9 is the community-maintained release of the old 1.x branch.

From the outset, the project documentation presented a disappointment. To carry out an installation, one would almost certainly have to make use of the guide on the website in conjunction with the forum and the downloadable PDF manual. A full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) system must be assembled before beginning the actual eyeOS installation, and things can get a bit tricky as eyeOS is quite finicky about the Apache and PHP settings. We give extra points for the install script that does its best to ensure that you have a fully compliant system, but we deduct some for the lack of comprehensive feedback from a fully installed yet non-functioning system. ‘There is an error in this eyeOS installation, please contact the system administrator’ is a typical error, accompanied by no useful output to any logs.

A morning spent moving between the forum and the supplied documentation should be sufficient for an experienced web administrator, but those less familiar with the intricacies of the LAMP will probably struggle. Being fair, it is a more complex system than, say, a typical CMS such as WordPress.

The eyeOS desktop itself makes use of familiar desktop computing paradigms. There are two main panels and a desktop backdrop with some icons. In the negative column, just like a webpage, text alignment within the GUI can be a bit haphazard, which can make the interface confusing at times. Its use of the Oxygen icon set along with a liberal application of white space gives eyeOS a look that is reminiscent of KDE 4. Performance is acceptable, but it’s not as snappy as a conventional desktop, and it even seemed a bit slow compared to version 1.9.

As with traditional desktop computing, user data is stored in files and folders – and to this end, there is a traditional file manager. Collaboration and file-sharing features are well integrated but insular. For example, the included instant messaging application only works with other eyeOS users. Getting files out of the system involves using the sharing system which spits out a URL that can be accessed from anywhere; moving files into the system involves uploading via the browser. It’s quite neat actually.

The included document editor is pretty impressive, as it does resemble a fully featured word processor. However, the ‘fit and finish’ isn’t quite as tight as we’d like it to be. Text had a tendency to jump about as it was entered, and occasionally, highlighted text simply disappeared for no reason, although it could be retrieved by using the undo function.

This project, in its current open source version, constitutes a cautionary tale in open source forking. Now at version 2.5, the current official branch does, in many respects, represent a step backwards from the final maintenance releases of the 1.9 series. The lack of available applications is glaring, omitting as such basics as a spreadsheet program. Unfortunately, version 2.5 is incompatible with the myriad third-party applications that were available for previous versions.

Verdict: 3/5
Oh how the mighty have fallen. Unfortunately, at version 2.5, eyeOS still doesn’t seem to have caught up with everything that the old 1.x branch had to offer. The still maintained 1.9 version continues to be a very good system in its own right and would be our recommendation.

Follow @LinuxUserMag

Pros: The best thing for long projects; works how writers think;
nothing it doesn’t do; currently free!
Cons: It’s still in beta; we found importing existing Scrivener projects harder than it needed to be
Scrivener homepage

It wasn’t so long ago that if you asked among novelists and scriptwriters, you’d hear them all swear by Microsoft Word or one of its proprietary clones. It’s easy to see why; much of the literary old guard cut their teeth on typewriters and handwritten notepaper. The ability to approach a project at any point and rewrite the parts that sucked without having to rewrite entire pages must have seemed miraculous in its day. Times change.

Previously only available on Mac OS X, last year a Windows version of Scrivener finally saw the light of day after a lengthy open beta. Such is its superiority to Word that many (including this reviewer) previously spent large sums of money on Apple products just to be able to run it. Now, thanks to Literature & Latte, Scrivener is coming to Linux, and we wouldn’t be overstating things to say that Scrivener is to word processing what word processing is to the quill and inkwell.

Novelists and scriptwriters don’t think in a straight line, yet traditional word processors operate on the assumption that they do. They posit that words form sentences and sentences form paragraphs and that one thing going after another must equal linear thinking. Not so. The final product may be linear, but the process is a hotchpotch of back and forth: rewriting, drawing maps and character backgrounds, assembling settings, outlines, synopses, research, photographs, video, audio, the contents of entire webpages.

Writing a single scene may require dozens of files associated with it and those files need to be close by for easy reference so a writer can write without leaving the confines of the project. What Scrivener does primarily is allow you to organise your work. Got a webpage you need for that info on 14th century Anchorite monks? Create a subfolder for your chapter and drag the whole thing in there for offline use. Scrivener’s project file keeps everything in one place.

More than that, Scrivener will automatically compile your work into all popular eBook formats, provide you with daily word-count targets, and hyperlink your characters to their bios and your settings to your research (essentially creating your very own project wiki).

When you’re writing Chapter 14 and something you need to happen needs foreshadowing in Chapter 3? Stick it in Chapter 3’s scratchpad without breaking your flow. It even has a dictionary that actually wants to learn your project’s unique vernacular (very handy if you’re writing sci-fi or fantasy) rather than underline everything in red. In short, it quickly becomes indispensable.

Beta Verdict: 5/5
Without mentioning the hundreds of other features packed into Scrivener, each a superb piece of writer logic, we still feel we’re selling it short. Right now it’s in beta, so it’s currently free. If you’re working on any kind of long writing project, Scrivener is the only choice worth considering and the beta is stable enough to make it an essential download now.

OpenSUSE 12.1, you say? Did we miss 12.0 then? No, this is the first release in the distribution’s slightly altered release numbering: from now on openSUSE will not have a .0 release but only .1, .2 and .3 releases. Because the distribution is following an eight-month release cycle, from now on the November release will always be the .1 release, the July release the .2 and the March release the .3.

The change in numbering came after a vote about adopting Fedora-style or Ubuntu-style release numbering or staying with the old scheme. Note that openSUSE does not have a major and minor numbering, so openSUSE 12.1 is not a major version bump.

OpenSUSE 12.1 is now available for download, but we installed the KDE live CD of the RC. Of course, you’re not obliged to run KDE: there’s also a GNOME live CD, and the DVD version offers KDE, GNOME, Xfce and LXDE to choose from. This is the first openSUSE release which comes with GNOME 3, although you could already install it in openSUSE 11.4 by adding a repository; GNOME 2 is finished.

If you’re using Xfce, you’ll be delighted to see that LightDM is now the default display manager, reducing the dependency on some core GNOME components, so openSUSE with Xfce is slimmer than ever. The two big desktop environment releases are KDE Software Compilation 4.7 and GNOME 3.2. Under the hood the developers have also integrated the newest components, including Linux kernel 3.1.0-rc7, glibc 2.14, rpm 4.9 and Xorg 7.6.

An exciting feature is integration with the systemd system and service manager, which replaces the SystemV-based init system. It provides aggressive parallellisation capabilities, offers on-demand starting of daemons, maintains mount and automount points, and does much more. You can check the output of the command systemctl to see which services are loaded by systemd.

The directory /lib/systemd/ hosts the configuration files for all systemd services, and configuration specific to your system or users happens in /etc/systemd/. You can enable, disable, start and stop a service with systemctl enable|disable|start|stop <name>.service. Not all services are already translated to a native systemd service, but systemctl is fortunately smart enough to execute the right chkconfig or /etc/init.d/<service> command if you’re trying to manage a non-systemd service.

OpenSUSE 12.1 is also the first release that doesn’t ship the Oracle-provided Java binary, because Oracle dropped its ‘Distributor’s License for Java (DLJ)’ which was required for redistributing Java. So, if you really need Oracle’s Java version, you have to download it directly from the Oracle website. Therefore, openSUSE now comes with the GPLed OpenJDK Java package. For end-users, this shouldn’t be a big problem, but there are still a lot of Java programs that are known to have issues with OpenJDK, especially the ones that are not packaged yet in Linux distributions, so openSUSE users can expect some incompatibility issues in the future.

The positive side of Oracle’s decision is that many of these programs will have to fix their incompatibility bugs with OpenJDK now that distributions are dropping Oracle Java, so the issues you’re facing now will hopefully be solved soon.

openSUSE 12.1 now also has full support for the Btrfs file system. You just have to check an option in the installer to create a Btrfs file system instead of the default ext4 file system. However, because openSUSE still comes with legacy GRUB instead of GRUB2 as the bootloader, it still needs a separate ext4 boot partition, as legacy GRUB can’t boot from Btrfs. If you use Btrfs for your root file system, you can also take advantage of Snapper, a tool for managing Btrfs snapshots. The basic idea of Snapper is that it creates a snapshot before and after running YaST or Zypper, compares the two snapshots and therefore provides the means to revert the differences between these two snapshots.

OpenSUSE 12.1 doesn’t install Snapper by default (because it doesn’t use Btrfs by default), but you can install the command-line client and the YaST module which offers a graphical user interface to work with the snapshots. The means are endless: you can manually create a snapshot of your file system, you can define cron jobs to periodically create snapshots, and running a YaST or Zypper command automatically creates two snapshots. You can also list your snapshots, get a list of modified files between two snapshots, compare the contents of a single file between two snapshots, and revert the changes between two snapshots. Snapper even allows rolling back changes to a single file.

While for many years SUSE Linux came with the SaX2 tool to configure the X Window System, starting with openSUSE 11.2 it became deprecated. OpenSUSE 12.1 now includes a revival of the good old graphical configuration tool in the form of SaX3 (openSUSE Advanced X Configuration Utility v3). It isn’t installed by default, because most systems are autoconfigured anyway by the latest Xorg, but if you have a system that doesn’t work out of the box and you don’t have any knowledge of writing your own xorg.conf, SaX3 can help you. SaX3 comes with an easy-to-use Qt, GTK and ncurses based GUI system to set up the most important features X provides.

The ncurses version can be used on the console when X completely doesn’t work on your system. You can configure your keyboard, mouse, touchpad, graphics card and monitor when Xorg autoconfiguration fails. Unfortunately, SaX3 lacks dual head mode, and at the moment it seems to crash a lot.

All in all, many of the new features in openSUSE 12.1 are in the ‘plumbing’ layer: a brand new kernel, a new Java, a new init system, a new file system and snapshot functionality, and a new graphical configuration tool for X. KDE users will not notice much new functionality on their desktop: the switch from KDE 4.6 (openSUSE 11.4) to 4.7 (openSUSE 12.1) is not that big, as the KDE 4 series has already matured. However, there are some interesting new features in KDE: the window manager KWin has better performance and improved support for older hardware with limited OpenGL support. And network management has also been improved, including Bluetooth tethering, 3G, VPN, MAC spoofing and other advanced options.

For GNOME users, the changes are much more visible. The previous openSUSE release shipped the already ageing GNOME 2.32, while openSUSE 12.1 made the jump to GNOME 3.2. If you had decided to skip GNOME 3, now is the time to reconsider and try the first update to the new GNOME 3 desktop. GNOME 3.2 supports online accounts such as Google to store your mail, calendar, contacts, chat and documents in the cloud. The new GNOME also makes it possible to save a website as a web application, which you can launch like any other Linux application. There is also a new Contacts application to manage your contacts for the Evolution mail program and the Empathy chat application. GNOME now also allows you to calibrate devices (monitors, webcams, scanners, printers) to ensure the shown colours are representative, and it has built-in messaging services.

Verdict: 4/5
While previous openSUSE releases were polished but somewhat boring, openSUSE 12.1 is a very exciting release if you want to play with the newest Linux technology. Especially, the Btrfs file system and snapshots to be able to revert accidental changes are interesting features. The new Xorg configuration tool SaX3 also looks interesting, but the developers still have some work to do there.

It’s fair to say GNOME 3.2.1 found in Fedora 16 is a polished evolution of the GNOME 3 series. For instance, it supports online accounts to store your mail, calendar, contacts, chat and documents. For now there’s only support for Google, but by setting up a Google account in the online accounts panel, your GMail, contacts and calendar work out of the box in Evolution, the GNOME Shell calendar will be populated by your Google calendar, and Empathy will have Google Talk set up automatically. Naturally you can enable or disable each of these services individually should you wish.

If you’re trying to run Fedora 16 on a computer with a graphics card that doesn’t support GNOME 3, there’s an automatic fallback to a GNOME 2-style system. If you don’t like GNOME 3 and always want to run the fallback mode, the option is there. Simply open the User Menu at the top right and then choose System Settings > System Info > Graphics and enable Forced Fallback Mode. As an aside, Fedora 16 sticks with Evolution as the default mail client, in contrast with Ubuntu that favours Thunderbird these days.

Under the hood, Fedora 16 sports the Linux 3.1 kernel. Another change in the plumbing layer is the switch from GRUB Legacy to GRUB2 as the default boot loader, which was bound to happen because GRUB Legacy is not maintained anymore. The default NTP (Network Time Protocol) client is now Chrony, which is designed to work well without permanent network connection, has a smaller memory footprint and saves power by limiting process wakeups. And HAL, the deprecated hardware abstraction layer, has been completely removed from Fedora as applications have moved over to using Udisks, UPower and libudev for device discovery.

While there have been talks about moving to the Btrfs filesystem, Fedora 16 still uses Ext4 by default. Of course you can use Btrfs if you really want to: you just have to choose it manually in the partitioning step of the installer. The new Fedora is also in the middle of another ongoing migration: while Fedora 15 introduced the new systemd system and service manager, this was just a first step. In Fedora 16, more services are converted to native systemd services, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL, with faster boot times as a result. However, a complete systemd-based init system will have to wait for Fedora 17.

Fedora has always been strong in the domain of virtualization, and Fedora 16 is no stranger to this. For instance, virt-manager can now examine a virtual machine to determine the version of the operating system and what applications are installed. This information is shown in the Details window of the virtual machine. There’s even a button, which lets you open the virtual machine and browse its file system graphically. Another interesting feature is support for the redirection of USB 2.0 devices to virtual machines, as well as USB network redirection.

Fedora goes even further and has some cloud features. OpenStack, a set of programs for building an IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) system, is packaged in Fedora 16, as well as a less well-known IaaS system, Condor. Fedora 16 also comes with the Aeolus Conductor, a web-based user interface and tools to create and manage cloud instances across a wide variety of cloud types, all from the same user interface.

Verdict: 4/5
All in all, there’s not one key area where Fedora has improved, but it has a lot of evolutionary improvements in various domains. With the ongoing migrations to Btrfs and systemd, Fedora 16 lays the groundwork for an exciting future. If you want to experiment with the newest Linux technology, as always, Fedora is the place to be.

Firstly, congratulations need to go to the Lubuntu project – it’s their first release as a fully subscribed member of the official Ubuntu family since Mark Shuttleworth welcomed the project to its ranks around the release of 11.04. It joins Xubuntu and Kubuntu among others, and slots rather neatly into the pack, each member bringing a slightly different slant to our beloved Linux desktop while staying true to the mainline software on offer from the core Ubuntu repositories.

As stated on the project’s homepage, the core objective of Lubuntu is to create a lighter, less resource-hungry and more energy-aware desktop distribution. It achieves this first and foremost by utilising LXDE (the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), but also backs it up with a number of popular applications and utilities, each picked for their frugal use of resources.

As we’ve said in the past, LXDE is a great alternative to KDE and the GNOME 2.x desktop environments in that aesthetic appeal and functionality is minimally compromised in its effort to be as sleek and light as possible. Since it’s targeted at the ‘normal’ tower and laptop user, its low system requirements are put to great work ensuring legacy hardware gets a new lease of life while modern systems run with real zip and zeal.

The requirements are low enough that a system as old as a Pentium II (or Celeron) with just 128MB of memory will boot. The end-user experience is unlikely to be optimal (for example, you can’t use the graphical installer without 256MB of RAM), but the ability to raise a pulse from a system so advanced in its years is an incredible achievement, not least from a fully-fledged and high-functioning desktop distribution such as this.

Considering all the fuss and bluster surrounding Unity and GNOME Shell, the cynic in us wonders if Mark Shuttleworth might have employed a certain amount of foresight in the enrolment of Lubuntu. Such a sizeable change in user experience was always going to upset the apple cart – having an array of official derivatives with a classical approach certainly implies a degree of damage control.

That’s enough cynicism for today, though – let’s take a quick look at what’s new. Since most components of LXDE have had official releases, you could argue that there’s little that hasn’t been updated. LXDM is an excellent lightweight display manager and PCManFM might be quite a young offering, but it’s fast and relatively easy to manipulate. Elsewhere Lubuntu 11.10 makes the switch to xfce4-power-manager for power management and there’s a even a new theme by Rafael Laguna to enjoy.

The now trademark pale blue of the desktop is almost hypnotic. It’s incredibly clean, clear and logically laid out – a user experience a million miles away from that of Ubuntu 11.10’s Unity or GNOME Shell counterparts. In comparison there’s an almost cleansing nature about its simplicity. If you’d like to keep your up-to-date Ubuntu back-end, but forgo the move to Unity, Lubuntu is certainly an excellent choice, though those of you with allegiances to KDE or Xfce might still prefer Kubuntu and Xubuntu respectively.

Verdict: 4/5
Lubuntu 11.10 certainly proves its worth as a full member of the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions and makes us wonder why we were so worried about losing GNOME 2.x. While it’s not as flexible or pretty as its defunct counterpart, Lubuntu 11.10 has certainly got everything you need to keep your computer happy and your desktop clean and clutter-free.

With Sabayon 7, you have the latest of everything. The latest versions of all of the big desktops are present, including GNOME 3.2, KDE 4.7 and Xfce 4.8. In previous versions, Xfce was only available in the experimental branches – now you have it available as its own ISO. You also get XBMC 10.0 available, allowing you use Sabayon as a media centre right out of the box. More people than ever use USB sticks to play with Live CD’s and do so using tools like unetbootin. This latest version of Sabayon allows you to simply dd the ISO file directly to a USB device. Just remember that you need to write it to the whole device, not a partition (e.g., dd if=sabayon.iso of=/dev/sdb). Although a small feature, it’s one of many examples of Sabayon’s advancement.

The first thing you’ll see when you boot up is a bunch of different options for your live CD. The default option will give the associated desktop (GNOME, KDE or Xfce) along with a nice little piece of intro music. If you’re not really into that kind of thing (it can smack of Mac OS X), there is an option there to boot more peacefully. You’ve also got the option of booting up into XBMC, giving you a state-of-the-art media center right off the Live CD. As far as we know, there is no other general use distribution that does this – it’s a great unique selling point, and something we’d certainly be inclined to use. The only issue we had with the Live CD was with regard to 3D effects on the desktop.

Our Acer netbook test machine features limited 3D functionality, so it can behave badly. Most distros can auto-detect this and either trim down the number of 3D functions they use, or fall-back gracefully to a 2D display. Sabayon 7 simply wanted to do more than my card was capable of and we ended up with all manner of graphics artefacts and distortions. It was not a major problem though, and we were able to deal with them once installed it on to the hard drive.

After you’ve tried out the Live CD and are ready to go ahead and install it on your hard drive you get to meet Anaconda, the Sabayon installer. It is a very fast, streamlined installer that gets you up and running in no time. Once you are up and running, you should never have to do a full upgrade again since Sabayon employs a rolling-release system, meaning that as packages change upstream you have access to them right away. The package system is called entropy (made up of a text client and a graphical client), and is based on the gentoo branches.

The Sabayon repository effectively goes out and collects the packages and compiles binary versions of them for you, allowing you to install or update your system using these. If you wish to have a more heavily tuned system, you also have access to the underlying portage system. This will allow you to install from source and compile the packages specifically for your system. There’s a real sense of power and flexibility here.

As you’d expect the initial live CD and installation includes the latest 3.0 Linux kernel. There have been huge improvements in the stock kernel, hence the move out of 2.x to 3.x made by Linus. Interestingly, though, the Sabayon team don’t think this went far enough, hence the inclusion of the fusion advanced patchset. These are available in the package repository after you have initially installed the system and includes experimental patches designed to provide even higher performance.

Things like the BFQ io-scheduler, Reiser4, experimental btrfs patches and experimental wireless patches. Apparently, even Theodore T’so has said that btrfs looks like the future of filesystems. With Sabayon 7 you have access to it and since it is backward and forward convertible with ext2 and 3, you can try it out safely.

Verdict: 4/5

Sabayon is a very polished, modern distribution, giving you all of the amenities that you expect from Linux. And being based on a rolling release system, you should only ever have to install once. The only issue was using the Live CD with an inadequate video card, ending up with artifacts and distortions, but advanced users should be able to deal with this issue in double-quick time.

Click here to see the latest posts from Linux User

Follow @LinuxUserMag

In Linux User issue 105’s beta review, we talked about how 11.10 appeared to be working hard to make good on plans laid out in the previous release. Where 11.04 was rough around the edges, with what was clearly a work-in-progress Launcher and Dash among other things, much more elegant solutions could be found.

It’s no secret that elegance and form are all very important factors for Canonical’s design team, but 11.04’s implementation smacked so heavily of form over function (a complaint arguably true of both ‘next-generation’ desktop experiences including GNOME Shell and Canonical’s Unity) that a positive reception would have been hard to wish for.

The ‘new’ Dash in 11.10 is strikingly beautiful with highly refined frosted glass effects and hi-res icons, but has made significant strides to address as many of 11.04’s misgivings as possible in the time allowed – it seems function finally got a look in. This is largely thanks to Lenses, which can be used to pivot the content you’re looking for within Dash, and Filters, which dynamically change depending on the type of content you’re looking for.

The Dash itself is much more useful as a result, but (as is the case when you abandon drop-down menus as Canonical has done here) there’s still a fundamental flaw no measure of tweaking and iteration can truly remedy: it’s still too difficult and time consuming to find what you’re looking for (especially if you don’t know what it’s called).

The core problem with this kind of icon-led design is that, by its very nature, it doesn’t cater for a brief bout of forgetfulness that stress or tiredness can so easily induce. This being the case, the simple act of finding your preferred ISO burner, for example, can be an annoying chore that requires more key presses and brainwork than should ever be necessary. You could type ‘ISO’ or ‘DVD” into the dash and might get the result you’re looking for. There’s also a good chance you wont.

That’s not to say Ubuntu’s developers weren’t mindful of these difficulties – Lenses and Filters can resolve differences in programs, files and folders down to the megabyte. More tellingly perhaps, they’ve also added a System Settings launcher shortcut which is otherwise completely buried in the application window.

The problem is that, while these are usable fixes to Ubuntu 11.04’s myriad issues, they’re not really solutions to the greater problem. We just can’t help but think that Unity, as a desktop environment, still has much evolution to endure before it can be considered any kind of revolution in desktop computing. Is it right to block legacy legacy desktop experiences in this way? Not to our mind.

For us the inability to use the desktop (to say, drag a terminal onto the desktop itself) is also something of a deal-breaker. We’re certainly not adverse to development, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of common sense or courtesy to the user.

Though there are many other updates and changes to Ubuntu 11.10 like vastly improved indicator applets, updated packages and the fast-acting and fashionable LightDM, Canonical’s design team have wisely focused much of their attention on a trinity of features unique to Ubuntu and that neatly encapsulate the key selling points of the distro. If there’s one thing Ubuntu does well it’s marketing, after all.

Besides the Dash, Ubuntu One and the Software Center make up this trinity, and have been on the receiving end of a good majority of the development work that’s taken place over the last six months.

Though many of the updates to the Software Center are purely aesthetic, it is arguably easier to find popular and specialised software alike. This is the age of the App Store, so its only fitting that the Software Center gets a makeover to incorporate app reviews and proprietary pay options.

The real story about the Software Center facelift, though, is that Synaptic Package Manager, which has been a mainstay of Ubuntu for some years now, is no longer installed by default in Ubuntu 11.10. It joins PiTiVi and Evolution as another package to fall off the defaults list, but will surely be missed more than the video editor and email client, which have been overshadowed by OpenShot and Thunderbird respectively over the last year. How you feel about these changes will ultimately boil down to your usage habits, but suffice it to say they each remain available in Ubuntu’s repositories.

Ubuntu One, as you may be aware, is Canonical’s cloud storage solution that syncs files and folders across multiple distro installs. The functionality of this service has grown recently to include music purchases (via the Ubuntu One Music store) and streaming services to iPhone and Android smartphones. Canonical has added another much-vaunted feather to its cap with the introduction of a Windows client too, which should go some way to tempt users of Dropbox and its many competitors, not least since the free storage quota has been raised to 5GB (more than double of some of its contemporaries) and it’s now possible to sync installed applications between desktops too.

VERDICT
In terms of design Ubuntu is really challenging Apple. In terms of compatibility and reach it’s certainly got Microsoft’s attention and where the open source ecosystem is concerned, it’s the most recognised brand alongside Tux himself. Does Canonical play entirely by the rules? No, and this is a very important problem for the project and there are many reasons why open source enthusiasts could (and perhaps should) steer well clear. But – and it’s a very big but – there’s no escaping the fact that Ubuntu is the most highly developed and refined open source operating system in the world today. The conflicts here make scoring pretty much moot – either you’re already enjoying it, or you’ve sworn never to grace Canonical’s mirrors again.

Read our interview with Canonical’s Gerry Carr about the launch of Ubuntu 11.10

Check out the latest posts from Linux User & Developer

Follow @LinuxUserMag

Pros: The auto-ripping feature is handy, and there’s plenty of functionality bundled as standard.
Cons: Installation can be fiddly, and there’s no i386 build for older hardware.
Homepage: VortexBox

There are plenty of methods for turning an existing server into a media streamer, but the promise of VortexBox goes beyond most: install me, it whispers, and you’ll have a headless, automatic-ripping, album-art downloading, powerhouse of a dedicated media streaming system in minutes.

VortexBox is based on Fedora 14 ‘Laughlin,’ and while that’s not the latest release – Fedora 15 ‘Lovelock’ has been out for a number of months now – it’s a solid basis on which the distribution can rest.

Unlike the majority of modern-day distributions, VortexBox isn’t provided as a Live CD. Instead, a console-based installation process walks you through the brief questions required to get up and running, with the boot menu including several scenarios – including installation on a system with multiple disks configured as a RAID setup – to make things easier.

For those with more complicated requirements, the ‘Advanced’ menu option loads a GUI with the more familiar Fedora installation menus, making it easier to customise the partition layout and to enable full-disk encryption, if required.

Installation of the distribution was relatively easy, although we did encounter one slight issue: leaving the VortexBox CD in the drive after installation and choosing the ‘Boot from local drive’ option gave us an error – leaving us scratching our heads until we removed the disk and rebooted, after which our new installation booted first time.

Another thing to be aware of is, despite the distribution being advertised as an i386 build, many of the packages installed are i686 versions – so if you were hoping to turn an ancient server into a usable system, you may want to look elsewhere.

Booting into a new VortexBox installation presents the user with a console: as a headless media server, its creators have decided to eschew the installation of a GUI in order to save space.

Instead, all the management is carried out via a web browser on a client system. It’s a neat trick, although we were forced to log in to the console on our test install in order to manually start networking – which, for some reason, had failed to come up at boot time – before the web interface became accessible.

From the interface, it’s possible to access VortexBox’s various features – and if you were expecting a minimalist loadout, you’re in for a surprise. A stock VortexBox install includes Logitech’s SqueezeBox software, the MiniDLNA UPnP streaming service, an iTunes-compatible streaming system, and most impressively of all an automated CD ripper.

This last feature is possible VortexBox’s strongest: insert a CD into an optical drive connected to your system, and the software will automatically rip the audio to FLAC – Free Lossless Audio Codec – format, with the option to mirror the files into the proprietary MP3 or AAC formats for non-FLAC compatible devices. VortexBox will even fill in the metadata, and download album art, automatically.

The distribution’s support of third-party hardware, such as the Sonos range of media streamers, is also impressive, largely thanks to its compatibility with various streaming standards like DLNA.

It’s true that there are plenty of niggles in VortexBox: the user interface for certain features is sorely lacking, and by basing it on an outdated release of Fedora its creators are missing out on the advantages that come from running the latest kernel and packages.

The benefits more than outweigh the negatives, however: while it’s possible to make a media streamer of your own using a more mainstream distribution, VortexBox packages a great deal of functionality into a distribution that gets you up and running in a matter of minutes.

Verdict: 4/5
VortexBox is far from perfect, but does precisely what it promises: after installation, you’ll have a system which offers media streaming through a variety of protocols with very little effort. The auto-rip functionality for CDs is especially impressive, and on a headless system with a CD drive could save hours.

Follow @LinuxUserMag