Ever wonder if there’s a cheaper better solution than iTunes Store? Well, I’m a huge proponent of using iTunes regardless of the Operating System, but have always perused the iTunes Store with caution so as to not end up with a $300 plus bill like a good friend of mine that just didn’t “pay” attention.

So, another friend of mine who will remain nameless, but his initials are DH, sent me two links that are extremely interesting. One is MP3Search.ru and the other is Tunester.ru - see any similarities? They both look like sites not hosted in the US, so I’m guessing as long as they’re running then they must be legit, but might be questionable on how long. Tread cautiously, but I can say, I now have a ton of awesome albums.

Posted: January 17th, 2006 under Personal, Reviews.
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SUSE 10.0: yes, I know the dinosaur Novell purchased it, but I took another look. Several years ago I had purchased SUSE 8.x and played with 9.x on a local workstation, but just didn’t feel compelled enough to use it on a daily basis. So, I stuck to the MacOS 10 and Windows XP flavors of OS’s for daily chores.

So, then a colleague of mine, Tad, catches me in the hallway and says, man Shane, have you seen the new SUSE 10.0 distro? Well, of course I hadn’t and beings that he is a hard-core Win user, but slowly converting to the Mac or at least using them both interchangeably, I figured I’d take another look.

Install download ISO disks are huge, but worth the wait. I did them over night one night as I tend to get more bandwidth at night (around 3mb or greater w/Mesa). The ISO’s make either several CD installers or one large DVD installer. I burned the DVD installer and gave it a go on my DELL 4700 workstation with a 150gb drive and WinXP Pro already installed.

The installation took about 45 minutes, but the coolest thing is that it has a built-in reformatting tool that took a chunk of the NTFS volume allocated to WinXP and shrunk it to make room for the Linux install. Way cool and didn’t even have to think about dual boot, which I installed first etc… Linux for dummies. Each step of the installation was very similar to Apples installer asking all of the basic questions. Will you connect to the internet, what user name/password and preset the ‘root’ password, etc… Once installed, it jumped right into the desktop and ran the YaST application, which basically ran out to their live update server and updated several patches and security fixes that had come out since the ISO burns.

Voila’ I’m now running a modern Linux desktop with the Gnome UI. You can choose between KDE and GNOME during install. Previously I’d used the KDE UI and found it a bit klunky. So, I decided to give GNOME a go. So far, so good.

Next, I popped open FireFox, pre-installed, and updated the theme and a few extensions I like to use. Jumped over to my blog site, gmail account and several web haunts to see if it looks and/or worked any different. Nope, all the same. Last, I downloaded the current PDF reader. The one thing I noticed was, the Acrobat installer was very Wind/Mac like. Double click an installer application and it was done. No package to install, no command line to run, no shell script etc… All things I’m familiar with, but my goal was to imitate the average Joe.

Now, I’m attempting to use it along with the WinXP and MacOS I’m familiar with and attempt to become as virtual as possible. No more OS dependencies! Maybe.

Posted: January 17th, 2006 under Reviews, Software, Software, Technology.
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