Thursday, December 01, 2005

Planning a Mandriva 2006 install


Friend and Linux advocate extraordinaire, Marcel Gagne, has used Linux Mandrake, now Mandriva, on his desktop for years, at least as long as I've known him. Though Fedora Core 4 has been serving me pretty well the past while, there are things I miss about SuSE Linux, such as the ease of switching between wireless networks - just switch profiles. I'm sure Fedora has such a thing too, but it doesn't seem as evident, and the Fedora docs team just don't seem to have it together quite the way the Ubuntu wiki does. I like Ubuntu, but I want a change, something different from what I install at work, Mandriva fits the ticket.

Before making the move I decided to compile a list of my killer apps:

  • Bittorrent - any graphical bittorrent client will do.
  • Bluefish - I really like the tag completion for CSS.
  • Camstreams - works well with my IBM camera.
  • Dia - great for organizing a network or thoughts.
  • Easytag - must have for retagging audio files.
  • Gimp - the premier bitmap image editor.
  • Gnutella - non-commercial gnutella client.
  • gThumb image viewer - makes very nice web photo albums.
  • Gweled - I'm a Gweled addict.
  • Inkscape - couldn't do without, vector image editor.
  • Ipodder - I'm turning into a podcast junkie.
  • KBattleship - My brother and I play networked over the net.
  • Kmail - I like kmail much better than evolution.
  • Mplayer - the best video viewing package bar none.
  • OpenOffice 2.x - the office suite that will crush Microsoft Office.
  • Pan - simple but powerful news reader.
  • Scribus - great for laying out documents.
  • Transcode - moving my video collection to hard drive.
  • Transgaming Cedega - to play Diablo and Nox.
  • Tsclient - connect to my Windows box.
  • Xchat - my favourite IRC client.
  • Xmms - music is best played with XMMS.


I'd link to the rest but sleep is catching up with me. Tomorrow I might possibly get to the Mandriva installation in the evening.

No comments: