Frederik's Blog

What I expected to happen some time ago, is finally becoming reality: Debian is now my favourite distribution for desktop systems. First I installed Debian on my new Samsung N210 netbook and I was very pleased with the result. Shortly after that, my father experienced a bug while trying to print in Firefox on Mandriva [...]

With the upcoming holidays in sight, I could not resist buying a netbook system to take along with me on my travel to Italy. So yesterday, I received a brand new Samsung N210. I chose this system because it is not too expensive and it appeared about the best netbook in this price class according [...]

Today I received a new battery for my Dell Latitude E6400 laptop. The old battery (a 6 cell one) only lasted for about 15 minutes any more, 1,5 year after I acquired this system. The new battery is a 9 cell version. gnome-power-manager estimates I should be able to run 6 hours now without a [...]

Tonight, I updated the server on which this blog is running from Mandriva 2010.0 to Mandriva 2010.1 Cooker. The update went very smooth. The only problem I discovered is that the bacula-fd init script seems pretty broken so I made some bug reports about that. At the same time, I updated WordPress to the latest [...]

GNOME’s development release has reached version 2.29.92, bringing mostly bug fixes. Also KDE got many bug fixes thanks to the new 4.4.1 version. The OpenShot movie editor reached version 1.1 final., bringing improved performance, undo/redo support and many new features. The Zarafa groupware solution is now included in Mandriva. reKonq 0.4.0, a Webkit based KDE [...]

The kernel is now updated to 2.6.33 final. As usual, KernelNewbies has a complete overview of the changes in this new kernel. Some noteworthy changes include: the new Nouveau driver for NVidia graphics cards is now included in the kernel and is now used by default on Mandriva instead of the NV driver. DRBD, the [...]

GNOME is now at version 2.29.90 (the first beta of GNOME 2.30). Compared with the previous alpha release, it brings various improvements to the new features previously added. KDE has been updated to final version 4.4.0. New features since KDE 4.3 include integrated desktop search in Dolphin, a new Plasma desktop interface optimized for netbooks, [...]

Linux kernel 2.6.33 rc6 is now the default kernel in Mandriva Cooker. In this kernel, the anticipatory I/O scheduler has been removed, and there were again various performance improvements to the CFQ I/O scheduler, which is the default already for a long time. There were also different performance improvements to KVM virtualization (such as improved [...]

The first two weeks of 2010 have passed, and the first alpha version of Mandriva 2010.1 has been released last week. Here are some of the interesting changes currently available in Cooker: GNOME has been upgraded to the new development release 2.29.5. The Cheese webcam application has been split into different libraries, making it easier [...]

In spite of the holiday season, lots of new packages continue to trickle in Mandriva Cooker. Amongst the many updates, here is an overview of some important changes: GNOME is now updated toversion 2.29.4: The most important changes are in Nautilus. In preparation of GNOME 3.0, where Nautilus will purely be a file browser and [...]