Improving boot time has been a focus of Ubuntu developers in recent releases, with the goal of a ten-second startup set for Ubuntu 10.4.  To test progress thus far, I compared boot performance for Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04 and 9.10.  Below are the results, which demonstrate the impressive strides that have been made thus far towards a faster boot.

This is not yet another article about yet another Linux distribution with arguments about how great it is compared to other popular ones out there. Instead, I’d like to tell you about a couple of nice features I came to grow very fond of.

Krecipes is an Ubuntu linux recipe manager that has slowly saved me from starvation. Now that I'm in my first year of graduate school, I decided that I better learn how to cook so I can save time in between class. Because of Krecipes, it's been a long time since I've eaten Ramen.

Fedora by default, does not include any non-free software, as per its goals. This can be irritating if you want to get a particular wireless card working or need to get the media codecs. Fortunately, there are 3rd party repositories that do store this software for you, and it is fairly simple to add these using Yum. The one I will concentrate on is RPM Fusion.

Everytime after you have reformatted the hard disk and reinstalled the Linux distro of your choice, the one troublesome thing that you need to do is to re-download all your applications and restore all the settings. This is made worst when your wireless connection just don’t work with the newly installed distro.

Flowplayer is a video player for the World Wide Web. It allows users to embed video streams on their personal web pages. It is an open source project with a GPL 3+ license.

I said goodbye to Kubuntu two weeks ago when I replaced my KDE desktop with Gnome and I haven’t looked back. It feels at the same time invigorating and betraying. Like I’ve left a former love for my new fling.