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Showing posts from January, 2010

Review: Linux Mint

I have long been an advocate of Debian GNU/Linux (hereafter referred to as Linux). It's wonderful for servers, stable, with a predictable development cycle. The Ubuntu distribution builds on this with a lovely desktop and wonderful, easy hardware and software management. Mint builds on this again with a polished distribution that I'm finding quite enjoyable to use. You can find Mint here at: www.linuxmint.com It's a regular 700MB download iso and uses Ubuntu repositories. As usual, you have the options of using the included software manager (which is good) or aptitude or apt (my preference). The machine I'm using for this is a HP/Compaq Presario C300. It's an older laptop, with a Celeron M processor and I've bumped the RAM up to a gig which gives me plenty to play with, even given that the video card steals some RAM. The C300 also has a lovely wide screen with that glossy look I normally despise but find to be very eyeball friendly at the moment. It only has a

iPhone App store compared to Nokia Ovi Store

Recently I was given an iPhone for work. Given that I use an e66 Nokia for my personal stuff I thought I'd compare and contrast the two devices' application stores. Ovi vs iTunes. Clearly the base operating systems are significantly different - Symbian S60 3rd Edition (e66) vs iPhone OS (iPhone (naturally)). Clearly given the differences in the OSes, the iPhone seems to lead itself to better application support. This, plus Apple getting in first, have given the iPhone a significantly better application store, variety and apparent implementation of user provided applications. I'm quite sure that Nokia wanted to get on board with this, but given that Apple got there first I'm not sure they'll catch them. The Ovi store is still developing from what I can tell and the phone based interface to it is not terribly impressive. Taking into account the difference in the user interface (non-touch phone vs touch phone), the iPhone is still better. Navigating the Nokia Ovi menu