Zenwalk - Gnome Edition

  I am a fan of lightweight Linux distributions, mostly because my motley crew of computers mostly consists of older, usually outdated machines that just aren't up to the task of running full blown (and bloated distros) like Ubuntu or Fedora.  It seems like lots of folks rave about Zenwalk, and having never played with it, I thought I might give it a try and see what the fuss was all about. 

  Zenwalk is a lightweight, primarily Xfce based distro with a focus on keeping it simple by providing just one mainstream application for each task.  I was sure that the standard Xfce based edition was fast and powerful, so I decided to look at something a little different, the GNOME based edition of Zenwalk.  In my experience, GNOME based distros tend to tax the resources of my older, slower hardware, and I wanted to see how well Zenwalk would run under GNOME on my machine.

  Here is my review of Zenwalk GNU/Linux - Gnome Edition.

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Clonezilla Live - A Live CD Based Open Source Disk/Partition Cloning Tool

   Clonezilla Live is an Open Source tool that  provides an easy and direct method for copying (cloning) the entire contents of one hard drive or partition to another.  Whether you need to backup a partition containing important data (for example, your /home partition, or perhaps a valuable SQL database), or copy an entire hard drive to another, Clonezilla Live makes it a snap.  Clonezilla will copy GNU/Linux,  MS Windows and Intel-based Mac OS partitions.

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SAM Linux 2009

  My first experience with SAM Linux was in 2007, with SAM Linux 2007.  I downloaded and burned a LiveCD (SAM Linux is primarily a LiveCD distro), and spent about 15 hours or so playing around with it.  I was fairly impressed at the time, both with the pre-installed applications and the general usability of the distro.  I even wrote a review of SAM Linux 2007, which I posted to the Ubuntu Forums. 

  While perusing DistroWatch the other day, I discovered that SAM Linux 2009 was recently released.  I remembered having been fairly impressed with SAM Linux 2007, so I thought I might download the latest release and see what was new. 

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TrueType fonts on a network share

My daughter complained yesterday about not having access to all the fonts she has installed on her computer available to her when she is using GIMP on a different computer on the network.

That got me to thinking, and after a little investigation, I discovered that GIMP can be set up to load the fonts from a specific location.

I copied all of the fonts from her computer to a network share on my server, and voilà!   All of her fonts are now available to her (or anyone else in the network who uses GIMP) on any computer on the network!

Here's how to change the path to the fonts when loading GIMP:

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