My Linux CD shop, Software Care, has had a redesign and update. It features a new backend and a handful of new distros to choose from. They are: Linux Mint, Slackware, SimplyMEPIS and openSUSE 11.0. Enjoy

http://shop.archux.com

The new kernel 2.6.26 includes new Intel wireless drivers. They are great! The first thing I noticed was the wireless light was lit. And flashing when it was doing something Today I noticed something even better. I put my laptop into suspend and when I resumed it, I expected I had to open wicd and disconnect...and connect again. But I tried to open something in Firefox, and it worked Before I used to avoid using suspend because of the hassle of disconnecting and reconnecting. But now I think I will be using it much more

The old theme made from scratch was...pretty buggy. It only worked in fixed width and well, I really don't like that. So I used Zen (a Drupal starter theme) to help make my theme. The only thing I needed to edit was the CSS file! It was so easy

Improvements

• So much easier to theme and tweak
• Fluid width
• Advert now moved so it doesn't look so out of place
• It's standards compliant
• More Oxygen/Plasma like
• Search box looks much better

I've made a new poll after the old poll got about 800 votes. The new one is "What's your favourite terminal emulator?" If I've missed any out, comment on the poll

My parents wanted me to look around for a decent £200-ish computer. So I had a look. But the ones I saw weren't all that good. I then thought that I could build a computer! Seems easy enough? I found out what was compatible and bought

• Intel Pentium Dual Core 1.8 GHz
• 80 GB SATA HDD
• 52x CD drive
• ASRock motherboard
• 1 GB RAM
• Cheap case w/ PSU (remind me never to buy one of these again! You could chop your fingers off with one of those..)
• NVIDIA graphics card (256 MB)

On the 19th of June, the release date of openSUSE 11, I joined everyone else to download it. I downloaded the KDE4 version, as I had heard it was very good. So, I stuck it into my laptop. Great new design. It quickly booted up and instead of the default KDE4 theme I was greeted with a more interesting grey theme called Aya. I didn't want to explore on the live CD so I immediately installed it. After about 20-30 mins, it was done.

Since the 2008.06 version is now officially gone gold, I'm going to be updating the installation guide, as a few things have changed. I may also add a few videos

I'm a bit bored of the current layout, and it's a bit buggy, so I'm going to debug and change the theme to look a lot like KDE 4! As you can see, I've changed the sidebar blocks to look like the new default KDE 4 plasma theme and the oxygen icons are used throughout the site. I'll do this throughout, because the titles and generally the content looks very old and cheap looking, so I'll be styling it a while. Don't worry if the site goes a bit strange.

A few weeks ago, I was using Arch Linux with KDE 4.1 SVN, and it was running great! The only problem was that it had no KPowersave, so I didn't get any powersaving programs. Even when my battery was about to run out nothing told me! So I decided to install Debian testing for a while, with KDE 3 because KDE 4.1 isn't available for it at the moment. I tried and tried to make it look like KDE 4, but each and every style I tried looked nothing like it. The only thing I could find was a Kicker background...

I've been using Debian testing for a while, and here's what I have to say about it

Debian testing

Advantages

• Plenty of packages in the repos
• apt is very fast
• Uses sudo as default if you tell it to
• No need to edit any configuration files
• Modular KDE
• Flash works on 64bit!

Disadvantages

• No AUR or anything similar so I have to compile packages the old fashioned way (./configure, make, make install)