Ubuntu

With Microsoft Windows Vista costing $400 and crippled with anti-piracy activations many people have turned to distribution of Linux called Ubuntu. Linux was never easy to use or simple to configure until Ubuntu. It offers a GUI very similar to windows, a long history of being more secure than windows and best of all is free.

I recently tried Ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop. It can run live off the cd or install onto the hard drive. It comes with many of the same type of applications that you are used too. Open Office is a open source suite of office tools including a word processor, spreadsheet, database, and presentation application. They are similar to Microsoft Office. Gimp is included for photo editing, again it is very similar to Adobe Photoshop. There is xchat for a IRC client, Gaim for AIM networks, and lots of other programs. It can even read and write to NTFS partitions!

There are still some areas that need improving. The kernel doesn't support alot of wireless cards natively and needs an addon such as ndiswrapper. I tried to install this and it sorta worked but never did. There are still some issues with power management, and a few other problems. There needs to be a lot more GUI for many of the administrative tasks. Where is the GUI "device manager" where I can easily update drivers? I think that if these issues can be addressed and the distribution can continue to become more user friendly it will be a great alternative to MS Windows.

The Best PDF Reader

Adobe Reader 8.0 (Windows, Mac, Linux, Mobile)

Adobe Reader 8.0 uses a downloader/installer program that is about 500KB. I'm not sure what the advantage to this is. To me it just seems like an extra step. Without the "album starter" addon checked Adobe Reader 8 takes up 117MB of hard drive space, 30.6MB of ram, and 30.1MB of virtual memory. Version 8 is a vast improvement over 7. The interface is much more streamlined and has way less clutter. The program load time is vastly improved. It loaded the IRS's 1040EZ form in under a second in firefox 2.0.0.3. Adobe Reader 7 used to take 5 or 6 seconds and seem to be bogged down while viewing. By default it fits PDF files to the screen and allows for continuous scrolling. It has a nice feature that allows you to view thumbnails of all the pages on a sidebar. It has a button which highlights all the fillable fields in the document. It has a reading mode that eliminates everything except the title bar and menu bar. There is also a fullscreen option that eliminates everything except the PDF document and defaults to 100% zoom with thumbnails of the pages on the right.



Foxit Reader 2.0 (Windows, Linux, Mobile)

Foxit Reader 2.0 is a lighter piece of software. It only takes up only 3.9MB of hard drive space 6.8Mb of ram and 2.2MB of virtual memory. Load times appear to be the same. The interface looks like Adobe Reader 7. It has a bookmark pane on the left that allows for jumping from page to page. It also has a button that highlights all the fillable fields, defaults to fit the PDF on the screen and defaults to continuous scrolling. It also has a fullscreen option but still retains a menubar at the top and lacks thumbnails of all the pages. It also has dynamic downloading of add-ons which helps keep the program from getting bloated with options you don't need.



Conclusion
I have always been a fan of adobe products. Their only problem is load time. Photo Shop CS2 takes a while to load as does most of the programs in the CS2 suite. I think that adobe responded very well to smaller faster competitors. I would compare Adobe Reader 7 and 8 to Windows 98 and Windows XP. As long as you have a decent amount of system memory and hard drive space I would use Adobe Reader 8 King.

Winner: Adobe Reader 8

Partition Imaging

Due to Microsoft's recent anti-piracy policy it is now essential to clone your system drive partition to avoid reactivation. I recently had to reinstall xp onto the same EXACT machine and still had to call Microsoft and talk to someone in India to get it reactivated. They asked 20 questions and it just wasn't fun. I first looked for a open source solution. Here is what I tried...

PING (partition image is not ghost) - Open Source - http://ping.windowsdream.com/
It is based on RIPLinux and comes in a bootable cd image. It booted up into linux and loaded its command line based interface. It easily worked with my on board 100mbit NIC on my laptop. I copied the image to my desktop machine which is on a gigbit LAN. It took over 2.5 hours to backup a 6GB partition. This seemed way too long and not a viable solution to my problem. I then tried it on my desktop machine and could not get it to work with my raid setup.



Norton Ghost 12 - $70 - http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/
It boots into a dos based GUI but I couldn't get it to work with the NIC in my laptop. I'm not going to mess with floppies and hunting for NIC drivers.



Partimage -Open Source http://www.partimage.org/
This is very similar to PING. About the same results also.




DriveImage - Open Source - http://www.runtime.org/dixml.htm
This program runs right in windows. It uses Microsoft's volume shadow services to backup a running partition. I ran it on my laptop and with compression on it backed up 6GB in under 30mins to 2.5GB. It automatically deletes the hibernation file, the swap file and it ignores free space. I decided to run it on my desktop machine to see how fast it would go. I have 2 drives in RAID0 pulling 110MB/s(PING couldn't do 100MB/min). With compression on it backed up 12GB partition from one raid to another raid to 5GB in about 15minutes. This amazed me. It can be ran on a usb bootable version of XP or off a live cd version of XP. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/



Conclusion
Drive image offers by far the best speed and the most options. It does require booting of a usb device or disc to restore the system drive or if the machine has a "dead" OS.