Mint Droid

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Sheesh, Linux.com and Konqueror should just get a room or something, based on all the love that Linux.com gave Konqueror in a recent article:

Konqueror is not just a Web browser, of course — it’s also a file manager, “universal viewer,” and more. As a full-featured file manager, it supports thumbnail preview of images, PDF files, and many other file types. It’s extremely configurable, and you can perform all sorts of actions on files with just a right-click. Want to email a file to a friend? No problem, just right-click and select “Actions -> Email File” from the context menu. Want to compress a folder into a gzipped tarball, or create a data CD out of a folder? Again, one mouse click and you’re on the way.Konqueror also supports viewing files inline, so you can open PDFs, JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, and other image files, browse ISO images as a local filesystem, and more. If a filetype isn’t supported, Konq usually “knows” how to handle the filetype and will pass the file off to the appropriate handler. For instance, if I browse my mail folder and click on one of the mail files, Konq will pass that off to KMail, where I can view the message. If I click on a log file, Konqueror will pass it off to KWrite.

I agree with a whole lot of this article, but I would never make Konqueror my primary web browser. There are just too many websites that don’t work – or don’t work right – in the Konq. But as an uber file manager, it rocks. And as a backup web browser, it rocks again. And I do love the way that Konqueror is tied into KDE. There is something reassuring about knowing that, no matter what KDE app I am working with, web links will open in Konqueror.

I do think the author of that article should’ve pointed out that most apps can be configured to use Firefox, however. I use akregator (since it integrates with Kontact), but I have akregator open pages up in Firefox instead of Konq. And I’ll continue to do so until Konqueror correctly allows bookmarklets (instead of forcing you to use minitools).

Seriously, who needs Partition Magic when one has easy access to  the GParted live CD?

Need a way to resize NTFS partitions, mirror disk images, or otherwise muck about with disk partitions — and don’t want to use a proprietary package like Partition Magic? If so, the GNOME Partition Editor (GParted) is an excellent open source tool for the task. The GParted team released the GParted live CD version 0.2.4-2 this month, so I decided it was a good time to take GParted for a spin.Click here to find out more!

GParted handles Ext2, Ext3, FAT16, FAT32, JFS, ReiserFS, Reiser4, NTFS, XFS, and other filesystem formats. At a bare minimum, GParted can detect, read, copy, and create partitions using those file systems — and, in some cases, can shrink, expand, and move partitions. See the features page on the GParted site for the full rundown on GParted’s capabilities.

It’s been interesting watching parted and its front-ends become more robust. Once upon a time, parted was sure to destroy any partitions you had on your disk. Now, it is rock solid, and can do 70-75% of what Partition Magic can do. For free. With a nice, easy-to-use front end in GParted.

This is good stuff!

MadPenguin has tried out a preview of Dapper Drake (the forthcoming Ubuntu 6.06) and really, really likes it. I mean in a disturbing, get-a-room-already kinda way:

Ubuntu 6.06 promises to be one of the best distributions to come out in 2006. Not only does it perform with the best of them, it has a perfect compliment of included applications, has a beautiful interface, supports hotplugging/automounting USB devices (superbly I might add), provides excellent hardware support, and it installs with ease.

All joking aside, Drake is shaping up to be a damned good distro, and a damned good update to an already great OS. I’ve loved Breezy since finally making the change, and can’t wait for Drake to go gold (so to speak).