Those good surprises...

Yesterday I decided to update PCLinuxOS on my ZaReason Strata laptop. 

PCLinuxOS has always remained a reliable OS to work and, as the update included Lomanager, the distro's method to update LibreOffice, I couldn't delay.

Although the update was fast,  LibreOffice was taking a considerable time to finish.  Yes, I must thank my ISP for that: my connection has been unstable for over a week, with a speed sometimes down to a crawl.

Speed was abnormally slow.  I became a bit restless.

That was when I saw the Steam icon on my desktop...the round icon that had not been clicked on since October 2015.

Back in 2014 or so, PCLinuxOS was, among my OSs, the one that best worked with Steam; all of my games ran like a charm.  However, due to a mysterious problem that I could never solve, the Steam client refused to work after an update.  I read the forums and tried suggestions to no avail.  My Steam on PCLinuxOS was broken.

By then, Steam in Mageia and Openmandriva was going good, so I didn't worry much.  Later, I also started playing on Fedora.  It was not a real loss.

Yesterday, I don't know why, seeing that the LibreOffice install was slow, I clicked on the Steam icon without actually expecting anything to happen.  A window displayed the hopeful message, "connecting to your account."

And, before my eyes, Steam came back from the dead!

I don't know for how long the issue has been fixed.  That's, in my opinion, unimportant.  Shame on me for giving up and not staying on top of the matter.  I learned a lesson here.

Thanks, devs and community members!

Elive is getting closer to version 3.0!

Yesterday was my daughter's 7th birthday --and Distrowatch announced Elive had made a new beta available: version 2.9.8.

Elive is a truly beautiful Debian-based distro that uses Enlightenment as the window manager, so its footprint is rather small and relatively old systems can run it.

When I saw Elive Topaz (the last stable release), I knew that this distro really puts attention to details.  Never had I seen a desktop more polished and glamorous! 


I also discovered that Elive was criticized because it was a project that offered free live CDs but, to be able to install the distro, one had to pay.  Back then, I believed that free software had to be also cost-free, so I did not pay.  However, I kept thinking about the project for a long time and, after understanding more about free software, my vision changed.

I have to say that this took some years.  While some distros seem rushed to get releases according to an inflexible calendar, let us just say that Elive prefers to take its time.  The last stable release I was referring to dates from 2010... It is so old that the EliveCD page suggests visitors to download the latest beta instead of trying out Elive Topaz!

In October 2014, my need to have Elive running on my laptop was so big that I paid for the module to install beta 2.3.9, the 19th release of a long development stage that started back in 2013.  And I could not have been happier than I did: the beta has run like a stable release on my hardware.  What's more, I have never had a problem with it since the install!

Yesterday's release (2.9.8) comes after 12 previous releases that followed the beta which I installed. Elive really takes its time, you see?

I wonder what this new beta has to offer.  One thing is sure: I am going to give it a try!