Today's featured Distro of the Day is Ubuntu 7.04, codenamed Feisty Fawn. This is the latest version in the Ubuntu Linux juggernaut. Lots of people know about Ubuntu, what with the commercial backing, the signs and billboards that have been popping up, not to mention the seemingly thousands of "My First Experience with Ubuntu" blog articles from Windows users.

The first featured Distro of the Day is Linux Mint 3.0, codenamed Cassandra. Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components. Normally with Ubuntu, you have to manually download and configure many media codecs and other essential software like browser plugins. Linux Mint comes with everything preinstalled, plus a minty-fresh look and some additional treats.

The month of June is the official "Month of Distros" ⁽¹⁾, so we are going to start a new feature called "Distro of the Day". Each day for the month of June, we will highlight a new Linux distribution that you can try out in a LivePC.

This is a great way to play around with different operating systems. With the LivePC Engine, you can use Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, or any of a myriad of other operating systems all seamlessly and with a single click. You don't need to install anything and because it runs in a virtual environment, the LivePC cannot affect your host computer. The LivePC Engine uses demand-paging so you can start using it right away without having to download the whole thing.

Software often has hidden features, called "Easter Eggs", that you can find by secret keystrokes or clicks. For Easter this year, I'll show you a few of the Easter Eggs we put in the LivePC Engine.

FPS counter

Double-click the Copyright notice to see a frames-per-second counter for the LivePC Engine. This also works on other windows, like the backup window.

We just released a new LivePC Engine beta today, 1.0.7695, via autoupdate and on the website. This is a bug fix release to fix a problem when fetching large (>2GB) LivePCs, such as the Vista LivePC. If you experienced problems where the buffering would get "stuck" at some percentage, this release should fix it.

Thank you all for sticking with us through our beta releases of the LivePC Engine. We do our best to incorporate user feedback and make sure each release is better than the last.

Here at moka5, we've seen all kinds of USB devices. Big ones, small ones, noisy ones, ones with red or green or blue or yellow or white lights, waterproof ones, fragile ones, flat ones, round ones, cubic ones, rubber ones, plastic ones, silicone ones, aluminium ones, leather ones, bronze ones; with integrated cables, detachable cables, no cables, twist caps, sliding caps, no caps, lost caps; inside pens, cell phones, media players, swiss army knives, laser pointers, bracelets, good luck charms, surfboards, barbie dolls, teddy bears, ducks, tempura, sushi, sake bottles, dimsum, body parts... Well, you get the idea.

A standard Windows installation can be pretty big - up to a gigabyte or more. About 80% of that is useless junk that you don't need, which just takes up disk space and makes your system run slower. This is especially true when you are building a LivePC - the environment is virtualized so most of the hardware drivers are unnecessary. The question is, how do you strip out the
bloat without breaking anything?

There are a couple of tools that will help put your Windows on a serious diet. We've used these at moka5 to build some truly tiny Windows LivePCs - just 38MiB for a basic Windows XP Pro installation! You can layer on the software you want and have a lean and mean, yet fully functional, Windows LivePC that you can fit on a small USB stick.