Wednesday, November 28 2007 @ 01:40 PM EST Contributed by: sde
Opinion -- Desktop Linuxes are improving so quickly that it's hard even for someone like me, who tracks operating systems the way some people track their favorite NFL team's game match-ups, to keep tabs on what's what with the latest distributions. That's even true of the major community Linux distributions: Fedora 8, OpenSUSE 10.3 and Ubuntu 7.10.
Nonetheless, since Fedora 8 arrived in mid-November, I've managed to use all three of them on my HP Pavilion a6040n Desktop PC. This is an older, inexpensive system powered by a 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 dual-core processor.
The a6040n has 2GB of 533MHz RAM. To store the operating system, applications and data, it uses a 320GB SATA (Serial ATA) hard drive running at 7,200 rpm. For the display, this PC uses an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 32MB of dedicated graphics memory. The graphic chip uses main memory for the rest of its requirements.
