Picture this: It’s late at night, you’re sitting at your computer playing a game or working on a project when, suddenly, Windows freezes completely. All your work is gone, and you find a blue screen full of gibberish staring back at you. Windows is dead, Jim, at least until you reboot it. You have no choice but to sigh loudly, shake your fist at Bill Gates and angrily push the reset button. You’ve just been visited by the ghost of windows crashed: the Blue Screen of Death.

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Nothing can beat having a great Linux distro installed on a super-fast hard drive, with all your favourite apps configured just how you like them and all your files at your fingertips.

But this has one major drawback: perfect as your setup is, it's also just one machine, and sooner or later you'll be forced to leave that computer behind and use something else.

Something that might run Windows. Something that might not even have Firefox. Because no one likes being parted from their data for too long, we present a smarter option: store it all on a USB flash drive.

In older days, you were able to store Linux on a CD and use a flash drive just to save changes. After some advancements, you were able to run Linux straight from the flash drive, but it didn't store any changes you made. But the latest generation of Linux distros – namely Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 9 – have a memory overlay system that allows you to store your Linux distro and any changes you make to it on a single flash drive. Sure, you'll need at least 1GB to be able to fit the entire distro on there, but it does mean everything you need is all on the one device.

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PCLinuxOS (also known as PCLOS) is an installable Live CD distribution based on the Mandriva Linux operating system. While PCLinuxOS tries to be a very elegant Linux desktop, on the other hand its main aim is to be easy to use by everyone who dares to try a Linux distribution. Looking back in time (a few years), PCLinuxOS project was started as a set of RPM packages created to improve Mandriva Linux distros (Mandrake was called at that time) and Texstar is responsible for the PCLinuxOS Linux distribution, which was created in 2003 as a fork of the Mandrake Linux 9.2.

Today, the PCLinuxOS project is proud to have three more "brothers": MiniMe (a minimal Live CD/HDD install with a basic KDE desktop environment), Junior (a self booting Live CD with advanced hardware detection) and Big Daddy (aka PCLinuxOS Full Edition). But wait, PCLinuxOS has more relatives (because of a nice script, which comes with the system, that can remaster the whole distribution). Here is a list with some of them:

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By David Chartier | Published: October 31, 2008 - 01:50PM CT

Google has covered quite a lot of turf during the march toward its goal of making every last bit of the world's information searchable. But considering all the ground that has yet to be covered—especially in the realms of offline data and paper documents—we weren't surprised when Google began dabbling with OCR technologies over the last couple of years. Now, the search giant has officially launched its next attempt to handle some of this previously unsearchable content.

As announced on the Official Google Blog, the company is now performing optical character recognition (OCR) on documents that it indexes and identifies as scanned as PDFs. Google has indexed documents that were saved as text-based PDFs for quite some time. But many documents wind up being made into PDFs through scans, which store the text as images. Google has now decided that its open-source OCRopus technology, based on software called "Tesseract" that HP developed, is up to the task of indexing scanned documents that can contain any mixture of text, images, and coffee stains.

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Three million copies of open-source office suite downloaded, group says
OpenOffice.org 3.0 was downloaded 3 million times in its first week, with about 80% of the downloads by Windows users, an official with the group said in a blog post on Monday.

The successful introduction of the open-source office suite came despite the group's download servers being temporarily overwhelmed by demand for the new software last week.

Only 221,000 downloads by Linux users were recorded, leading John McCreesh, head of marketing at OpenOffice.org, to suggest a massive undercount. McCreesh said 90% of Linux users traditionally receive OpenOffice.org updates straight from their Linux distribution's vendor, which would explain the relatively low Linux count.

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A colleague today showed me a cool, new browser that he's been using to browse the web at blisteringly fast speeds. The browser? Minefield. The author of the code?

Mozilla.

Yes, that same Mozilla that makes the Firefox browser. Minefield is, in fact, a way to glimpse into the future of Firefox, as it's a pre-release/alpha version of the Firefox browser.

After spending some time with Minefield, one thing is clear: the future of Firefox is fast. Lightning fast.

How fast? Some claim that it has the fastest javascript engine on the planet, which means it leaves Google's Chrome browser in the dust. In my own unscientific tests, I'd say that this assertion is correct. Ars Technica pegs Minefield as 10 percent faster than Chrome.

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