Technology. Without Error

The best way to try out a new OS would be to run it off a USB drive. Now you can run the early build of the Chromium OS off a USB. Just grab the Chromium OS build from here and follow instructions. If you’d rather not go to all that trouble, you can try running Chrome OS off a virtual machine like I did.

The folks at engadget have even put up a video as to how it works.

The secret behind the builds is all about creating a build. If you’d rather create the build yourself then go to Google’s build instructions page for the Chromium OS.

Running Google Chrome off the USB makes it run faster, lets you have a real feel of the OS. All you need is a bit of time and patience.

Make Reading easier on your eyes.

One of the main reasons everything looks better on a Mac is because, Mac uses better font-smoothing technology as compared to a Windows. But, font smoothing is subjective and its more a matter of personal preference. (Scroll down to see the difference)
Mac uses a stronger form of font-smoothing which makes letters look more darker, clearer and less fuzzy. It’s the same technology which the Apple safari browser uses to render clear text. It might take sometime for you to get adjusted to an OSX’s font smoothing, but once you get used to it, its one of the most comfortable ways to read loads and loads of text (no wonder, the Mac is popular with designers, it makes everything seem good..) 
     Font hinting is the method preferred by Microsoft. Unhinted font is used on OS X and Linux. and you cannot disable font hinting in windows. GD++ is a tiny application which seeks to do this by changing the windows font smoothing during runtime. Simply download the GDI++ zip file, extract and run GDItray.exe.

The font smoothing might take sometime to get used to. But, like they say..once you’re used to a Mac..You’d never go back. I love reading Ebooks with strong font smoothing so the file is in my startup folder, just so that, it runs at every windows startup.

see the difference between the windows font smoothing and font smoothing with GDI++ enabled.

Windows font smoothing

GDI++ enabled

Read how to make your Windows look like OSX here.

via Estevão Mascarenhas

You’re tired of windows and all its travails and decide to look around for alternative operating systems (read open source!). What flavor of Linux do you chose, if you’ve never used Linux or any other operating system other than windows? We recommend that you try Slax on your USB flash drive or a CD. That way you’ll always have your boring Windows platform to come back to, if you ever chose to (or even if you had to!!)

Before we download Slax, lets take a look at what Slax is all about. Slax is a Linux operating system  build based on slackware linux. You can read more about it at slax.org or on the wikipedia page here. Linux as you might have heard is open source and as a result of which comes in a variety of shapes and sizes such as Ubuntu, Redhat, Knoppix and a hundred others built by people like you and me around the world.

BTW, you would find a lot of links on this page considering that this post was not written for geeks alone. We tried the Slax installation on a 4GB USB drive, although it shouldn’t be too much of a hassle running it from a 1GB USB drive either. But as always, bigger is better. Slax also gives you an option to run completely from RAM (*really fast!) although you need to load it from your USB or CD in the first place.

Head to the Slax website to download the slax installation package for the USB or the CD as you may want to. The first roadblock you may face is the installation file itself. Its available either as an ISO or as TAR package. (no! no Zip files or installers!). Most software for the linux operating system itself is packaged as a TAR package. Now a TAR package isn’t too different from an average Zip file and you can extract if you have the latest version of your File extraction software (if you run into trouble extracting it into a folder, use google!) Copy the contents of the folder to the USB drive (In case of the CD image, just burn the ISO onto any CD).

Ensure the first bootable device on your BIOS is set to your USB or CD as required. Now plug in the USB/pop in the CD and reboot. Now if everything goes fine, it should bootup to load Slax. Linux boots up on the default root account. Connect your PC to the network cable and it should pick up the internet connection just as easily. If not, click on the select IP and click ok to associate the IP with the system. Load Konqueror which is the default browser for the KDE shell(which is the desktop environment for linux; similar to what the explorer means to Windows) go and search for all those software which are available ready to use as slax modules here. You just need to download and click on the files to install them, which you would find installed in your start menu.

You can find a few screenshots here. Now come the gripes, I miss using the Wifi on the HP Pavillion laptop and no matter what, slax did not recognise my wifi card. Of course I was too lazy to pick up an NDISWrapper for my Wifi card’s windows drivers. That should make any windows driver work with Linux and the same goes for Slax.