OK, I've finally lost all patience with SUSE Linux, after the fourth time it's attempted to corrupt my partition table. OK, I don't know it was SUSE, it could well be a hardware issue, but I think it's about time I switched. For my main desktop, I need a stable Linux distribution that doesn't delete everything on the hard drive.

So yesterday, I backed up everything on SUSE and installed Fedora. First impressions were good. Now I've used Fedora before on a server machine, but this time I wanted it in a desktop configuration. So I picked KDE (my favourite desktop environment) and after a bit of modification, I've got a nice-looking, stable system.

Of course, Fedora is renowned for cutting-edge technology, so I'm still downloading the 600 MB of updates that have been released. That does seem a bit of a large number of updates, but it does keep me using the latest open source stuff.

I've also got to install Flash Player, Java, RealPlayer, some decent fonts and some of my favourite KDE applications. Wish me luck in Fedora not breaking everything again.

Just got my hands on Office 2007 Beta 2 (yes, it's a public beta) and I've got some great screenshots for you all.

Also check out my post at Gizbuzz.

Enjoy playing around with the beta while it lasts, rumours say it will stop working in February 2007. Plenty of time to play around until then...

I'll be back with more.

I think the title is fairly self-explanatory here. The brilliant tech news blog I contribute to (read it, it really is great), Gizbuzz, has moved from its old, Blogger-powered home to a new, shiny, Wordpress-powered site.

So visit it, update your bookmarks and check out the new feed URL (you can right-click and use Copy Link Location to update your feed reader).

Now the question I hear you all ask: will I go Wordpress too? Wait and see...

As my friend Jamie put it:

Well that's it then. Done. Finished.

School, or at least school as we know it, going in every day for lessons has come to an end. Now, just the small matter of exams to attend to. Only two next week, but nevertheless, I can't guarantee frequency of posts (or even whether I'll be doing anything interesting).

But after the 22nd June, I will do some serious web development and do more messing with operating systems. Maybe getting a network connection in OpenSolaris or maybe getting Gentoo to sit there and compile itself for hours. Provided my hard drives don't die.

Wow, that's it. That really is it. No more lessons, not in school anyway. Any of my friends reading this, then whoo, I actually have readers. Anyone else, you probably know the feeling of leaving somewhere that you've been for a long time.

Here's to the future.

Here's something quite cool if you haven't discovered it yet, Google Notebook is a great service which allows you to, well, have a notebook to collect information online and then have it with you on any internet-enabled computer.

There's also a neat Firefox extension which you can just right-click and make a new note. Be warned however, apparently it doesn't work on the Mac OS version of Firefox (but I can't confirm this as I don't have a Mac).

It's still a beta project by Google at the moment, but it has a really nice Ajax-driven web interface so you can manipulate notes without ever having to reload the page.

The title says it all. Apart from exams, tomorrow will be my last day at school ever. Ever. As in, the final countdown. (No singing please.)

So exams will start next week before a bit of a break, so I'm really not sure about how much web stuff will get done or whatever.

Whatever happens, read the latest tech news - you know you want to, especially since I write some of that.

OK, so I'm still in the exam season, so updates won't be too frequent at the moment, but I'm just chiming in to say that SUSE 10.1 has been released and is really great.

If you can spare the hacking time, you can get Xgl up and running on SUSE 10.1, which is very sweet, but I haven't really had the time recently and my monitor isn't perfectly supported with the 3D drivers so I'm still working to resolve that.

And I would advise you to be very careful compiling source code with GCC on SUSE 10.1, as I came very close to losing all my data on my first hard drive again (so obviously it was GCC, not PHP).

Proper written exams are from next week, so don't be surprised if updates are a bit scarce for now, rest assured I will get back up to normal frequency as soon as possible. Thanks for reading, by the way.

Here's a great article for home PC users who are a bit interested in taking a look at Linux - Mandriva Linux 2006 for home users.

It's accessible to non-geeks, and if you do want to have a look at this whole Linux and free software thing, take a look.

Having said that, Mandriva isn't the only way to go. I'd recommend Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora for home users (probably in that order).

And, if you find it interesting, please do leave a comment.

I apologise for the lack of updates, but I'm really busy at the moment - the exam season is coming.

Until the exams are over, updates won't be very frequent, but I'm planning to blog about the release of SUSE Linux 10.1 on Thursday. It's going to be grrrr-r-eat.

See you soon.