Welcome to Trisquel GNU/Linux! I've been wanting to write this for a long time, because trying this distribution really feels inviting. Trisquel GNU/Linux is as you can see by the naming convention one of the few distributions fully endorsed by the Free Software Foundation, and in return they're doing a lot to promote the FSF and their principles on their website. If you're yawning already, hold steady and read on, because Trisquel looks sharp and has something to offer.

Once upon a time the daddy of this distribution, Klaus Knopper, started a trend with his pioneering Knoppix live CD as rescue and repair tool. It was known for incorporating extensive hardware detection that required minimal to no configuration at boot to arrive at a fully working desktop.

In other news another favorite of mine, at least in the rpm universe, has released an Alpha build of what will be Unity Linux 2011. I reviewed Unity Linux last year on this blog and images were 276MB and 277 MB per architecture, and the subsequent update 2010.2 brought it to well over 300 MB. This time the size is only a 100 odd megabyte and the team is making some significant changes.

Keeping up the schedule of a new release roughly every six months, a new and updated Archbang live/install image with the 3.0 kernel is out, 2011.09. Read the release announcement and see a screenshot here. As always it is available for i686 and x86_64 architectures. The images are a handy download size of 526 MB and 531 MB respectively. If you already have it installed there's no need to get this as of course Arch is rolling, but good for if you want to update a copy on your USB stick for newer hardware.

Being a Linux Magazine subscriber this is actually an old hat as I had the fortune of reading the article when it came out. Nevertheless it's still an extremely neat trick to be able to send automatic status updates, log output and system messages to a microblogging service from where you can monitor it anywhere in the world on an infinite number of device, on smart phones, via rss feeds etc.