Today we're looking at another more specialized distribution spin called grml that apparently has its origins in Austria, not that it mattered much when technology allows us to work pretty much from anywhere. Is it grml because those mountain folks up in the Alps are always grumbling and grumpy, or is it that life as a sysadmin is turning people into muttering zombies?

Semplice Linux is a very young project that has only recently made its debut on Distrowatch with Release Candidate 1 for their upcoming 2.0 code-named 'Emily' getting listed. This means there must be a support structure in place, a website, bug tracker, documentation and user forum.

Hello guys. It's been another long year, although it went really quick. Seems contradictory, but with everything going on in the world and in my private life it seems both long and short.
In the Linux and free software world both the Unity desktop and GNOME Shell had their first public releases that sparked plenty of controversy and set the scene for the year.

Vinux is a specialist distribution remastered from a Ubuntu base and optimized specifically with visually impaired users in mind. Some others also come with a screen reader and other accessibility options by default, for example in the login screen, but these are never turned on from the start and voice recognition software is rarely if ever present.

Chances are you already know this if you're into Slackware based live distributions that are using SquashFS for an easy to manage modular architecture. Development has picked up again, and on Tomas M's blog there is also a nice video of what's called a Slax 7 technology preview. Looks like Porteus, the project spawned by the fan community as Slax-Remix, will soon not be the only choice.

Around two weeks ago, on 28th November, VectorLinux 7.0 was finally released after two years of work, or, as the developers put it in the release announcement, "nearly two years of blood, sweat and tears". We don't want to be disrespectful then. You can get a brief overview of features for the standard edition here and here. I've previously looked at RC2 in a longer review over on Muktware, so this is more meant as an addendum.

It's been a long time coming. In October last year I wrote a post wondering what browser to switch to or whether to stick with Mozilla's Firefox. And that was even before the current madness, upping version numbers all the time with little if any perceivable benefit to the end user. The stability problems were easily overcome, just by re-enabling those little helpers called hosts file, Adblock and Noscript. It's a testimony though to how bug-ridden websites are that all those are needed just for a

I was going to write about how I finally dumped Firefox for Opera, but Firefox 8 does not seem too bad and for the first time appears a bit nippier at start up. Like Dedoimedo has found, this does not look like a completely arbitrary decision to pump up the version number but actually has some small benefits, so I'm going to give Firefox another chance before it is relegated.