I just discovered Xara Xtreme today and it looks like an amazing tool. It is a vector drawing program (as apposed to Photoshop, Gimp, etc, where are raster or bitmap based) but yet has some really cool features. If you have the time, check out their video demos. I’ve watched their demos and I was really stunned at the tools that are offered.

In addition to being faster than any of its competitors, Xara is cheaper too! It is just $79 which is a steal when compared to Adobe’s products.

The best part? It has an Open Source (free) Linux version which I’m trying out right now. Now that Xara is OSS (Open Source Software), they are talking with the developers at Inkscape (the current leader in vector graphics for Linux) to share ideas and try to make a killer graphics program for Linux.

I’ve been really attracted to Inkscape to use for web development, but I stuck with The GIMP because of some core features that I needed (easy shadows, fading, etc) that were hard to do in Inkscape. However, it looks like Xara can do all that and more

Information about Xara:

• Windows version: http://www.xara.com
• Linux and OSX version: http://www.xaraxtreme.org

Have you ever wondered what operating system you are most like?

LOL, I didn’t think so. However, there is a fun quiz you can take that will (attempt to) match your personality with an operating system. Take the quiz and post what operating system you are. My quiz result was slackware linux

I especially liked the part: “…you are often mistaken as insane”

The quiz can be found on BBspot

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which is the best distro of them all?

My hosting provider recently upgraded everyone’s month bandwidth limit to 2 Terabytes. I wasn’t sure what to do with all this extra bandwidth, so I decided be help mirror some popular but under-mirrored Linux distributions. Currently I am hosting 4 different “flavors” of Linux:

These can all be downloaded at http://www.linuxlefty.com/projects/mirrors

Last month, my bandwidth usage was 82 Meg. However, yesterday alone I used up 100 Gigs of bandwidth. Hopefully this will take a little load off of the projects’ main servers

I’ve used Ubuntu Linux for a number of years and have found it to be an excellent distro of Linux. It is by far one of the most popular (if not the most popular) version of Linux around and has a huge user base.

However, I’ve been looking into trying a different distro for some time now. I enjoy trying out different distros to see what is available in the Linux community. I’ve tried almost 15 different distros, covering every major one out there ( other than Arch and Slackware ). I came across PCLinuxOS last week and was hoping to install it over spring break.

However, for some reason my root partition ( I did a cold reboot when the system hung doing a hard-drive intensive operation ) got corrupted and I needed to reinstall my OS. I really didn’t want to take the time to reinstall, but this is my only system and I need it for school.

So, I installed PCLinuxOS and I was very impressed. All my hardware worked out of the box (even 3D acceleration with aiglx). I was very impressed! The system is very responsive and snappy. I haven’t used it for long, but I think PCLinuxOS is definitely a distro to check into!

This week I came across two funny “How to’s”.

The first was a guide on how to successfully install Windows Vista. The person who made the how-to spent over 12 hours fighting with the installer. He downloaded countless incompatible drivers and encountered numerous hardware conflict issues. He finally figured out how to install Vista and wrote the following tutorial on it:

In addition, I came across A Guide to Grading. It’s a good read and a good laugh. I’ve had some teachers that must grade like this