May 08 Issue of CPU: 10 Linux Distro Roundup, SPAMfighter, TotalMedia Extreme, and ClipX

The May 2008 issue of CPU Magazine is out, and it reflects a very busy month for me.

Page 77 has a 5-page round-up of 10 popular Linux distributions, which was a blast to write. I had most of my test machines up and running at the same time for a few weeks to use them all side by side, with all of them also running under VMWare Workstation concurrently too. Ubuntu 8.04 comes out on top as the best general-purpose Linux, but I'm quick to point out that most distros are geared for a certain type of user, and if you are that type of user, you'll probably find that distro best suited for you. While I prefer Gnome to KDE for a graphical desktop, I wish Ubuntu and Fedora would take some steps to simplify the occasionally random and sometimes cluttered GUI choices Gnome makes. I am very impressed with OpenSUSE's re-swizzling of the standard Gnome menus and GUI, and I wish Ubuntu would do the same. Favorite line: "...PCLinuxOS looks and feels like a slightly older version of Ubuntu slapped about the head and neck with a Simplicity Stick."

Two of my reivews are on Page 82. SPAMfighter is an innovative anti-spam plugin for Outlook and Outlook Express that uses the power of millions of other SPAMfighter users to identifiy spam far better than any Bayesian filter, but the free version drops advertising turds on your outgoing email, and $29 a year for the turd-free commercial version seems a tad overpriced to me unless you're really buried under spam. TotalMedia Extreme is a do-it-all DVD burner software suite that handles Blu-Ray and HD DVDs too. Very nice.

I also looked at Tritton Technologies' SEE-2 Xtreme on Page 33, which the good people of Tritton Technologies were nice enough to loan me a pre-production sample of. It basically gives you a DVI connection for an LCD monitor from any USB 2.0 port (they also sell a VGA version), allowing you to add up to 8 monitors. The video is plenty fast enough for web browsing and YouTube videos, but gaming looks rather poor.

Finally, Page 75 has my monthly Beta Software column, where I cover a real gem called ClipX. ClipX is the kind of utility I just can't live without: it keeps track of everything I copy into the Windows Clipboard, and allows me to Paste something back from the last 20 things I Copied by pressing Control-Alt-V instead of the typical Control-V. A menu pops up and shows all my clipboard items, including graphics. The beta is stable, the software free, and it takes less than 500k of RAM. Highly recommended.