The web interface is professional in appearance (along with the Community edition, there is an Enterprise version as well) and had many features built right in that were convenient to install. I decided to try it out. As part of this upgrade, I decided to use a gigabit (10/100/1000) network card for my LAN so what I could get better internal speed for copying files within my network. Along with that, I bought a gigabit switch as well. I chose the intel GT nic (many other gigabit cards were not compatible including a Dlink one I tried and a Linksys one that I researched and noticed would not work) and I bought a green friendly Dlink gigabit switch.

The install went fine however, I would have liked to see better instructions along the way. For someone who may not be familiar with setting up a home gateway/router, it could be very confusing. At times, I was unsure what the prompts were asking me and yet I was quite familiar with what I wanted to do. I could imagine some people giving up after not knowing what information to enter. Once done, I removed my previous box which had served me well and replaced it with something a bit more powerful but still not a powerhouse: P3 450 mhz, 256mb ram and a 12 gb HD. I could have used more ram but the motherboard was picky and would accept certain types. I tried several banks but was only successful getting 256 to work. I decided to give it a shot anyway although the recommended amount was 512 for a network of under 5 users. Instantly after plugging everything in and power cycling my cable modem, I was able to visit the Clark Connect internal web interface.

Some of the added features that I can now use are intrusion detection (snort) which IP Cop did have built in but my previous box could not realistically run as well as Windows File Sharing (samba), Web Proxy Filter, Content Filter, Web Server, Mail Server, FTP Server as well as a DHCP server and Name Server. I may not use all of these services, but it would be easy to try them as the built in software retrieval method will download the appropriate packages after simply checking off a corresponding box.

I am still in a testing phase with Clark Connect but so far it has been reliable, fast and easy to use. I like the web interface and the ability to configure things further should I desire. If you have a reasonably decent older box at home that you want to make use of, I would highly recommend trying out Clark Connect and if you want something that can run on older hardware like my P166, then IP Cop could be for you. On older machines, several services may not run well or be practical such as snort intrusion detection. Research the sites and consider replacing that standard big name hardware router if you are having issues with it. You may never use one again as in my case.

The Install – It couldn’t get any easier than the method DreamLinux uses. After booting the Live CD, there is one screen where you can decide on your partitions and whether or not you want to use a bootloader or not and adding a user of your choice. Although it might have been nice to have a bit more configuration settings such as package selection, I tend to find package selection with preconfigured desktop distros to be more of a hassle. The DreamLinux team did a nice job of keeping things simple.

Upgrading – DreamLinux includes the Synaptic package manager. It was very easy to upgrade, although there were a great deal of packages to update after my install. I have yet to figure out how to get my Nvidia drivers installed despite reading forum tips and google searches. The upgrades took a while to complete, but it wasn’t too painful with a decent internet connection…

Sound and Video Menu – I was pleasantly surprised to see some of the applications preinstalled. It is very rare one ever sees either Mplayer or Easytag included with a default install and DreamLinux had both. Also included is Avidemux and Brasero is listed for burning…

Also worth mentioning is the fact that Sound Juicer was included and had a preset for creating mp3 files from cd’s which had not been included in the past. It seems to be a change in Sound Juicer but it’s definitely nice to have an application provided that does not require any intervention to add mp3 profiles as previous versions of Sound Juicer demanded…

Making Things Easier – A few things that are included in DreamLinux that some users may appreciate in terms of getting things running right away include a Gmail check application, The Gimp remodeled with the GimpShop configuration to make it work more like photoshop…

Extras – DreamLinux includes some extra configuration tools aside from its own control center as well. Of note, there is a simple colored folders window that allows you to change your aesthetic preference. Also, there is a built in tool for getting wireless drivers working that may need to load the Windows original using Ndiswrapper. This should be included in any distro that is looking to attract more users to switch to Linux.

In addition, you can see throughout the screenshots that DreamLinux uses AWN (Avant Window Navigator) as the dock at the bottom. I remember using a Gdesklets dock many years ago that I eventually became frustrated with because it broke with every Gdesklets upgrade. I can’t comment at all on AWN but I’ve seen it around more often recently so hopefully it is more stable than I remember Gdesklets.

Issues – The only issue I really ran into was trying to get my Nvidia drivers installed. I eventually deferred to trying the binary driver from the Nvidia site. Even when I tried to get back to a tty, the screen just went multicolored and did not seem to allow it. I also attempted to boot into single user mode and was unsuccessful with that. While compiz is provided with DreamLinux, it isn’t of much use without providing an easy way to get drivers working fully.

Overall – DreamLinux may not be considered unique to some because it uses Debian packages as a backend and this seems to be an ever-growing prevalence among startup distros; however, there are some unique characteristics about DreamLinux that make it worth checking out. DreamLinux uses the testing branch of Debian so it is more up to date than a lot of other distros. This means that you get all of the new features of applications, but there is also a risk of instability that is inherited. DreamLinux also has some cosmetic differences such as sing the AWN and also its own configuration tools and choice of applications. For any Linux enthusiast I would say it is worth installing and testing. I probably wouldn’t recommend it for production machines at least not until I’ve done more testing. There is more documentation and extra screenshots on the DreamLinux documentation page.

]]> http://easylinuxguide.com/blog/2008/09/28/dreamlinux-3-review/feed/ 2 http://easylinuxguide.com/blog/2008/07/10/bestbuy-selling-ubuntu/ http://easylinuxguide.com/blog/2008/07/10/bestbuy-selling-ubuntu/#comments Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:36:39 +0000 easylinuxguide http://easylinuxguide.com/blog/?p=172 Yes this is all over the internet but I am going to post it anyway and make it even more viral. BestBuy is selling Ubuntu. I’ve read a lot of comments on this happening including the comments by the people who have purchased this OS from the store. There are many different angles to take on this and everyone from a new user to a Linux guru will have his own thoughts. I personally see it as a good thing. Anything to help spread the popularity of Ubuntu and Linux in general is a step in the right direction. For a mere $19.99, a prospective user gets a retail copy (which most of us know you can download or order directly from Canonical for free but this is a physical copy right in a major outlet store).

Hopefully this sells well and BestBuy continue to do this. Apparently 60 days of support and a light booklet come with this edition. More pics can be found here and here.

I am considering buying one if I can find one around here just to offer support.

With all of that said, I believe that the text area resizing feature was once again added in a later release. While sometimes I can be forgiving, there is a fundamental reason why I choose to use Linux that I really appreciate which is not being force fed any features or lack thereof. It is for this reason that I quickly adopted the fork of Pidgin called FunPidgin. Funpidgin developers advertise on their site that “Unlike the Pidgin developers, we believe the user should have the final say in what goes into the program.” To me, this is a huge selling point. Even though the Pidgin developers may have added in the said feature in the end after a ridiculously long standoff, the feeling that this disregard for the average user still lingers strongly enough for me that I will likely never return to the original especially as long as there is an alternative and one with several more features at that!

I have recently uploaded the necessary packages to switch to Carrier on the ELG Arch Linux repositories for those in the know. This is available on 32 bit and 64 bit repos. For those who just want to install it manually, you will now need two packages: Webkit and Carrier for 32 bit systems from this directory and Webkit and Carrier for 64 bit systems from this directory. These can be installed using pacman -U pkgname in the corresponding order. Special thanks to Connor Behan who is one of the developers for FunPidgin/Carrier and put the effort into making a pkgbuild for Arch Linux users.

I received some responses to my article and decided that I could look into the distros that I had listed under the CD/DVD method in more detail to see where they stood. This article is about Mandriva.

As a disclaimer, Mandrake/Mandriva and I historically did not get along well. Back in the days when the defacto easy distro race was between Red Hat and Mandrake, I always managed to get Red Hat to work very well, but I could never get Mandrake (then) to work properly. I knew people who swore by it, but it was never a good fit for me. I don’t have any bias toward Mandrake/Mandriva these days though as I don’t use it regularly on any of my boxes.

Due to my inactivity with Mandriva, I feel quite apt to evaluate it from a newbie perspective which is ideal for the type of experiment I am conducting – What it is like for a newbie to upgrade Mandriva to the latest version?

I have to also admit that I was given some tips via email on certain commands and such so I may appear a bit more familiar with things than my inexperience with Mandriva realistically would have elicited.

On to the test….

The first thing I did (upon recommendation) was download Mandriva 2008.0 Live CD for Gnome and the aim was upgrade it to Mandriva 2008.1. The point of this test is not to evaluate Mandriva as a distro, but I will make some comments along the way about my observations.

I managed to install Mandriva to my system and generally speaking the install went well. There is a very convenient Install button the desktop which was nice to see as that seems to be quite a friendly method. I was also impressed that not only did the live cd recognize that I had an Nvidia graphics card, but it also loaded the driver for me. So far, so good. I set up custom partitioning as I typically do. I recall feeling a bit off about the partitioning wizard though. Unfortunately I did not do any screenshots, but it seemed a bit too quick on formatting without double checking with the user on whether that was really what they wanted. A confirmation would help, I think. I can’t really dwell on it though since I didn’t take any screenshots of that scenario. The install went well otherwise and was done in about 5-10 mins on my AMD XP 3800 with 4GB memory. One thing that really bothered me was that I was forced to install a bootloader. I was given the option to install to the mbr or any other partition I wanted, but there was no option to bypass installing a bootloader. Maybe this was added to the 2008.1 installer? I added Mandriva to my bootloader on a different distro and was able to boot up fine.

Upon booting up for the first time I had to go through the paces of a first time boot configuration wizard. I have seen this before with other distros so it was no big deal. There was a small part about registering with Mandriva which made me feel like it was a bit commercial but there was an option to skip it so that was short lived.

When I arrived at the desktop, I was surprised to see some really odds things which I will list here (click on the text in each line for corresponding screenshots):

• Only 1GB of my 4GB of Memory was recognized (high memory support enabled in kernel by default?)
• Fonts were set at 60 DPI (I changed them to 96 and things were much better)
• Nvidia Driver was running but maybe my monitor detection didn’t work so well as my 22″ LCD had a max resolution of 1024×768. I ended up editing the xorg.conf file to get 1680×1050.
• The special Mandriva Gnome menu had some major redundancies here and here.

And onto the upgrade procedure. I didn’t see any pop up in the Gnome toolbar or anywhere in the menu indicating how to move to the next version. It was recommended to me to use the easyrpmi website to upgrade my version. I proceeded to (text is linked to screenshots again):

(keep in mind that I needed to use the “old” easyurpmi website since I was using 2008.0 or older)

• Pick the version of Mandriva I was using
• Select the Mirrors and Repositories I wanted
• Copy and Paste the output provided by the website into a root terminal

I was already feeling that this was quite the laborious process compared to other methods, but I continued on, undaunted and determined to give a fair evaluation.

I opened a terminal and became the almighty root user and copied the information as instructed. It went through some terminal lines and then stopped after only updating 2 additional packages – one of which was urpmi. I decided that I was going to try the same command again. This time it wanted to update 216 packages – now we’re getting somewhere. I let all of the packages update and rebooted for good measure and was disappointed when I didn’t see any evidence of being at the aim of 2008.1. So, I made sure my updates were completely done but that didn’t make any difference:

• My kernel was old
• My Firefox version was old
• My Gnome version was old
• My Nvidia driver was outdated
• My release was still at 2008.0

Easily, I am no expert at Mandriva, but I have been using Linux for several years (although anyone who reads this article only would think I’m a newbie for sure), however; the idea for this test was for a new user to the distro to be able to upgrade to the next version. I wasn’t able to do it so that doesn’t bode well for total neophtyes in my opinion. I know that I could have missed some steps or done some things wrong, there is no doubt about that, however; the point is that I should be able to do this upgrade notwithstanding or at least that was my hope. Any distro with rolling release cycles (although perhaps more difficult to set up, will automatically update you to the next version and while they may not do so in a 100% problem fashion all the time, I find them generally very stable). Ubuntu, for example, that has Update Manager which is a built in upgrade system and alerts you to moving to the next available version (not just package updates).

Mandriva could really use a step up in this department if it wants to capture more new users, but of course, that all depends on the intentions of the powers that be at Mandriva. If that is not the goal, then so be it, but it would be a great feature to add nonetheless.

The good news is that Mandriva is almost there. They have a graphical update tool that integrates nicely into the Gnome toolbar (green circular checkmark beside the volume speaker icon) and also some decent output of what is available for updating. The part that is missing is how to get to the next version.

I sincerely hope this is something that gets added to the Mandriva distribution as it will make it more accessible to more users.

There are now separate buttons for settings, plugins and users which appear on each page in the top right which makes them easier to reach.

The upgrade process was quite easy as usual and went off with no hitches. If you are a Wordpress user and haven’t upgraded yet, then this might be the one to try. Obviously you want to back up all of your files first as per usual, but once you upgrade, you probably won’t want to go back.

Great work by the Wordpress team in making it the defacto blogging software in my opinion.

I came across this really cool theme with icons used in a version of Linux called Ubuntu Studio. I didn’t really care much for their default background and splash screen, but their theming inside the DE was very nice. The screenshot above illustrates the gray with blue mix which also is used in the drop down menus. I find this easy on the eyes aesthetically but also literally. I’ve applied this to the Ubuntu install I have as well as other distributions I use. The packages can be found on the universe/multiverse repositories of Ubuntu so it is very simple to install. For anyone using a different distribution, you can simply use the .deb file and extract it and look for the icons and theme directories and then copy them into your respective local user hidden directories. To make this easy, I’ve uploaded a compressed file containing only the icons and theme directories which can be found here Once downloaded you would need to copy the contents of each directory into the matching hidden directories in your /home/user/ if that’s where you want them. For example:

(extract the directories first and open a terminal in the same directory)

cp -R icons/*  /home/username/.icons/

cp -R themes/* /home/username/.themes/

(or you can just use GUI copy and paste)

Once this is done you should be able to choose this theme by going to System > Preferences > Appearance and looking for the theme in there.

When finished, you will have a very nice DE to use as seen in the screenshot above!

I will define Distro Ditching as the abandonment of one’s choice of distro on a main machine or computer that is used regularly (not a test box) where the switching may be considered either chronic or due to seemingly minor reasons.

So, now that I’ve qualified the expression, let me give some more information. First, I would never criticize someone for trying out a new operating system as this has many possible benefits (of course depending on the user). These benefits include learning new processes and understanding a different system as well as being able to troubleshoot in a variety of operating systems. This can really help one get a better understanding of how computers work under the hood on both a software and hardware level.  Also, the exposure to many variances gives someone more of an opportunity to grasp a preference for a specific style of OS.

What are some examples of Distro Ditching? I specifically called it Distro Ditching because of the nature or conditions under which the change takes place. There have been circumstances for various Linux users where they have found through trying a different distro that one satisfies their needs more than another. I experienced this myself several years ago while trying out a plethora of distros. I can remember changing from SuSE to Gentoo to Red Hat and at the onset of Fedora, I switched to Arch. None of these choices were on a whim or without much thought even though I was a new user. Each suited my needs better each time I changed. The testament to that is my use of Arch Linux as my primary distro on several machines for around 3 years now.

It seemed to me, that it was normal to go through the ritual of learning this different OS and facing the unsuspected belittling on certain nasty IRC chats and forum members and if you survived such rite of passage, you came out on the other side only the wiser. There appeared to be a sense of branding in this experience that was worthwhile.

Lately, this rite of passage appears to be lost. I am not saying that people do not encounter struggles with learning a new OS, only that perhaps the overall reaction may be different. People are too fast to give up and throw in the towel. This may mean switching back to Windows or Mac or it could mean wiping off that hard drive only to try a different version of Linux that may or may not magically satisfy all computer needs.

Where does this all or nothing mentality come from? It could be a derivative of the distros getting more automated so users have come to expect the transition to require less adjustment. This could be taken as a compliment I suppose. Perhaps it is a perpetual motion machine sharing the option to say uncle early as normalcy. Of course the risk in this is cheating themselves of the learning experience. There was a time (and it is still my opinion) that any Linux user after a short period of time needs to learn to compile his own kernel as this is a fundamental aspect of the inherent value of using Linux.

Fast food distro society? Are people less patient in the Linux world overall lately? While strides have been taken to make processes (installations, adding packages, configurations etc) easier, it doesn’t mean that the value of learning what is underneath is gone. Typically, it is human nature to only put as much energy as is required into a task.

So what? The risk is that anyone who can’t be bothered to learn what’s under the hood will cheat themselves of the ability to troubleshoot their choice of OS. Linux will give you logical error messages most times that can point you in the right direction of providing a fix should it arise, unlike other OS’s that give useless error messages, blue colorized screens that are not usable or useful or just do nothing at all in return except not provide the requested result.

Old school? Yeah, I can admit I am a bit old school, although I began using Linux only about 4 or 5 years ago. I consider the learning experience, while frustrating at times, the most valuable experience in terms of computers that one could endure.

The journey or the destination? Those fast food OS types get to experience plenty of destinations due to the vast array of Linux flavors. The unfortunate part is because of the tendency to participate in Distro Ditching, the destination is often short-lived and under appreciated.

[ELG64]

Server = http://easylinuxguide.com/downloads/archpkgs/ELG64

I have tested this out on my own 64 bit install and it works fine. This is also indexed so you can download just one or two packages manually if you want as well. I look forward to being able to do other things with our new host. Hopefully this is just the beginning.

Why did I change hosts? My former host was having issues with stability and decided to discontinue the service. This came right out of the blue and it was not very well timed, but these things tend to happen in this manner.

What research did I do? I looked up many websites where there were ratings and such and asked lots of friends and some people I didn’t know too well for their opinions. I didn’t have much time, so I tried to make the most of it and take in as much information as possible. I found that there was quite a range of pricing for hosting.

One alternative was to use a dedicated server which runs about $100 monthly. This is a really nice solution, but the drawback other than price is diskspace. If a company dedicates and entire box to you, they are likely not going to put a large hard drive in it. There are upgrades available but they are very costly, upping your monthly costs by $20-$100 depending on the amount of space you want. Also, ram upgrades are very expensive too and these are monthly charges.

Probably the most popular hosts for regular end users are shared. The least expensive and most popular of these boast very large disk space up to 350G and a monthly transfer rate of 3500GB. This is an incredible amount of space that most people will never use. I actually called 3 places: Bluehost, Host Monster and Lunar Pages. The result of calling Lunar Pages are still somewhat unknown because I couldn’t really understand the sales agent. I discovered that Bluehost and Host Monster were owned by the same company. The funny thing was that I even got the same guy on the phone when I called the second one.

I first called Bluehost and spoke to “Joel” in sales. Maybe because I work in sales and customer service and used to supervise at a call center, I have higher standards but talking to Joel was a great experience in helping me decide not to go with Bluehost. He seemed completely disinterested in getting my business and if I wasn’t speaking, there was totally dead air. I was shocked that this kind of person was in “sales”. When he answered the phone when I called Host Monster , I did the mature thing and hung up. Although I was initially excited at the amount of space and decent pricing of these companies, I was quickly disappointed and crossed them off my list of prospective new hosts.

One of the things I had liked about my previous host was that it was a smaller business and if I needed anything, I could talk directly to him. He had been quite helpful in getting things up and running for me. I really thought a lot about which host to choose and examined all of the numbers closely.

I had viewed the hosting on Godaddy’s site not very long ago and I found that the pricing was a bit high considering the amount of bandwidth and space they allotted. I decided to give a quick visit again. This time I noticed that they had vastly increased the space for their top 2 tier accounts of the 3. The most basic – Economy offered 5GB space with 250GB monthly transfer usage for $3.99 which the next step at Deluxe offered 100GB space with 1,000GB transfer space for $6.99. The Premium offered 500GB space and 2,000GB transfer for $14.99. Previously I had been using around 1.2B of space with around 10-15GB of monthly transfer so the Economy package probably would have worked, but I ended up deciding on the Deluxe because knowing that I have the extra space, I will think of ways to use more I’m sure.

How was the setup? I processed the account online and had it all set up in terms of hosting basics the same night. I was able to get ftp access fairly quickly. I uploaded all of my files overnight and then returned to the work in the morning. I ended up getting everything done the same day. The tedious part was creating the sql databases again on the server and then importing the ones from the previous site. Godaddy makes this fairly easy though with their intuitive tools. Once this was done, I had to edit my corresponding text files that contained the proper information for the server and such and I was done.

Why Godaddy? Apart from them improving their bandwidth allotment, I have used them for my domains for several years and never had an issue. I’ve never heard anyone complain about them. I found that some of the other companies would advertise deals on their front page and then once you got in deeper, they would say this only applies to account sign ups for 1 year. Godaddy is monthly but there are options to purchase longer plans with discounts. With my domain and hosting both with the same company, I can have everything on one bill as well.

Performance? It’s still early, but I find Godaddy every bit as fast as my last host which is around 600-750 kb/s for downloading. The only downside is that I lost some of the more recent posts on the forum, but that had nothing to do with the host.

It wasn’t my favorite way to spend a weekend as I really set my free time at a premium because I am usually so exhausted during the week from working long hours. I am glad that it’s done and I don’t think Godaddy is going anywhere anytime soon so the idea of switching hosts likely won’t come up for a long time.

The new version includes several new qualities including:

• Blu-ray and HD DVD data recording support
• Upgrade to GTK 2.0
• Improved graphical user interface similar to the look and feel of the current Nero Burning ROM 7 edition
• Unicode support in all languages currently supported by Nero 7 Premium Reloaded

I typically use Gnomebaker, but it’s good to have options. NeroLinux 3 is a step in the right direction. The software has evolved nicely.

Adjusting packages for the architecture is only one change recently. Gnome and XFCE4 were moved from /opt into /usr which means that any packages relating to these Desktop Environments will need to be rebuilt to reflect the new locations. The /opt directory may become a thing of the past for ArchLinux but for now, both will work. I would think that a new ISO would be released fairly soon, accommodating these changes.
If anyone has any issues with the repository, please visit the IRC Channel or send me an email and I will look into it.

On a side note, I would like to thank those programmers and developers that write clean code and make package building easy for people like me, whether this is incidental or not, it is appreciated. Also, when download locations or the way a package is built gets changed frequently, it makes it not only more difficult and tedious to build your application but some people may even consider it too much of a bother and not even build it anymore. Take it however you like, but if you want your hard work on an application to be widely used please take the following into consideration:

• Try to use a fairly standard way of building your package such as make/make install or setup.py
• Unless you are switching to a better way to build your code, don’t change the build style
• Pick a naming scheme that is typical for building – using all lowercase, no spaces or odd symbols
• Although it is somewhat out of your control, try to keep your application on the same server

Thanks to all of those people who develop such amazing free applications for all of us to use. The GPL is a fantastic thing but it wouldn’t do much without all of those people (almost all unpaid and still have to work a full time job otherwise) who allow everyone the benefit of using such well developed software!

The other major change was the relocating of the sata and pata drivers. Serial ata will no longer be located under low level scsi drivers, but instead under its own section. This was an inevitability due to sata catching on and being used more frequently. It’s nice to see some good changes in this release. Excellent work kernel devs!

Hope everyone likes the new colors and layout!

Linux Updates — My distro of choice – Arch Linux has had two interesting stories this past week. The modularization of Xorg was moved from testing repos to the main repos. In other words – X (what is responsible for allowing you to have a graphical desktop as opposed to text based only) has been split into several pieces instead of just one file. There are two distinct advantages for this: one is that it allows you to install only the files that you absolutely need which streamlines your system by saving diskspace and giving you a more pure package database. The second is that it allows developers to work on individualized packages in terms of adding features or enhancing them without affecting one entire package.

The second Arch story was the server drive. Judd (creator of Arch) issued a plea to the public of Arch users to help out financially so that Arch could have a new server since the previous one was being overloaded and therefore the main Arch site was going down at times. The response was unbelievable! If you check the main site: archlinux.org you will see a progress meter that is insanely past its original goal. What will be done with all this extra money? Well, Judd has said Arch will be able to get an even better server than originally expected and the use of the other money is undecided, but it could be saved for the next investment needed. I don’t recall Judd ever asking for money from the community and this is certainly a worthwhile cause. After all, it’s easy to give to a cause when you are not *expected* or *forced* to give money as Linux competitors require. I was impressed and proud to see the amount of support that poured in not only financially but also through emails and such. What a great community that is dedicated to ensuring the future of Arch Linux!

New Music – Due to not yet having a cd player in my car that reads mp3’s, I am stuck with burning new audio cd’s once in a while. My latest idea is to make an extremely heavy CD containing all fairly new metalhead songs. I started to make a list, but about 20 songs are needed to fill a CD and without being able to dedicate the kind of time to listening to music that I would like, I had a list of about 7 songs. Then I happened to see a video on MuchLoud called “Undying” by Demon Hunter which was instantly a new fave. I since have acquired almost every Demon Hunter song available and I am having a great deal of difficulty finding one that I want to discard from my new CD project. For anyone into heavier music, I would strongly recommend these guys. I would compare them musically a bit to Atreyu or even Killswitch engage but with some heavier parts. Their newest release called “Triptych” would be where to start if you’ve never heard any Demon Hunter before. Some of their earlier material is amazing too, but the newer CD is a bit more polished and easier to get into for the average person. I may have a few new CD’s to make now due to this new discovery.

Originally, I had some Ill Nino, Killswitch Engage, Six Feet Under and Demon Hunter planned, but I am looking at doing one Demon Hunter CD separately and then an additional one for the other tracks.

Azureus and Bittorrent woes continue. It’s still killing my network, i’ve adjusted numerous settings and nothing appears to be working. I used to pull in files at over 400K and now i’m stuck around 50 on good files. I’ve been hearing the same from other users – is this the downfall of torrents?