distros with xfce

As I wrote previously, Xfce is the best choice as desktop environment for older PCs. Planete Beranger reviews several distros that comes with Xfce. It's rather thorough. Check this distro review.

igoogle's language switching proglem

I'm using iGoogle because I like the idea of having a personalized homepage with my e-mails, todo list, current weather information and aggregated news from different sources in it. But although I'm using a Windows Vista in English, iGoogle keeps on turning the language to Turkish (probably due to the regional settings of my Windows) and lots of its content are changing (which annoys me very much). So I'll present you the tip to change the language of your iGoogle into English: add "?hl=en" to http://www.google.com/ig and use http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en.

ready to kill some processes/applications in linux?

In Linux -as in all modern Operating Systems-, applications become unresponsive and you may want to kill the process pertaining to them. To do this, open the terminal and write this:

killall applicationName

If that does not work try

killall -9 applicationName

If you don't have an idea about the application name, you can take look at the current processes by writing

ps

then to kill the processes you want

kill processID

If that does not work then try

kill -9 processID

Another possibility is to use xkill (for applications with gui). The window of the application waiting to be killed should be visible. Then, open Terminal and type

 xkill 

and later choose the window of the application to be killed.

better touchpad performance in linux mint

After some time with Linux Mint I realized that I'm not fully satisfied with the behavior of my touchpad and thought about downloading a program which will allow me to tweak it. I downloaded gsynaptics thru synaptic package manager and edited xorg.conf for gsynaptics to work. First you should open xorg.conf with a text editor. There's a text editor called Mousepad that's bundled to Linux Mint. So all you have to do is to open Terminal. Then write "sudo mousepad /etc/X11/xorg.conf" and press enter. Then find the section below:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"

Add the line

Option     "SHMConfig"     "true"

as the last entry (just before EndSection). Save the conf file and reboot. Later, open the Terminal and write "gsynaptics" and configure your touchpad. Voila!

my quest for the greatest linux distro

Well, I can't tell that I found THE linux distro, but I tried Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and their performance can't match with Linux Mint (Xfce) on my three year old laptop. Linux Mint is Ubuntu-based, so we got the advantages of Ubuntu which's Debian-based and it is lightweight thanks to Xfce which is a desktop environment lighter than gnome (should I compare with Kde?). Furthermore, Linux Mint is user-friendly and I think that it is a good distro to start your linux adventure.