We want to continue the tradition this year but instead of just writing to software companies that we think might fit we would like to do it different this year. We are asking you to leave a comment with software that you would like to see in the giveaway. We will take your suggestions and contact the companies that produce these software program to see if they are willing to participate in the giveaway.

We cannot guarantee that the software companies that you mention will donate some of their products but we will do our best to convince them that it’s a win-win situation for all sides. Leave a comment below if you would like to see a software program or developer included.

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They would like to analyze 100 surveys and I thought a good way to do this is to create a post asking for your help. The survey takes between 5 to 10 minutes to complete and is completely anonymous. You do not have to provide an email address or your name in the survey. You might do it however as there will be a drawing in the end awarding one of the participants a $100 Visa gift certificate that is valid worldwide.

I would also like to add five Ghacks T-shirts to users who contribute in the survey. Just leave a comment telling me that you did and you enter in the drawing for those shirts. You can click the link below to be taken to the survey. I understand that some of you have strong objections against surveys. That’s totally legit as well. Thanks for taking the time to read this plea for help and thanks again if you have decided to participate in the survey.

Survey Link

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I just want everyone to know that in advance so that no one thinks I’m dead or decided to stop updating the website. The other authors will continue with their usual schedule. If you have any tips or ideas for the trip let me know. I already got some great advice from Dotan for which I will be forever grateful.

I will go on at least two additional trips this year and plan to do about six in the coming years to find some time to relax and see the places that I always wanted to visit. I’m off now packing my suitcase and doing some final preparations for my departure tomorrow morning.

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That’s highly problematic and reduced the experience of many visitors that discovered the site for the first time. Ghacks will be up and running on the new server in less than eight hours if everything works out as planned. You will then be able to enjoy a better connection to the web server that will serve the website faster to your local computer system. It can take between 24-48 hours before all DNS servers have propagated the changes and are routing users to the new server and not the old one.

The worst case scenario is that something goes terribly wrong during migration which could mean a short, medium or long outage or even a transfer back to the old dedicated server for the time being until the problems have been sorted out.

There will be no more posts until the migration is completed. Comments that are posted today might not be taken over to the new website as well. If you want to contact me use the contact form on the top. Thanks for your patience and lets hope for the best!

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A lot of research should go into such a decision and that’s what I did. One tip that I would like to pass on is to take a look at the dedicated server forum over at Webhostingtalk. Web hosting companies post special offers in that forum that will give you benefits such as double bandwidth, server memory or discounts on the price.

My business partner and I moved our Windows 7 website recently from a hosting company in the UK to Wiredtree in the US using one of the discounts found in the forum to get a great managed server for a good price and absolute reliable and fast support.

I decided to do the same and order a managed server at Wiredtree. Here is what I got for the yearly price of $2315.8 (second year will be $199 less due to setup costs which would reduce the price of the server by $25 per month for its lifetime which means it pays of after eight months). I got a deal with double server memory, bandwidth and a discount of $70.

Intel Core i7
12GB DDR3
Primary Disk:250GB 7.2k RPM SATAII 16MB Cache

Plan is to add another server with a faster hard drive (raid I suppose) that will run the database eventually. The server is currently setup by the Wiredtree support team who will also handle the migration of the website. It could mean some downtime in the next days but the website will definitely benefit from the new server with speed improvements.

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We figured that a gadget and hardware website would fit perfectly in our portfolio, as we love to write about things that we love and are passionate about. Hah, that sounds a little bit stupid. Still, if you want to keep the motivation to write for a website after a month or year you need to be passionate about the niche. Or, you need to be one of those professional writers who can write about everything without problems.

Otaku Gadgets is on the other hand an experiment as we never operated a blog where the contributions were mostly coming from writers that we hired. We made sure to hire professional writers who are also passionate about the things that they write about.

The design of the site and pretty much everything is temporary for now. We have the intention to change to a custom design in the future but this will be fine for now. I would be very happy if you would pay a visit to the site. You can subscribe to the RSS feed if you like and I encourage you to voice your opinion on the site. Is there something that you love, like, do not like, hate? Keep in mind that it is a work in progress.

It is funny how some things turn out. I met Everton back in 2005 when we created our first websites and we have become good friends over time. It is very likely that this is not the our last project.

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Rarst did all the work on the project with me and Samer doing a little bit of beta testing. It’s his project that we fully support. You can take a look a the appnews website to see how it looks and subscribe to the various update notification options.

Rarst made an announcement post where he is going into a little bit more detail on the technicalities. The service is basically a mashup of Rss, Dropbox, FeedBurner and SimplePie.

Here are the direct access links:

Home: http://appnews.net/
Feed: http://feeds.appnews.net/appnews
Email subscription: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=appnews&loc=en_US
Twitter: http://twitter.com/appnews
Search engine: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=014146561317267595789:1f-ivlvlh7y

Feel free to leave comments here or at Rarst’s blog. Suspect that Samer will introduce the service on his blog as well soon. We would also like it very much if you would blog about it, send it to your friends, comment about it on other sites or add it to social media sites that you are a member of. We think that this service is something special. And there is of course growth potential to add additional review sites to the mix.

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We would like to ask you to comment on the new theme and especially notify us if you encounter problems of any kind including page load errors, display errors and any other kind of error that is dampening your user experience. And we would of course like to listen to your opinion about the new theme.

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Lets begin with some basic information about browsers and operating system. More than 50% of all Ghacks visitors are using the Firefox web browser followed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with 35%, Google Chrome with 4%, Safari with 4% and Opera with close to 4%. The situation is different operating system wise. Roughly 90% of all users that come to Ghacks use a Windows operating system, hence the major concentration on that operating system. Apple Macintosh users make up almost 6% of all visits while Linux users are close to 3.5%.

If you look at some of the more technical statistics available you notice more diversity in the numbers. While 1024×768 is still the major screen resolution with almost 24%, 1280×800 with almost 20%, 1280×1024 with 16%, 1680×1050 and 1440×900 with 10% each are all above the 10% value and worth considering. There are still about 2% of all users that access with a screen resolution of 800×600.

And yes, there are some pretty strange resolutions out there like 2048×768, 3840×1024, 832×624, 1050×1400 or 1296×1304.

Where are all the visitors coming from? A majority of 40% comes from the United States followed by the United Kingdom with almost 9%, Canada with 5%, India and Australia with 3% and Germany with almost 3%.

The majority of users has a broadband connection at his disposal although there is a large 30% unknown factor in the stats. DSL, Cable and T1 users make up almost 60% of all connections to Ghacks while dialups are at about 2%.

That sums it up for now. Any other information that you would like to take a look at? Let me know and I might share it with everyone.

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The design should lay more emphasize on the various categories and provide RSS feeds for single categories or tags so that users could pick what they want to read. Before I give the start signal for the redesign I would like to ask you about your opinion once again. Not so much if the site should be redesigned but about what you would like to see when the new design goes online. Just add anything that you might want to see. Please keep in mind that the ads have to be there as this is how I make my living.

So, let me know about colors, new features and functions, design choices, fonts and everything else that comes to your mind. I cannot promise that it is possible to add everything there is a very good chance that the popular suggestions will be added to the site.

This is also a nice idea to link to example designs of sites that you like so that we can take a look at them. Fire away!

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I still have not come to a decision and I thought it would probably be best to ask the ones that are affected by the decision (that would be you). Two blogs would make it easier to concentrate topics for a certain user base with the option to visit both if both types of content would be interesting to you.

The main question is whether the content should be separated and if that is the opinion of the majority which content should be moved to another blog.

My initial thoughts were to move the web development topics to a new blog and also some of the advanced Linux topics. The new blog would be some sort of uberGhacks for advanced users.

Please vote and let us know which content should be moved to a separate blog if you select Yes.

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I would especially like to say thanks to the writers here at Ghacks who contribute to the success with their articles. They add to the diversity of articles here at Ghacks. The addition of Jack who is writing regularly about Linux is another step in the right direction and we will continue with all writers into 2009.

All new year resolutions related to Ghacks came true. I managed to raise the RSS subscriber count to more than 10000, finally got more than 1 million unique visitors per month and made some great progress earning wise. Goals motivate and although I would be be happy to stay on this level throughout the year I want to raise the bar and set a motivating goal this time.

I’d like to raise the RSS subscribers count to 20000 subscribers. I’d also like to raise the unique visitors per month from 1 million to 2 million. That’s a pretty tough goal but it motivates me enough to keep going.

My last wish is that you will continue to post comments on my blog and that you will continue to tell your friends, coworkers and relatives about my site. I hope you will continue to enjoy coming to my website as much as you enjoyed it in 2008.

Have a nice, rewarding and peaceful 2009.

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The main question is: How did you like it? We would like to hear your opinion to think about possible changes that we could make in next year’s giveaway. Maybe you would like to see more Linux or Mac programs in the mix, maybe hardware or something else that we did not think about. Whatever it is, let us know and we surely will do our best to please as many users as possible.

One element that worked out quite well was to ask you about the software that you would like to see in the Giveaway. We managed to convince most companies to donate some licenses of those programs and we intend to ask you again in next year what you would like to see.

Now it is your turn to let us know what you think about it. Oh, and merry Christmas to anyone.

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Usage is pretty simple. The basic rule is to simply append /feed/ to the url to access the RSS feed of the category, tag or author. To give you an example. Jack started posting about Linux today at Ghacks. If you wanted to subscribe to his Linux articles you could do it the following ways:

Subscribe to the Linux category, tag or the author.

This method is not unique to Ghacks. It is the native way how Wordpress handles feeds. You can use it on any standalone Wordpress blog as long as they are not catching all feed requests and sending them to a feed processor like Feedburner. (I disabled the feed fetcher plugin to make the custom feeds work)

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Choose the right distribution.

Let me begin at the begining, or at least the best starting point. The Linux operating system is built with a number pieces. The most underlying piece is the kernel – that is the heart of Linux. On top of the kernel rests a ton of libraries, drivers, and system applications. Overlaying that is user-space console applications. The next layer is the X Windows system. X Windows is the piece that gives Linux a graphical environment. The final layer is the desktop.

Linux is separated into distributions. A distribution is, for all intents and purposes, a “brand” of Linux. There are many distributions: Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat, Mandriva, PC/OS, gOS, SuSE, etc (hundreds of them in fact). Each distribution is based on a different base. There are five main bases: Debian, Slackware, BSD, RPM, and Gentoo. Each “base” is formed around a package-manager (a package manager is a system for installing, removing, and managing the software that is on the system.)

How a distribution puts together its version of Linux defines their audience. Some distributions are better suited for new users. These are:

• Ubuntu
• PCLinuxOS
• Mandriva
• Linspire

Some distributions are better suited for mid-level experience users:

• SuSE
• gOS
• Fedora
• Red Hat

And some distributions are better suited for advanced users:

• FreeBSD
• Debian
• Gentoo

NOTE: As gHacks user MrBuddha has already pointed out, BSD is not actually a Linux distribution but a variant of the BSD operating system. I do generally lump BSD in with Linux because they are both UNIX-derived operating systems and share a number of similarities.The lumping in of BSD is two-fold: 1) simplicity and 2) applications created for Linux generally can be used on BSD.

If you are a new user your choice of distribution should be limited to the top four listed. That will make your learning curve far more shallow. Distributions such as Ubuntu have done everything they can to make using Linux simple. From the installation to the desktop, you will find these distributions to be the easiest operating systems you have ever used.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.
But what makes them easier?

Let’s take a look at the Linspire distribution. The Linspire mission has always been to make Linux the easiest operating system available. And many of the easier-to-use distributions are following suit. Linspire and Ubuntu can be found on many pre-installed computers. One of the aspects that makes these distributions so much easier is package management. Each of the easiest distributions have a centralized location for software installation. If you want to install something, you fire up Synaptic (or whatever opens when you click Add/Remove Software) and search for a package to install. It’s simple. But don’t think, for a second, that you’ll have your operating system up and running and have to install a bunch of software. A Linux operating system usually comes complete with everything you need. You could effectively install the operating system and never have to install another piece of software again.

Another piece of the puzzle that makes one distribution easier than another is choice of desktop. There are some Linux desktops that make the migration from Windows a no-brainer. Both KDE and GNOME can be made to mimic the look and feel of Windows so well some users wouldn’t know they are using Linux.

Freedom of Choice

Ultimately the choice is yours. Do you select a distribution that targets new users or do you go for a more advanced Linux? Don’t fret. Most modern Linux distributions offer Live versions of their operating systems. This means you can boot from the LiveCD and run the operating system without making any change to your computer. This allows you to test-drive Linux. Do this with the easiest distributions and I bet you’ll find one that meets your needs.

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Seriously though…

I have been writing about Linux for over ten years. I have had published thousands of articles covering Linux and open source. My plans here at gHacks will begin with helping the new Linux user (or the Windows user wanting to switch) easily migrate from Windows to Linux. As I tackle this cause I will sprinkle into the mixture some more advanced topics to keep those accustomed to Linux interested. I will introduce you to software you never knew about, desktops that will wow you, and the open source ideology that has been my war cry for over a decade.

I hope you will enjoy my articles here at gHacks. If you have any suggestions (or requests) please feel free to drop me a line via email.

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We are looking for a dedicated writer who knows the ins and outs of the operating system. Who is able to write articles suited for beginners who never experienced Linux in their live but also for long term Linux users who might know Linux as good as you do.

If you love to tell others about things you like you might want to apply for this job. We are looking for someone who can write between 1-5 articles per weekday. Ideally you are a English native speaker but we are happy to hire non-native speakers as well.

Your work will be compensated obviously and you will be paid at the beginning of each month. Preferred payment method is PayPal or bank transfer depending on your location in the world.

Please use the contact from to apply for this job. We would like to read at least one 250+ word article about Linux written by you to get an impression of your writing skills.

So, what are you waiting for? Apply today..

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Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 includes the Kaspersky Antivirus components but extends the protection of the computer system beyond that. At the core stands it antivirus and anti-malware engine that is protecting the system from those threats. The Internet Security 2009 suite adds to that a two-way personal firewall, content filtering and data & identity theft protection.

Several new features have been integrated into the 2009 edition of the software. This includes the ability to restore previous system settings after cleaning malware, security ratings for unknown applications, a virtual keyboard to protect against phishing and keyloggers and the automatic access restriction (user data folders) for unknown applications.

Installation of the software suite should not be problematic although it requires the uninstallation of other applications of its kind before the installation can be completed (Multiple firewalls or antivirus programs can interfere with each other). Inexperienced users can and should keep the automatic settings while experienced users can configure the layers of protection manually. It does not make much sense for example to enable the Anti-Dialer module if the user is connecting to the Internet over a network.

The interface of Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 has been redesigned. It is divided into the four blocks Protection, Scan, Update and License.

• Protection: Various protection layers can be analyzed and configured in this entry. It is also providing access to various tools like the creation of a Rescue Disk, a Security Analyzer or Network Monitor.
• Scan: Perform a quick or full scan of the computer system.
• Update: Will check and download updates
• License: License information. Will list the validity period of the application

Inexperienced users will love the automatism of the software program. The initial scan of the system will add automatic rules for most applications that are installed on the system. Kaspersky Internet Security did add applications like Firefox, Thunderbird or Teamspeak to the list of trusted applications which in turn meant that no “Do you want to permit” windows where launched when the application was started.

Kaspersky Internet Security 2009 is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. A trial version is available that can be used for 30 days without restrictions.

The Giveaway:

Kaspersky gave us five program suites and we will give all five to you. Just post a comment before December 2 12:00 CET and you are taking part in the Giveaway. Make sure to include an email address so that we can contact you with the details in case that you have won.

Winners:

Joseph, Bernard, Ian, Mezan and Enigma

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We will start tomorrow with a review of Kaspersky Internet Security 2009. Yes that’s right, you can win copies of this excellent software program tomorrow.

We have 20 confirmations so far from software companies who have donated their software for the Christmas Giveaway and are confident that we will be able to fill the last four spots easily. Those users who suggested software programs to include in the last article will be delighted to hear that we were able to get some of them for the giveaway.

The easiest way to follow the Giveaway is by following the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway tag which will be used to tag all posts of it.

A friend of mine is currently designing a logo for the competition which will hopefully be ready in the coming days. Make sure you spread the word about the Giveaway to help making it a huge success for everyone.

The best aspect of it is that I do want to win most programs of the giveaway myself, hehe.

Rules:

Well there are not many rules for the giveaway. Anyone can participate only once per day. The winners will be drawn randomly from the list of commenters and notified the next day per email. Some information is required for the registration process that I will submit to the software developer. This usually means the email address and a username. By participating in the giveaway you allow me to do that.

Winners have 48 hours to claim their prize. If they fail to do so the license will go back into the pool and be given away again on December 24.

If you have any questions or suggestions let me know. You can still suggest software products that should be part of the giveaway.

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Many well known and respected companies have already agreed to provide us with free software products that we could hand out to lucky readers. I do not want to spoil the fun just yet and announce which products we are going to offer but you can be sure that they have been selected because they are excellent.

A new post with additional details will be posted on December 1 when the Ghacks Christmas Giveaway officially starts. It will include all rules and information needed to grab a few nice software packages. Stay tuned. We are counting on you to spread the word of the giveaway.

We are still in the talks with several software developers and would like to use this article to listen to you. Do you have a software company in mind that would make a good fit for the Ghacks Christmas Giveway? We cannot guarantee anything but we might contact the company to see if they would donate a few software packages. Let us know in the comments.

All posts related to the Giveaway will be tagged as “ghacks christmas giveaway” which should make it easy for anyone to stay up to date with the latest posts.

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