Content and news by Rob Williams

“At Phoronix, we are constantly asked “What Linux distro do you prefer, and why?” As any frequent visitor probably realizes, most of our testbeds are loaded with Red Hat’s Fedora as that what we had settled for after several months of testing different distributions such as Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake, MEPIS, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and the list goes on. Surprisingly enough, one of the distributions we never tried was Linspire, formerly known as Lindows, which is said to be “The Worlds Easiest Desktop Linux.” Today, we will be trying Linspire’s latest release, Linspire Five-0.”

This is one Distro I have yet to try. Looks promising though. Check it out at Phoronix.

“D-Link has brought to market a product that is both powerful and easy enough for most to understand (as long as you are willing to read the manual some). Not only have they provided you with a rather complete list of supported games, they have given you the ability to manipulate this with your own settings if you so desire.”

Check out the review at Viper Lair.

“A fanless CPU cooler doesn’t always mean high temperatures. Thermaltake’s fanless Sonic Tower provides great performance at 0 dBA.”

Very cool looking. Check it out at InsaneTek.

“Introducing the Corsair XMS Xpert TWINXP1024-3200XP dual-channel DDR kit. As you can see, it makes quite a first impression. this dual-channel, PC3200 pair of 512MB DDR DIMMs come with a pair of programmable digital displays which can be attached to the top of each module. These LED displays work with the included ‘Memory Dashboard’ software, allowing your memory to display several monitoring characteristics or even a custom scrolling message!”

Check out the review at PC Stats.

“Gigabyte has tried to create a motherboard that takes the forward-thinking approach of Socket-T and marries it with established Springdale technology. The end result is a hybrid board, unimaginatively named 8IPE775-G, that will last as long as Socket-T is around. It’s also priced at a wallet-friendly £60 and makes use of regular DDR1 RAM and AGP-powered graphics cards, thus making the jump to LGA775 a palatable one for most.”

Check it out at Hexus

“Select journalists at the CeBIT trade fair in Germany were tittled at the tattle of eyewitness reports of Chris Hook, ATi Technologies’ EMEA PR Manager, seemingly out on a cruise… to recruit senior NVIDIA employees in to ATi. Apparently Chris’ efforts seemingly went unrewarded at that stage, but HEXUS has just learnt that ATi may have just recruited two key NVIDIA people.”

Wow that’s interesting.. Going to be fun to see if anything comes from this. Since they apparently didn’t have to sign any confidentiality agreements prior to joining Nvidia in the first place. Read more at Hexus.

It looks like Steam has gotten a whack of updates. In Counter-Strike specifically.. now you have a “Buy Favorite” option that you can set. Also, now when a teammate speaks in chat, you can see where they are.

Now, if there is an enemy behind a smoke cloud, you will not get an “Enemy Spotted” message.. so as to make it more difficult. There are more updates to be had by updating your Steam client, simply by opening it. You can read about the updates here.

Computer Games magazine has an interview with Chris Taylor, of Gas Powered Games. Here is a quick snippet of the interview: Computer Games – What are some of your favorite new monsters that will be found in the sequel? Kevin Lambert – Dungeon Siege II has many great monsters, but my favorites Comment (0) -->

Gamespy today, has an interview with Jason Wonacott of Turbine. They are talking about the recent announcement of Turbine self publishing LOTR’s MMO. GameSpy: Is Turbine planning to self-publish the game, or will you be shopping the property around to another publisher? Jason Wonacott: In our new relationship with Tolkien Enterprises, Turbine Comment (0) -->

“OCZ has just released their latest Enhanced Latency DDR modules with the launching of the new EL PC-3200 Gold memory modules! Featuring a 400MHz DDR clock speed at ultra-tight latencies of 2-2-2-5, these modules also feature OCZ’s ULN2 and EVP technologies.”

Check out the review at Rojak Pot.

“The inside of the case is, big surprise, nothing special. The front uses a single cage for mounting all the drives using good ‘ol screws. There’s a stamped grill with holes for an 80mm intake, but as is the problem with many cases even to this day, it’s pretty much useless since there’s no opening in front of it to take in air. Around back we have the PSU, 80mm fan, non-removable I/O shield, and the expansion slots. If you look closely you’ll notice the protrusion mentioned earlier which holds the expansion cards in place. Finally, the motherboard tray isn’t removable either. You’ll find raised mounts where typical motherboard holes can be found; for the rest you’ll need to install the somewhat awkward provided plastic stand-offs.”

I am having a hard time grasping why they call it Super White. Check out the full review at MikhailTech.

Thanks to Akiba, we can now see some pictures of the unreleased Gigabyte 8N-SLi Royal motherboard. The board supports a P4 with 1066FSB, with 4 sticks of Dual DDR667. It also seems to support a RAID support for 6 HDD’s. And of course, what makes this board more special is it’s SLi support.

Check out the spy pics here.

“Canada’s administration announced today that it will introduce new legislation aimed at tailoring the country’s copyright law toward the Net age. The country has been an outlier in the world, with courts ruling that file-swapping is legal, for example.”

Up to now, there haven’t been any people sued in Canada for downloading music over P2P. I could be wrong. With this new legislation.. that may change. Check it out at News.com Blog.

“A good quality laser printer is still an essential for any office where printing is required. We work in an office ourselves, and we know how difficult it can be to find reliable unbiased information in the less-than-sexy area of reliable business equipment. We’ve taken a look at several laser printers over the last few months, and today we’re pleased to have another one in-house. The Hewlett-Packard Laserjet 2420dn model that we’re looking at is a networked monochrome laser printer with a 1200×1200 maximum resolution, 64MB of onboard memory (expandable to 320MB), 350 sheet paper capacity, a built-in HP JetDirect Ethernet print server, and automatic duplex printing.”

Check out the review at PC Stats.

“Cooler Master has just released their Aquagate Mini water cooling kit! Designed for easy installation and maintenance, this is small enough to fit even mini-tower and some SFF cases! Let’s take a look at it!”

Check it out at Rojak Pot.

For overclockers who really want to get an extra punch out of their GPU.. a stock cooler doesn’t usually do it justice. Copper Heatsinks are becoming more and more popular, and Logisys has joined that bandwagon. Does their Copper cooler improve on a stock cooler?