Jim Lynch: Tech Tips, Opinions and Reviews

The recent announcement of Barnes & Noble’s “Nook” e-book reader really caught my eye, to say the least. As some of you might know by now, I tend to covet gadgets and, despite being the mostly happy owner of a Kindle 2, I developed a terrible case of gadget lust when I saw the Nook [...]

Well, well, well…look what the cat has dragged back in to ET. Yes, I’m back. Well in a manner of speaking anyway. I’m not here as a full-time employee or as Community Manager. I’m here as a columnist and content contributor. How did this insanity come about? Lance Ulanoff (the EIC of PCMag.com) pinged me [...]

I’ve always had a love/hate relationship going with iTunes. On one hand I’ve loved the sheer amount of content I could get from it. Movies, music, audiobooks, iPhone apps…there’s just a ton of stuff available in the iTunes store. But I’ve also been annoyed by its slowness, clunky interface and various other things.

In one of my last columns I pointed out 5 Reasons Why World of Warcraft Doesn’t Suck. Patch 3.2 added some great stuff and helped improve playability considerably. Unfortunately, World of Warcraft is a business and so it’s not always about playability. Sometimes it’s all about profit and greed. Yes, greed. Naked, in-your-face, over-the-top, out-of [...]

There has been an amazing amount of hype about Chrome, Google’s upcoming operating system. Before I get into this column let’s look at what Google says Chrome is: Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks [...]

Last Tuesday I got an email from Apple saying that I could order Mac OS X Snow Leopard and have it delivered by today. Since I planned to buy it anyway, I hopped on the offer since it meant free shipping too. So instead of having to drive to the nearest Apple store (which is [...]

Well as the saying goes…all good things must come to an end. And so it is with this iteration of ExtremeTech and with my involvement with the site. It’s been a fantastic 8 years (wow! 8 years? unreal!) and we’ve all come a long, long way. If you weren’t already aware, changes are afoot here [...]

We’ve looked at a couple of religious based distributions such as Ubuntu: Christian Edition and Ubuntu: Muslim Edition. But there’s another version of Ubuntu…a dark and evil one. A version so hideous and so terrible that it’s name is only spoken in whispers among Linux users… Ubuntu Satanic Edition 666.6 (Jesus’ Jugular) Yep! There really [...]

This week I decided to take a look at a lesser known distribution called Wolvix Linux. Wolvix is based on Slackware and, according to the Wolvix site, is geared toward the home user. Wolvix uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and provides a somewhat greater range of apps than some of the other distributions. But [...]

Linux has, in some ways, always been a bit politicized in the sense that there are true believers among Linux users and developers that all software should be truly free. When I say free, I mean free as in free to use and share with others without any restrictions on that usage or sharing. gNewSense [...]

Before I get into this review let me be clear that gOS is not “Google OS.” It is not put out by Google so nobody should be confused by its name. gOS stands for “Good OS” though it does contain a lot of links to Google Web apps, Google Gadgets, and the option to add [...]

A while back I barked about why I thought World of Warcraft sucked. Well I’m happy to report that some (but not all) of my complaints have been answered by Blizzard. In fact, World of Warcraft doesn’t suck nearly as much as it used to and here’s why. #5 Cold Weather Flying At Level 68 [...]

I got an email from a reader a few days ago and he pointed me to a blog entry by the developer of Linux Mint, one of the most popular Linux distributions. I did a review of it recently and came to the conclusion that it’s pretty darn good for anybody interested in Linux on [...]

Last week we looked at VirtualBSD, this week we’re moving back to Linux and to a more convential kind of distribution. Sabayon Linux is based on Gentoo. Gentoo as you might already know is somewhat famous for being the “roll your own” kind of distribution. It’s an extremely powerful and customizable version of Linux but [...]

If you read Superman comics as a kid or an adult then you’re probably already familiar with Kandor, the Kryptonian capital city that was miniaturized by the evil Braniac and trapped in a bottle. Well how ironic then that I managed to stumble across an operating system in a very similar situation. The only difference [...]

I recently looked at the latest beta of Ubuntu: Jaunty Jackalope. Ubuntu has proven to be such a popular distribution that there are even other distributions based off of it. One such distro is Linux Mint which seeks to take the ease-of-use provided by Ubuntu to a new level and, for the most part, succeeds. [...]

The last time I looked at PC-BSD was way back in 2007. PC-BSD is another option for those who want an alternative to Windows but who might not be interested in Linux or Mac OS X. PC-BSD is an operating system that is based on FreeBSD and uses the KDE desktop. My last experience with [...]

It’s been quite a while since the last update to PCLinuxOS back in 2007. While Ubuntu and other distros come out every 6 months, PCLinuxOS is considered a “rolling release distribution” that gets updated regularly as new stuff appears in the PCLinuxOS repository. So was it worth the wait? I’m happy to say…yes it was! [...]

It’s been quite a while since I last took a look at Ubuntu and it’s come a long way. Canonical has just released a beta version of Ubuntu Linux 9.04. In keeping with past traditions, the new version has a cute animal nickname: Jaunty Jackalope. If you aren’t familiar with the Jackalope, it’s a fictitious [...]

A long time ago I used to actually use a separate computer to install and test Linux distributions. I even built some of the boxes that I used to do the testing with but these days I mostly do my work on Macs. I know, I know…I’ve become a lame Apple whore. Along the way I finally ended up dispensing with testing Linux distributions on separate computers.