Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Born to Be Wild
The LG Flatron E2290, World’s Thinnest Monitor
For the last couple weeks I’ve been reviewing the LG Flatron E2290, billed as the world’s thinnest monitor. Let me tell you, it’s really, really thin. And unlike overly skinny fashion models, thin is in for monitors. At just a hair over 0.25 inches, the thing nearly disappears when viewed sideways. It’s covered in a chrome finish and has mostly rounded edges. The base is wide and solid, and covered in touch sensitive buttons to access the OnScreen Display (OSD). The OSD is comprehensive and one of the best I’ve seen in a monitor.
As you can see in the pictures, the E2290 simply looks great. But how does it perform? We don’t have the equipment to perform accurate color and brightness measurements, but I can attest to the fact that it makes the image on my previous monitor look as bad as monochrome CRTs. Blacks are deep and uniform and whites are very bright. The horizontal viewing angle is very wide and there is very little color distortion as you move from side to side. The distortion is a little more pronounced on the vertical but still very acceptable. It features a native resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 and has DVI, VGA and HDMI connectors which are in the base rather than on the monitor itself. The are recessed by about 2 inches, making accessing them a little difficult. But this has to be done only once so it isn’t a huge issue. The response time is a very good 2ms.
It’s a 21.5 inch display and costs about $350. This is a premium over similarly sized models, but given the device’s aesthetics and performance, we feel it’s not unreasonable. If you have a living/working space that is already sleek and modern and are looking for a monitor that will fit right in, this is your choice.
Openmamba GNU/Linux 2.0 Pre 4
Silvan Calarco has announced the availability of the fourth pre-release of openmamba GNU/Linux 2.0, a general-purpose distribution with KDE as the default desktop and RPM package management: "The ISO images of the fourth pre-release of openmamba GNU/Linux, milestone 2, are available for download. This new release adds the following new features: long-term Linux kernel 2.6.35.11; Linux kernel 2.6.37.6 can now be installed optionally by enabling the new milestone2-kernel channel; KDE desktop environment 4.5.5; network connections management is now based on NetworkManager in order to provide an integrated and simple solution for Ethernet, wireless, mobile broadband, ADSL (PPPoE) and more; 500+ software components updated." Read the rest of the release announcement for more details. Download: openmamba-livedvd-en-2.0pre4.i586.iso (2,326MB, MD5, torrent). Italian and Spanish editions are also available.
Download Mirrors http://www.openmamba.org/distribution/download.html
Zenwalk Linux 7.0 "Core"
Jean-Philippe Guillemin has announced the release of Zenwalk Linux 7.0 "Core" edition, a minimalist, but extensible distribution based on Slackware Linux: "Zenwalk Core 7.0 is ready. Zenwalk Core 7.0 is the base foundation of Zenwalk - everything except the X server and desktop environment. Installation process takes about 10 minutes and then you are free to install just the packages you need to create your very own desktop environment or your highly optimized and secured server. Zenwalk Core features the 2.6.37.4 kernel with BFS scheduler, KMS and many performance tweaks. Two kernels are available - the standard one supporting SATA or PATA disks, and a bigger kernel supporting any disk technology from SATA to SCSI. Note: the next version of Zenwalk Core will most probably be included in Zenwalk Standard edition as an installation option." Here is the brief release announcement. Download: zenwalk_Core-7.0.iso (329MB, MD5).
Download Mirrors http://www.zenwalk.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=1
Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.04 Milestone 4
Phil Miller has released a new development build of Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.04, an Arch-based distribution featuring KDE 4.6.2: "After two weeks of heavy developing we are proud to announce our fourth milestone of 'Aida'. This is the first KDE SC 4.6.2 live CD that you can download and give a spin. We added Burg as our bootloader -- including OS detection -- so other operating systems get be detected and added to the boot menu. Rekonq is again our default web browser, in version 0.7.0. Also our installer, Tribe, got fixed and most of the known bugs are gone now. So what else can you expect from this release: Linux kernel 2.6.38.2, X.Org 7.6 stack with Mesa 7.10 and X.Org Server 1.9.5, KDE SC 4.6.2, updated Chakra tools, GPT support...." See the release announcement and release notes for more details. Download: chakra-2011.04-ms4-i686.iso (691MB, MD5), chakra-2011.04-ms4-x86_64.iso (687MB, MD5).
Download Mirrors http://chakra-project.org/get/