No other operating system — Vista included — offers the innovation and simplicity of Mac OS X. With Mac OS X Leopard, the Mac leaps even further ahead with new features that let you do more with less effort.

System requirements (what you must have)

To upgrade to Snow Leopard or install Snow Leopard for the frst time, you must have a Mac with:

• An Intel processor.
• An internal or external DVD drive, or DVD or CD Sharing.
• At least 1 GB of RAM (additional 1 GB RAM is recommended).
• A built-in display or a display connected to an Apple-supplied video card supported by your computer.
• At least 5 GB of disk space available, or 7 GB of disk space if you install the developer tools.

However these requirements are the bare minimum to run Snow Leopard and are nowhere sufficient to use all of its gorgeous features. So i recommend atleast 2 GB RAM(more is better) and around 15 GB of HDD space (for faster installation and if you want to add cooler apps later)

Please check your hardware for all the firmware updates before you install if you want to avoid a major nuisance after you are done installing, any problems check the apple support page.

Several software have been classified as incompatible with Snow Leopard even though they worked fine with earlier version of Mac, check this support article to confirm whether you have any of them.

Installing or Upgrading Mac OS X

Follow these easy steps to upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

• Insert the Mac OS X installation disc.

• Double-click the Install Mac OS X icon.
  The Welcome pane appears, followed by the License Agreement. Read (rather ignore it) and agree to the software license agreement.

• In the pane where you select a disk, select your current Mac OS X disk (in most cases,  it will be the only one available).

• Click Customize to select or deselect optional software.
  You can customize some of the software that will be installed, such as printer drivers, fonts, and language translations. In the Custom Install pane, select the software you want to install, and then click OK.
  Note:  If you see a message that you don’t have enough disk space to install Mac OS X, you can deselect items to save space. Please avoid seeing this message by allocating sufficient space during installation.

• Click Install.
  To quit any open applications and start the installation, click Install in the message that appears. When prompted, enter your administrator password. This is the point of no return, there is no way of stopping the setup process once you do this.

• Listen to music.
  Here you are pretty much done your end of the job (easy right!!) so grab an ipod and start listening to some of your favorite music. The installation process should be over in around 30-50 mins.

• Have fun with Snow Leopard.
  Once installation is done your system will restart once, and the welcome intro video appears (its the same one as Leopard!!!). Next comes the setup assistant. Do not bother with this if you have done with a straight upgrade. (I canceled it rather than wait to use my new OS X) You can always run the Migration Assistant later if you need to. (/Applications/Utilities/Migration Assistant.app)

Even though these steps seem simple, several issues can indeed crop up. So as to avoid them be careful of the choices you make while customizing the optional software.

P.S. : Remember to make a backup before you start please, do not say i didn’t mention it or warn you about it.

However you can still use the options provided in the previous Mac versions, the most common one being the “Erase and Install” option.

Erase and Install…..huh…. what for?

If the new installer is so much better than ever, why erase your drive in the first place–a process removed in this version to simplify the installation process. (remember the old Erase and Install option?)

The most obvious reason is that if the standard installation procedure produced problems, an Erase and Install, followed by a restoration of important data from backup, could solve most (if not all) of those problems. You might also want to consider this approach if your Mac has been acting buggy under Leopard.

After installing Snow Leopard using this technique, you’ll be asked if you want to transfer applications and data from your backup. Should you choose to restore everything, you’ll end up exactly where you would have been if you’d used the standard install procedure (without the erase and install), so do not restore everything just pick the settings and data you need and get them back to leave a fresh feeling.

Smarter and Faster!

Apple claims that the entire installation process up to 50 percent faster, yet more comprehensive and reliable than before. For example, Snow Leopard checks your applications to make sure they’re compatible and sets aside any programs known to be incompatible in a separate folder. In case a power outage interrupts your installation, it can start again without losing any data, so you don’t have to start all over again.

Some Neat Features claimed by Apple are:

1. The Browser Safari works faster than ever.
2. The Finder (file finder) has been completely rewritten to make it faster by up to 1.4 times than Leopard.
3. Almost 2 times faster shutdown and wake up.
4. Auto updates for printer drivers. (a major relief for so many users)

Check the Apple Mac OS X page for further refinements

Go Ahead and buy it…

I would definitely recommend everyone to buy the upgrade offered and install it immediately as i find it to be the smartest, and easiest Mac OS X install ever made.

SAN FRANCISCO – August 19, 2009 — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced it is publishing an update to its April 2008 study on Linux kernel development. The new report is written by original authors and kernel developers Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman, and the Linux Foundation’s Amanda McPherson.

This latest “Who Writes Linux” report is now its second year, this time tracking the development of Linux from the 2.6.24 kernel to the recent 2.6.30 kernel release.

The report found that that Linux operating system saw a net increase of 2.7 million lines of code between the two releases, compared to the almost 300,000 lines added  up to version 2.6.24, which is staggering for an operating system.

That code was contributed to Linux at a much faster rate and by many more developers than the previous release, the report also found.

The development rate, measured in patches accepted per hour was as much as 42 percent faster than it had been in the first report generated in 2008. Between the two version releases, there were 5.45 patches accepted every hour, with an average of 10,923 lines of code added every day, the Foundation discovered during the course of their study.

New code contributions have included additional hardware support as well as operating system features such as next-generation filesystems like BTRFS.

While new code is added, old code is also pruned away. The report found that an average of 5,547 lines of code are removed every day, but the linux code is still growing rapidly at the rate of 5400 lines per day on an average.

After all this being said its obvious one asks this question, which is

Who is doing all the work?

Since the first Who Writes Linux report last year, the average number of individual developers who contribute to Linux has grown more than 10 percent: The 2.6.30 Linux kernel release had 1,150 developers while the 2.6.24 release had 1,057 developers.

Over the course of the last four and a half years, between the 2.6.11 kernel in 2005 and the 2.6.30 kernel release this year, a total of 4,190 individuals contributed.

But those figures don’t tell the whole story, according to the Foundation which had this to add to the above statistics

Despite the large number of individual developers, there is still a relatively small number who are doing the majority of the work.

In any given development cycle, approximately 1/3 of the developers involved contribute exactly one patch. Over the past 4.5 years, the top 10 individual developers have contributed almost 12 percent of the number of changes and the top 30 developers have contributed over 25 percent.

Surprisingly, it was found during the study that the Linux founder Linus Torvalds is no longer among the top 30 Linux contributors over the course of the last year, as measured by the total number of changes. Since the 2.6.24 kernel, Torvalds contributed 254 changes. In stark contrast, Red Hat kernel developer Ingo Molnar contributed 1,164 changes between the two releases, which is more than 4 times the number of changes submitted by Torvalds.

The foundation had this to say about Linus Torvalds

Linus remains an active and crucial part of the development process; his contribution cannot be measured just by the number of changes made

Top companies contributing

The top companies that contributed to the current release were found to be:

1. Red Hat with 12 percent of all change contributions.
2. IBM with 6.3 percent.
3. Novell at 6.1 percent.
4. Intel at 6.0 percent.

While developers with company affiliations contribute many changes to Linux, the report found that 21.1 percent of all changes since the 2.6.24 kernel came from developers with absolutely no corporate affiliation. In the previous study, the Linux Foundation reported only 13.9 percent of developers as having no corporate affiliation.

The report mentions:

The increase in the number of developers with no employer is most likely an artifact of better information in our database — many of them were previously in the ‘unknown’ category.

The report is certainly good news for all the Linux fans and spells danger for Microsoft Windows 7(slated for release on the 22nd of October), as it implies directly that Linux as an operating system is evolving rapidly, getting better and becoming more secure. This may mean Linux is closer to overtaking Windows than everyone else thinks it is.

For a further detailed read try the Linux Foundation News

Universe 8 starts on August 18 – OGame Redesign – Release 1.0.

This was the news posted in the ogame.us forums a few days back and it was later confirmed by the admins.

This Server is based on the new design which ogame owners Gameforge plan to implement in all the remining servers which use the older design.  The new design is getting mixed reviews with some older players calling it the death of ogame and some of them hailing the changes made to the game as revolutionary. The game can be observed to be considerably slower than the earlier versions so it is becoming a huge discouraging factor for all the players with slower network connections but then the interface is extremely charming so the game may still be worth playing for many.

Ogame New Interface

Ogame Old Interface

The admins of Ogame had this to say when asked about the new version of the game being introduced in the older uni’s

We´re still planning how and when we will update the old existing universes. It´s still not decided which features of redesign they will have beside the new design.

The changes and new features in the OGameRedesign for new uni´s can be explained breifly as follows:

-> completely new design & interface
-> changed colonisation process – bound with research astrophysics which replaces the old expedition technology
-> new balanced storages
-> changed planet sizes and properties
-> ingame tutorial
-> new empire view (with drag & drop)
-> technical improvements like using AJAX for several menus
-> several old OGame bugs fixed

The entire changelog can be found here under the spoiler tags. Also read the new game rules here before making any mistakes.

To play this space game go to the ogame homepage and click on Join Now and register under the Andromeda universe and join in this fun filled universe

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 7 ‘Gloria’ KDE.

Quick steps:

• Download the ISO or the torrent.
• While it’s downloading look at the overview of the new features and make sure to quickly go through the known issues.
• After the ISO is downloaded verify the MD5.
• Burn the ISO at low speed (lowest possible) and enjoy Linux Mint 7 KDE.

Introduction to Linux Mint 7 KDE:

The KDE Community Edition aims to provide a version of Linux Mint which uses the KDE desktop.

For a detailed overview of the new features and improvements included in Linux Mint 7 KDE, please read “What’s new in Gloria KDE?“

System requirements:

A minimum of 4GB of free space and 256MB RAM are needed. For a comfortable experience we recommended to have at least 512MB RAM and 10GB of free space.

For a complete list of known issues read the Release Notes.

For the download details read more at: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=986

Feedback, ideas, bug reports:

If you find any bugs (really any, even the silliest one), please don’t hesitate to report them at https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint and if you have ideas that you would like implemented, don’t hesitate to register them at https://blueprints.launchpad.net/linuxmint, who knows the idea might turn out to be brilliant after all…….

Remember that every bug you report helps the whole community