6. Submitted by Basil, Monday 23rd October 2006

great distro indeed, i've tried for a year and a half and i was never unhappy with it. thnx, tex.

7. Submitted by Anonymous, Monday 23rd October 2006

What is this about 'ejecting' USB sticks?
Ubuntu can do this?
Does it have a robot arm that I never received?
So far as I am aware Ubuntu 'unmounts' USB sticks as does every distro I have tried.

A bit of an explanation would be desireable.

8. Submitted by Mike, free-bees.co.uk, Monday 23rd October 2006

In response to #7:

Certainly! Although it's nothing quite as exciting as robotic arms. Let's say you plug your USB stick in, and /dev/sda1 gets mounted. Now, most distributions would simply do this:

umount /dev/sda1

This unmounts that partition, but the drive itself is still connected to the system. To actually turn the power to the drive off, you can run:

eject /dev/sda

Now, that is supposedly safer, although I have no idea whether it is or not. But it does a bit more polish when distributions use eject instead of umount. It is also reassuring to some users, since using eject over umount means that LED of the stick turns off - something that users might expect.

9. Submitted by davecs, Monday 23rd October 2006

Good review, eventually! You can boot up to a predetermined resolution with a non-US keyboard, it just takes a little extra work.

When confronted with the initial GRUB screen, instead of just hitting ENTER, hit "E" twice, then the Left Arrow key until you see "keyb=us". For a British keyboard, change it to "keyb=uk". You can also fix the res by specifying a resolution with the xres keyword, ie, "xres=1280x1024". Since the switch to GRUB, these "cheat codes" have not been as much to the fore, but they are still valid.

As you say, all these things can be changed from the Control Centre once installed.

PCLinuxOS is my desktop of choice, and I am hardly using Windows at all now, especially since I discovered that I could program my OneForAll remote using the program that does it under Wine.

10. Submitted by Anonymous, Monday 23rd October 2006

Thank you for the explanation of the 'eject' function.

Does the 'mount' function perform a double action - power on and mount - or are there two functions to perform if you wish to re-mount an 'ejected' USB stick? This being a stick you have not unplugged.

BTW, you have dashed my hopes of getting the robotic arm ........