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I mentioned this to my younger bother the other day. He was not old enough to remember it. One of Microsoft’s first failures.

rdiff-backup tries to “combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup”. It’s a command line utility that not only gives you a plain mirror of your files, but also allows you to retrieve previous versions of your files using the extra difference data it keeps. This means you can quickly copy and paste to restore a file from your most recent backup, or retrieve the contents of files as they were at the time of any previous backup. rdiff-backup has built in support for network backups over SSH and is network-efficient and fast thanks to its incremental nature. It’s also possible to run rdiff-backup on Windows, soon I’ll be investigating whether it will work as a backup solution for the Windows systems on my network.

Tom has a nice rdiff-backup tutorial. Is there a GUI for all this somewhere?

I always liked RedHat. Whenever you hear about serious business (banks, Stock Markets, Health care) running Linux, somewhere in there is RedHat. CentOS is the exact same thing, except for the RedHat branding. It is also free. Did I mention this website runs on CentOS?

We will try everything we normally do – from Wireless via Samba sharing to MP3 playback – and then some. I will test four times: two laptops and two installations, one 32-bit and 64-bit. And check everything in KDE and Gnome. This is probably the most extensive test I have done yet. We will practically do everything, from scratch. So not only is this a review, it’s a full blown tutorial to turning your CentOS into a superb desktop.

Some of the stuff waiting you just a few mouse scrolls below:

• Live CD checks on two laptops (Wireless, Bluetooth, Web camera, NTFS support)
• Installation of a 32-bit edition
• Installation of a 64-bit edition
• Solving screen resolution issues
• Compilation
• Installing VMware Tools (in VMware Server and ESXi)
• Configuring startup programs in the session
• Configuring proxy
• Solving update problems via proxy
• Samba sharing
• Adding extra repositories
• Flash Player 10 on 32-bit and 64-bit machines
• MP3, Windows video playback
• Installing cool software (VLC, Skype, others)
• Applications
• Making CentOS pretty (new themes, styles in KDE and Gnome)

And more … until your eyes water from sweet exhaustion. It shall definitely be intriguing. So follow me. Spare an hour or two and have a lovely read.

If you ever wanted to see clearly how hard Apple is beating everyone else.

No upgrade from XP. They have got to be kidding.