Apr 2004

Fri, 30 Apr 2004

PC World Covers Cobind

One month after we released Cobind Desktop, PC World Columnist Matthew Newton is taking a look at Cobind in his Free Agent Column:

But as I've said before, while a geek like myself can navigate labyrinthine dialog boxes to tweak settings, typical users get lost. And while I used to be turned on by eye candy, now I'm more partial to a desktop that is simple, straightforward, and speedy. I want to be creative when I'm using my PC; I want to get work done; I don't want to spend my days tinkering with the way my windows look and behave. And I'm thinking that Grandma--who, having never used a PC before, doesn't yet know what a window is and certainly won't care very much whether it is blue or grey or metallic-looking--will appreciate Gnome's simplicity, too. After all, she's got a learning curve ahead. I'm just trying to keep it manageable. That's why I've chosen Gnome for her.

But wait: Stop the presses! Two readers suggested a distribution I hadn't heard of before: Cobind. Is it Gnome-based? Well ... yes and no. The folks at Cobind use a mix of Gnome's Nautilus file manager and the XFCE Desktop Environment, an alternative desktop that doesn't get very much attention. Perhaps it should. I'll be taking a look at XFCE and Cobind over the next few weeks, and should have something to report in my next column.

Now we're playing in the big leagues grandma!

Posted at: 06:09 | permalink

Tue, 27 Apr 2004

Off To Boston

OS News reviews Cobind Desktop and calls it "Linux Done Right". Overall, a well-written and thorough review by Adam Scheinberg that makes many of the same gripes that I've made myself.

In other news, I'll be off to Boston later this week - first time I've been back since I used to fly in from Redmond once a month back in 1999. I miss the place, or the pace. Things just don't move quite so quickly in most of the rest of the US. Hoping to meet old friends for drinks and dinner and take a few pictures while I'm at it. If I'm really lucky, I'll get over to Fox's lobster hut or Legal Seafood and gorge myself while I'm there.

Speaking of Boston, check out Keith Erskine's Blog. He's working on a cheap sub-notebook prototype that I'd love to buy and believe there's huge pent-up demand for such a device.

Posted at: 10:26 | permalink

Thu, 01 Apr 2004

What a Week

One week ago today, we put Cobind up on the web. When we did that, there were less than 100 entries on the search for "cobind" on google and our website was dead last. This week there are over 7000.

Distrowatch started covering Cobind on that day. A week later we're holding a steady #59 in the top 100 Linux distros on distrowatch. We averaged 7592 page views per day for the week and our bandwidth usage neared a half terabyte for the night 3/25 - 3/26. I call that getting distrowatched. Michal from Cornerhost called Friday morning and we had to shut down the downloads since they were eating the pipe. The bandwidth charge for that night alone was over a grand. The nice folks at Cometway worked all weekend to get our downloads online for us.

Over the weekend I did an interview with flexbeta. On monday, that got slashdotted. More traffic.

Got bittorrent and some mirrors set up. Many thanks to the very generous folks who have written me offering to mirror. I've had to warn people since the traffic is so high it's likely to sink all but the biggest pipe/rack combination. So we check that everybody's got mod_throttle or the like.

We got donations as far away as Taiwan and the Cobind Desktop CD has started selling.

All in all, not a bad week. Thanks to everyone who has supported us or wished us well. The local business community, in particular, has been very supportive.

Posted at: 22:51 | permalink