Ubuntu blogspot

Long Time, No Blog!

2010-07-05T23:39:00.003+02:00

A lot has happened in the world and nothing has happened on this blog, so I decided to interview myself to clear up what’s been going on and explain a little about myself. Here we go…

Why don’t I see your contributions to Ubuntu anymore?

I’m glad you asked that question ;-) Basically, there are two reasons. The main reason is that, real life work, that pays bills, takes up most of my time at the moment. I just don’t have the same amount of time to spend in front of the computer as I have had in the past. But the time I do have, I spend on reading about all the amazing stuff that is happening around Linux.

The second reason is that I am/was mostly involved with artwork and design stuff, which is done by the Canonical design team these days. The design team consists of 15 highly talented people with some incredible skills. Much of the work that emerges from the design team is created internally behind closed doors and I can fully understand that. Decisions are made by professional and informed people whose sole aim is making Ubuntu great. However, I feel that that model clashes with the way I’d like to contribute to Ubuntu. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t contribute to artwork, design and user-experience just because there’s a dedicated team for that, but for me personally, together with the reason I mentioned earlier, I don’t have that burning obsession of making Ubuntu better anymore – I’ve left it to the pros.

Why did you contribute to Ubuntu in the first place?

When I started to contribute to Ubuntu, I did so because it was (and still is) an amazing project. When I read about Ubuntu, Linux and how Mark Shuttleworth fits into the story, a ‘I want to give something back to this wonderful project’ fire was lit inside me.

How did you get involved?

My first Linux distribution, that stayed with me for more than a weekend, was Feisty Fawn aka Ubuntu 7.04. At first I was only a user, but as the ‘must give something back’ fire got hotter, I began to look for things I felt that needed to be improved. If I was able to create some superior myself, I would share my thoughts with the world and try to push things to the right people. Like the Ubiquity slideshow that actually landed in Ubuntu 9.10, where I basically emailed Dylan McCall a better suggestion.

Which areas did you contribute to?

Working with graphics on the computer is something I’ve been doing amateurish for many many years. With the easiest place to start for anyone at any level being wallpapers, I set out to make peoples desktops brown and pretty. In March 2008 I had my blog up and running, and it was an obvious place to share my work.

Since I have a master’s degree in music, I figured I could spread some love to that part of the free software community too. This was a more difficult task then I thought and it never lead to anything I was fully satisfied with.

I also got involved with the boot experience, countdown banners, release party posters, flyers, brochures, DVD covers and so many others areas that you can expect me to list them all here. If you’re interested I’ll post a link to my portfolio below or you can try to search my blog.

Is your blog dead?

As I mentioned above my time in front of the computer is limited, so I have decided to only blog about my own work and not everything slightly related to Ubuntu that I come across. This means that since I’m not working on anything, I’ve got nothing to blog about. There's still topics I want to blog about. These days I get my Ubuntu related news mostly from OMG! Ubuntu! and you should too.

Is there a place where I can see all your Ubuntu related work?

Yes, I have a portfolio at Behance (http://www.behance.net/madsrh123 ) or my blog (which is this blog) or if that fails, Google is your friend.

Is there anything you would like to add?

I’ve written a lot of this post in past tense, but I want to emphasize that I do still contribute, use, love and endorse free and open-source software. I've not yet fallen of this earth or gone into space, so feel free to write a few words or perhaps a question below - who knows when I'll be blogging again.

Thanks for the excellent questions ;-)

//MadsRH

OMG! UBUNTU! PODCAST LAUNCHING NEXT WEEK

2010-04-14T12:09:00.000+02:00

I've talked about podcasts before and today I came across some great news for podcast fans. Everybody's favorite Ubuntu blog OMG! Ubuntu is launching a podcast next Tuesday. I'm really looking forward to this new project.

Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/04/omg-ubuntu-podcast-launching-next-week.html

Lightworks Video Editor Going Open-Source

2010-04-14T11:33:00.001+02:00

While there have been video editors on Linux like Cinelerra and Kino for some length of time, and more recently there have been new open-source projects that aim to better non-linear video editing on Linux like OpenShot and PiTiVi, up to this point it's been an area just like gaming: the Linux solutions haven't been great compared to other platforms. However, there's a lot more potential for that to change now that a professional video editor for Linux is being open-sourced.

LightWorks is a software product currently owned by EditShare that has won scientific and technical Academy Awards and Emmy Awards, has been used to produce a number of popular films, and has many other "wins", is being open-sourced. Work on the LightsWorks software was started over two decades ago, but only recently was it acquired by EditShare, and they now find it in their interest to open-source this code. Shutter Island, Centurion, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are among the films that have been edited using Lightworks.

Lightworks Open Source as its known is expected to be released in the third quarter of this year as a free download. It's a pity that the code cannot be immediately accessed, but you can sign up to stay informed on the process. Hopefully this means the soon-to-be-open-sourced code is currently undergoing some revitalization and being brought into a state where it's more likely to succeed as a free software project with documentation, a clean build process, etc.

As was said in their press release announcing this open-source endeavor, "EditShare is completely committed to turning out a superior professional editor through the Lightworks Open Source program. We are increasing our development and support staff, and all contributed code will be thoroughly managed by our distinguished Lightworks team, ensuring the reliability of the new Lightworks Open Source editor."

Source: www.phoronix.com

Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users as Lucid Linux Desktop Nears

2010-04-08T09:49:00.001+02:00

Sean Michael Kerner writes:

Ubuntu is gearing up for the debut of its latest release with Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed "the Lucid Lynx" and scheduled for general availability at the end of the month. It's a release that offers multiple new features on the desktop and a new look to Ubuntu Linux.
The Lucid release could also help to further accelerate adoption of Ubuntu, which has been growing over the last several years. In 2008, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu, pegged the number of Ubuntu users at 8 million. It's a figure that could have increased by as much as 50 percent or more since then, insiders say.

Ubuntu One Music Store

"We have no phone home or registration process, so it's always a guesstimate. But based on the same methodology that we came up with for the 2008 number, our present belief is that it's somewhere north of 12 million users at the moment," Chris Kenyon, vice president for OEM at Canonical, told InternetNews.com
In contrast, as of March 29, Red Hat's Fedora Linux was reporting usage of its Linux distribution at approximately 24 million installations.

Source:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/7032/1/

Ubuntu 10.10 - Maverick Meerkat

2010-04-02T13:48:00.004+02:00

Mark Shuttleworth has just announced the mascot name for Ubuntu 10.10 - Maverick Meerkat.

Mark writes:

Our mascot for 10.10 is the Maverick Meerkat.

This is a time of change, and we’re not afraid to surprise people with a bold move if the opportunity for dramatic improvement presents itself. We want to put Ubuntu and free software on every single consumer PC that ships from a major manufacturer, the ultimate maverick move. We will deliver on time, but we have huge scope for innovation in what we deliver this cycle. Once we have released the LTS we have plenty of room to shake things up a little. Let’s hear the best ideas, gather the best talent, and be a little radical in how we approach the next two year major cycle.

Meerkats are, of course, light, fast and social – everything we want in a Perfect 10. We’re booting really fast these days, but the final push remains. Changes in the toolchain may make us even faster for every application. We’re Social from the Start, but we could get even more tightly connected, and we could bring social features into even more applications. Meerkats are family-oriented, and we aspire to having Ubuntu being the safe and efficient solution for all the family netbooks. They are also clever – meerkats teach one another new skills. And that’s what makes this such a great community.

Meerkats - like Ubuntu they are light, fast and social.

Read the entire post here: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/336

All About Ureadahead

2010-03-31T21:08:00.000+02:00

I haven't been blogging for a while, but today I came across something I thought I had to share with you. You might have heard about Scott James Remnant, the Ubuntu developer behind Upstart and Ureadahead, but probably most famous for promising a 10 second goal for boot time in Ubuntu 10.04.

Scott recently posted a very informative post about Ureadahead and other boot related things on the forums. A recommended reading for sure!

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1434502

Countdown Banners For Ubuntu 10.04

2010-03-16T21:57:00.000+01:00

As usual Matthew Nuzum, the Ubuntu webmaster, has called out for help in creating a beautiful countdown banner for Ubuntu 10.04.

Unlike previous times the banner will not be launching with the beta release. There are two betas this period and the team is aiming at releasing the countdown in between the two. The material from the newly announced Ubuntu Branding will give the artists new opportunities in the form of a new color scheme, new logo and new font.

There's already a few submitions on the wiki. Have you submitted your suggestion?

More info:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Website/LucidCountdownBanners

https://lists.canonical.com/archives/ubuntu-website/2010-March/000853.html

6 Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Wallpapers

2010-03-15T11:31:00.000+01:00

Ubuntu root have found six beautiful alternatives to default wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.04. All the wallpapers can be found on deviantart

Ubuntu 10.04 wallpaper pack

Purple sensation

Blue Warty

Lucid redesigned / black & white ver.

Lucid

Ubiquity Slideshow Get New Design

2010-03-11T22:12:00.004+01:00

The folks at Canonical's design team have been working on a new design for Ubuntu's installer slideshow that matches with the new branding. This means that the design I created for Ubuntu 9.10 will be dropped. The kickass community contributer Dylan McCall who maintains the Ubiquity slideshow (also behind Day of Ubuntu as I've mentioned earlier) has already implemented most of the code for the new design. The reason I say most of the code, is because of a few technical impossibilities in the mockup created by the Canonical design team.
You can see the current progress here: http://people.ubuntu.com/~dylanmccall/ubiquity-slideshow-ubuntu/redesign-lucid/ubuntu-transitions/slides/index.html

It makes perfect sense to change the design to fit the new branding, but at the moment it still needs some work in my opinion. Of course I'm sad to see my work being dropped, but hopefully it will live on in other distributions. I'm sure when it all comes together the new design will look amazing.

Read more: http://dylanmccall.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-stuff-for-ubiquity-slideshow.html

Nautilus + Zeitgeist

2010-03-05T10:18:00.001+01:00

So a couple of days ago Seif Lotfy promised a Nautilus + Zeitgeist hack. You might remember seeing this mockup Ian Cylkowski's blogpost Deconstructing Nautilus and rebuilding it better

That has now become a reality. So far it is just a proof of concept, over the next week more work will be done to make things really shiny. Read Randal B's blog for more info.

Very cool indeed!

Ubuntu 10.04 Has A New Default Background

2010-03-04T19:54:00.003+01:00

The default wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.04 has been selected. Actually, we already saw the new background yesterday when the new artwork and design directions was announced. The screenshots from wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand was using, what today landed as the new default wallpaper.

The default wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.04

As much as I love the new color-scheme, I can't help feeling that the purple/lavender color belongs to Apple. The face that every member of the design team is using a MAC as their primary laptop, might have something to do with that.

Besides the new wallpaper, the new boot splash artwork also landed today - awesome!

Ubuntu's New Look - No More Brown!

2010-03-03T22:38:00.005+01:00

Finally it happened! Ubuntu now has a brand new look and feel. New Logo, GktTheme, Webdesign, Boot splash and so much more. The community logos (Ubuntu QA, Brainstorm, UbuntuForums, SpreadUbuntu and Xubuntu) have also received an update. The new color-scheme is a dark purple or brownish-purple color that resembles the color of the outer skin of a European eggplant - Aubergine! (As Alan Pope points out). Pure awesomeness! Check it out:

The new light GktTheme

The new boot screen. Notice the new font that has replace the Ubuntu Title font?

The new Ubuntu 10.04 CD cover

Source:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand
http://fridge.ubuntu.com/

Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.2 Released

2010-03-02T22:18:00.000+01:00

The always awesome application for tweaking Ubuntu (hench the name) has been released in version 0.5.2. Though no new features is introduced in this release, Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.2 brings a huge amount of fixes and adds highlight support for the new items in Application Center and Source Center. Together with the new beautiful website, Ubuntu Tweak now looks like a truly professional product and provides an awesome user experience.

Gnome 3 Usability Hackfest

2010-02-28T10:32:00.006+01:00

Last week Canonical hosted the GNOME Usability Hackfest in London. Some interesting research was done and there's a lot of awesome improvements coming to the "Control Center”, Nautilus and Gnome 3. I hope Ruben Vermeersch's wish for a yearly GNOME Usability Hackfest will come true. I won't try to summarize everything that happened, but I will encourage you to read the blogpost I've linked to below. If you want the summarized version ArsTechnic has a nice article titled "Task Pooper" could revolutionize GNOME desktop".

Thomas Wood: Usability Hackfest London

Seth Nickell: Early peak into Gnome 3’s potential

Máirín Duffy: Adding Chapters to Totem

Bastien Nocera: We're (re)moving settings again

Ian Cylkowski: Deconstructing Nautilus and rebuilding it better

Not really related to the Hackfest, but related in the sense of improving the user interface of the Nautilus file manager.

Ubuntu One Music Store FAQ

2010-02-26T21:03:00.001+01:00

I'm sure you already know that there's a new music store coming soon to Ubuntu 10.04. A lot of people have already written about what we can expect. Now Stuart Langridge has created a wiki page which will answer many of the frequently asked questions relating the new music store. At first I didn't want to duplicate the effort from other Ubuntu bloggers who already wrote about this. But for the few people who do not follow amazing blogs such as OMG!Ubuntu or Popey, I had to make sure they will get their questions answered too.

Q: What will be the store's name?
The store is called the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: How is Ubuntu getting access to popular music?
For the Ubuntu One Music Store, our primary goals are to 1) provide a wide selection of popular songs to users and 2) enable Ubuntu users around the world to have access to these songs. Among the partners evaluated, we chose 7digital because they had the largest selection of songs available without digital rights management (DRM) for the most regions around the world.

Q: What desktop application will include the Ubuntu One Music Store?
The standard Ubuntu music player, Rhythmbox, will be used for the music store. We know that people still want choice in their music player application so The Ubuntu One Music Store was developed as a plug-in that can be re-used in some other music applications. We have received approval from the music labels for the Ubuntu One Music Store to be embedded within Banshee, Amarok, and a few other applications. Please contact the Ubuntu One Music Store team for information about this process and implementation support.

Q: How is this different than Jamendo and Magnatune?

Jamendo and Magnature will remain in the Rhythmbox music player. These are both great sources for creative commons and open licensed songs. The Ubuntu One Music Store extends the catalog of music available to Ubuntu users and will include mostly songs from minor and major label artists. These are songs that you typically find on the shelves of your favorite record shop...except in a downloadable format.

Q: What are the details about the music in the Ubuntu One Music Store?
Songs purchased through the Ubuntu One Music Store are available in high quality 256 kbps (sometimes higher) MP3 audio encoding and without digital rights management (DRM). MP3 purchases can be:

burned to a CD any number of times
played through any software on any type of computer that you own that supports MP3
synced to any MP3-enabled device such as a portable music player

You may occasionally find songs in WMA format. We're working with our partner to remove these songs from the Ubuntu One Music Store. Until this is resolved, we don't recommend purchasing these songs in this format. An MP3 version can typically be found by using the store's search feature.

Some have asked for songs in other formats such as Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. Acquiring popular songs in this format was not possible at this time, but Canonical will continue to look for future opportunities to improve the quality of the songs found in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: What are the 'system requirements'?
If your computer can run Ubuntu 10.04, has Rhythmbox installed, can play sounds and connect to the Internet, then you are ready to use the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: Will these downloads play on my iPod or portable media player?
The MP3 format is widely supported on portable media players such as the iPod. Rhythmbox works with most portable media players without additional configuration and a Rhythmbox plug-in (libgpod) is available that provides support for most iPods.

Q: What are the features of the Ubuntu One Music Store?
The Ubuntu One Music Store has features that users expect from an online store.

Search by artist, album, or track
Browse recommendations and genres
Discover new releases or just released songs each week
A convenient shopping basket
Support for a variety of payment options

Q: How is the store related to Ubuntu One?
An Ubuntu One account is required to purchase songs from the Ubuntu One Music Store. Ubuntu One accounts are free and come with 2 GB of personal cloud storage. Purchased songs are automatically transferred to your cloud storage, synchronized to all of your computers, and added to Rhythmbox. Customers will find a new library that contains purchases from the Ubuntu One Music Store. You can also fetch your music from your personal cloud storage through a web browser, just like all your other files.

Integrating the Ubuntu One Music Store with Ubuntu One gives consumers the security of online backup as well as convenience of auto-synchronization.

Please note that Ubuntu One synchronization does not support users who connect to the Internet through a proxy server. These users will need to download their purchases from the Ubuntu One website and manually add songs to their Rhythmbox library.

Q: What does it mean by x downloads remaining?
The Ubuntu One Music Store's partnership with the music labels limits the number of times customers can download a purchased song from the music store to three (3). While this gives people some security in case of catastrophe, additional downloads should not be necessary as purchases are backed-up in the customers's Ubuntu One personal cloud. The initial transfer from the music store to a customer's Ubuntu One personal cloud will count as one (1) download. Any synchronization of purchased songs stored in your Ubuntu One personal cloud to any number of your computers does not count against the music store's download limit. Clicking to download again will transfer songs to your Ubuntu One personal cloud again and will deduct from the downloads remaining. Customers shouldn't need to do this though unless they delete the song from their cloud storage.

Q: What regions of the world will be able to purchase songs?
Most popular songs are licensed by territory (basically by country). Our starting territories will be the UK, US, Germany, the EU, and the Rest of World. Customers who use the EU store (users not located in the UK or Germany) will have access to purchase songs from two of the four major labels. Customers who use the Rest of World store will have access to purchase songs from independent labels.

Canonical will analyze usage of the EU and Rest of World stores after the 10.04 launch to decide which territories would be best for expansion. Watch the Ubuntu One blog in the months following the launch of Ubuntu 10.04 for more information.

Q: How do independent artists from the Ubuntu community get their songs into the store?
The Ubuntu One Music Store has great potential for the Ubuntu community and we want members to be able to contribute their own works (especially if it was produced on Ubuntu) to the store. Our partner, 7digital, works with various digital distribution companies that represent artists. Here are a few that you can contact to get your songs added to the 7digital catalog and the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: I've found a bug. I have a great feature. What do I do?
Please submit bugs and feature requests to the Ubuntu One Music Store project in Launchpad. The development team monitors this area and reads all messages.

Q: Where do I get help?
Customer support is available by clicking on the Help button in the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Q: How can I install and test the store?
The store isn't quite ready for wider testing. Watch this area or the Ubuntu One blog for more details coming soon.

Source: http://popey.com/blog/

Release Schedule - In Russian

2010-02-26T10:17:00.000+01:00

Thanks to AgafonovDmitry there's now a Russian version of my Ubuntu Release Schedule Introductory. As I mentioned earlier, I hope people will create YouTube subtitles - although I haven't received any yet. In case you want to add a voiceover in another language here's the .OGV source (30MB): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/175241/THIS_IS_THE_ONE.ogv

Banshee 1.5.4 Released

2010-02-25T10:01:00.002+01:00

Banshee 1.5.4 has been released, with several new features and 40 bug fixes since 1.5.3. This is a BETA release and the fifth release in preparation for the 1.6 milestone release, which is scheduled at the end of March.

New Features

Opt-In Usage Data Collection

Under Preferences, you can choose to "Improve Banshee by sending anonymous usage data" back to the Banshee developers. This collects information on what version you're running, what OS, library size, slow SQL queries, and a whitelisted subset of your preferences. This information will help us choose better defaults and see what parts of Banshee are used most and can be improved. All collected data is anonymous!

Default Equalizer Presets

Banshee now ships with several equalizer presets, and the core of the equalizer management has seen much internal improvement.

Banshee Community Extensions

A new sub-project named Banshee Community Extensions has been created. Its code is hosted on Gitorious, and its bugs tracked alongside Banshee's. It already contains 9 extensions, including Alarm Clock, Lyrics, and Mirage, and has 15 maintainers. Its releases track Banshee's.

Extensible Shuffle Modes

Extensions can now add new shuffle modes and PlayQueue fill-by modes. The Mirage extension is the first to take advantage of this, adding a Shuffle/Fill-by Similar mode based on acoustical analysis.

Other Enhancements

Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
Add support for Nokia N900 phones
Add tooltip to playback error column
On close Internet Archive item, return to Search
Notify user if trying to sync missing file to DAP
Popup explanation of manual playlist ordering when appropriate
Simplify the default set of columns in Podcasts
Enable 'Delete From Drive' action in File System Queue
Make debuggable from within MonoDevelop
Coverart for unicode artist/albums now supported
Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
Option to sort an artist's albums by year, not title
If starting Banshee hidden (--hide), up to half a second of startup time is saved; this is particularly useful in Moblin

More Information
As always, check the release notes for more detailed information, screenshots, and download links. Thanks to everybody who made this release happen!

Source: http://banshee-project.org/download/archives/1.5.4/

Spotting Visual Inconsistencies

2010-02-24T00:31:00.001+01:00

It isn't that often that Hylke Bons writes a blog post, but whenever he does, I always find he's posts to be very interesting. In Hylkes lates post, On GNOME and Elegance, he writes about how small things can help make the GNOME desktop elegant. As he says, elegance in interfaces doesn’t come from funky graphics and pretty widget themes. It comes down to how your interface is laid out. Hylkes gives some pretty obvious, but good to know examples and encourages everyone to report bugs if you come across any visual inconsistencies. Certainly a must read!

I love the fact that there's so much focus on artwork, UI Design and Usability for the linux desktop.

Source: On GNOME and Elegance

Mark Shuttleworth at PyCon: Cadence, Quality and Design

2010-02-22T12:17:00.001+01:00

As you might know I love to hear Mark Shuttleworth speak. It's always so inspiring and he's always so positive. Below is an interview with Mark by The Bit Source from PyCon.

Mark Shuttleworth and Antonio Rodriguez are to be the keynote speakers at PyCon 2010, the world's largest conference of the Python programming community. Over 1,000 Python programmers are gathering now at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta for eight days of intensive education, cooperation, and networking.

More Information about Shuttleworth’s keynote: http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/schedule/event/122/

My Artwork Landing A Ubuntu 10.04

2010-02-22T10:50:00.002+01:00

As I mentioned earlier, I've been working with Scott Ritchie to create a "branding-ubuntu" package. During the Lucid cycle Scott have been working on getting the artwork into the actual Ubuntu 10.04 release (rather than just a separate package). If you play Mahjongg or Klondike (also known as Solitaire and Aisleriot) in Ubuntu 10.04, you will notice the new artwork. See the screenshot below:

A blurry screenshot from Ubuntu 10.04

It's very easy to spot the new "table" background and the new card back artwork in Klondike, but in Mahjongg the change is much more discreet. I've added red circle around the changed tile.

In the Karmic cycle my artwork for the Ubiquity Slideshow landed and it's truly a great feeling when something actually makes it into the release.

Related links:
Mocking Up Aisleriot
Random artwork...
PPA for the “branding-ubuntu” package

Edubuntu 10.04 Wallpaper

2010-02-20T10:28:00.001+01:00

A few days ago Stephane Graber posted a screenshot of the current Edubuntu desktop and I was very pleased to see that one of my wallpaper suggestion is being used.

UPDATE: I sincerely apologize for not adding the well deserved credit for the original photo to marxicoli.

Edubuntu desktop - daily build Feb 17, 2010

The screenshot also shows the new Edubuntu Menu Editor.

No Human Theme In Ubuntu 10.04?

2010-02-20T08:17:00.011+01:00

In an interview recorded on February 19 2010, Mark Shuttleworth revealed that a new light theme will replace the Human theme in Ubuntu 10.04. The Human theme has been the default theme in Ubuntu since the first release.

In the interview Mark says:

...we'll have some new styling which is going to be the starting point of another five year view. We've been Human for the last five years and now we're gonna be light oriented.

I'm sure Mark is referring to something like the Elementary theme, which has been a hot topic these last few months.
Some people think that interpreting "some new styling" being "the starting point of another five year view" as an entire new GTK / Metacity theme redesign might be a bit of a stretch. As 23meg from the Ubuntuforums.org points out, it can be interpreted as only the starting pieces of a new five-year outlook landing in Lucid as well.
During the Ask Mark session at Ubuntu OpenWeek, Mark was asked about the artwork for Lucid. Back then he replied:

New window decorations, some new icons for the panel indicators, some new styling on boot and login, no new gtk theme.

I must admit, I'm really in doubt about what to expect in Lucid. There are no artwork drops secduled for this release, but the User Interface Freeze is just around the corner, so we'll soon know what Lucid Lynx will look like.

Return Of The Linux Action Show

2010-02-19T10:48:00.004+01:00

Bryan Lunduke, the Co-Host of audio and video shows at Jupiter Broadcasting, have revealed a secret that was (as he puts it) burning a hole in his… secret pocket!
On his blog, Bryan writes:

The Linux Action Show, the alpha and omega of Linux podcasts, is back.

This Saturday (February 20th) at 5pm (Pacific Standard Time) we will be recording the first episode of Season 11 of the Linux Action Show and, of course, the whole thing will be streamed live (in full video glory) over at Jupiterbroadcasting.com/live.

And, starting with Season 11, the Linux Action Show is going to a weekly schedule. That’s right. A brand-spanking-new episode, packed with Linux-y goodness, each and every week!
Will we talk about Windows Phone Series 7 Phone Windows Series Windows Phone 7 Phone? No.
Will we talk about Apple’s latest round of sticking an “i” in front of a word? No.
Will we talk about Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo, open source NVidia drivers with 3D acceleration and the latest Linux Distro releases? Oh hells yes.

So, this Saturday, head over to JupiterBroadcasting.com/live and join in the live chat while we record the return of the best freaking show about Linux to ever grace this fine planet of ours.

I have nothing against The Computer Action Show, but this announcement is a really nice surprise. I'm very much looking forward to it's return with their 11th season after over 7 months off the air.

Totem Arte+7 Plugin

2010-02-17T21:14:00.000+01:00

Users from France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland can benefit from Simon Wenner's work on the Arte+7 Plugin for Totem. The plugin allows you to watch the streams listed on plus7.arte.tv with Totem.

You can download the stable totem-plugin-arte-0.8.tar.gz or pull it from gitorious.org/totem-plugin-arte. There's also an Ubuntu package in Nicolas' PPA for those of you who are too lazy to compile it. It would be nice if someone from a country not supported by the Arte streaming service, could test the plugin too, to check if it behaves reasonable in such a situation.

OpenOffice Isn't Good Enough For Roskilde

2010-02-17T11:08:00.002+01:00

When I blogged about Danish schoolchildren that complained about OpenOffice I revived a lot of feedback and a lot of comments on the topic. Now there's more bad/sad news for OpenOffice in Denmark.

After testing OpenOffice for about six months, the IT manager at Roskilde municipality has now chosen to abandon it and return to Microsoft Office 2007.
The reason is, according to the Danish news site Version2, that teachers, pupils and parents have experienced major problems in the application of OOo. It is especially compatibility and conversion problems, but also the speed of the program was not found satisfactory.
Another criticism, especially from students, is the difference in how Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org is used. Students are accustomed to using Office 2007 and find it inconvenient and a nuisance to convert to OOo.
The IT manager in Roskilde municipality, Ole Bech says that in the light of the study they will continue to use Microsoft Office 2007. He does not deny that they will make another attempt with OpenOffice.org at a later time. Later this month he will be meeting with other municipalities who have experience with OOo, to exchange them.

Read more here...

HP Unveiles Android Touchscreen Smartbook

2010-02-17T10:51:00.000+01:00

HP has unveiled its first smartbook, the Compaq Airlife 100. The device features a 10.1-inch touchscreen, (purportedly) a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 16GB SSD, Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity, an SD card slot, a webcam, a QWERTY keyboard around 92% the size of a standard laptop's, and it runs Android. HP says the system boots up instantly and it's good for up to 12 hours on single charge or 10 days on standby. It's nice to see that a lot of products will be shipping with Android in 2010, rather than jumping on the Windows 7 Starter Edition wagon. Pricing hasn't been revealed yet, but it will probably vary between providers and contract terms.

GDM Setting For Ubuntu 9.10

2010-02-15T09:51:00.000+01:00

The setup utility that comes in Ubuntu Karmic is missing most of the older GDM setup utility's functionality. If you're tired of not being able to configure many of these settings, two community members have come to your rescue. Garth Johnson and Nick Glynn have developed a great tool called gdm2setup which put all of the functionality back in the hands of the users through a familiar and simple GUI.

Grab it here or try it out from their PPA!

Source: Robert Ancell

The New Start Page Is Here

2010-02-11T21:37:00.001+01:00

The new default start page for the Firefox webbrowser in Ubuntu 10.04 is now online. The design is kept very clean and simple. You might remember that I created a few suggestions for the Ubuntu 8.10 design myself, but I must say I really like this minimalistic look.
There's also another huge change besides the design. The new start page will use Yahoo as the default search engine as part of Canonical's deal with Yahoo.

Linux Foundation Announces 2010 "We're Linux" Video Contest

2010-02-11T10:53:00.002+01:00

Ones again The Linux Foundation has launched it's "We're Linux" contest. Last years 5 finalists were selected amongst the 90 videos submitted from Penguinistas worldwide. The winning video “What Does it Mean to Be Free” was an inspirational piece that communicated the ideals of the open source operating system.

The 2010 contest is calling all community members and amateur filmmakers to share with the public what a 30-60 second Linux-focused spot for the Super Bowl might look like. This theme is not a requirement for entry; however, videos that can demonstrate the benefits of Linux to the general public are likely to receive more community votes. The submissions should aim to inspire people to use Linux, create conversations among the public, and convey the power and ideals of Linux.

If you want enter the 2010 contest, there's a few rules you have to follow:
• Contest is open to anyone over 18
• Contest winner to be decided by community rankings and a panel of judges chosen by the Linux Foundation
• Each video needs to be between 30 - 60 seconds in length
• Each video cannot include copyrighted material or have illegal or offensive content; this is up to the LF to decide
• The contest opens Feb 4 and will close at midnight pacific on April 4.

The winner will be determined by a combination of online community ranking and a panel of judges and the winner will be announced on April 14, 2010.

To submit your video, please register here. If you're already registered, upload your video here.

For more information on the contest rules and guidelines, please visit: http://video.linuxfoundation.org/

Google Wants To Be A Social Network

2010-02-10T10:17:00.001+01:00

Google has taken a major step towards becoming a social network - and thereby firing a cannon salvo against both Facebook and Twitter.
Google has a brand new service is called Google Buzz that was presented Tuesday at a press conference in Mountain View, California. Buzz combines Google's own Gmail mail system with status updates and the ability to share links, images and video with friends.

While we're talking about social network services, I should mention that a few days ago a huge pile of updates for the "Social from the start" initiative landed in the daily build of Ubuntu 10.04 - Lucid Lynx. The "Social from the start" plan is not just about having Twitter and Facebook applications installed by default, but rather how to leverage and integrate these with the desktop and the users workflow. Below is a screenshot of the new MeMenu.

Screenshot credit goes to Jono Bacon

Social network services like Twitter, identi.ca and Facebook are becoming an increasingly common medium in which people communicate and I'm exited to see what will come of this new initiative from Google. I'm a Gmail user myself and would love to see Google Buzz integrated in future version of Ubuntu.

Sources:

PyMT 0.4 Released

2010-02-10T00:20:00.003+01:00

New slick website

The open source library, for developing multi-touch applications, PyMT has just been released in version 0.4. Please take a look at the release notes to see what’s new in this release. Besides all the new stuff this release brings, the PyMT website has also been updated with a new slick look.

If you know your way around Python and want to develop applications that utilize new user interfaces, such as multi-touch, you should check out PyMT. You may have seen examples of this technology in use on CNN, at a mall, or on the Microsoft Surface(R). Multitouch is here to stay - let's hope PyMT will push Linux and open source forward in this area.

PyMT Speech Recognition

Source: http://pymt.txzone.net/

Pinta - A Lightweight And Simple Alternative To The GIMP

2010-02-09T10:15:00.008+01:00

The open source image editing application GIMP is often refered to as huge and complex, being a high-end application for professionals. GIMP isn't the tool that you would advise every user to use for their casual photo editing. This is also the reason behind the decision to remove the GIMP from the default Ubuntu 10.04 installation. We've all heard this before, but now a new lightweight open source image editing application called Pinta aims to give casual users a simple alternative to the GIMP.

Jonathan Pobst was inspired to start the Pinta project after reading an article on OSNews stating how something like Paint.NET was needed for the Linux desktop. Pinta is currently very early in development (version 0.1), but this might be a much wanted application for the Linux desktop and perhaps it might find it's way into future versions of Ubuntu.

Download Pinta!
Current Version: 0.1

Ubuntu

Source: http://pinta-project.com/

Google-Pad?

2010-02-09T00:16:00.001+01:00

Recently Apple launched the Ipad (could you possibly have missed this?) and now rumors says that Google is working on a tablet PC too. On the Google site The Chromium Projects you can see visual explorations of how a Chrome OS tablet UI might look on actual hardware. The site has a strip of photos of the concept which is a lot similar to an Ipad.

Google's Tablet PC will naturally run its own operating system, Chrome, which implies that the web browser is in focus, and that all applications available from the web. The video below demonstrates how Google envisions that this new gadget will work.

Source: http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/user-experience/form-factors/tablet

Location-based operating system concept: “Locus OS”

2010-02-08T20:27:00.001+01:00

I just came across this very interesting UI concept video. The video by Barton Smith, a designer from Australia, appears to be a prototype UI for a conceptual “Locus OS” which is described as a “location-based operating system”. What makes it special is that it appears to be Microsoft branded, however without any background information I can’t say for certain if this was commissioned by Microsoft or not.

The video itself presents some very interesting concepts, the main focus of which is a multiple “desktop” arrangement that is location-aware – giving you flexibility in the widgets and applications you see based on your location and what you might be doing. Although some elements of the UX appear inspired by the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android, the designer points out that this was created in 2008 making many of the ideas original at the time. Nevertheless, definitely worth a look.

Source: http://www.istartedsomething.com/

Call For Testing: ATI and nVIDIA graphic cards

2010-02-02T22:19:00.002+01:00

The Ubuntu QA blog has send out a call for help in the noble quest to ensure that ATI and nVIDIA users will have a smooth experience in Ubuntu 10.04. It says:

Do you have a nVIDIA or ATI graphics card? Do you want to help ensure users have a smooth experience if they choose to use the proprietary drivers?

We are looking for committed volunteers to test nVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers on a weekly basis. The goal of this testing is to catch regressions early in the cycle, and fix bugs before they reach a major audience.

If you want to be part of the team you will need:

A computer with an ATI (R600 or newer) or nVIDIA (GeForce series 2 or newer) graphics card
A spare partition on that system

If you don't have a spare partition you can easily create one

One hour of your time per week
An Internet connection

If you want to take part in this adventure, please, send me an email (ara AT ubuntu DOT com) with the exact model of your graphics card , and I will get back to you with detailed instructions.

Thanks for helping making Ubuntu even better!

P.S. This project is to test the proprietary drivers. If you're interested in testing the free drivers, we don't need installation testing but help is always welcome. Check how you can help at the Ubuntu X team page.

Lucid Lynx Mascot Wallpaper

2010-02-01T22:52:00.003+01:00

Saleel Velankar recently posted this beautiful wallpaper suggestion on the Ubuntu-art mailinglist. Although I really like the use of the mascot (the codename), I would prefer a more abstract, or less obvious, animal like the Hardy Heron or Intrepid Ibex wallpapers.

I also think mascot wallpapers are perfect for Alpha releases as a placeholder until the final artwork lands. Sadly this did not happen for this release either.

Wallpaper Artwork

2010-01-28T11:58:00.003+01:00

I've been trying to create a wallpaper for Edubuntu. So far I have a few suggestions, but nothing that is good enough to be used as default wallpaper. Anyway, I just wanted to share my four current suggestion with you.

You can grab the .JPG versions in 2560x1600 px here:

...dark-glow.jpg
...gray.jpg
...rainbow.jpg
...tree.jpg

David Siegel Suggests Improvement For Launchpad Bug Workflow

2010-01-25T00:18:00.001+01:00

David Siegel from the Ubuntu Design Team has suggested a way for opportunistic programmers to contribute to bug-fixing without knowing everything about dependencies, maintaining clean build environments, generating patches, version control systems, packaging or publishing PPAs. David wants to add a “Quickly fix this bug” to Launchpad that will download the source code and open it for you in Eclipse.

You should read the entire post, but let me just shortly summarize. David's user story consists of the following steps to create, test, and submit a patch for a small bug:

Click “Quickly fix this bug” on the Launchpad bug report.
Edit the source of the corresponding package in Eclipse.
Build the project and test the changes.
Submit the patch and comment back to Launchpad.

This would make a huge improvement in Launchpad bug workflow and the quality of software in Ubuntu - a great idea. Read "Improving Launchpad Bug Workflow for Opportunistic Programmers" here.

Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 3 Goals

2010-01-19T10:33:00.000+01:00

Many people are following the development of Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) closely, and so is many news sites:

...just to name a few. Following this development might be most interesting to developers and more tech minded people, because it often involves a lot of geeky terms. Raving Rick (aka Rick Spencer) recently wrote a blogpost titled Ubuntu desktop Alpha-2 and Alpha-3 work items update, where he provides a summery of what actually landed in Alpha 2 and writes about the re-planned for the next milestone, Alpha 3. Most of the Social From the Start items and the Xorg triaging and diagnosis tools didn't make it into the Alpha 2 release.

Alpha 3 goals
You can see the full and detailed current plan here:
http://macaroni.ubuntu.com/~pitti/workitems/canonical-desktop-team-lucid-alpha-3.html

So, what is planned for Alpha 3:

Social from the start work focused on supporting the Me Menu
UNE session for desktop, desktop session for UNE
Finish xorg triaging and diagnosis tools
Make the experience for users of proprietary graphics drivers more robust
Switching to -nouveau open source nvidia driver by default to support 3d and KMS (note that this is risky work and will depend on stability and quality of components in xorg and the kernel and will be backed outbefore end of Alpha 3 if necessary)
Continue to improve desktop start up speed
Tweak compiz effects
Continue to change apps to use Udev rather HAL
Continual integration of Dx assets as available
Continual integration of OLS assets as available
Normal desktop throughput, such as update GNOME packages, updatesfrom Debian, bug triaging, etc...

Source:
http://theravingrick.blogspot.com/2010/01/ubuntu-desktop-alpha-2-and-alpha-3-work.html

Is GNOME Going To Duplicate The Efforts From Canonical?

2010-01-15T11:41:00.003+01:00

Gnome Shell recently introduced a new notification system. Sadly it seems like GNOME Shell is going to duplicate a lot of the efforts from Canonical. Besides the notification system the application indicators also have similarities.

It looks like the Notify OSD of GNOME Shell is named the Message Tray. You can see a short screencast demo here: http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/mockups/20090630-demo

I was truly hoping that Gnome would continue the fantastic work Canonical is doing rather than starting over. The question still remains, what experience will Ubuntu 10.10 ship?

Source:
http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf

The Ubuntu Manual Project

2010-01-12T10:16:00.001+01:00

The Ubuntu Manual project has set out to create a complete beginners manual for Ubuntu, featuring comprehensive guides, howto's and information about anything you will need to know after first installing Ubuntu.

The manual will be available as a .PDF file and there will be a new revision released every six months there will coincide with each new release of Ubuntu. The work will of course be released under the CC-BY-SA license. The plan is to have the final version suitable for mainstream consumption ready in time for the Ubuntu 10.04 release.

At the moment the project has ten chapters and is translated into 20 languages and it has over a hundred contributors. Take a look at this very early release: Ubuntu Manual 0.1

If you want to contribute the easiest way for both you and the team is to follow these steps:

Join the Ubuntu Manual Team and the mailing list.
Check out the blueprints and find something that is unassigned that you think you might be able to handle.
Assign yourself to that blueprint, and read up on it in the blueprints section of this wiki.
If you can't find anything that you think would suit you, then scroll down a bit more and have a look at the "To Do List" or email the mailing list and ask for help, or join #ubuntu-manual on irc.freenode.net and ask someone what you can do.
If there is something that you think is right up your alley, but is already assigned to someone else, then contact them and ask them if they would like any help - chances are they would love an extra pair of hands.
If all else fails, then contact Benjamin Humphrey and he can find something for you to do!

Fluent in more than one language? Consider translating!

A Proposed Title Page

Source:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-manual/
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/37759660/ubuntumanual.pdf

Ubuntu Release Schedule Video

2010-01-11T12:23:00.003+01:00

After blogging about my Ubuntu Release Schedule Video project, I received a lot of awesome feedback. Some of the feedback was received a bit too late in the process (like text suggestions) to make it in the video, but is still very much appreciated. Today I finally have something to show. Alan Pope have been so kind to provided me with the missing audio for the video. Although many people offered to help, I decided to go with Alan for various reasons. These include having English as first language, being a well known voice (UK Podcast and screencasts), having quality recording equipment. So, let's look at the result:

There's still a few thing I could/should have included, but other that I'm very happy with the result. About the YouTube subtitles that many people commented on, just send me the file and I'll add it. In case you want to add a voiceover in another language here's the .OGV source (30MB): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/175241/THIS_IS_THE_ONE.ogv

Although this video took more time to create than I intended to spend, I really want to create other similar videos. If you want to help out, please add your ideas, suggestion, comments to the wiki (kind of obsolete now that the video is done) or the forum thread.

Before I leave you, I should give a shout out to Jens Sage who (for some reason) send me this: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1669637/indian_ubuntu.mp3

Once again, thanks for all the amazing feedback!

Ubuntu-Artists Group At Deviantart

2010-01-08T19:43:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Martin Owens, there's now an Ubuntu-Artists group at DeviantArt.

Martin wants anyone who is involved in Ubuntu related art/design and uses or is interested in Ubuntu to join. He also want to favorites contain artworks made using Ubuntu, and the galleries to contain things that were made for Ubuntu (wallpapers, ui mockups, tans, fan-art, etc).

Martin writes:

I have only today noticed the a new feature in DeviantArt called Groups, this allows people to get together and form communities.

So I have applied to create a social group called “Ubuntu-Artists” which will hopefully act as a point of contact for anyone who uses ubuntu to create Art, for people who make Art for the community or for people who do UI design work for any of the programs in Ubuntu.

Available at the following link: http://ubuntu-artists.deviantart.com/
Please do join and post your Ubuntu related artworks and designs.

What will be really good is getting a place where Ubuntu Art can be hosted, collected and shown off in all it’s glory. There are some really amazing art works created in Inkscape, Gimp and Blender on Ubuntu and it’s time we got to appreciate the artists who are striking out against the common belief that Macs make the best artist computers or that windows is where every drawing tablet works.

http://ubuntu-artists.deviantart.com/

Source: http://doctormo.wordpress.com/

DivX Wants To Embed DivX TV Into Your Devices

2010-01-07T15:23:00.001+01:00

DivX has a long history of trying to reinvent itself and this year at CES 2010, the company is attempting yet another shift: becoming an Internet TV platform for the living room. DivX TV will stream online media content to any connected device, including TVs, Blu-ray players and game consoles without requiring a separate box. Instead, the platform will be embedded directly into the device. DivX TV content will come from the AP, blip.tv, Break, CNET, Dailymotion, Revision 3, TED, Twitter and more. The software will also be able to stream music from Rhapsody and Pandora, as well as display pictures from Picasa.

DivX is hoping to leverage its existing partnerships with consumer electronics manufacturers to give them a new way to appeal to consumers who are viewing more content online these days. It's a compelling proposition: by embedding the Internet TV platform directly into a device, there's no need to buy a separate device and gives the manufacturer a slice of the advertising revenue.

Of course, as now-defunct Internet TV provider Joost learned the hard way, the product is only as good as its content, and without movie partners like Netflix or Amazon, or major studios to rent content as they do on Apple TV, it remains to be seen whether consumers are interested in watching Diggnation on their TV.

LG is the first partner for DivX TV, and the manufacturer will include the feature in an upcoming Blu-ray player.

Source: http://www.betanews.com/

Danish Schoolchildren Complaints About OpenOffice

2010-01-07T15:15:00.001+01:00

In Denmark in an open letter to the mayor, city council and the IT manager in Lyngby-Taarbaek Municipality, the Virum School student council is now targeting sharp criticism against the decision to replace Microsoft Office with OpenOffice. There are major problems with programs and students lack training in how to use them, says the criticism.

Already last year there were debate around the municipality's decision to opt for OpenOffice rather than Microsoft's office suite.

Microsoft's technology director Jasper Hedegaard Bojsen then sent an open letter to the municipal mayor, which he denied that that OpenOffice should be an equal and cheaper alternative to Office. It led to accusations that Microsoft tried to implement a scare campaign.

Local newspaper site debate went back and forth between individuals. But now the pupils at school, are speaking up. In the open letter which can be read on the newspaper's website, they write include:

"Firstly, we think it is a huge problem that we have not learned to use the program, especially since 9th classes, the exam in a program they did not know and not know how to use. One solution might be to give us students a course in how to use the programs. It makes others know when they must learn a new program to know."

But criticism from Virum School student council will not stop here.

"We also have big problems with the layout. For example if we write a Danish-style home in the Word and spend much time on layout in style when we come to the school and must print it out or edit the layout is completely different and more cluttered than we had used time at home. This is a problem because we are also characters in order..." reads the letter.

Schoolchildren also regrets the lack of substitutes for several programs in the Office, including Publisher, is not in the OpenOffice package.

"We can not understand why only students and teachers to use OpenOffice, while all those who work elsewhere in the municipality still allowed to work with Microsoft Office package," they write.

The municipality has however been expressed that the entire administration to be shifted to OpenOffice and not just schools. The letter ends with this telling-off to the politicians:

"We think it is unfair that some of the most important tool in our school work and who previously has worked really well until we got OpenOffice, has now been changed to something that works worse."

Skype Goes 720p, Jumps Onto LG and Panasonic HDTVs

2010-01-05T10:28:00.001+01:00

Although I love open source, I have to admit I'm a frequent Skype user. This week there's some big news from Skype. They're making a push for 720p video quality, with both new HD webcams and software support, but that's not the biggest deal here. They're also partnering with LG and Panasonic for Skype-enabled HDTVs.

Gizmodo writes:

The new Skype 4.2 beta can achieve better quality video than ever before: 1280 x 720 resolution at 30fps. They've also got a line of HD webcams (hardware from faceVision and In Store) that pack video encoding and processing onboard, so as not to confound your grandma's crappy old computer. There are two versions from each manufacturer: FaceVision has one with and one without a microphone ($100 and $70, respectively) and In Store has the Freetalk Pro at $120 and the presumably ever pro-er Freetalk Pro Plus at $140.

Now for those HDTVs. LG and Panasonic are the hardware partners here, and they've integrated both a webcam and Skype software into their HDTVs. They'll have just about every Skype feature the computer software has—voicemail, landline and mobile calls, free Skype-to-Skype, all that—as well as a 720p webcam and microphones specifically designed to pick up sound at couch distance. Want to say hello to your kid, niece, nephew, grandkid, whatever, but he or she won't sit still in front of a computer? Let 'em run around in front of the TV! We'll get more info from Skype on specific pricing and availability for these TVs this week.

Makes me wonder how this will work. Will every HDTV be running Skype on top of Windows or are Skype finally making a push for Linux? The last one would be the wiser choice.

I Need Your Help...

2010-01-04T23:28:00.002+01:00

This might seem desperate, and perhaps it is, but I really need your help with a little project I'm working on. Basically I want to create an introductory video that briefly explains how the Ubuntu release schedule/cycle works. This will very much be aimed at Ubuntu newbies.

My first idea was to create an introductory video that would summarize what goes into a release cycle (Toolchain, UDS, Freezes, Alpha, Beta, RC), but that part has been postponed mostly due to my lack of knowledge in these areas (how does one describe Toolchain upload?). Anyway, back on topic, I figured I could write most of the text for the beginner friendly release schedule video myself, and so I did. There's things that have been left out and things that I properly have forgotten. This is the current draft for the voiceover:

Hi, my name is ????? and I'm here to tell you about the Ubuntu release schedule.
Every six months a new Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server release is produced.
Each release is supported for 18 months. (perhaps this should be in years?)
Upgrades to new versions of Ubuntu are and always will be free of charge.
Every two years, a LTS version is released.
LTS is a abbreviation for Long term support
With the Long Term Support (perhaps just LTS) version you get 3 years support on Ubuntu Desktop.
There is no extra fee for the LTS version, the very best work is available to everyone on the same free terms.
There is 5 years support on the LTS Server release, which makes it ideal for enterprise users making large deployments.
The official name of an Ubuntu release uses the year and month of the release as the version number.
If the release is delayed the version number changes accordingly.
The first Ubuntu release was Ubuntu 4.10 and was released in 2004 on October 20.
Since (the actual release date may change and) humans tend to prefer names rather than numbers, Ubuntu releases are also given codenames.
The codenames, uses an adjective and an animal with the same first letter. With the exception of the first three releases, code names are in alphabetical order.
Visit ubuntu.com for more information
Thanks for watching

I'm still looking for someone to record the actual voiceover - preferably someone who speaks native English. Anyone?
I desperately need help with this, so if you want to contribute in any way, I will appreciate it. Also, if you think this project is a waste of time, please let me know :-)

Enna Media Center

2010-01-03T22:53:00.003+01:00

By now there's a few really good media center application available for Linux, and today yet another joins the game. The very first release of Enna Media Center (v0.4.0) has came out!

click to view fullsize

Benjamin Zores, the project leader for the GeeXbox project and long-time MPlayer developer, has announced the first public (beta) release of Enna. Enna is a multi-media player that will be at the heart of the GeeXbox 2.0 distribution and is available as a separate program for those using other Linux distributions.

This project is still very very young and still lacks many features compared to something like XBMC, but Enna is said to be much smaller in terms of size, dependencies and resources consumption. Although we have XBMC, Moovida and LinuxMCE, it's always nice to see a new competitor on the block.

click to view fullsize

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic users can have a quick try at it, through apt-get, the whole stuff having been packaged for. Just add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://packages.geexbox.org/ karmic main

Once done, you may just install Enna through the following command:

aptitude update
aptitude install enna

More information about Enna can be found in this blog post.

Source:
- http://gxben.wordpress.com/2010/01/03/first-public-enna-0-4-0-release/
- http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzg1NA
- http://enna.geexbox.org/index.html

Karmic X-splash Makeover

2009-12-27T16:21:00.000+01:00

I've created this little animation using the Karmic X-splash background. Finally I have some time to work on Ubuntu related projects which has been neglected for some time. I have other small projects that I will share with you in the near future. Let me emphasize that the Karmic X-splash makeover is only a mockup!

Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T09:59:00.001+01:00

In the spirit of the holiday season, I want to wish you all a merry christmas.

Sources:
- http://gerry.ws/2008/12/417/going-loco-over-the-ubuntu-logo.html
- http://skyisgrey.org/blog/ubuntu-desktop-course.html
- http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Christmas-Tux-ubuntu?content=70260

Docky!

2009-12-22T21:41:00.000+01:00

My fellow blogger at the awesome site http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk, has been writing a lot about Docky. The Launchpad project description says: "Docky is a full fledged dock application that makes opening common applications and managing windows easier and quicker. Docky is fully integrated into the GNOME Desktop and features a no non-sense approach to configuration and usage. It just works."

Personally I'm still mainly using Gnome vanilla style, but Docky is look nothing less than fantastic!

WOW! For more info I've added links to some of OMG Ubuntu!'s Docky posts below.

Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk and https://launchpad.net/docky

Mark Shuttleworth Steps Down As CEO At Canonical

2009-12-18T00:12:00.001+01:00

You couldn't possible have missed this (every open-source and linux site has written about this), but just in case let me inform you that Mark Shuttleworth has announced the current COO Jane Silberwill have the privilege of leading Canonical from March of next year. Mark will continue to play a major role in Canonical, and it is expected to be a smooth transition. Silber's official blog and Linux.com each have more details on how the change will be implemented. Mark wishes to focus more on making Ubuntu better and less on the financial aspects. In his blogpost Mark writes:

From March next year, I’ll focus my Canonical energy on product design, partnerships and customers. Those are the areas that I enjoy most and also the areas where I can best shape the impact we have on open source and the technology market. I’m able to do this because Jane Silber, who has been COO at Canonical virtually from the beginning, will take on the job of CEO.
Since Jane joined the company, she and I have shared the load of coordinating between the leaders of all the key teams that make up Canonical. We’ve been through various permutations as new initiatives needed different kinds of attention; Jane currently leads the Ubuntu One effort, for example.
I’ve become very passionate about design and quality, and want to spend more time figuring out how we harness the collaborative process to build better, more insightful products. I can’t think of a more interesting challenge, and luckily I couldn’t think of a better person to take over my formal management and leadership responsibilities at Canonical than Jane. We’ve worked together long enough, and closely enough, that I can be confident of continuity in the pieces I most care about and also excited about the ways in which I think Jane will raise the bar for the senior team. As a former VP at General Dynamics, Jane has more experience of large customers and large organisational leadership, which I see as essential for Canonical over the next five years. We are being welcomed as a partner and supplier to ever-larger businesses, and I want to make sure we are a robust answer to their needs...

I've met both Mark and Jane in person and I honestly believe that this is a really good thing - they are both amazing people. I wish them both congrats and the best of luck.

Sources:
- http://www.markshuttleworth.com/
- http://blog.canonical.com/
- http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/
- http://arstechnica.com/

Improvements Coming To The Desktop Notification Area

2009-12-17T11:01:00.005+01:00

The Canonical DesktopExperienceTeam (with help from Ayatana) is working on some nice improvements to the desktop notification area (or systray) for Ubuntu 10.04.

The current notification area is becoming more and more difficult for users to interact with. Each application behaves differently, they're not accessible, and they're even sometime styled differently. Ted Gould explains that this makes the interface difficult for users as they don't know what to expect. It provides a difficult situation for applications as there is no way that they can give the user a good experience as there are no standards to follow. And it makes the whole support system for software more difficult through documentation and long explanations of how to use the computer.

The DesktopExperienceTeam propose to migrate the different applets to using simple menus. This change should provide a more consistent interface and be an important step to improve the user experience with the right hand side of the panel.
With every application being a menu, and the panel knowing this and being able to assume it, then the whole notification area can be a menu bar. This makes it easy to browse application's menus, find what you want, and work with it. It also improves keyboard navigation and increases the accessibility. Menus are a nice mix between simplicity and expandability as they're easy to use and yet provide a way for applications to provide a rich set of functionality.

The proposed changes define two main areas in the panel:
• A "system indicator" area at the far right of the panel, gathering system features like sound, power or session management
• An "application indicator" area, just before it, grouping icons and menus from applications that wish to host a part of their interface on the panel Additionaly, we propose to turn all of the elements on the right side of the panel into regular menus.

This way, users will not have to worry about whether a function is accessible with a left or right click, or be suprised when a click on a panel icon suddenly hides or shows a full application window. Additionally, that will help provide:

• An accessible interface: icons and menus will be introspectable by screen readers
• Style consistency: as the menus will be rendered by the same toolkit as the panel, the context menus of KDE applications will be rendered in the same style as other applications running on a Gnome desktop, and vice versa
• Constant layout: being integrated in a common menubar (as opposed to a collection of applets), icons and menus shouldn't be disturbed by resolution changes, like when doing a presentation and then returning to the desktop to see all applets totally disorganized
• Menu scrubbing: users frequently browse menus in search of a feature; by turning the notification area into a set of menus, the users will be able to search the interface more easily

To understand more about what's coming in Ubuntu 10.04 and how to port applications the DX team tried to put up some documentation including a porting guide for applicationscode with examples.

In the notification area the messaging menu will also receive improvements. The DX team is providing specifications for how applications should integrated with the messaging menu.

A sketch for the Messaging menu in the nocification area for Ubuntu 10.04

Another part of Canonical's plan for panel perfection is a concept that the company calls the Me Menu. Based partly on Ubuntu's current presence applet, the new Me Menu will serve as a one-stop shop for configuring messaging status and social networks. Designed by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth himself, the Me Menu is expected to be one of the highlights of Ubuntu 10.04.

Much like the current presence menu, it will offer tight integration with the Empathy instant messaging client, allowing users to control their status and availability settings. It will also integrate with the Gwibber microblogging client to make it possible for users to post status messages to Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, and other services directly through a textbox in the Me Menu. Another major goal of the Me Menu is to provide a single access point for account management. The user will be able to use the menu to launch account configuration for Gwibber, Empathy, and Ubuntu One. (source ArsTechnica)

I would really like to see GNOME Shell considering picking up some of this amazing work. I am really excited about the opportunities this work is bringing to the Ubuntu desktop and I'm very much looking forward the improved user experience in Ubuntu 10.04.

Sources:
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopExperienceTeam/ApplicationIndicators
• http://gould.cx/ted/blog/Having_a_tidy_systray
• http://www.jonobacon.org/2009/12/17/application-indicators-in-python/
• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MessagingMenu

Banshee Gets Grid View

2009-12-17T10:07:00.000+01:00

Earlier Aaron Bockover told us about the future of Banshee and the new Clutter based interface (Netbook-focused) called Cubano. Today, Aaron announced the new beautiful grid layout mode for the album browser in Banshee. The new code haven't been merged to master yet, because there's still a few quirks to work out, but the code is ready for some broader testing.

On his blog Aaron writes:

...That is, all the benefits of our polished list widget with a new look and feel! I’m making the widget more clever and abstracted about layout and rendering so it can be more inviting to users. In fact, you can even live-toggle between layout modes (e.g list and grid) without losing any state.

This effort provides a more visually immersing and space-conscious view for your collection of albums. This big step forward is the groundwork for presenting other media collections in a friendlier way — video thumbnails, movie box covers, audio books, photos…

Many people were sad to hear that Banshee won't become the default media player in Ubuntu 10.04 - possibly not even in Ubuntu 10.10, but that is yet to be decided. Rhythmbox will be the default music player and will get an integrated music store in the next version of Ubuntu. The music store will deliver the ability to purchase music from within Rhythmbox. Lets hope someone will intergrate the music store in Banshee as well.

As always, Banshee is looking awesome!

Source: http://abock.org/2009/12/17/banshee-grid-view

Zeitgeist + Docky

2009-12-14T12:30:00.001+01:00

In case you've missed it, I just wanted to share the awesomeness of Zeitgeist + Docky with you. A few days ago Seif Lotfy posted this on his blog:

So Jason Smith approaches me after I was fiddling with Teamgeist.
Baiscally we gave Docky some awesomeness by providing its folders the knowledge of what it uses most.
After 1 hour or a bit more we had code. It is simple and I would love to see that in Shell. There will be much more Zeitgeist + Docky in the future. Of course stay tuned for other kick ass extensions, namely Teamgeist and Synapse.

Could this be the new GNOME experience?

X-Splash For Edubuntu 10.04

2009-12-14T10:30:00.002+01:00

After talking with Stéphane Graber at UDS Dallas about new artwork for Edubuntu 10.04, I've created a very simple X-splash throbber mockup.

There's a lot of other artwork related tasks to work on for 10.04 as Edubuntu will have the following needs for the next release:

Main artwork

Wallpaper (at least one, should be 1920x1440 as the Ubuntu one)
Gnome/GTK theme (might be the same as Ubuntu)
Icon theme (might be the same as Ubuntu or our current one)
GDM theme (or at least background, depending on how we can customize it nowadays)
Splash (xsplash + usplash/plymouth depending on what's used for Ubuntu)
LDM background (for LTSP, same requirements as last time) (we'll need an Ubuntu and an Edubuntu background here)

Additional artwork

Theme for KDE (wallpaper, kdm theme, ...)

Stéphane Graber will create a complete wiki page listing the needs for each of these items (size, resolution, restrictions, ...) and will then announce it on both ubuntu-artwork and the edubuntu mailing-lists. As you can see from the list, there' s a lot of things to work on, and Edubuntu is looking for all the help they can get.

Source: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-devel/2009-December/003199.html

Customizing X-Splash

2009-12-08T00:04:00.006+01:00

I've been receiving a lot of feedback regarding my x-splash artwork and mockups. The most common question people ask, is "How can I get this?".

Since the first release of X-splash, we have seen many people customize the boot experience - some attempts more successful than others. You can find something really interesting on Gnome-look and the Ubuntu forums, but so far I haven't found any tutorials that explain how to create your own X-splash throbber. This post is an attempt to create such a "tutorial".

How does it all work
The X-splash files are stored in the /usr/share/images/xsplash folder. Modifying files in this folder requires root authority.
The background, logo and throbber images are all stored in four different sizes (It has been suggested to use only one scalable background image for Ubuntu 10.04, so this guide might be outdated by 10.04). X-splash will use the image sizes that fits your screen resolution best. I only use the largest files available for background, logo and the throbber, since these are the ones X-splash uses on my system. These three files are called:

bg_2560x1600.jpg
logo_xtra_large.png
throbber_xtra_large.png

You will notice the background image is in .JPG and that the filename contains information about the image size (2560x1600 px). If you create your own background image and plan to pass on your work to others, you must resize the image to the four different sizes. You can do the same for the throbber and the logo images, but in most cases (depending on the size of your images of course) you can use the same image size for all/most resolutions.

The logo and throbber files are .PNG files. .PNG was originally created as a replacement for the ubiquitous GIF format, which used to require a patent license for producers of imaging software to use it legally (the GIF/LZW patent has since expired, so this is no longer a factor). Besides being a freely available format, PNG allows for virtually unlimited transparency effects by enabling an alpha channel for transparency. This is exactly what we want for the throbber and logo image.

The logo image gets placed so that its center is screen width/2, screen height/3.

The throbber gets chopped via the throbber image's width and height divided by the number of frames. Xsplash expects 50 frames default. You can use whatever size image you want for the throbber, just make sure the graphics matches the number of frames. So, if you put an 100x5000 image, it'll appear as a 100x100 throbber animation with 50 frames.
Perhaps you remember when the Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 5 came out (first time X-splash was included) and every website posted YouTube videos of this weird looking animation. The throbber image shiped in Alpha 5 had 51 frames insted of 50!

The animation
For the animation you can eighter create the frames manually in applications like GIMP. You may already have brilliany ideas, but start simple until you understand how this works. MacUntu, from the Ubuntuforums, illustrates this perfectly.

A throbber with 17 frames by MacUntu

I prefer to use a animation application like Blender, which can render frames and save them as .PNG images. If you know other good applications for this task, please let me know.

When you've created the .PNG throbber frame images, you'll need to "stitch" them together. To stitch the frames images together (you'll need Imagemagick), place all the frames images in an empty folder and type:

convert `ls *` -append new_throbber.png

I've created 50 frame images for you to try this with: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/175241/boot/throbber_frame_images.tar.gz
The images won't give you a smooth animation since these are only old test images for what eventually became the Xubuntu X-splash.

Need more help
I hope this will get you started customizing X-splash. Remember you can re-install the default X-splash, go to the terminal and write:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-xsplash-artwork

To show the X-splash arrguments:

sudo -u gdm xsplash --help

If you are look for more help, visit the Ubuntuforums.org where you'll find information about how to customize usplash, xsplash and grub and other goodies.
If you don't want to get your hands dirty, you can check out these other X-splash customizations:

Please DIGG this!

Kernel Summary from UDS Lucid

2009-12-07T10:54:00.001+01:00

UDS Lucid was a busy time for the Kernel Team. They chose a new kernel for the Lucid Lynx release, they reviewed their policies for Stable Updates, reviewed their kernel delta and configuration, and much more. Here is a very brief overview of their decisions for those who are interested. I should warn you that this might get a bit geeky.

The primary decision for the kernel team at UDS is to choose the base kernel version for the release. For Lucid this will be 2.6.32. This version has just released providing the maximum stabalization time, it also is expected to be the kernel of choice for long term releases from other major distributions (SUSE, Fedora?). The kernel team will also keep ext4 as their primary filesystem.

They also reviewed their Stable Release Update policy, moving to a more upstream stable branch oriented policy. The team will be taking upstream stable updates for longer and preferring those for Lucid.

The team reviewed their Ubuntu delta, the drivers, and patches they are carrying. They plan to update all of their Ubuntu drivers except for drbd. drbd is primarily consumed by the server team and they use a dkms module to get a more up to date version. On the patch side they have identified a number of redundant patches which have been dropped, and a number which should be moved upstream.

The team has decided to experiment with backporting newer kernels onto LTS releases for Lucid. This will involve provision of a kernel from later cycles into Lucid, supported on certified platforms. The policy here is being firmed up now.

For graphics, they chose to enable Radeon Kernel Mode Settings by default and to seriously look at enabling Nouveau for Lucid. This should bring a flicker-free Plymouth boot to the majority of users, but for people using the 2D-only "Nouveau" NVidia driver on Nvidia chipsets, they will have to sacrifice things like 3D compiz and VDAPU video playback. Confused? Read more about Plymouth and KMS here...

For those who crave more detail on these and a couple of other key initiatives can find more information at the following wiki page, which they will be keeping up to date with the current state of the union for the kernel http://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/UDSLucid

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kernel-team/2009-December/007948.html

FreeNAS Switching From FreeBSD To Debian Linux

2009-12-07T00:12:00.000+01:00

FreeNAS, a popular, free NAS solution, is moving away from using FreeBSD as its underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers, can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux.

Changeing its underlying core OS is no picnic, but I think it will be all worth it.

Ubuntu 10.04 Will Have "Simple Scan"

2009-12-06T23:38:00.005+01:00

Robert Ancell is working on making scanning on Ubuntu "just work". Currently scanning is performed using the default installed Xsane. Xsane has many options, has a style that does not integrate into the current Ubuntu desktop and does not allow scanning from within applications. In Karmic it was proposed to peplaced Xsane with the application Gnome-Scan, but Gnome-Scan was not found to be stable enough.
Robert Ancell's application titled Simple Scan is basically a frontend for SANE - which is the same backend as XSANE uses. This means that all existing scanners will work and the interface is well tested. However, this does not rule out changing the backend in the future. Besides a much cleaner interface, Simple Scan will also have a GTK+ interface that integrates nicely with the Ubuntu desktop.

Latest UI suggestion

Simple Scan is under heavy development, but hopefully Robert will have something solid, slick and intuitive to ship in Ubuntu 10.04.

http://people.ubuntu.com/~robert-ancell/simple-scan/
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Lucid/DocumentScanning

Ubuntu Studio Variant Of The Breathe Iconset

2009-12-06T23:09:00.000+01:00

Cory Kontros recently announced that Ubuntu Studio is looking for a icon refresh and is considering depending on the Breathe iconset as a base for Lucid. The idea is to create new icons in the Breathe/Oxygen style and inherit Breathe as a dependency. This new look will be a nice update from the current Tango styled icons. Saleel Velankar has already made the first submissions on the wiki.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/BreatheIconSet/UbuntuStudio

Ubuntu's Karmic Koala Bible .. 50 Page Guide Released

2009-12-02T20:21:00.004+01:00

In simple copy/paste steps and detailed over 25 sections, the "Karmic Koala Bible" appeals to both Linux initiates and intermediates alike, stepping out key procedures such as partition planning and with a raft of system tweaks. It manages also to simplify use of the often-daunting terminal for greater user efficiency, even for new users.

Guvnr's founder Olly Connelly said of the guide:

The latest Ubuntu release is superbly user-friendly. At last Linux is giving Windows a serious run for its money. This guide gives newbies all the start-up knowledge they need while helping intermediates to attain a truly enhanced system setup.

The closest-to-perfect all-in-1 guide .. all-on-1-site! This guide belongs in the virtual library of every Linux user!

Web version here: http://guvnr.com/pc/karmic-koala-bible/

PDF version here: Download the Ubuntu Karmic Koala Bible in PDF, or read it online on Scribd!

Ubuntu Extra Wallpaper Package

2009-11-29T23:56:00.002+01:00

Karmic includes a set of freely licensed high quality desktop backgrounds. A lot of beautiful backgrounds from the "contest" didn't make it onto the CD, but last week Kenneth Wimer pushed the extra wallpapers from the flickr contest to his PPA.

Hi all,
 
I've just pushed the extra wallpapers from the flickr contest to my ppa.

Direct link:
https://launchpad.net/~kwwii/+archive/ppa

Instructions on getting that setup on your machine:
https://launchpad.net/+help/soyuz/ppa-sources-list.html

The package to install is desktop-backgrounds-extra

Ken

You can click here to download the desktop-backgrounds-extra_0.2_all.deb

Although the Ubuntu 10.04 contest haven't yet started, the planning has. For each release, there will be a start and end date where you can submit pictures for the current development release. The pictures won't be considered for more than one release (but you can re-submit). Currently the plan is to have the end date set three months before release day, with a first package in Beta 1.

Let's hope Lucid will see as many beautiful submissions as Karmic did.

Lucid Lynx Timeline

2009-11-29T17:11:00.000+01:00

Perhaps you already noticed in my last post "Lucid Lynx - This Is The Plan" that I've created a Lucid Lynx timeline. As I mentioned with the Karmic Koala timeline, I was inspired by Andreas Nilssons graphical representation of the GNOME Release Process and wanted to create something similar for Ubuntu.

This is the "updated version" which has roots, earth, sky, a Ubuntu EC2 cloud and a Debian snail.

The image represents the 6 months Lucid cycle as a timeline. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidReleaseSchedule

Lucid Lynx - This Is The Plan

2009-11-26T00:18:00.006+01:00

What can we expect from 10.04 - Lucid Lynx?
This post is ment as a followup on my previous post titled "What can we expect from 10.04". Of course no one can know exactly what Ubuntu 10.04 will be like and what features will land. But based on the outcome of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas here's my vision.

An early landing.
If you've been following the Karmic development, you will know that much of the work landed rather close to the actual release. With Lucid Lynx, the plan is to land as many critical elements as possible around alpha 2. The release schedule looks a little different this time. The biggest change is that there's now two beta releases. This is mainly done with the hope that more people will help test the release and report bugs earlier in the development cycle.

Since this is a LTS release, there will also be more time scheduled for bug fixing. Lucid might not be shipping the latest and greatest, because the of the increased focus on stability and long term support. The opposite might also be the case, as we saw in Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, where the final release shipped a BETA version of Firefox. There's some crucial choices to be made.

The music store
Rhythmbox will be the default musicplayer (Banshee might be considered again for Lucid+1) and will have an integrated music store. The music store will deliver the ability to purchase music from within Rhythmbox. No actual music partner has been announced yet, but Canonical are looking at several major vendors. The music downloaded to your music player library locally can be synced across all your computers via UbuntuOne. All the music will be DRM free, which means there will be no restrictions as to how many times a user can copy their purchased music.
With UbuntuOne you will be able to easily share any folders in your home directory. No need to move files into the UbuntuOne folder anymore. The team has also got massive plans for the future.

Applications
As you might have heard, Rick Spence brought up the suggestion of removing the GIMP from the default installation (it will still be available in the Software Center). The Gimp is a showcase for the power of FOSS, but it is also very complex. It takes up a lot of space, and basic photo editing tasks are taken up by F-Spot (though F-Spot could use some allround love). The plan is to include a videoeditor by default and the choice has, for now, landed on PiTivi. This has caused a lot of people to complain (with feedback), but this really isn't a big deal. The GIMP is not being "abandoned" just because it is not installed by default. The Ubuntu community supports a lot of software; not just what is on the disk. During the Alpha cycle, it will be decided if PiTivi is ready for the Lucid Lynx. Ryan Paul has written a nice article about the topic on the ArsTechnica website.
Lucid will ship OpenOffice version 3.2.1. The selection of games will undergo a clean-up. Basically the goal is to choose fewer, better games by default – especially ones that are online multi-player games.

System indicators
For Ubuntu Lucid, the messaging menu will by default contain a section for each messaging application you are actively using. The goal is to make the panel elements feel coherent and the behavior more consistent. Each section will show an item for the application as a whole, then any custom commands specified by the application, then any items for individual message sources within that application. An application may provide a new-messages count or a time-since-last-message for each message source as appropriate, or alternatively provide a new-messages count for the application as a whole. Your default mail application, and Ubuntu’s non-mail default messaging applications (Empathy and Gwibber for Lucid), will be placed first in the menu if you’re using them. All other application sections should have an item for the application itself, highlighted with a triangle if the application is currently running. Improvements are target the session menu, status menu, sound menu and power menu.

View more system indicator sketches here...

Software Center
One of the biggest features that were introduced in 9.10 was the Software Center. With a simple design it can be used to install and remove software packages and to add repositories for finding, installing and managing new applications. In Ubuntu 10.04 the Software Center will expanded its features and will also present packages (as opposed to end-user applications). It is also planned to include a way for users to review software or packages.

Compiz
Personally I was sad to learn that the rewrite of the Compiz core in C++ (which allows for smart functions, easier and smarter private systems, easier initialization and clean-up, and there are numerous other advantages) will not be ready in time for Lucid. The popular eye-candy application will however be receiving some allround improvements. Besides having it's own dedicated milestone in the 100 paper cuts project, the goals have been listed as:

Visual consistency with the Ubuntu theme
Coherent keybindings; utilizing the Super key
Increase awareness of features, really need to think about discoverability
Go back to 4 workspaces to make it worth a users while to learn the feature.
Improve animations - they need to be made more consistent, faster.
Disabling plugins to improve boot performance (compiz currently takes 9 seconds to start!).
Provide better interface for doing settings upgrades and backups

Notifications
The notification system that was introduced in Ubuntu 9.04, will have a "do-not-disturb" mode that individual applications can trigger. Whenever a program is inhibiting the screensaver, Notify OSD will be in the do-not-disturb mode. This means that while you’re watching a movie in fullscreen, you will not be notified about chat, e-mail or other non critical notifications. However a notification will appear if for example your battery is low.

Design specification for Notify OSD here...

100 Paper Cuts
Started during the Ubuntu 9.10 development cycle was an Ubuntu project to address paper cuts in Ubuntu, or rather small usability bugs in Ubuntu and the Linux desktop that are often only minor impairments or annoyances, but these easy-to-fix issues have never been heavily targeted for correction. These "paper cuts" are often spotted by new Linux users but frequently go unnoticed to those that have been using the Linux desktop for a while and are accustomed to its shortcomings. Most of the 100 paper cuts targeted for Ubuntu 9.10 were addressed (the official count seems to be at 76), but this project is going to live on with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
Lucid will have ten rounds to fix 100 (or more) paper cuts in time for the Lucid Lynx before it is released in April. Three of the ten rounds are focused on addressing the outstanding paper cuts from Ubuntu 9.10. David Siegel has described the ten milestones that will help structure the effort to fix one hundred paper cuts for Lucid in his blogpost (see the Lucid series on Launchpad). If all goes according to plan, 100 paper cuts will be healed by the end of February.

Testing
Dustin Kirkland recently announced Testdrive which makes it simple to run any Ubuntu release in a virtual machine, safely, and without affecting your current Ubuntu installation. This is a great way to "try out" the Ubuntu release beyond your current version, before upgrading. Dustin Kirkland expects that testdrive will be very useful to Ubuntu developers, testers, and bug triagers during the Lucid development cycle, as these people will be able to test Lucid's daily ISOs throughout the cycle, and in particular at the release milestones for ISO-acceptance-testing.

Boot experience
There's a 10 second goal for boot time for Lucid, with the Dell Mini 10v with SSD as reference machine. The desktop-team has got a lot of work to do to reach the goal, which will shave 10 seconds off the the boottime. Even though we haven't seen any drastic improvements in Karmic, all the under the hood work done in Karmic will shine though in Lucid. The design and artwork won't change much from what we saw in Karmic - mostly small tweaks and cleanups here and there. Usplash will be replaced with Plymouth. Radeon KMS support should be available in 2.6.32 and later covering the kernel version in Lucid. Nvidia support is expected to only be available via the Nouveau driver, which is currently not slated for inclusion currently.

Only pieces
What I’ve described above only covers the stuff I’m most excited about surrounding the Ubuntu desktop. I hope the 100-papercuts project and Dustin Kirklands TestDrive will help crush a lot of bugs. There is still a ton of exciting stuff that I haven’t mentioned like all the server development, Ubuntu on ARM, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Kubuntu, Cloud, Quickly, Community and so much more. The new Gnome 2.30 release will of course bring a lot of enhancements as well.

Looking forward to Ubuntu 10.04 - the Lucid Lynx.

//MadsRH

Please DIGG this post - thanks.

Shot Of Jaq

2009-11-25T10:51:00.001+01:00

About a month ago Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge announced their new podcast Shot Of Jaq. Shot Of Jaq is an irreverent take on the goings on in the Open Source, Free Culture and technology world, delivered to your ears via weekly shots.
Featuring Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge, founders of the popular award-winning LugRadio, each Shot Of Jaq delivers a thought provoking, comedy infused ten minute dose of entertainment twice a week. Each podcast is only 10 minutes long. Check it out at:

http://www.shotofjaq.org/

Google Chrome OS Promises a 3-Second Boot

2009-11-23T23:59:00.001+01:00

Softpedia just posted a nice article about Google Chrome OS. Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google, announced on November 19th the immediate availability of the source code for their upcoming Chrome Operating System, under the name of Chromium OS. The actual Chrome OS, as Google said, will be released sometime at the end of 2010, one year from now, and it will be available at first for netbooks and, later on, high-end machines.

With this source code freely available for download, various developers can get involved in the project, by creating applications, patches, etc. In other words, from now on, the development of the upcoming Chrome OS will be done transparently.

"There is still a lot of work to do, and we're excited to work with the open source community. We have benefited hugely from projects like GNU, the Linux Kernel, Moblin, Ubuntu, WebKit and many more. We will be contributing our code upstream and engaging closely with these and other open source efforts." - was stated in the official release annoucement.

OK, so please enjoy the official, 1 hour and 20 minutes long "Google Chrome OS Open Source Project Announcement" video, in high-definition!

So, here's what we've learned about the Google Chrome OS until now. Under the hood, it will be powered by the Linux kernel (version 2.6.30 in the current source code archive) and a customized firmware, it will have an Ubuntu base (yes, Karmic Koala actually), EXT4 file system and the revolutionary Google Chrome web browser. But the best part is that Google's Chrome operating system will be so optimized, that it will start in no more than 3 or 4 seconds (depending on the hardware specs of the machine).

"Unlike traditional operating systems, Chrome OS doesn't trust the applications you run. Each app is contained within a security sandbox making it harder for malware and viruses to infect your computer. Furthermore, Chrome OS barely trusts itself. Every time you restart your computer the operating system verifies the integrity of its code. If your system has been compromised, it is designed to fix itself with a reboot. While no computer can be made completely secure, we're going to make life much harder (and less profitable) for the bad guys."

YouTube is already filled with video to help us understand how Google Chrome OS will work.

Until the Chrome OS will be available for download or deployed on your netbook, you can grab the Chromium OS sources right now from Softpedia.

Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Google-Chrome-OS-Promises-a-3-Second-Boot-127592.shtml

New UI for Ubuntu Tweak 0.6

2009-11-23T23:40:00.001+01:00

The beloved application Ubuntu Tweak, designed to make configuring Ubuntu easier for everyone, will be receiving come UI love. The designer of UTCOM has done a mockup of Ubuntu Tweak 0.6, and here’s some new concept.

The mockup of Ubuntu Tweak 0.6

As you can see there will a new toolbar to switch between main category of functions, and the sub-functions will locate at the right-sidebar.

I simply love this application and I'm very much looking forward to this UI makeover. Let's hope they will spell "Ubunto" right in the final release ;-)

Source: http://ubuntu-tweak.com/2009/11/21/mockup-of-ubuntu-tweak-0-6.html

UDS Overload!

2009-11-20T07:03:00.000+01:00

I haven't exactly been keeping this blog up to date with information about and from UDS. There's simply way too much going on here for me to cover it all. I'm not going to write a long summary today either, but I've listed some links below. If you want to know more about the discussions, check the Gobby documents which contains the actual notes from the sessions.

You can get videos from UDS on our Ubuntu Developers Blip.tv channel, and our Ubuntu Developers YouTube channel.

My fellow blogger at http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/ is doing an amazing job, writing about the discussions and decisions made here at UDS in Dallas.

GIMP To Be Removed From Lucid; F-Spot Has Challengers

PiTiVi On Course To Become A Default Application In Lucid

Ubuntu Music Store Coming In Lucid - Gets Detailed

UDS - day one

2009-11-17T05:32:00.010+01:00

I’m at the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit (UDS) in Dallas. If you don't already know what UDS is, please read Alan Popes blogpost which describes it rather well here...

Remember you can easily participate even if you're not here.

The sessions

Every day I read, write and listen to English, and yet I rarely speak it. This trip to UDS in Dallas has been really challenging for both my tongue and my English vocabulary.
I've been meeting some very nice three dimensional people with full-sized human bodies and their hackergotchis sitting on top. Today I attended four sessions besides the joint ones in the Grand Ballroom. I'll try to describe some sessions below.

UDS name badges

Opening Plenary
The day kicked off with Jono Bacon, who made an introduction in the Grand Ballroom at 9:00 am. Besides a lot of practical details, Jono told us to eat healthy food, get enough sleep and be awesome! He pointed out that it is important that we stay on topic and that we get the most out of the one hour we're given in each session. Mark Shuttleworth also spoke briefly about Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Desktop round table

At this session we talked about what's important to focus on in this LTS release. Should the choice of applications remain the same to give users a feel of consistency, when moving from one release to another - or should we simply ship the best application for the job to deliver the best desktop experience. Banshee vs. Rhythmbox was brought up as an example.
Although this case was only a thought experiment, I should add that it is not likely that Lucid will be shipped with Banshee. Rick Spencer, the desktop team leader, also brought up the controversial idea of removing the GIMP in favor of a video editor, but he wanted to save the juicy details for the Wednesday session Application selection in the default install.

Boot preformance
Scott James Remnant talked for two hours about the plans for further improvements and about how to achieve it. He started the session by giving a short introduction to how to read boot-charts – mainly because people often get it wrong. To sum it up shortly, there are two graphs, the CPU graphs is how hard the CPU is working, the second is the disk being used. On the CPU blue is the CPU working hard, idle is generally bad. Disk utilization, we want the disk to be used as hard as possible for as short a time as possible; red is bad.
Even though we haven't seen much improvement in Karmic, all the under the hood work done in Karmic will shine though in Lucid. Scott talked about having budgets for each section of the boot. If all the teams all hit their budgets, the goal is achieved. He then gave a list of specific tasks to work on for each team to meet the goal. This was a very interesting session indeed.

Short joint sessions
After lunch we all meet back in the Grand Ballroom where Jono talked shortly about how to run a good session. He had created some pretty slides and remembered to recharge his laptop.

MPT explained the future plans for the Software Center. Throughout the week there will be some Software Center sessions, so I won't go into details here. I'm really looking forward to seeing the application mature.

Didier Roche (didrocks) and Rick Spencer did a demonstration of Quickly by writing a small application, building it, testing it and uploading it to a PPA in like five minutes. A fantastic usability improvement if you're writing applications on Linux. The videos aren’t up yet, but there are previous screen-casts showing it off.

Boot experience work
This session focused on the technical how to of the boot experience. Here Scott James Remnant again did much of the talking (along with Collin) and demonstrated his Plymouth dancing monkey animation. The plan for Lucid is to introduce Plymouth, although the details on how everything will fit together isn't entirely clear to me yet. Mat Tomaszewski had a list of technical issues that he wanted to discuss solutions for. Like; Removing the semi hidden and currently flickering mouse cursor and the fade in/out during startup and shutdown, etc..

Looking forward to tomorrows sessions.

Ubuntu Developers Summit - Participate Remotely

2009-11-13T13:26:00.001+01:00

The Ubuntu Developers Summit will be next week (Nov 16 - Nov 20) in Dallas, TX USA.
All my bags are packed, I'm ready to go, and hopefully I will be writing blogposts from UDS throughout the week - I'm sure many others will too. After UDS, I plan to write an updated version of What can we expect from 10.04 - Lucid Lynx?.

Even if you're not joining the party, there's still ways to participate. Check out the UDS wiki Page for more info in participating remotely.

Internet Relay Chat

Overall discussion, including plenary: #ubuntu-devel-summit on freenode.
Discussion Channels - The tracks are shuffled around different rooms, so the irc channels are /per room/, not per track. Here are the channels, which corresponds to the room of the session in the schedule.

#ubuntu-uds-waverly
#ubuntu-uds-stanford
#ubuntu-uds-madison
#ubuntu-uds-esmeralda
#ubuntu-uds-mayflower
#ubuntu-uds-riviere
#ubuntu-uds-vinoy
#ubuntu-uds-presidente
#ubuntu-uds-riogrande
#ubuntu-uds-lonestar1
#ubuntu-uds-lonestar2
#ubuntu-uds-lonestar3
#ubuntu-uds-alamo1
#ubuntu-uds-alamo2

Icecast
http://icecast.ubuntu.com/

Find stream for plenary sessions in room 5.

Recording a Live Stream
Use mplayer to capture the livestream (e.g for room3):

Code:

mplayer -playlist http://icecast.ubuntu.com:8000/room3.ogg.m3u -ao pcm:file=/tmp/mystream.wav -vc dummy -vo null

and use lame for encoding as .mp3:

Code:

lame -m s /tmp/mystream.wav -o "/tmp/uds_room3.mp3"

for scheduling you can use cron to start mplayer and pkill to stop the recording.

Gobby
gobby.ubuntu.com

Gobby is being used at UDS to collaborate on the specifications that are being written and to facilitate remote participation.

To take part, please install Gobby (available in universe) and tell it to connect to gobby.ubuntu.com. You will be presented with a list of documents being edited. During any session or meeting, and particularly at the end of one, please do make a local backup of your documents. WARNING: There is a new gobby in karmic, gobby-infinote, we will NOT be using this at UDS since we need for people on older releases to participate. Ensure you are using the "gobby" package.

Lifestream
A stream of all Ubuntu and UDS posts made to Identi.ca, Twitter, and Flickr can be found at http://summit.ubuntu.com/media/lifestream.html

Videos
We will be recording certain sessions and all the plenary sessions at UDS. You can follow along with the videos as we post them on the Ubuntu community on Miro. If you want to automatically receive updates when videos are available we recommend that you Miro and click on the miro links at the site to subscribe to the video feeds. These videos will be in Ogg Theora format and is the recommended method for watching UDS videos.

Micro-blogging

Micro-blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to send brief text updates of 140 characters or less. It is a great way to inform the Ubuntu community of discussions and news that happen during UDS. Many Ubuntu users get there news from UDS from microblogging sources. During UDS-Mountainview, Identi.ca saw more traffic during UDS than during the night of the U.S. Presidential elections.

Microblogging is not a replacement for gobby or IRC, which have important uses during an UDS event. It should be used as a tool to communicate with other people at UDS and the wider Ubuntu user community.

Suggested ways to use microblogging at UDS:

Announce session topics at the beginning of the session.
Ask for feedback from the community during the session discussion.
Dent/tweet important discussion points during the sessions.
Dent/tweet any news worthy items during UDS (Kernel version, encrypted swap by default, etc...).
To plan social events and gatherings during UDS.

Identi.ca
We encourage people at UDS to create an account on Identi.ca, an open source micro-blogging platform if they don't already have an account. If you have a Twitter account you can link it your Identi.ca account and posts you make to Identi.ca will automatically forwarded to Twitter.

If you don't wish to create an identi.ca account, each track has a generic account that people can use to post. These accounts will also announce each session as it begins. Passwords for these account will be listed at the UDS venue.

@udscommunity
@udskernel
@udsqa
@udsfoundations
@udsmobile
@udsdesktop
@udsserver

In identi.ca, please use the !ubuntu and !UDS groups in your message, which already have many followers. These automatically post to the hashtags #ubuntu and #uds, if you want to follow and are not interested in sending.

Gwibber

Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME developed with Python and GTK. It supports Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, and RSS. Gwibber is available in universe in Ubuntu 9.04+.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-L

Humanity Icons Pack

2009-11-13T11:57:00.003+01:00

For a while, my fellow blogger on OMG! UBUNTU! have been writing a lot of posts about the Humanity icons for Ubuntu 9.10:

Now you can grab all of the icons in the Humanity Icons Pack that includes monochrome Humanity panel icons for:

Printing, Shutter, Tomboy, Banshee, File Operations, Rhythmbox, Deluge, Fusion-Icon, Transmission, Gwibber, Emesene, Lifera, PolicyKit/Seahorse, Exaile, gPodder, Gwget, CellWriter, Gnome-Do, Specto, HPLIP, Brasero, Weather.

And there's more to come! http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Humanity+Panel+Icons+Theme?content=115260

GNOME 3.0 in September 2010

2009-11-10T14:06:00.003+01:00

After collecting some feedback, the GNOME Release Team has finally decided on the release date for GNOME 3.0: It will be September 2010.
To take a look again at the GNOME 3 plan that was released in April 2009: Click here.

This may come as a disappointment to those that have been very much looking forward to major improvements on the GNOME desktop, but a six-month set-back won't be too bad if it will lead to a better quality release (especially after judging the initial KDE 4.0 release). Additionally, Canonical for instance was not planning on shipping GNOME 3.0 until Ubuntu 10.10 due to Ubuntu 10.04 being their Long-Term Support release and not wanting to ship a potentially buggy desktop, so many desktop Linux users would not even have encountered the 3.0 release until October of 2010.

New module decisions for GNOME 2.30 were also made of course.

On the Gnome devel-announce-list, Vincent Untz wrote:

GNOME 3.0 will be released in September 2010, and in the meantime, we
will release GNOME 2.30 in March 2010, continuing our long-standing
tradition of six-months releases.

Thanks to the input from the community, we were able to draw a clear
picture of where we stand today and where we will be next March. As
mentioned in the GNOME 3.0 planning document [1], the release date for
3.0 was not set in stone: while we're using a strict schedule that
allows us to release GNOME every six months, GNOME is above all using
quality-based release engineering. That's why our community wants GNOME
3.0 to be fully working for users and why we believe September is more
appropriate.

Note that this release date for 3.0 doesn't mean that 2.30 will be less
stable than usual. On the contrary, this will help us integrate the
changes that are ready for 2.30, while leaving the parts that are still
rough on the edges outside of GNOME, as used daily by our users, until
after 2.30 is out. This will solidify both our 2.30 and 3.0 releases.

The idea of doing GNOME 3.0 was first seriously discussed in 2008,
before focus areas were defined in 2009, alongside a plan to reach
3.0. Those focus areas include revamping the user experience,
streamlining the platform and improving the promotion of GNOME. Compared
to GNOME 3.0, GNOME 2.30 will see the iterative improvements and bug
fixes that people have now come to expect from our 2.x branch, in
addition to some preliminary work needed for GNOME 3.0.

The GNOME 3.0 planning document was answered by the community with a
tremendous amount of work, with various teams taking the opportunity to
set their own goals for 3.0. Such goals range from modernizing part of
our stack to proposing new UI models for our desktop: those broad
changes show our ambition to always offer the best to developers and
users, and this make our path to GNOME 3.0 most exciting!

Let's make 2010 a fantastic year for GNOME!

Vincent

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/Plan

A wise decision and I'm sure the Gnome 3 release will be fantastic ones it arrives.
If you want to test the developer preview of Gnome-Shell, you can easily install it in Karmic Koala via Synaptic.

Source: Andre Klapper (andre) and phoronix.com

"Dawn of Ubuntu" Returns

2009-11-09T00:16:00.003+01:00

This beautiful artwork by Armin Ronacher, have been brought back to life by Dylan McCall (the workhorse behind the new Ubiquity slideshow). In case you don't know, "Dawn of Ubuntu" is a desktop background that has been around since Feisty Fawn. It exists in various remixes, which makes it perfect for a really elegant day / night transition, that reflects the outside world.
Dylan McCall announced his little project as early as May 2008, but about a week ago, he picked up the project again. This time with the hope of bringing "Dawn of Ubuntu" back to Ubuntu.
On the ubuntu-artwork mailinglist he wrote:

Hi,
A while ago, I made a slideshow wallpaper out of Dawn of Ubuntu and its
various remixes. It crossfades between them throughout the day. The
result is a really elegant day / night transition that reflects the
outside world.

I finally got around to making a Debian package for the thing (since
people had trouble installing it themselves), and I uploaded it to my
PPA. No need to add the PPA to install the package, since there probably
won't be any super exciting updates. (Just browse through its files and
grab the appropriate .deb).

Unless I'm really mixed up, I believe there has been discussion about
bringing back Dawn of Ubuntu since the licensing stuff has been cleaned
up; it's simply cc-by-3.0 now. Perhaps this package - or something like
it - would be a stylish way to do so.

Enjoy :)
(And feedback is always appreciated)

Dylan McCall

On the mailinglist, the idea of changing images regard to the climate was also brought up.
I've always felt that "Dawn of Ubuntu" captures some of that African spirit that surrounds Ubuntu. I know there's millions of beautiful wallpapers out there and I'm sure my feelings for this one is purely sentimental.

- PPA: https://edge.launchpad.net/~dylanmccall/+archive/ppa
- Source: http://code.launchpad.net/~dylanmccall/+junk/day-of-ubuntu-wallpaper
- PPA (with a build package): http://dylanmccall.googlepages.com/day-of-ubuntu-wallpaper_1_all.deb
- Grab the wallpaper here: http://the-mitsuhiko.deviantart.com/

MythTV Theming and UI Patch Contest

2009-11-08T00:19:00.001+01:00

After a year and a half of development and two release candidates, MythTV 0.22 final is now available. Version 0.22 of MythTV, this popular free software project to watch and record television from your computer, brings a lot of new stuff, including a major overhaul of the Qt-based MythTV user-interface and its new MythUI library with all new capabilities. The MythTV project also announced today a competition for designing new themes for MythTV with some nice prizes.

First Prize: A Hauppauge HD-PVR ($249 Value), A Schedules Direct T-Shirt, a free year of Schedules Direct service, and the inclusion of the theme into MythTV to ship with MythTV 0.23 (Due out approximately March 2010).
Second Prize: A Hauppauge HVR-2200/2250 ($149 Value, model will depend on location of winner), a Schedules Direct T-shirt, and a free year of Schedules Direct service.
Third Prize: A Hauppauge HVR-1200/1250 ($69 Value, model will depend on location of winner), A Schedules Direct T-Shirt, and a free year of Schedules Direct service.

Read the theming contest details and about the consolation prizes at http://www.mythtv.org/theming-competition

Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzY4MQ

Artwork Ready For 9.10 Release Party

2009-11-07T23:33:00.002+01:00

I've been working on a Danish leaflet/flyer/brochure for the Danish release party, and it has now reached the stage where they are being printed. As I mentioned in my previous post, I've used the Ubuntu Leaflet as base, and changed the colors to fit Karmic. I also created a very simpel poster. Finally I've managed to upload both to SpeadUbuntu and my Behance portfolio.

At Ubuntu Live! 9.10 / Karmic Release Party, members of the Danish Ubuntu community will have 250 brochures to give away, along with a huge pile of Ubuntu CD's provided by Canonical. Let's hope this will help spread the word.

As I also mentioned in an earlier post the Danish Ubuntu community will be doing something a little different with this release. This time we want to try to reach out to people who have never heard of Ubuntu before. Although the event always is open to the public, it's mostly people from the Danish forum, IRC, mailinglists and Linux community that attend.

On Saturday 14th November 2009, we’ll set up a handful of delicious laptops in the shopping mall Bruuns Galleri in Aarhus. By each table, one or two people from our group will demonstrate and talk about Ubuntu. We'll hand out free CDs and the brochure to those who might be interested. The telecommunications company Telenor will, thanks to Anders Pedersen, be providing us with Huawei E230 USB modems and broadband connectivity - awesome! Afterwards there will be something more relaxed, community minded and probability more geeky as usual.

I'm going to UDS, so I won't be able to make it to the event myself, but I'm sure Ubuntu Live! 9.10 / Karmic Release Party will be fantastic.

http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/da/material/brochure/ubuntu-awareness-brochure

http://spreadubuntu.neomenlo.org/da/material/poster/simpel-910-poster

Danish TV 2 Is No Friend Of Linux

2009-11-05T12:39:00.002+01:00

The Danish TV station TV 2 has been using Microsoft's Media player to display its content on Sputnik for a long time. This has caused several problems, especially for those not using Windows or Internet Explorer.
It has been decided to switch to another system, and here the choice fell on Microsoft's Silverlight as a replacement for Flash. The Danish news website Version2 have asked TV 2 why they chose as they did.
The most obvious reason was that the whole infrastructure behind Sputnik was already based on Microsoft Media Video format, which Silverlight can use directly. If they had chosen to use something else like Flash, almost everything would need to be rewritten.
Silverlight has integrated DRM technology and copy protection which is a request from several of the content providers.

Linux users left in the cold.
Although everything is now working on TV 2 Sputnik for both Mac and Firefox users who have the Silverlight plugin installed, Linux users are still left out in the cold.
Open source Moonlight project is an attempt to create a Silverlight clone for Linux platform and developed in collaboration between Novell and Microsoft.

I must admit that I have not tested the player with Moonlight. I am quite sure that our DRM-protected content will not work

says Magnus Rask Detlif. He adds that the new player is still in beta, and therefore may be minor errors.
I would have liked that a huge website like TV 2 would have chosen a more open solution. A setback for Linux as a desktop platform, but a win for TV 2 and Microsoft.

Is Karmic Koala Buggy?

2009-11-05T00:51:00.001+01:00

The Register has an article reporting that early adopters are having a tough time with Karmic Koala. The article says that Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. (read more here...)

This brings us back to the testing debate again. Reporting bugs is the only way for developers to know about the bugs you experience and to fix them and make Ubuntu the best Operating System it can be. It is absolutely crucial that we have enough user to test the entire system on various hardware, and that these users provide the developers with good bug-reports. But Ubuntu doesn't lack users, in fact Ubuntu has never been more popular. So, what happened with Karmic?

As João Pinto pointed out, whether Karmic Koala is a good or bad release, it is all a matter of expectations. João also belives this was an accounted risked, part of the preparation for a much important goal which is 10.04 LTS. Martin Pitt posted the following on the ubuntu-devel-discuss:

Well, the bug tracker is full of regression and other reports. Karmic indeed was meant from the start as a "crack dump" release, with lotsand lots of new technology going into it. So in a way, it was the Fedora of Ubuntu releases so far. Perhaps we should have announced that more clearly...At least we now have a full cycle ahead of us to do bug fixing. :) "Unlike the usual blame game this was a much simpler and probably more realistic answer.

What has been your experience if you've moved to Karmic?

Read the entire article here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/03/karmic_koala_frustration/

XBMC 9.11: Alpha1 ready for testing

2009-11-04T23:02:00.001+01:00

The first official testing release of the beloved XBMC 9.11 is now available.

The official announcment writes:

Today we are pleased to announce the first official testing release of 9.11, Codename: Camelot. It’s been quite a while since Babylon, so we’re very excited to begin the release cycle and work towards a new release. Please keep in mind that this is an early alpha build, and it should be treated as such. While it’s not likely to burn your house down or eat your pets, it’s likely that testers will run into a few bugs. If this happens, please search TRAC to see if someone else has already reported it. If not, you may submit a QUALITY bug report. Keep in mind that the reason for releasing alphas/betas is so that we can get a better feel for what bugs are out there. If you don’t report them, we can’t fix them.
We are also still working hard to clean up the settings. Many useless ones have been removed, but there’s still quite a bit of rearranging to do.

There are a lot of new features in this release, far too many to list here, but the highlights are:

DirectX has replaced OpenGL for Windows
Numerous skinning engine updates which allow for use of some fancy new skins
Many improvements to the video player which allow for much smoother playback
Switch to Core Audio on OSX
Many VDPAU improvements under linux
Many platform-specific customizations
Much Much more. We will be showcasing the new features here on xbmc.org as the final release approaches.

Download

If you like living on the edge and would like to try the alpha, head over to our download page. You will always find the most current official builds there. AppleTV users may update via launcher’s downloads.

The Ubuntu SVN PPA build and XBMC Live will be uploaded soon!

Source: http://xbmc.org/team-xbmc/2009/11/04/xbmc-9-11-alpha1-ready-for-testing/

Firefox 3.6 Enters Beta 1

2009-11-03T07:30:00.000+01:00

The Mozilla community has now release Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 for download. This beta version of the next version of Firefox is built on the Gecko 1.9.2 web rendering engine, containing many improvements for web developers, Add-on developers, and users. The Mozilla community appreciates your feedback and assistance in testing this preview of the next version of Firefox. Your beta software will update itself periodically, and eventually will be updated to the final release itself.
This first revision of the Beta of Firefox 3.6 / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features:

Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
Support for the WOFF font format.
Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

Web developers and Add-on developers should read more detail about the many new features in Firefox 3.6 for developers on the Mozilla Developer Center. For the full list of changes since the alpha release, see this list (it’s big).
Please use the following links to download Firefox 3.6 Beta, or visit the beta download page:

Linux: firefox-3.6b1.tar.bz2

At this time most Add-ons have not yet been upgraded by their authors to be compatible with Firefox 3.6 Beta. If you wish to help test your Add-ons, please also download and install the Add-on Compatibility Reporter – your favorite Add-on author will appreciate it!

Souce: https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2009/10/30/firefox-3-6-beta-1-is-now-available-for-download/

Testing To Make It Better...

2009-11-02T23:26:00.004+01:00

While we have an incredible bunch of people in the Ubuntu community, at Canonical and upstream that fixes bugs, we are always looking for good people to hunt down these bugs and report them. Reporting bugs is the only way for developers to know about the bugs you experience and to fix them and make Ubuntu the best Operating System it can be. But it is absolutely crucial that we have enough user to test the entire system on various hardware, and that these users provide the developers with good bug-reports.

From the Windows 7 download site, Microsoft can see that 8 million users download the Windows 7 BETA release!Microsoft also has these telemetry data that they get. Whenever anyone installs the Windows 7 BETA, they will automatically enroll into the customer feedback program. In the RC release and the final release it's an opt in program, but back in the BETA the deal was; "Hey, you're BETA testing this thing, we want the feedback - you have to provide us with this information!".
From the data collected by the customer feedback program, Microsoft was able to see that the testing pool wasn't 8 million, as the download site indicated, but instead 15 million people! So, this means 7 million people obtained the BETA or RC release of Windows 7 from elsewhere (Bittorrent, etc.).

I have no idea how many people tested the Karmic Koala alpha/beta/RC, but I'm sure the number is "slightly" smaller. It is impossible to calculate how many people is using Ubuntu. Ubuntu, and Linux in general, is getting a lot of spotlight from the press lately, which helps bring new users to Linux every day. More user means more software testers.

It seems to me that the average judgment in the Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 reviews, says it's a close race and the score is roughly even. Some like Windows 7 better and some like Ubuntu 9.10 better. Basically, I don't freaking care. I couldn't care less about a boot race when I know that Karmic Koala is merely a stepping stone. You could of course argue that every release is, but Windows 8 isn't due until early 2012.
Six months from now, Microsoft will still be shipping their new flagship, while Ubuntu will be releasing Ubuntu 10.04 - the Lucid Lynx. At this point, Windows 7 will be fighting the fastest, most solid and most beautiful version of Ubuntu ever.

DIGG!

Windows 7 info source: Paul Thurrott

The Shimmer Project Makes Open Source Beautiful

2009-10-31T13:36:00.006+01:00

I'm happy to announce that I've now joined the newly created Shimmer Project. Pasi Lallinaho (knome) founded the project to make everything Open Source beautiful. We will not be tied with any particular project even if we work with them. You could think us of as freelancers of the Free Software world with the exception that we don’t ask for any money but only work for the projects and things we have passion for. The Shimmer team will try to contribute to various fields of FOSS projects, including artwork, GUI design, usability, desktop integration, et cetera.

When Pasi Lallinaho first announced the project on the Xubuntu Developer mailinglist he wrote:

...The reasoning behind setting up a separate group rose from my and Steves disappointment in the somewhat cold and dismissing acts of the DX (Desktop Experience) team, which lead us to do more and more work to fix things that we hadn't broken. We feel really bad that Canonical is making design decisions with only GNOME in scope and don't want to handle with fixing (in our opinion) their design flaws. Yet another thing that clearly became a burden too big is the Canonical half-yearly release schedule. With our new project we will be free of any other than our own schedules...

Our IRC channel is #shimmer on freenode. All of you are welcome to join us. Besides Pasi Lallinaho, the team consists of Steve Dodier, James Schriver, Simon Steinbeiß and myself. A hardcore team and I'm honored to have been invited to join them.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what this project will bring to the Free Software world.

http://shimmerproject.org/

Please Tell Me About Packaging...

2009-10-30T23:21:00.003+01:00

Call me ignorant, but there's a lot of things below the surface of Linux, which I know absolutely nothing about. I'm wondering why distributions, or at least the large ones, haven't standardize packaging. Can you tell me?

What I do know

Linux package formats are the different file formats used to package software for various Linux distributions.
A software package refers to computer software packaged in an archive format to be installed by a package management system or a self-sufficient installer.
Linux distributions are normally segmented into packages. Each package contains a specific application or service.

from Wikipedia

Whether it is Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, OpenSuse, PCLinuxOS, Gentoo we need different packages for each distribution. And because different distributions needs different packages and formats, there's a lot of lost effort. Many people are duplicating the packaging effort, when we could be so much more efficient.
The current state of packaging is a setback for the distributions, the developers and the users.
You could of course argue that this situation is not a problem for the experienced Linux users — they might
choose to install directly from source code or at least make decisions about the best way of installing the software themselves. However, for a newcomer in the GNU/Linux world, this situation is pretty confusing.

What I don't understand
I agree that diversity is good, but the waisted effort in this format war just seems insane. If just some of the largest distributions would get together and standardize on one of the current formats, like .Deb or .RPM. But, really, it doesn't matter - just choose one and everyone just use it!
Are we stuck because developers can’t agree on which format is the superior one? Would it be possible to start over, in a joint effort to create a new format with all the capabilities?

I know Linux Standard Base have tried to solve these challenges, but at the moment LSB just looks like a stranded whale. If every distribution could utilize the same packages - that would be amazing!
I can of course understand that the transition from one format to another would require a huge amount of work, but I think it would be worth it in the end.

Feel free to enlighten me :-)

UPDATE: When the question ’should we put your advocacy weight behind one distro?' was asked at OggCamp 2009, the conversation also covered packaging!

Save Bandwidth And Time Downloading Ubuntu 9.10

2009-10-29T15:50:00.003+01:00

Today is the day of the Karmic Koala - also known as Ubuntu 9.10.

Can can with success use .torrent files for downloading the final version of Ubuntu 9.10. This way you can download the latest image without affecting the main server or any of the mirrors.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors

You can also use zsync to save your bandwidth and time while you download the final version of the karmic koala.

zsync is a file transfer program similar to rsync. zsync is optimized for distribution of files across Internet, with one file on a server to be distributed to thousands of down loaders.

zsync -i yourexisting.iso http://final.iso.zsync

If you haven't got zsync installed, just type:

sudo apt-get install zsync

Happy downloading and congrats to everyone that has contributed to the Karmic Koala release, including everybody in GNOME, KDE, Xorg, Ubuntu and Canonical!.

Read the official release announcement here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2009-October/000127.html

Post Your Artwork Submissions And Concepts For Ubuntu 10.04

2009-10-29T11:40:00.002+01:00

As with every release of Ubuntu (..., Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty, Karmic), there's a wiki page for incoming artwork submissions and concepts (themes, icons, etc.). On the wiki you can post your artwork submissions and concepts for the Ubuntu release planned for April, 2010, nicknamed Lucid Lynx. The first submission has already been made to the Lucid Lynx artwork wiki.

During the Karmic cycle, you could submit background and wallpaper suggestions both on the wiki and on Flickr. This was the first time Flickr was used as a supplement to the wiki. It was a huge success with over 2000 submissions! With the restriction of disk space, only 19 of the fabulous wallpapers made it onto the final Ubuntu 9.10 CD. If your favourite isn’t on the CD it will be made available as a separate package!

For Lucid Lynx no wallpapers can be submited on the wiki to avoid having submissions in two separate places. You must join the Flickr Ubuntu Artwork group if you would like to offer Wallpapers for Ubuntu.
Because there's shortcomings to both using the wiki or Flickr, there has been thoughts about creating a special site for artwork submissions. The discussion also brought up the question of how to make it easier for people to select wallpapers directly from the pool.

Andrew Thomas says 'Ubuntu is still rubbish'

2009-10-28T00:12:00.001+01:00

I just read Andrew Thomas' "review" of Ubuntu 9.10 and I must say...WTF!
It seems to me that these days anyone can become a tech journalist.

Andrew Thomas writes:

...Linux is like a really ugly baby: only its mother could possibly love it. So, yet again, it's a case of not even close and definitely no cigar.

Source: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44443/140/

Ubuntu 9.10 Feature Tour

2009-10-27T23:38:00.000+01:00

The feature tour website for Ubuntu 9.10 is up: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/910features/

The White House switches to Open Source

2009-10-27T10:43:00.002+01:00

The White House website has now moved over to an Open Source platform to make the system more robust and more secure - and more open. The President's website is now using Red Hat Linux as operating system and the classic combination of Apache web server and MySQL database. The system also uses the Apache Solr search engine and the JavaScript library jQuery. The PHP-based Drupal has been chosen as the CMS.

The White House website has not changed its appearance - all the changes has happened below the surface. The switch to Open Source is not just about technology. In an interview with the Huffington Post it is implied that the administration also wants to send a message of openness and transparency by switching to Open Source.

Source: http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/whitehousegov-goes-drupal

What can we expect from 10.04 - Lucid Lynx?

2009-10-26T00:50:00.016+01:00

DIGG this Although Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) isn't out the door yet, let's take a look at what's coming in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

What do we know?
Well, not very much at the moment, but that will all change next month. In November, Ubuntu developers from around the world will gather to help shape and scope the next release of Ubuntu at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas. At UDS it will be decided what the developers will be working on over the next six months, and as a result, what we'll be seeing in the next versions of Ubuntu. However, until UDS arrives let’s see what we can predict at this time.

LTS release
Ubuntu 10.04 will be Ubuntu’s third long-term support (LTS) release, coming, as promised, two years after 8.04, the last LTS release. With security updates available for five years for servers and three years for desktops. The enhanced stability and longer lifecycle of LTS releases make them appealing to hardware makers and organizations that are rolling out large Ubuntu deployments. With the increased focus on stability, this also means that there won’t be a long list of new features.

No new interface
If you’re waiting for Gnome 3 to arrive, don’t hold your breath – at least not as default. Ubuntu 10.04 will use Gnome 2.x as its desktop environment, with the focus to shift to Gnome 3.0 thereafter. This means the user interface won’t look very different from previous releases. It is of course to be expected that Gnome 3 will have a lot of rough edges at its birth, which again doesn’t make it ideal in a LST release. The Gnome shell will be available for installation though, should you want to take it for a test drive. Overall, a wise decision.

The upcoming Gnome 3 that is to be released early 2010, can already be tested in an early stage in Ubuntu 9.10. If you want to test the Gnome Shell, install the package "gnome-shell", open a terminal and enter the command "gnome-shell --replace&".

Gnome Shell

Artwork
With Ubuntu 9.10 things has started to look really good. Michael Forrest, the Canonical Design Team GUI prototyping guy, explains on his blog that we must remember that this is work in progress and I’m sure they won’t let us down. Michael writes: “There is a lot of work to do on a million other aspects of Ubuntu so I hope people won't get fixated on things like the default desktop too much - these are matters of taste and there are no correct answers - you have to trust that we have a long-term vision and that decisions are made to move things in a certain direction. We don't think you'll be disappointed when things really start to come through over the next few releases.”

Faster
Boot speed has been a hot topic for a long time now and Ubuntu has come a long way in the last few releases. For Ubuntu 10.04 the target boot speed is 10 seconds! The reference platform for this target is a Dell Mini 9 netbook with a slow CPU and fast SSD that makes it an excellent "middle of the road" machine. Some people's machines will be slower, some will be faster.

There’s also a plan to improve the speed on the installation process. Currently when installing packages in Ubuntu the download is a separate step from the unpack/configure. Ubuntu will be able to install package faster by doing downloads and installs in parallel. While downloading the cpu and disk are mostly idle. While installing the network is idle. Doing them in parallel is a good way to utilize both systems.

Under the hood Ubuntu 10.04 will also be switching to using a swap file, instead of a separate partition. This will allow on-the-fly resizing.

Boot experience
In Ubuntu 9.10 the boot experience went through intensive surgery and came out with a much improved look and feel. We will be seeing more improvements in this area in 10.04.
On shutdown will we have the option to install updates. This feature was planned for 9.10, but deferred.
A graphical OS selector is planned for switching (rebooting) between two or more operative systems. The preferred version of the graphical OS selector will have easily recognizable logos for the installed OSs. This will require a lot of work and might not actually land in 10.04.

Ubuntu Software Center
One of the biggest features that were introduced in 9.10 was the Software Centre. With a simple design it can be used to install and remove software packages and to add repositories for finding, installing and managing new applications. In Ubuntu 10.04 the Software Center will expanded its features and will replace Synaptic, Software Sources, Gdebi and (if appropriate) Update Manager.

Mark Shuttleworth's announcement
Attendees at Atlanta Linux Fest's breakout session Ubuntucon were among the first to hear the Lucid Lynx announcement straight from Mark Shuttleworth himself.

What does it all mean

All over Ubuntu 10.04 is looking to be an amazing release!

DIGG this

Creating Marketing Material

2009-10-23T21:25:00.000+02:00

I've been working on a Danish leaflet/flyer/brochure for the Danish release party. I've used the Ubuntu Leaflet as base, and changed the colors to fit Karmic.

Here's the (original) Ubuntu Leaflet:

For the Karmic Koala release party we (the Danish Ubuntu community) will be doing something a little different. This time we want to try to reach out to people who have never heard of Ubuntu before.
On Saturday 14th November 2009, we’ll set up a handful of delicious laptops in the shopping mall Bruuns Galleri in Aarhus. By each table, one or two people from our group will demonstrate and talk about Ubuntu. We'll hand out free CDs and a Danish version of the Ubuntu leaflet for those who might be interested.
Afterwards we'll do something more relaxed, community minded and probability more geeky in cooperation with Østjyllands Linux-usergroup øjlug.

The text for the Danish leaflet has been translated, edited and written by members from the Danish community. To do this in the most effective way we created a wiki page for easy management. I'm planning to add this brochure to SpreadUbuntu.
Here's a preview of the Danish version (still only a draft):

You can also grab a higher resolution version .PDF here: http://wiki.ubuntu-dk.org/Marketing/brochure

Apple ridiculing the Windows 7 release

2009-10-23T20:41:00.000+02:00

It seems hardly a surprise that Apple, in connection with Microsoft's launch of Windows 7, has sent a new "Get a Mac" advertising on the street, making a mockery of the new operating system.
Microsoft claims that Windows 7 will be better than Vista, a claim that Apple in their advertising does not think is particularly reassuring.
Video is titled "Broken Promises" and it briefly shows how the PC through the years have made the same promise at each release of a new version of Windows, claiming that now everything is so much better. Why should Windows 7 be different?

Watch the video below:

Head Tracking for Desktop with Wii

2009-10-21T10:35:00.000+02:00

Johnny Lee talks about yet another awesome way to interact with your computer.

As of June 2008, Nintendo has sold nearly 30 million Wii game consoles. This significantly exceeds the number of Tablet PCs in use today according to even the most generous estimates of Tablet PC sales. This makes the Wii Remote one of the most common computer input devices in the world. Johnny Lee's projects are an effort to explore and demonstrate applications that the millions of Wii Remotes in world readily support.

Using the infrared camera in the Wii remote and a head mounted sensor bar (two IR LEDs), you can accurately track the location of your head and render view dependent images on the screen. You don't actually need the Wii console. This effectively transforms your display into a portal to a virtual environment. The display properly reacts to head and body movement as if it were a real window creating a realistic illusion of depth and space.

Thanks to Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University for this enlightenment. For more information and software visit: http://johnnylee.net/

IBM and Ubuntu roll Linux for U.S desktops vs Windows 7

2009-10-21T10:29:00.000+02:00

It looks like IBM isn't much of a friend of Microsoft's anymore. Today IBM announced an extension of its Microsoft-Free PC effort together with Canonical Ubuntu Linux. This is the same thing that was announced a few weeks back for Africa, and now it's available in the US. The big push is that IBM claims it will cost up to $2,000 for a business to move to Windows 7. They argue that moving to Linux is cheaper. The IBM/Canonical offer is an interesting one and the timing against Windows 7 is a brilliant stroke of marketing.

Read the article here: http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2009/10/ibm-and-ubuntu-roll-linux-for.html

Source: Slashdot

Interesting GUI Concept

2009-10-20T11:48:00.000+02:00

I just came across a very interesting 10/GUI concept video. On the frontpage of their website it says:

Over a quarter-century ago, Xerox introduced the modern graphical user interface paradigm we today take for granted. That it has endured is a testament to the genius of its design. But the industry is now at a crossroads: New technologies promise higher-bandwidth interaction, but have yet to find a truly viable implementation. 10/GUI aims to bridge this gap by rethinking the desktop to leverage technology in an intuitive and powerful way.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Makes you wonder what the future of the Linux desktop will look like.

Source: http://10gui.com/

More Ubuntu Startup Sounds...

2009-10-20T10:04:00.000+02:00

First of all, thanks for all the amazing feedback in my earlier post "New Startup Sounds".

At the moment 71 people has cast their vote and so far sound number 5 has 29 votes (40%). If you're hoping to hear this sound in a future Ubuntu release, don't get your hopes up. Sound number 5 has already been suggested, but was rejected because it sounded too much like Vista and too little like Ubuntu.

In my previous post the five ideas were very different unlike this post, where I'm again seeking your amazing comments and feedback. I've worked on ideas using the "melody" from sound number 5. Although Alan Pope makes some very good points in the comments, I've still used the same base for the new sounds. So for Popey this will sound like a plinky plonky nintendo DS weather report. I know it can be dangerous to use sarcasm when communicating over the web, but I'm sure Alan will know I *really* do appreciate his feedback.
The reason I've used the Kalimba sound, it because it's the only melodic instrument I know from Africa. This is all part of the quest to capture the spirit of Ubuntu. Although a clean synth sound might sound more modern, it lacks a bit of Africa so to speak. Personally the "startup_distant_drums" is my favorite at the moment, but I'll let you judge.
I should also mention the filenames are weird because it help me to keep track of the files. Also the files have not been mastered, so the volume is very low in these snapshot versions.

Listening to startup sounds can be very strange, because it is the entire boot experience (boot splash, login and so on) that counts. I suggest setting the sound you like best as your default startup sound for a few days before judging.

Grab the files here and please do post your feedback below: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/175241/lyde/MadsRH_startup-sounds.tar.gz

Happy Birthday Ubuntu

2009-10-20T09:45:00.000+02:00

Today, 5 years ago, on October 20th the very first version of Ubuntu was shipped - Ubuntu 4.10 "The Warty Warthog".

Images from Nizar Kerkeni's blogpost

Softpedia takes a quick look at when each of the Ubuntu versions was released, and what it brought: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Happy-Birthday-Ubuntu-124827.shtml
If you want to take a closer look at the history of Ubuntu, check out Dustin Kirkland's Ubuntu Museum.

The official Ubuntu 4.10 "The Warty Warthog" announcement can be found here: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2004-October/000003.html

New Startup Sounds

2009-10-16T23:27:00.001+02:00

UPDATE: There's new sound available in a more recent post here...

Way back before Intrepid was released, I created some system sounds for Ubuntu, because I felt the Ubuntu startup sound needed to be replaced. They didn't make it in, because they were too Vista'ish - which I fully agree with. So, I'm working on some more Ubuntu spirit sounds, but this is no easy task. I have a few ideas I haven't tried out yet, but I would like your feedback on the ideas below. Please cast your vote in the sidebar! (God I miss Wordpress!)

Sorry about the file-size :-(

Suggestion number 1

Suggestion number 2

Suggestion number 3

Suggestion number 4

Suggestion number 5

Did you spot the Vista'ish one? If you want you can grab my Intrepid suggestion from my portfolio on www.Behance.net/madsrh123

Bryan Lunduke loves the Karmic Koala

2009-10-15T12:24:00.000+02:00

Bryan Lunduke, the software developer and co-host of The Computer Action Show at Jupiter Broadcasting, loves Ubuntu 9.10 aka. Karmic Koala.

While this might not be big news (everybody loves the Koala) , this sure is big news coming from Brian. Any listener of the Computer Action Show will know that Brian's love is reserved only for the very best.

Besides doing a review of Ubuntu 9.10 in the latest eposide of The Computer Action Show, Brian also wrote two fantastic blogposts:

Windows 7 vs Ubuntu 9.10 vs OS X 10.6

Ubuntu 9.10 - Almost Perfect

Receiving X-Splash Feedback

2009-10-15T10:09:00.000+02:00

Lately I've become tired of reading the comments people write to my X-splash mockups. I receive about one to two new comments per day, on my five suggestions which are posted on YouTube, the Wiki and this blog. It is not because I don't want the criticism or feedback, but I primarily experience two kinds of comments.

1. The short positive comment: "This looks AMAZING!"

2. The rip off accusation: "This looks like Windows 7"

Of course the first one is okay. It's always nice with a pat on the back, but this type of "feedback" isn't really useful.
The second one is the one that annoys me. Although I see the similarity, and why Canonical would want to avoid such a comparison, this idea came long before Windows 7 received it's boot screen. During the Hardy cycle I came across a U-splash suggestion on the artwork wiki. The idea is little different from what I came up with, but this is what the concept looks like:

I really liked this concept and quickly created a mockup of my own version of the idea.

As you can see from the date (Feb 11 2008) on Ubuntu-art.org, where this is posted, this is again long before Windows 7 ever was released to the public. Perhaps the Microsoft designers have been seeking inspiration in the Ubuntu community ;-) Know what I mean? Nudge nudge, wink wink.

Today LanHikari90 posted this comment on my 4th animated boot splash idea:

Really nice. I wish, it would be the official boot screen.
But sadly it is just a rip-off of the Windows 7 bootscreen. And to all these guys who say it isn't: It obviously is!

I've considered disabling the comments or even removing the videos, but every now and then someone will write something worth reading.

Gnome Shell status

2009-10-11T23:45:00.000+02:00

Jason Clinton (jclinton) has news from the GNOME Shell sessions (with Owen Taylor and Colin Walters) to everybody interested in the Gnome Shell development.

http://jasondclinton.livejournal.com/76065.html