J_K9 @ Linux

Ubuntu 7.10—Up To Standards

As always, Ubuntu’s latest release doesn’t fail to disappoint. In fact, I’m severely taken aback by some of the background improvements which perhaps have not earned as much credit as they ought to have.

One such improvement is font rendering. Even with sub-pixel font smoothing on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), the font rendering still wasn’t great. Now, it’s on par with Mac OS X—yes, the font rendering really has improved that much!

There are also many other improvements in Bluetooth support, Compiz (which is now enabled by default), desktop graphics, usability and much more, but instead of repeating the same spiel I’ll just point you to some existing articles, including some about the Release Candidate (spoil-sports!).

• Lunapark6: Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) Desktop Edition
• polishlinux.org » Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy
• Quick Look at Ubuntu 7.10 Release Candidate | tuxmachines.org
• Ubuntu’s New Gutsy Gibbon Brings Linux Out of the Jungle

Ubuntu 7.04: A Hit

All of the reviews I have read of Ubuntu’s latest and greatest release have implied the same thing: it’s a hit. I have been running the Beta since a few days after it was released and it has worked flawlessly with the exception of one or two bugs which were already on Launchpad, the Canonical-run service which Ubuntu’s developers use to track the product’s bugs and their status.

There was plenty of talk before the final release about some of Feisty Fawn’s new features, such as the innovative Migration Assistant to aid your transition from Windows to Ubuntu and the Proprietary Drivers Manager to allow you to more easily control which proprietary drivers are installed and in use on your system. There are also some more subtle changes which have been blogged about.

On the developer front, due to the recent (well, fairly recent) Open Sourcing of Java and Sun’s partnership with Canonical a complete Java stack has been made more readily available for those who require it, which is excellent.

Oh, and did you know that Michael Dell, CEO of Dell is running Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn on his newest laptop? This was announced not long after Dell’s decision to pre-install Linux on more of the computers in its range, so it’s good to know that Michael Dell practises what he preaches

In fact, there was such anticipation for this release that celebration parties were organised and blogged about all over the world! I just wish I could have gone to one!

We should also expect to see the first release of Ubuntu Studio, a specialised version of Ubuntu geared towards audio, video and graphics enthusiasts and professionals, in the next few days.

There are plenty of screenshots boasting the graphical elements of Feisty Fawn and I hope to get my hands on the installation CD, or unrestricted internet so that I can upgrade my still-beta laptop soon!

No Ubuntu 7.04 Release Candidate?

I was expecting a Release Candidate for Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn to be made available yesterday (Thursday), a week before the release of the final version, but apparently the jump has always been from Beta straight to Final just less than a month later and there will be no such Release Candidate. Well, at least not until the final stages in the development of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon when a Release Candidate will, apparently, be released one week before the Final release.

I think this is a good move by the Ubuntu team because, although compiling and uploading a pre-release does take a lot of time and effort which could be better spent bug-fixing or developing, it allows more people to test an almost-ready version of Ubuntu and thus iron out any final critical bugs which may remain and not previously have been spotted (which is always possible). The users of the Release Candidate could then submit feedback reports and requests to the developers to allow them to apply the final touches to the release before it is made final. I think this is an excellent approach which is much better than the current one. I’ve been running Ubuntu 7.04 Beta since a few days after it came out, and since then I’ve downloaded and installed more updates than I could keep count of. This substantial jump from the Beta release to the Final may only incorporate minor changes to individual applications but one minor change has the potential to cause major problems, and so adding in a Release Candidate will set the point for a reduction of changes and a focus on polishing the distribution before the final version is released and distributed to the public.

Bravo Ubuntu! The team have done a great job with 7.04, as you can read about here and here, and I cannot wait for the Final release on the 19th April! Make sure you’ve all got that noted down in your calendars.

Preview of Ubuntu 7.04

Ubuntu 7.04 Beta was released just two days ago, and a brilliant article entitled “What You Should Expect From Ubuntu 7.04″ outlines the additions and changes in this new version of Ubuntu which should surprise you if and when you install the final version, which will be released on the 19^th April.

I can’t wait for this new version of Ubuntu - it will make it so much easier to achieve a completely functional desktop Operating System, down to the installation of proprietary codecs. For more information, see the article!

Ubuntu Webserver Overload

The Ubuntu website is currently experiencing too many concurrent connections and, as such, is displaying error messages. I’m not sure whether a [distributed] denial of service attack is underway or if there are simply too many people trying to access it, but it’s very odd one way or another - I cannot remember the last time this happened to Ubuntu (has it ever?).

Screenshot below:

How odd. Keep your eyes on the news

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Will Not Include Binary Drivers

In a surprising turn of events, the Ubuntu team have decided not to distribute the proprietary ATi and nVidia binary graphics drivers with their upcoming release, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. I quote Michael Labarel’s post:

Moments ago hitting the ubuntu-announce-list is word that the upcoming 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” release will not include the closed-source ATI and NVIDIA display drivers by default. [..] Like existing releases, the proprietary video drivers will be easily available through their repositories, but they will NOT be activated by default.

These technical board decisions were announced on the ubuntu-announce mailing list almost 7 hours ago by Matt Zimmerman.

Apparently 3D desktop support is not as important as staying on the good side of the Linux Foundation and the community by not (potentially) breaking the GPL, and I respect their decision.

Ubuntu 6.10 Videos Delayed

I’m sorry about this. I did try to make them, but my laptop (Pentium M 740 1.73Ghz with 512MB RAM) simply was not powerful enough to record the videos at a decent fps. I was trying to make it do at least 10fps with XVidCap, but my laptop could only handle about 1.8fps, which is hardly satisfactory.

So why didn’t I record them on my computer, which is definitely powerful enough to handle high frames per second at a clear resolution? It has Ubuntu installed on it, but there’s one thing it lacks: WPA support. The lack of WPA support means that I cannot connect it to my wireless network, so I cannot download network-manager which would allow me to connect to it.. Ironic, eh? The router is also on the other side of the room from the computer, and the only ethernet cable I have (a 3m cable) does not reach. Moving the computer is also out of the question, as there are just far too many cables running behind the desk to even consider moving it. I’m not willing to compromise the security of my network, even for a few minutes, to connect the desktop. However, I am willing to buy a 20m ethernet cable, and as I have the whole of next week off (it’s a short break) I’ll have more than enough time to record the videos. So, don’t lose hope yet - they’re on their way

How To Videos - On Their Way

My mother has recently bought herself a MacBook, so it’s up to me, of course, to teach her how to use it As I’m not around too often (because I go to boarding school and am only allowed out on Sundays - and the boarding school is hundreds of miles away from my home country), and as I have got an unusual window of opportunity this weekend due to having been allowed to stay out Saturday night, I’m going to make the most of this free time and make some videos to teach my mother how to use OS X. I will focus on the main uses, functions and differences from her old environment: Finder, Dashboard, System Preferences, Expose, Dock, Spotlight, and all the other OS X goodies.

I will, of course, upload these videos to this site and release them for download in the main three formats: the free Ogg Theora (.ogg), Microsoft’s Audio Video Interleave (.avi) and Quicktime Movie (.mov). I highly recommend downloading the Ogg Theora files when they are available, by the way, as the other two formats are proprietary

“What’s this?” is what some of you may be thinking - an Open Source advocate making and publishing videos of a proprietary OS (Mac OS X) instead of Linux when his blog’s called J_K9@Linux? What is this madness?

Don’t worry - I plan to make more and even better videos for Linux. I shall use Ubuntu as the distribution on which I shall record the videos (although I may record a few on Slackware), but the topics and features I shall be covering will hopefully apply to most other distributions as well. I also hope to cover some of the Most Wanted list on UbuntuClips.org, and I will probably be hosting this set of videos on their website to save myself some bandwidth!

Now let’s just hope I will have enough time to accomplish all of this - I doubt it, but I’ll remain optimistic and keep recording until the moment I’m dragged away from the computer

Update: Well, I’ve made about half the videos for OS X and they’re already taking up over 550MB of hard drive space, which I should have expected.. In that case, I doubt I’m going to be able to upload them to my website or to any other file sharing service, for that matter, because my upload speed is too poor and it would literally take weeks to upload these videos. However, if anyone else has a good upload speed, I’d be willing to send you a DVD so that you could kindly upload them to a file sharing service or at least help out with the torrent sharing for these videos. Cheers

Breathing Life Back Into HyperGet

Some of you may have heard of a project I started over a year ago called HyperGet. What you may not know is that it died in the cold of January 2005 - all but two developers lost contact with the rest of the team (and have not replied since), and the project lost its direction completely as the Lead Developer was one of those who left. However, against all odds, it’s under development again and we’re hoping to release v0.1 (with fairly minimal features) in a few weeks’ time. The description on the project’s homepage is a little out of date, as its functionality has changed and the way in which Xiro (the application which downloads the files) interacts with the PC without internet access. How has it changed? Well, just before the project died, I contacted the excellent developers of Synaptic and the Lead Developer agreed to consider implementing Fido (the package management and dependency resolving part) once v0.1 of Xiro was out. Whether the Synaptic team still want to implement Fido I don’t know, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed! It has been a year since we were last in touch, after all.

Although the LSB Packaging group is working hard to produce a universal package format to make it easier for third-party developers to distribute packages, I suspect it shall be at least another few months (if not longer) until such a package format and its related management system appear and are implemented by most Linux distributions. So, HyperGet will be safe until then - and, after that, we may even be able to alter HyperGet to work with that package format instead of the current .deb, although that will depend on the specification of the package format and management system (ie. how dependencies are handled) that the LSB create.

And, before I finish, I must give my thanks to llama love (now HyperGet’s Lead Developer) for inspiring me and for working so diligently on our project. Keep up the great work

Alleluya! Ubuntu To Include Extra Drivers

It looks like the Ubuntu team has been listening to the community: Ubuntu has decided to ship some proprietary drivers with their next release, Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn.

There are problems with this, such as the possibility of a violation of the GPL and the general immorality of using closed source drivers in an open source OS, as well as a host of practicality issues such as the simple technical problems that support for the drivers is completely dependent on the hardware vendor.” However, this is a huge leap forward for Linux (in my eyes): I do not like closed source drivers, but I do recognise the fact that they are the only good solutions we have at the moment and so they are fine as a short-term improvement to the situation. As I expressed in my previous post on this topic, there are many graphics, sound and wireless drivers which are closed source but without which the OS is too impractical to use as either a home or office OS.

I am extremely glad that Ubuntu has made this step. I don’t think this is encouraging closed source software at all - the Ubuntu team are just doing their best to provide the best end-user experience possible, and that means that it must include closed source drivers at this stage in Linux’s development, then so be it. They may have gone a bit too far by offering the drivers during the installation from the CD itself rather than educating the user and asking them whether they want to download the drivers, but I still respect their decision. This is an incredibly bold move.

Who knows - I might just be able to get past the splash screen when I try to install Ubuntu 7.04