Ubuntu Daily

After 6 months of development, the new version of Ubuntu is available. The release is named Ubuntu 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron”. The numbers stand for the year and month of the release date while Hardy Heron is the codename. LTS stands for long-term support, which means that this release will be supported for three full yours with fixes and security updates, the server version is even supported for four years.

Check the feature tour to find out about all the exciting stuff that is new in this release, some of the higlights are

• GNOME 2.22 with GFVS, a new file system abstraction layer that makes many file operations faste
• Xorg 7.3 with a new screen resizing and rotating utility that makes manging mutliple monitor easier
• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• Wubi, a new installer that installs Ubuntu inside a file in Windows without changing the partitions
• Transmission, a lightweight but full-featured BitTorrent client
• Brasero, a disc-burning application
• A firewall called UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) that makes it easier to allow or disallow connections via command-line

Ubuntu is available for download on the Ubuntu website. Alternatively, free Ubuntu CDs can be ordered through Ubuntu ShipIt.

The upcoming Ubuntu release 8.04, codenamed “Hardy Heron” can be pre-ordered now.

Ubuntu ShipIt is a service sponsored by Canonical where anyone can order Ubuntu CDs free of charge. This is especially useful for people with slow internet connections or restricted transfer volumes.

So to everybody who can’t or doesn’t want to download the next release: head over to ShipIt and order Ubuntu for free.

Follwing the latest meme, here are my 10 most used commands in the shell history:

tim@tim:~$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
89 sudo
42 ls
42 cd
31 rm
18 java
17 unrar
16 wget
16 gksudo
15 ajcore
10 mv

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a platform that allows the creation of web applications and run them on the desktop alongside “classic” software. The Windows and Mac OS X version of AIR has been around for a while and today, Adobe released a first alpha version for us Linux users.

The software isn’t available on the home page of Adobe directly but can be downloaded at the Adobe Labs. The installer is a binary installer that requires root privileges, which were gained after a window prompted me to enter my password. This is the standard way in Ubuntu and therefore handled correctly.

The installation itself is fast and only consists of this window:

After a few seconds, Adobe AIR is installed into /opt and a new menu entry called “Adobe AIR Application Installer” can be found in the menu. All it does is opening a file chooser where you can select and .air file to install it.

The first application I tried to install was the Adobe Media Player.  When I opened the .air file I was greated by this error:

Sorry, an error has accoured

This application requires an update to Adobe AIR but downloading that update on your system is not allowed by your administrator. Please contact your administrator.

I don’t know whether there is a workaround for this problem and I didn’t bother to search for one. Instead, I tried other applications. The next one I tried was a Google Analytics interface, which installed whithout problems. I won’t write anything about that application itself because that’s not in the scope of this review.

There are many more AIR applications on the Adobe marketplace, but they are not installable because the website claims that Air is not available for my system.

I will leave it at that for now and come to my conclusions regarding AIR on Linux:

• Adobe AIR for Linux really is alpha software. If you don’t have strong reasons to install it, don’t
• Adobe should settle on one way to deploy Linux software. Flash is available as rpm and tarball, Reader is also available as deb, now AIR brings its own .bin installer. The right way to do things is to offer packages for the major Linux distributions, like Skype does
• Flash is a core part of AIR and Flash on Linux is pretty bad. For most people, Flash consumes lots of CPU power, crashes Firefox and makes fullscreen video impossible. If Adobe doesn’t fix Flash, Air won’t be any better
• Last but not least: It’s great to see that Adobe shows interest in Linux and a runtime that works on all three major desktop operating systems will probably bring more software to Linux. If, however, Adobe continues to treat Linux as a third class citizen AIR might do more harm than good to Linux because software vendors won’t release native software but only “Airplications” that only run badly on Linux, similar to software running on Wine

Ubuntu brainstorm is a new site for Ubuntu fans to vote on which issues should have the highest priority. Everybody is free to register and submit ideas. Then, one can vote on every entry, either adding or subtracting a vote.

The site closely resembles Dell’s IdeaStorm, which incidentally contains a fair share of Ubuntu-related entries itself.

In my opinion, Ubuntu brainstorm is a great addition to classic bug-tracking and specifications, providing a good way to measure the interest in certain features of the Ubuntu community at large. Especially users who aren’t comfortable with diving into Launchpad or other more technical ways will now have the option to make their voice heard with a convenient and easy website.

So go ahead, visit Ubuntu brainstorm, start submitting your ideas and vote on existing ones.

Wow, for a blog that’s called Ubuntu Daily there may have been not enough posts in the last time, maybe I should have called it Ubuntu Quarterly.

This post is just to inform everyone who is interested that I am not dead and neither is this blog.

I won’t make any promises on how often I will post, but there is one thing you can definitely look forward to: a review of Ubuntu on the Dell XPS M1330.

I ordered the notebook a week ago and according to Dell it will arrive in the fourth week of february. You can expect my review in late february or early march.

Not long ago a video popped up on the internet show what was called “content-aware image resizing”. Everybody was amazed by this new technology.

Now just a month later there is an open-source implementation and a free GIMP plugin to download.

Here is an example of what can be accomplished with this software:

Picture source: hackszine.com

A job offer for Senior Engineer that recently appeared on Valve’s website lists among other things the following responsibilty:

Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.

If they really mean games and not game servers this might be a major breaking point for Linux gaming and Linux on the desktop in general.

Valve’s Steam platform is probably the number one way to purchase games digitally, and if it gets ported to Linux it might be a big enough incentive for other game develops to port ther games to Linux, too.

Ubuntu is featured in issue #4 of the Marvel Comic Mighty Avengers.

You can see the boot manager GRUB and the list of Kernels to choose from, along with a movie-style “Access Denied” message:

Normally this isn’t the point where you have to authorize in Ubuntu, and you could just use recovery mode to go to a root shell, but hey, it’s free software so they could have just modfied it to act like this.

Continuing the efforts to bring their software to Linux, Google released a port of their desktop search utility.

Google Desktop for Linux indexes the files on your computer which leads to almost instant search results.

The software sits in the tray area and is most easily accessed by tapping the Strg key two times, which will show this search box:

The search results appear as-you-type and the files can be opened by a click on the drop down list. If there are many results they can also be listed in the web browser with an interface that closely resembles Google’s online search.

In fact, most of the software interface, like the preferences is only accessible in a web brower. For example, this is the index status on my computer right now, shown in Firefox:

As of now, I didn’t do a thorough test, but this is what I think of the software so far:

Pros:

• It’s always nice to see a company acknowledging the Linux user base.
• The indexing process is very light and barely noticable.
• Google probably shares the same codebase with the Windows and Mac versions so it is fairly proven software.

Cons:

• It’s closed source. This isn’t a show stopper for me, but it may be for some of you, and in any way, an open source version would be better.
• The Windows and Mac version are much more feature rich, for example the Linux version doesn’t support Google Gadgets at all
• The UI is mainly in the web browser, which means it is rather badly integrated with the desktop. I hope they add a panel applet and other means of integration in future versions.
• The native (GTK+) UI doesn’t fit in very well, the context menu of the tray icon isn’t aligned as it is in Gnome apps and no entries have an icon. The dialogues have the button order reversed:
• Google Desktop creates a top level entry in the Applications menu. I know no other software (including Google’s Picasa and Earth) that does this and I have know idea why they chose to to this.

Conclusion:

Google Desktop is one more of those proprietary applications that is now also available on Linux. Whatever your views on “software ethics” are, you probably should agree that this is a good thing. Many people will oppose to using this software and there is nothing wrong with that, but for other people this will lower the barrier to using Linux, and even if it’s only a tiny bit.

I, for one, will use Google Desktop from time to time, but what I’m really looking forward to is Google Talk for Linux.