Ubuntu Heaven

Canonical Ltd. chief developer Tollef Fog Heen announced Thursday that the first release candidate for the upcoming Ubuntu 6.10 is now ready for testing. "Edgy Eft" features a 2.6.17 kernel and a GNOME desktop. The corresponding Kubuntu RC, of course, sports a KDE desktop.

The three release candidates include installable live desktop CDs, server images, alternate text-mode installation CDs, and an upgrade wizard for users of the current stable release, the project team said.

"We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable for testing by any user," Fog Heen said. "The final release of version 6.10 is scheduled for 26 October 2006 and will be supported for 18 months on both desktops and servers."

# posted by picdout @ 08:01 0 comments

Two new items arrived this week. They haven't been on hand long enough for a full review, but here are some first impressions.

Ubuntu carries a subtitle, "Linux for human beings." That's a refreshing concept. Six years ago, you could put Linux on a desktop computer but it required advanced computer skills or a techie to get the job done.

The applications available for this open source operating system -- one whose basic code is available to anyone to use, modify or improve -- were not as plentiful as they are now. Nor were they as good, at least compared with the Windows and Mac alternatives of the time.

# posted by picdout @ 14:16 0 comments

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- There's a popular notion swirling around the high-tech sector that Microsoft's dominant position in the industry and software bugs have customers scurrying for the cover of Linux.

This may be more of a myth than a notion, Gartner analyst John Enck said during a session comparing the two operating systems at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo here.

"We're just not seeing any sort of motion away from Windows towards Linux," Enck said.

Enck said that by 2011, users who do migrate to Linux will do so because of the quality of applications built on top of the operating systems, from software distributors like Red Hat and Novell, as well as the variety of new-fangled distros such as Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu.

# posted by picdout @ 14:15 0 comments

This HOW-TO covers up the whole process of installing Adobe Photoshop CS2 on a Ubuntu box in a few simple steps. This method has been tested only on Ubuntu, but it should work on any other linux flavor. Any questions or feedback leave them in the comments.

# posted by picdout @ 14:06 1 comments

The OpenSparc initiative was launched earlier this year as a way to promote the porting of open source operating systems and applications to Sun’s once-proprietary hardware platform. The project involved Sun releasing the specifications for its UltraSparc T1 processor, allowing Linux distributors to create ports to the platform, without having to reverse engineer or hack Sun
hardware.

# posted by picdout @ 11:24 0 comments

Applets are little applications that sit on your panels and make things easier for you. In Ubuntu, your default Gnome Desktop comes equipped with some very useful applets pre-installed but not activated by default. People who are absolutely new to Ubuntu and Gnome desktop are usually unaware of these applets and it takes sometime before a newbie finds them.

It is easy to drop and activate one of these applets by right clicking on an empty space in your panel and selecting “Add to Panel…“. This will open a new window displaying some applets and providing you an interface to create your own application launchers and custom application launchers. Listed below are the descriptions of some of the applets I use on my panels.

# posted by picdout @ 08:16 0 comments

As development of a new release of Ubuntu begins, Canonical is sponsoring a week-long developer summit, gathering Ubuntu developers from around the world to help shape and scope the next release of our beloved distribution. The summit is open to the public, but be aware that it's an intense developer-oriented event, and participants should be prepared for hard-core low-level discussion. If you are ready for the challenge, the summit provides a great place to talk to core Ubuntu developers. The summit is not a conference, exhibition or other audience-oriented event, but an opportunity for Ubuntu developers -- who usually collaborate online -- to work together in person on specific tasks.

# posted by picdout @ 15:54 0 comments

David Wolf submits: CNET has a decent article on Friday by Stephen Shankland about how Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, plans on building a global business by giving away its software and selling service, a strategy originally adopted by the current major Linux marketer, Red Hat (RHAT), which it has since rejected. The article takes a rather dim view of the approach, questioning whether that's going to make it for Mark Shuttleworth and his band of South African software revolutionaries.

Laugh on, CNET, but in China I don't think anyone would so much as giggle. As the nice folks over at Microsoft (MSFT) and the Business Software Alliance will happily tell you, it's proving exceptionally hard to talk people in China into paying for software that can be downloaded in a zip file or shrinkwrapped and sold at a counter. I'm not sure it's going to get any easier.

# posted by picdout @ 09:12 0 comments

Most fans of Linux know that while the open source operating system has proven its might in corporate computer servers, it has languished on the desktop, where Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) maintains its monopoly.

While companies such as Linspire, Xandros and others try to make Linux more appealing on the desktop, Ubuntu Linux distributor Canonical faces a different challenge: how to move its popular, simple and easy desktop Linux distro into business computing and server environments, in order to reap the support and service dollars that await there.

# posted by picdout @ 08:00 0 comments

Some time you might find some applications are having only .rpm files but you want a .deb package for your debian,Ubuntu and other debian derived ditributions.If you can’t find .deb debian package in any of the debian,ubuntu repositories or elsewhere, you can use the alien package converter to install the .rpm file.

# posted by picdout @ 08:02 0 comments

Canonical is the 65-employee start-up behind a popular version of Linux called "Ubuntu". The company is betting that it can win a place in the market using a strategy that dominant Linux seller Red Hat has dropped.
Red Hat offers two versions of Linux: Fedora Core and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora Core is free, but relatively untested and unsupported by Red Hat, while RHEL is supported and certified, but must be purchased. With Canonical's Ubuntu, however, the free and supported versions are identical--the approach Red Hat abandoned in 2003.

# posted by picdout @ 08:00 0 comments

Linux community, by people who toss it off as a pejorative without considering just why it is so. In fairness, I decided to provide an explanation of the circumstances that encourage that politcal activity. I hope that seen in this light, Debian politics can be shown for what it is; the glue that holds this community together, and the reason that Debian continues to be the standard of mature Linux distributions.
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# posted by picdout @ 08:01 0 comments

London (PRWEB) October 3, 2006 -- Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, the world's fastest growing Linux distribution, today announced it has entered into an alliance with Open Country, the Linux Journal award-winning, next-generation systems management software company. This will enable the two companies to deliver proven enterprise level management solutions.

Open Country becomes the first commercial software vendor to offer a systems management solution for Ubuntu users. The newest version of its flagship product, OCM 3.1, is the management suite that encourages repeatable best practices and supports the widest range of Linux distributions in the industry. OCM will support both server and desktop versions of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. OCM will be able to provision and manage Ubuntu-based servers and desktops across the enterprise.

# posted by picdout @ 08:07 0 comments

I'm breaking with tradition at Tectonic. We usually review Ubuntu, the Gnome desktop version from the Canonical/Ubuntu team that brought us winning operating systems like Warty Warthog, Hoary Hedgehog, and Breezy Badger. And, according to my last review, a loser like Dapper Drake. This time I'm reviewing Kubuntu Edgy Eft, the KDE version of the latest Ubuntu release.

I came down hard on Dapper Drake - and received much ire from the community because of it - simply because it was aimed at the corporate market. I felt (and still feel) that it didn't have the polish to really go up against the likes of Suse and Microsoft for the big-spend, big-rollout environments.

# posted by picdout @ 10:01 0 comments

If you have an old PC lying around (or even a brand new one), this may be the time to give Linux another try.

Yes, I know, you expect Linux, the free operating system developed by volunteers all over the world, to be nerdy and hard to use.

And, when compared to Windows, it used to be. But several new distributions of Linux make it painfully easy to get up and running on Linux without spending a dime.

My new favorite of these is Ubuntu, a great product with a catchy name.

# posted by picdout @ 17:12 0 comments

This tutorial shows how to install and configure the Zenoss network monitoring tool on a Ubuntu 6.06 system. Zenoss is a free open-source tool that allows you to monitor servers, applications, networks, power, etc. regarding their configuration, availability, performance, and so on. It can also alert you by email if it finds inappropriate actions.

# posted by picdout @ 17:10 66 comments