Month: April 2007

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Ubuntu 7.04 – spring cleaning

Ubuntu circle (logo)It is Spring and as every year it is time to do a bit of cleaning. Perhaps, you have recently upgraded your Ubuntu Linux from the release 6.10 (Edgy Eft) to the up-to-date 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). By doing so you might have some packages and residual files that are no longer needed, and by removing them you could free up lots of space on your hard disks.

To describe the various possibilities and reasons to do an Ubuntu Spring cleaning, I have started a wiki article. If you have any comments feel free to give them here, in reply to this post. I will try to take them into account.

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A web browser for Human beings

Ubuntu Linux is designed for Human beings. It tends to be as easy as possible for all of them and to make things just work. A similar contender on this concept but in the web browser/e-mail environment is Opera. Sadly it is not open source but it is freely available to anyone and on many platforms and languages.

Opera features many enhancement regarding accessibility (and are/were pioneer in many of this area). They have integrated into their browser things like mouse gesture, voice control and many UI improvements (some were adapted in other major software) including: tabs, sessions, zoom and private data management.

It seems as if Opera has always tried to make their software more ergonomic with each new release. Something that was not really considered seriously until recently by the contenders.

Continue reading “A web browser for Human beings”

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Upgrading Ubuntu Server to 7.04

Feisty official pictureYou might have read Canonical information on how to upgrade your Ubuntu 6.10 Server Edition to the latest Ubuntu 7.04 Server Edition. But somehow, you cannot install the update-manager-core program.

I might have the problem because I am not using the Universe or Multiverse repositories, but when using only the official ones, an installation of the above mentioned package will failed with the error that the package could not be found.

Continue reading “Upgrading Ubuntu Server to 7.04”

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It is spring, the trees and Ubuntu are in Blossom

Flower bud in a tree full of blossomI love spring (though I love each seasons…) the nature is never so green and full of colour as during this season. The nature is all blooming and it is such a nice sight.

And like every year since 2004, Linux Ubuntu is in blossom (at least for the Northern hemisphere). The next Ubuntu release has been confirmed today for release on the 19th of April. Both the desktop and server edition will be available at this date.

So what’s new in Ubuntu 7.04 (a.k.a. Feisty Fawn)?

Continue reading “It is spring, the trees and Ubuntu are in Blossom”

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Getting more from your battery

Gnome Power Management logoFollowing my previous article on the Gnome Power Management applet, I want to talk about another new functionality of this tool that got added with the latest version of Gnome (2.18 available with the coming Ubuntu Release).

This new facility helps you getting more information from your battery and is available via the menu of the Gnome Power Management applet when clicking on it with the left button. In the menu, the first entry should be about your battery with the charge information.

Continue reading “Getting more from your battery”

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The Wow had already started

It is not my intention to transform this blog into a video one. But I will from time to time add one that I found of interest.

Today is an alternative wow that I want to say. I have installed a 3D desktop on my computer last autumn and found it fun, I also found out how crap was my built-in laptop video card… sigh!

Anyway, today I was watching a recent video of such 3D desktop, and wow! They have evolved really fast. The video is a bit long at the beginning, but it is worth it. I like the dock at the bottom of the screen (kiba dock). Of course, the operating system is Linux.

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Hello, I’m an alternative!

Video MIME Type by TangoEven if you do not have a TV, it was difficult to miss the advertisement campaign from Apple: “Hello I’m a Mac. And I’m a PC.” If you have missed it out, here is one of the latest one to date: the flashback.

I am a big fan of Apple computers, and there are right that for a home computer desktop there are two possibilities: a PC or a Mac. However, there advertisement do not emphasise on the hardware (which is nowadays pretty similar) but more on what can be done with them. So it should have better been called: “Hello I’m OS X. And I’m Windows.”

But on this ground, there are more than those two systems, many alternatives like Ubuntu Linux, FreeBSD, etc. do exist. That is what maybe triggered a counter campaign from Novell (Linux distributor of SUSE Linux). I am calling it “Hello, I’m an alternative!“.