Category: Ubuntu

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Linux is going to be super green

Gnome Power Management logoEcology, this is a kind of marketing and political buzz word now-a-day. When someone says “I am an ecologist”, what does he really want to say? Thus, I will not use it but rather say that I love hiking and cycling, and the best place to do so is Nature, especially far from any road or city. Therefore, I love Nature (at large) and I am doing my bit and my best to protect it and today I was quite happy to read an article on future improvements on the power management of Linux.

To shortly summarise (I heavily advise you to read the above linked article): the new kernel (2.6.21 with the tickless timer) and Intel involvement will mainly help reducing power consumption. Also, it seems that KDE (another Linux desktop environment) has some nice improvements in sleep states area.

Now linking the article conclusion about AMD/ATI drivers and the dream that perhaps AMD/ATI will help the open source community creating new drivers. There are hopes to save even more energy.

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Commercial virtualisation product available for Ubuntu

A bit more than a month ago Spring just started, but it is so hot and sunny now that it feels already like Summer. Summer means much more outside activities and fewer inside topics: less blogging and less playing with Ubuntu.

Anyway from time to time, I still find opportunities to discover a new side of Ubuntu and to write about it. Today is about a recent update in the Ubuntu repositories that enabled the first commercial package: VMware Server.

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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.

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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.

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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)?

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100% free laptop

Hold on, I did not mean that I was selling my laptop for free. I am not selling it at all and I am more than happy with it as it is 100% free (libre) when I am using Ubuntu. There is no proprietary driver used even for 3D or Wi-Fi.
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn offers a new tool about restricted drivers in the administration section which deals with restricted drivers.
I was curious about its functionalities and I launched it.
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Linux distributions trends

Google trends - Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat based, Debian, SUSE based) and Windows Vista

I was just playing around with Google Trends and I thought of showing the result of one of my search.

You can see on the figure (or directly at Google Trends) the evolution of search request perform by users of the Google web search engine in 2005 and 2006.

At the beginning of 2005, Ubuntu was rather new, hence the growing number of request over 2005 and 2006. I have no explanation about the sudden rise of Vista in the beginning of the second 2005 semester.

So was Ubuntu more popular than Vista in 2006? Well if by just using Google Trends we would have such an answer that would be easy, but this is only one factor amongst many. So you can think of your own good idea.

To conclude, you could check this other trend comparison between various version of Ubuntu, interesting…

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NTFS write support for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (the development codename) has a fairly easy way to enable write mode on NTFS partitions. Writing on such partition is safe since release 1.0 of NTFS-3G, and it is included in Ubuntu Feisty’s Universe repository.

To use it, one should enable the Universe repository and install ntfs-3g package (see Ubuntu documentation about installing software) and that’s almost it.

You can now either update manually your partition configuration file (/etc/fstab) to use ntfs-3g driver instead of the default ntfs. Or you could use the ntfs-config package which does the trick taking care for you about the local settings or external hard drive. Who said Linux was not easy?

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