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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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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.

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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!“.

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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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Gnome Power Management

Gnome Power Management logoIn the up coming Gnome 2.18, there have been several improvement of the Gnome Power Management applet. It still does the job of easily configuring many options that reduce power consumption. But recently it offers a power history.

This functionality is accessible upon right click on the applet icon. It displays a neat little plot of the power level of your battery and of various ACPI-related events (like session idle, suspend, etc.) Gnome Power Management - Power History exampleI find it quite useful to see if the power management policies chosen are applied and if they could be optimised.

On your right is a screenshot of the power history (click the image to enlarge).

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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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