We’re publishing an initial version of the Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix today, based on Ubuntu 11.10.
Deployment teams have long been modifying their Ubuntu installs to remove features like music players or games and add components that are a standard part of their business workflow.
This remix takes the most common changes we’ve observed among institutional users and bundles them into one CD which can be installed directly or used as a basis for further customization. Before anyone gets all worked up and conspiratorial: everything in the remix is available from the standard Software Centre. Packages out, packages in. No secret sauce for customers only; we’re not creating a RHEL, we already have an enterprise-quality release cadence called LTS and we like it just the way it is. This is a convenience for anyone who wants it. Having a common starting point, or booting straight into a business-oriented image makes it easier for institutional users to evaluate Ubuntu Desktop for their specific needs.
This work was first discussed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in October. We consulted with the Ubuntu Technical Board and Ubuntu Release Team, to ensure that the finished product met the standards of the Ubuntu project. Doing so resulted in a commitment to enable community participation in the packaging of some of the pieces that are important to enterprise users.
Ubuntu makes a point of openness to heterogeneous environments. We celebrate the point that the Ubuntu desktop can be highly useful, beautiful, functional and complete without any proprietary applications at all, while recognising that some people need to work with proprietary software on occasion, making sure that software is available and certified for Ubuntu, and making it easy to install. Remixes can include non-free software and still retain the Ubuntu name, as long as they can be brought back to the standard Ubuntu experience with straightforward package management tools and no risk of divergence on the hardware and security front.
Since we established the system of remixes, the Technical Board has defined guidelines for additional package archives which are exposed to Ubuntu users through the Software Centre. We’ve clarified with the Technical Board that remixes can draw from any such archives.
<blink>Registration required</blink> ;-) Some applications like VMWare View are included in this release under a proprietary license so download is covered by an EULA, and this image can’t be mirrored unless you make prior arrangements with the relevant ISVs. Boring, but better to do it once than for every individual app. We will ask users who download it to provide feedback on how we might improve the product, and provide them with details of Canonical’s deployment services and management solutions.
Get it here.
The Original Redhat Ad on LinkedIn:
The Ubuntu Remix featuring me:
You decide by letting it be known right here.
Originally Posted At: Benjamin Kerensa dot Com
Recently I have been blogging about a project I have been hacking on called Ubuntu Accomplishments.
This is an accomplishments system that can be used to identify when people have accomplished various things in the Ubuntu project and reward them with trophies. The plan also makes additional skills and accomplishments more discoverable and provides better help for people to get started. While designed for Ubuntu, the system can be used for other projects and also for local applications (e.g. completing Level 1 on a game). Accomplishments in community projects are verified for their integrity so people can’t fake their trophies.
I wanted to present a video demo of the system working so far:
Can’t see it? See the video here!
You can find out more about the project here and the code is available in the following branches:
Now, this is really early in the stages of development. If you grab the code you will find various bits that are not yet implemented, but the core idea works.
Things we need to do next:
I plan on writing a longer blog entry about how the system works later for those who are interested in contributing.
I’ve had a number of people suggest Gwibber could use a new logo, but nobody has actually stepped up and designed anything. Recently I had the good fortune to chat with Abi Rasheed on IRC who volunteered to help. He has put together a couple of great concepts, and we would like to gather some feedback.
I’ve posted the concepts on the wiki, please check them out and provide some feedback.
Thanks!
As I mentioned in a recent post, gedit snippets can help you write code more quickly, and with fewer errors, than writing all of your code manually. Snippets work by expanding small chunks of text into complete combinations of code boilerplate and variable/attribute placeholders. Using these pre-configured combinations of boilerplate and placeholders frees you to focus on the bits of code and text that are materially relevant to your work at hand.
You can enable the gedit snippets plugin by selecting Edit > Preferences > Plugins > Snippets.
There are four components to using snippets: confirming the language or syntax setting, entering the snippet ID, activating the snippet, and completing the snippet by entering the appropriate attributes or variables into the placeholder text areas.
The first thing is to make sure that the file type is set to correspond with the type of file you’re working on. If you’re starting from an existing file, gedit will attempt to set the file type for you automatically. If you’re starting a brand new file, or if gedit hasn’t correctly identified the file type, you can also manually set or change the file type.
Once you have that in place, the most difficult part is actually remembering the snippets that are available. You can view, edit, and create snipppets using the Manage Snippets window (see Tools > Manage Snippets). Once you know the relevant snippet IDs, all you need to do is type a snippet ID, and press the tab key. The tab key is what activates the snippet.
After you press the tab key, gedit converts that brief snippet of text into a combination of boilerplate text and appropriate variable or attribute placeholders. Pressing the tab key again will move the cursor to the next placeholder area.
Here’s an example. I’m starting from a blank page, and am writing a new Mallard XML file. The snippet ID to start a new Mallard page file is just the word, “page.”
Simple enough! Just enter the snippet ID, press the tab key, watch as gedit inserts the boilerplate text, and then use the tab key to maneuver through the placeholder areas.
There are currently snippets for numerous languages and syntaxes, but coverage of each language varies, and some snippets may not include the most recent language features. Give gedit snippets a try. If you don’t see a snippet feature that you’d like to use, file a bug in the gedit bug tracker.
As a teenager, I ran a small poetry and short story magazine. It had a suitably overwrought title, was lots of fun and put me in touch with a whole load of people who’ve influenced who I am today.
One such person was Geoff Stevens who ran another, far longer established, magazine called Purple Patch. I didn’t realise at the time but Purple Patch was one of the best respected and widely known small-press poetry publications in the UK. Both Geoff and Purple Patch were based in West Bromwich, and for a little while, Pebble Mill. These were far off and exotic lands to the teenage me, living in a windy ex-pit village in the north-east.
When, a few years later, I found myself living in the West Midlands, I had a go at getting in touch with Geoff; no more than a couple of answerphone messages. Then other things got in the way and, well, now it’s too late.
I was sad to read, today, that Geoff died a few days ago. So, thanks Geoff for your encouragement and I’m sorry I didn’t try to call again.
A few weeks back, I blogged about python-charlie, a python lib to get at Boston MBTA data.
I’ve since re-factored the code and mashed it up with “Super MBTA World”, by Adam Summerville of Circle Cat Games, a fantastic image of Boston’s public transit.
A few hours and a bit of flask later, here is “trendy” (I hate picking names) - which will move little Koopahs over the MBTA map.
It’s very incomplete, but it’s just showing off how awesome some of this data is.
Patches welcome!
Check out Why I don’t host my own blog anymore.
I mentioned it to a friend and he immediately piped in “Oh that guy did it wrong, he shouldn’t care about KeepAlive, he needs FastCGI”.
Ok so the guy “messed up” and misconfigured his blog. Zigged instead of zagged. Bummer.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Right now we offer Wordpress as a juju charm. This lets us deploy Wordpress with Mysql in 4 commands.
However if you look at the db-relation-hook we don’t do anything special, we create an apache vhost and set it up for you. While this is simple, there’s no reason we can’t make this charm be a turbo charged deployment of Wordpress. Let’s look at some of the recommendations we see on his blog and on HN:
I’m sure everyone will have an opinion on how to deploy Wordpress. From an Ubuntu perspective, we ship the wordpress and mysql packages, but that only gets you so far. It’s still up to you to configure it, and as this guy proves, you can mess something up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could collect all the experience from people who are Wordpress deployment experts, put that in our charms and just give people that out of the box?
We could use nginx in the Wordpress charm, with FastCGI, we can certainly add relations to make varnish and memcached know what to do when they’re related to wordpress. And/or just “juju add-relation jekyll wordpress” and have that Just Work.
These are the kinds of problems we’re trying to tackle with juju. Will it be totally perfect for everyone’s deployment? Of course not, that’s impossible, but we can certainly make Patrick’s experience more uncommon. People will always argue about the nitnoid implementation details, but we can make those config options; the point is that we can share deployment and service maintenance as a whole instead of hoping people put the lego blocks together in the right order.
Interested in turning a plain boring charm into something sexy? I’ve filed the bug here, let us know if you’re interested.
TRAUMA is a game that tells a story of a young woman who survives a car accident. Recovering at the hospital, she has dreams that shed light on different aspects of her identity – such as the way she deals with the loss of her parents. TRAUMA lets you experience those dreams in an interactive way, reminiscent of Point-and-Click Adventure Games.
2. Oil RushOil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. It combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS with the sheer fun of Tower Defence. Fight the naval war between furious armies across the boundless waters of the post-apocalyptic world.
3. Fluendo DVD PlayerFluendo DVD Player is a software application specially designed to reproduce DVD on Linux/Unix platforms, which provides end users with high quality standards.
4. Family FarmWork the farm in this game of 19th century farmsteading and build a home for your families. Clicking cows won’t earn you any cash. This is a simulation of a farmstead experienced in stories which span a generation. Keep them fed, develop their skills, and grow their land in to a Family Farm!
5. Steel Storm: Burning RetributionSteel Storm: Burning Retribution marks the return of top-down shooters with new twists. The game has score oriented competitive gameplay, and is designed for people who like fast paced action, hordes of smart enemies, destructible worlds and ground shaking explosions.
6. BraidBraid is a platform game in painterly style where you manipulate the flow of time to solve puzzles. Every puzzle in Braid is unique; there is no filler. Braid treats your time and attention as precious, and it does everything it can to give you a mind-expanding experience.
7. Monster RPG 2Monster RPG 2 is a fantasy quest that spans continents and worlds and lets you take a simple villager and develop her into a hero with the power to save her world. The next instalment in the classic Monster RPG series, Monster RPG 2 is a turn-based role-playing game with great variety of plot twists, secrets, and scenery.
8. World of GooDrag and drop living, squirming, talking globs of goo to build structures, bridges, cannonballs, zeppelins, and giant tongues. The millions of innocent goo balls that live in the beautiful World of Goo are curious to explore. But they don’t know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious. The most addicting and awe-inspiring puzzle game will set you on an adventure that you’ll never forget!
9. The Clockwork Man: The Hidden WorldExplore a Victorian era filled with wondrous contraptions and fascinating machinery. Embark on a steam-powered, rollercoaster journey through land, air, and water in this unique Hidden Object Adventure! Miranda and Sprocket are back! Join them in their new adventures and discover the Hidden World, a land lost in time and glimpsed through legends.
10. UplinkYou play an Uplink Agent who makes a living by performing jobs for major corporations. Your tasks involve hacking into rival computer systems, stealing research data, sabotaging other companies, laundering money, erasing evidence, or framing innocent people. You use the money you earn to upgrade your computer systems, and to buy new software and tools. As your experience level increases you find more dangerous and profitable missions become available.
Top 10 free apps 1. Marble Arena 2Free, physics based, 3D marble game, featuring vibrant HD graphics, fun and addictive star zapping gameplay, and an easy to use built-in editor for creating custom levels.
2. RyzomRyzom, one of the best role playing Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the moment (MMORPG), is set more than 2000 years in the future, on a living, evolving world: beautiful Atys!
3. Crossover GamesPlay Windows games like World of Warcraft on Ubuntu! CrossOver Games (Ubuntu Edition) makes it possible to play Windows games such as World of Warcraft and many others. CrossOver Games is built on the latest versions of Wine, based on contributions from both CodeWeavers and the open-source Wine community. CrossOver Games aims to bring you the latest, greatest, bleeding edge improvements in Wine technology.
4. Tribal Trouble 2Tribal Trouble 2 is a browser-based RTS game that takes place in the zany age of the Vikings. You are the Chief of a Viking tribe and are responsible for making a name for yourself by conquest and skill.
5. CoreBreach DemoCoreBreach is an anti-gravity racing game with combat-based gameplay. Its unique graphic style, with a cell-shaded look, sets up a very futuristic atmosphere with a wide range of choices for ships, race tracks and powerful weapons.
6. Full Circle MagazineFull Circle is a free, independent, monthly magazine dedicated to the Ubuntu family of Linux operating systems. Each month, it contains helpful how-to articles and reader submitted stories. Full Circle also features a companion podcast, the Full Circle Podcast, which covers the magazine along with other news of interest.
7. Vendetta OnlineVendetta Online is a 3D space combat MMORPG. This MMO permits thousands of players to interact as the pilots of spaceships in a vast universe. Users may build their characters in any direction they desire, becoming rich captains of industry, military heroes, or outlaws.
8. TreeSheetsThe ultimate replacement for spreadsheets, mind mappers, outliners, PIMs, text editors and small databases. Suitable for any kind of data organization, such as Todo lists, calendars, project management, brainstorming, organizing ideas, planning, requirements gathering, presentation of information, etc.
9. CrossOver Pro (Trial)CrossOver Linux allows you to install many popular Windows productivity applications, plugins and games in Linux. You can think of it as an emulator, but it’s different, because there’s no Windows OS license required. Your applications integrate seamlessly with your GNOME or KDE environment. It’s like running Windows on your Linux machine, but without Windows.
10. WunderlistFree cloud-sync task manager, helps sharing your To-Do lists with friends and colleagues. Manage your to-dos and synchronize them with your free Wunderlist account. View and modify your tasks on Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch, Android and the Web. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide use Wunderlist everyday. Wunderlist – your tasks anywhere, anytime.
Notes:
Follow Ubuntu App Development on:
Yesterday on Planet Ubuntu, Jono blogged about how to make your blog more compelling, professional and popular. Great advice!
One of Jono's tips that caught my eye, and admittedly one that I personally underutilize was:
"Use social media – post a link to your post on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and other social media accounts."Social media can extend the reach of your blog, taking it to new places and new audiences. However, despite my love of the first (bolded) part of that advice, I just could not stomach the second part. To me, it would be the equivalent of wearing a fur coat to a PETA rally. So, in the spirit of forking, here's my version:
"Use social media – post a link to your post on Twitter, Google+, Facebook and other social media accounts that respect freedom, do not censor, and do not sell or otherwise disclose your social graph."So, I reposted my Planet Ubuntu post from yesterday to Diaspora*. To my delight, I received some additional traffic and insight from a new reader:
Do you use Diaspora* to further the reach of your blog? Do you want to communicate to people who love and understand freedom?
#Ubuntu is now followed by 1737 people on Diaspora*. And I'll bet you a beer that we can easily multiply that by a factor of 1000.
I hope you'll join the discussion on Diaspora* by participating and contributing your great Ubuntu blog posts there.
Forget walled gardens. Freedom awaits :)
Lets be precise on the fact that TweetDeck’s new HTML5 client is horrible and is a stripped down version of the client we love so much. I have frequently fancied the idea of finding an Open Source Twitter client that matches some or all of the features that TweetDeck 0.38.2 had but in all honesty Gwibber and the rest are really not up to par performance or feature wise.
As such I was recently trying to find a way to get TweetDeck 0.38.2 running on Ubuntu 12.04 since TweetDeck removed the option from their site and here is the solution…
1. Download AdobeAIRInstaller.bin here.
2. cd Downloads
3. chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
4. ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
5. Download TweetDeck-0.38.2.air here.
6. Install the air application and voila your back to the goodness and features of TweetDeck 0.38.2!
Originally Posted At: Benjamin Kerensa dot Com
I was recently selected to be a part of the Mozilla WebFWD Scout Team where I will put to good use my never-ending advocacy for Free Open Source Software. I’m really excited to have an opportunity to be on this team and be apart of Mozilla’s “Open Innovation Program” which aims to support Free Open Source Software Projects that extend the web.
A bit on what WebFWD Scouts do:
WebFWD Scouts are our eyes and ears on the ground, helping us identify and connect with entrepreneurs and developers who have the skills and initiative to make the world a better place. As a Scout, you’ll become a key participant in the global WebFWD team and community.
With that in mind I think I will be a valuable asset to this global team and I will be sure to look for some excellent projects out there that might benefit from mentorship and other resources available through the WebFWD program.
FOSS Yeaaaah!
Originally Posted At: Benjamin Kerensa dot Com
An issue has been noticed due to interaction between a recent libc upgrade and the nvidia graphics driver. If you have nvidia hardware, please avoid upgrading until this has been resolved. Investigation is
ongoing.
Details will be found and tracked in:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers/+bug/929384
Ubuntu 12.04 is shaping up nicely. Last week Alpha 2 got released, which means you should be testing by now. Next week we will hit Feature Freeze, by which time we “stop introducing new features, packages, and APIs, and concentrate on fixing bugs in the development release”. This also means that new upstream versions (if they are not part of on the release team’s list of exceptions or pure bug fix releases) will need to get a freeze exception from the release team. This is also a reason why Daniel Holbach called for a “Sponsorship Friday”, so the queue of uploads which need code review is emptied again.
Matt Fischer wrote an interesting article about how to write a LightDM greeter. The post is really well done, explaining how LightDM works internally and how to get the greeter done easily.
EventsWe are excited to let you know about the Ubuntu Global Jam, an event where Ubuntu LoCo Teams around the world meet, have fun and together make Ubuntu better. Be it through translations, work on bugs, documentation, testing, packaging or whatever else. Check out the list of participating events to find if there is something happening near where you live, or start an event yourself!
Can’t see the video? Click here.
Things which need to get doneIf you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there are still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:
We had a number of folks getting involved last week: Daniel d’Andrada, Nicolas Bonnefon, Kiall Mac Innes and Anton Gladky.
Spotlight: Kubuntu, alive and kickingBenjamin Kerensa and Daniel Holbach briefly interviewed some of the Kubuntu developers to get an idea where things stand with Kubuntu.
The announcement that Canonical employee Jonathan Riddell would soon focus on goals other than Kubuntu maintenance has been widely discussed in the media, so first we asked the team, if they would like to add anything to these discussions which had been missed. Jonathan Riddell started out by saying that “pulling the plug” as many headlines have put it was too harsh and that Kubuntu will get the community support it always has done. Also he pointed out that Kubuntu did pleasingly well during 11.10 when he also wasn’t working on it. We asked if the lack of you being involved full time would have any noticeable impact. Jonathan responded and said that he does community management, so nudges people towards tasks that they are capable of, and fills in areas of Kubuntu that are sometimes neglected, such as ISO testing and that these tasks will have been done by others.
As many readers probably don’t know how Kubuntu is put together, we asked how Kubuntu development has worked up until now. Rohan Garg gave us an overview: Basically, the Kubuntu team deals with the KDE and Qt packages in the Ubuntu archive, so whenever a new release is about to be made the team gets the source tarballs a couple of days before release and the team of “Kubuntu ninjas” get cracking. They build, patch, and see to it that everything works as expected before release day, reporting any build issues upstream and getting tarballs respun is part and parcel of the job. Sometimes it happens that everyone is busy which causes delays in the release. Once the Kubuntu release is out, packages are usually backported into the Ubuntu backports repositories for the current stable release. The Kubuntu ninjas are also responsible for other KDE packages such as Amarok which are not part of the standard KDE release and as Jonathan Riddell pointed out that there is Qt and related bits too and added “with luck we can do some feature development (which is mostly specced out at UDS)”.
Testing is important as well. Jonathan mentioned ISO testing and Philip Muškovac explained that before stable release updates are pushed out, testing is done through public PPAs. Rohan and Philip went on and described how most of Kubuntu’s bug work is being done upstream: KDE bugs are directly reported in the KDE bug tracker, as KDE applications have their own bug/crash handling framework. Philip added that it would be great to have more contributions to bugs in Launchpad, so they can be forwarded to Upstream in a more timely fashion
Next we asked what’s in the cards for Kubuntu 12.04. Philip explained that the introduction of KDE 4.8 took a lot of time and that he is still working on supporting the Oxygen theme for GTK3. Rohan mentioned that a new IM client is being packaged right now, using the Telepathy framework. The packaging is almost done and testing will go on for a week before they enter the archive. Also Rohan was proud to admit that he is going to apply for Kubuntu upload rights!
It is interesting to note that Philip and Rohan both mentioned that the withdrawal of “official support” would actually make the development of Kubuntu easier: up until now all packages for the Kubuntu CDs had to be in the main repository, which requires a thorough investigation of the code. From now on Kubuntu bits could come from main and universe.
It is absolutely possible to contribute to Kubuntu and the team has enough tasks lined up, so you can help out. If it is triage of bugs, ISO testing, documentation or packaging: everyone is welcome to contribute and get involved. Jonathan mentioned that it is important that you are a “motivated self starter”, but that the fine people in #kubuntu-devel can help you out if you get stuck. The Kubuntu wiki page has more details.
Get InvolvedPick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.
In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.
Getting in touchThere are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.
TRAUMA is a game that tells a story of a young woman who survives a car accident. Recovering at the hospital, she has dreams that shed light on different aspects of her identity – such as the way she deals with the loss of her parents. TRAUMA lets you experience those dreams in an interactive way, reminiscent of Point-and-Click Adventure Games.
2. Oil RushOil Rush is a real-time naval strategy game based on group control. It combines the strategic challenge of a classical RTS with the sheer fun of Tower Defence. Fight the naval war between furious armies across the boundless waters of the post-apocalyptic world.
3. Fluendo DVD PlayerFluendo DVD Player is a software application specially designed to reproduce DVD on Linux/Unix platforms, which provides end users with high quality standards.
4. Family FarmWork the farm in this game of 19th century farmsteading and build a home for your families. Clicking cows won’t earn you any cash. This is a simulation of a farmstead experienced in stories which span a generation. Keep them fed, develop their skills, and grow their land in to a Family Farm!
5. Steel Storm: Burning RetributionSteel Storm: Burning Retribution marks the return of top-down shooters with new twists. The game has score oriented competitive gameplay, and is designed for people who like fast paced action, hordes of smart enemies, destructible worlds and ground shaking explosions.
6. BraidBraid is a platform game in painterly style where you manipulate the flow of time to solve puzzles. Every puzzle in Braid is unique; there is no filler. Braid treats your time and attention as precious, and it does everything it can to give you a mind-expanding experience.
7. Monster RPG 2Monster RPG 2 is a fantasy quest that spans continents and worlds and lets you take a simple villager and develop her into a hero with the power to save her world. The next instalment in the classic Monster RPG series, Monster RPG 2 is a turn-based role-playing game with great variety of plot twists, secrets, and scenery.
8. World of GooDrag and drop living, squirming, talking globs of goo to build structures, bridges, cannonballs, zeppelins, and giant tongues. The millions of innocent goo balls that live in the beautiful World of Goo are curious to explore. But they don’t know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious. The most addicting and awe-inspiring puzzle game will set you on an adventure that you’ll never forget!
9. The Clockwork Man: The Hidden WorldExplore a Victorian era filled with wondrous contraptions and fascinating machinery. Embark on a steam-powered, rollercoaster journey through land, air, and water in this unique Hidden Object Adventure! Miranda and Sprocket are back! Join them in their new adventures and discover the Hidden World, a land lost in time and glimpsed through legends.
10. UplinkYou play an Uplink Agent who makes a living by performing jobs for major corporations. Your tasks involve hacking into rival computer systems, stealing research data, sabotaging other companies, laundering money, erasing evidence, or framing innocent people. You use the money you earn to upgrade your computer systems, and to buy new software and tools. As your experience level increases you find more dangerous and profitable missions become available.
Top 10 free apps 1. Marble Arena 2Free, physics based, 3D marble game, featuring vibrant HD graphics, fun and addictive star zapping gameplay, and an easy to use built-in editor for creating custom levels.
2. RyzomRyzom, one of the best role playing Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the moment (MMORPG), is set more than 2000 years in the future, on a living, evolving world: beautiful Atys!
3. Crossover GamesPlay Windows games like World of Warcraft on Ubuntu! CrossOver Games (Ubuntu Edition) makes it possible to play Windows games such as World of Warcraft and many others. CrossOver Games is built on the latest versions of Wine, based on contributions from both CodeWeavers and the open-source Wine community. CrossOver Games aims to bring you the latest, greatest, bleeding edge improvements in Wine technology.
4. Tribal Trouble 2Tribal Trouble 2 is a browser-based RTS game that takes place in the zany age of the Vikings. You are the Chief of a Viking tribe and are responsible for making a name for yourself by conquest and skill.
5. CoreBreach DemoCoreBreach is an anti-gravity racing game with combat-based gameplay. Its unique graphic style, with a cell-shaded look, sets up a very futuristic atmosphere with a wide range of choices for ships, race tracks and powerful weapons.
6. Full Circle MagazineFull Circle is a free, independent, monthly magazine dedicated to the Ubuntu family of Linux operating systems. Each month, it contains helpful how-to articles and reader submitted stories. Full Circle also features a companion podcast, the Full Circle Podcast, which covers the magazine along with other news of interest.
7. Vendetta OnlineVendetta Online is a 3D space combat MMORPG. This MMO permits thousands of players to interact as the pilots of spaceships in a vast universe. Users may build their characters in any direction they desire, becoming rich captains of industry, military heroes, or outlaws.
8. TreeSheetsThe ultimate replacement for spreadsheets, mind mappers, outliners, PIMs, text editors and small databases. Suitable for any kind of data organization, such as Todo lists, calendars, project management, brainstorming, organizing ideas, planning, requirements gathering, presentation of information, etc.
9. CrossOver Pro (Trial)CrossOver Linux allows you to install many popular Windows productivity applications, plugins and games in Linux. You can think of it as an emulator, but it’s different, because there’s no Windows OS license required. Your applications integrate seamlessly with your GNOME or KDE environment. It’s like running Windows on your Linux machine, but without Windows.
10. WunderlistFree cloud-sync task manager, helps sharing your To-Do lists with friends and colleagues. Manage your to-dos and synchronize them with your free Wunderlist account. View and modify your tasks on Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch, Android and the Web. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide use Wunderlist everyday. Wunderlist – your tasks anywhere, anytime.
Notes:
Follow Ubuntu App Development on:
I am glad to announce the third bugfix release for Muon Suite 1.2. The Muon Suite is a set of package management utilities for Debian-based Linux distributions built on KDE technologies.
The third bugfix release fixes several crashes found with previous versions of the Muon Suite, including a rather severe crash in the Muon Software Center caused by default repository changes in Kubuntu. Additionally, hangs experienced during long/large upgrades have been fixed, and issues with the update notifier not always notifying of updates have been fixed. All fixes have been included in the recently-released release candidate of the Muon Suite 1.3.
Packages for Kubuntu 11.10 are from the QApt repository. I will try to get 1.2.3 pushed as an official update for Kubuntu 11.10 over the next week or so using the Ubuntu Stable Release Update process. Since this has a more rigorous testing process than my unofficial PPA, regression testing from users will be required. Stay tuned for more info about that if you’d like to help! This did not happen with the 1.2.2 release due to a severe lack of time on my part due to final exams and work, but I will try to make it happen this time as this release does fix several serious issues.
Further technical information about the release, including source tarball downloads and a detailed changelog, can be found at the project pages here and here.
On Monday at the CSS Working Group, Microsoft, Mozilla and Opera announced that each are considering supporting some -webkit- prefixed CSS properties.
I include here Bruce Lawson's excellent summary:
Lots of developers, despite evidence to the contrary, have assumed that mobile Web = WebKit browsers, because that’s the rendering engine in Android and iThings. Suppose the site was made a while ago and used the experimental, pre-standardised code -webkit-border-radius and didn’t use the cross-browser future-proof method. The real CSS property border-radius has been long been standardised and supported without prefixes in all the major browsers. But the -webkit- prefixed version still lingers on in Safari and Chrome, so that legacy code looks fine in the webkit browsers, but broken in Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer.We've been through this fight before. A few years back, Internet Explorer proposed the X-UA-Compatible header, which would mean that IE8 would act like IE7 unless you specifically told it to act like IE8. The proposed solutions back then were similar to what we're seeing today in response to -webkit-* CSS in non-WebKit browsers: developers shouldn't be lazy; developers should do it right; sites should break if they use WebKit-only CSS in order to punish the developer; use this library to help you do it right (LESS for CSS pre-processing on the server side, prefixfree on the client-side); WebKit should stop supporting a prefixed CSS property once it supports the unprefixed version; vendor prefixes are a broken concept and should be abandoned.
None of these approaches will work.
Expecting developers to just Do It Right To Begin With™ is a noble goal, but it doesn't work like that. Everyone has deadline pressures; most people are not on the bleeding edge of the web standards community; the tension between "make it work today" and "make it right for the future" is never going to go away, no matter that we wish it would. The way to success is to align the right way to do it with the easiest way to do it; the way to success is to make correctness the path of least resistance. This is what informs the HTML5 "pave the cowpaths" approach, and it's that way for a reason; if correctness requires extra work, then at least some people will be incorrect through lack of time or lack of knowledge.
Breaking websites, by having WebKit deliberately stop supporting a -webkit property once it supports the unprefixed property, is not going to happen. The WebKit team have explicitly stated that they won't do that, for "backwards compatibility reasons". Also, frankly, expecting them to is naive; they should make websites break just in order to teach developers the Right Way To Do Things, when those websites currently work? Remember, it's not developers who are punished by this; it's the users of the sites, because those users get a new phone or a phone OS upgrade and suddenly half the sites they use don't work. This hurts them, and they're who we're doing this for. The WebKit team are looking out for WebKit, but they can't be blamed for that; stuff works for them, after all.
There's an argument that users who find their sites broken will blame the sites, and then the site developers will fix the problem. I disagree. If I decide to try Opera Mobile or Firefox on my phone and half the sites I use don't work, I'll say: oh well, can't move to that, then, and I'll go back to the built-in browser. This is the Microsoft argument: one broken program will prevent an upgrade, and they're right. What we get is de-facto lock-in, just the same as all those businesses which couldn't migrate away from IE6 because of their intranet.
Using a server-side preprocessor or a client-side JS patch to turn some-property into -webkit-some-property, -moz-some-property, -o-some-property, -ms-some-property is a useful tool for developers who know what they're doing but can't be bothered to type it all in. Think about it: if I just use the unprefixed standardised property right now, then eventually (when the browsers all implement it) my site will work! I don't have to do anything to make that happen; I'm out in front and waiting for technology to catch up with me. It does not help the developers who are actually affected here, the ones building sites with only -webkit CSS properties in them, the sites that Bruce calls "legacy code" above. And it's those legacy sites which are compelling Mozilla and Microsoft and Opera to debate supporting that WebKit-only CSS.
So, then, smart-arse, what's the solution, if it's none of those?
Well, obviously, the evangelism efforts should continue. Progress is made. People do learn. It's slow, but we get there in the end. What we're talking about is an interim solution in addition to that.
I think @leaverou's prefixfree JS library has the right idea, it's just backwards. Prefixfree takes proper CSS (an unprefixed property) and turns it into all the vendor-specific prefixed properties, so that you write CSS-of-the-future and the library turns it into CSS-of-today. It's a polyfill. What's wanted here, I think, is something like prefixfree but which takes CSS-of-the-past (-webkit-some-property and turns it into CSS-of-today (-webkit-some-property, -moz-some-property, -o-some-property, -ms-some-property, some-property). This wouldn't be a hard polyfill to build (it's just prefixfree, tweaked), but then of course you have the problem that no-one knows about it. So here's the second part of the proposal: common JS libraries should do this sort of thing by default. Imagine if jQuery fixed this stuff for you. I think, without wishing to sound snobbish, that most reasonably-complex websites include some JS (progressively enhanced, ideally), and most of those use a library. The developers we're talking about (and this is the snobbish part), the people writing legacy WebKit-only code, will have that WebKit-only code automatically patched to work with all other browsers without having to know that it's even happening. The ones who are short of time get that time back; the ones short of knowledge can learn on their own time and are helped to not screw their users in the meantime.
This sort of view is problematic. I'm proposing giving a man a fish, not teaching a man to fish, and that's wrong. I agree. In this instance, given the choice between not educating a developer or not screwing some of his users, I'm choosing the users. I don't know a way to choose both. It's also problematic because I'm suggesting that library developers do all the work, and everyone using that library takes a performance hit even if they don't need to. So, I'm sure there will be other suggestions, and I'd love to hear them. I'd just like to stop hearing all the ones above that don't help the problem get fixed.
Hey all,
Been really quiet over the past few months mainly because I changed my blog over to drupal and never bother to change the rss for planet so didn't blog. Anyway ill be blogging more now and should have some cool announcements about what ive been doing in a few weeks. As for what ive been doing since I left ive been reading a lot ill post my book list because most of them are really interesting and ive only gotten through about half. Oh and my comments might not be working properly I have them working with openid but I haven't actually tested it.
So hopefully ill be more active again after the break :)
Edit: does anyone know how to remove the tags thing from drupal it looks pretty annoying on the rss to have the tags included.
Tags:Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.
TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.
Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.
I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels
A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.
Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!
More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.
When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.
Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?
