A little while ago I did a tutorial on upgrading to Flash Player 10 Beta. I still recommend most Linux users do this, since it fixes a problem with drop down menus disappearing behind Flash content, however I noticed one issue today. The issue is, in fact, quite funny. When clicking on a CNN.com video, I was presented with this error message (I am on Ubuntu running Firefox 3 with Flash Player 10 Beta):

Interesting error message...

Hmmm… “This CNN.com feature is optimized for Adobe Flash Player version 8 or higher. You are currently using Flash Player 10″

Last time I checked 10 was greater than 8. Anyway, for anyone who watches lots of CNN videos, don’t upgrade to Flash Player 10 quite yet. If you already upgraded, don’t worry. Just install an older version like you would install version 10 beta and you should be fine again.

I checked most of the other major news sites and they seem to all be fine with Flash Player 10 beta.

When Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix was first announced, Ars Technica mentioned that “No major OEMs have revealed plans to use it yet and Canonical is still actively looking for new partners in the hardware space.” This brought up the potential concern of what if no one really adopts Ubuntu Netbook Remix?

Of course, we can be quite confident that Canonical will figure something out, but for those of you who have been really hoping that the Ubuntu Netbook Remix will be widely adopted, it looks like you can stop holding your breath.

In a blog post today, Mark Shuttleworth said that:

The Canonical OEM team has been approached by a number of OEM’s who want to sell netbooks (small, low-cost laptops with an emphasis on the web) based on Ubuntu.

It is great to see cofirmation that Ubuntu Netbook Remix will almost certainly be adopted and I can’t wait to see what happens when it ships on the first devices.

Note: I am away right now, so I cannot cover the daily news, but I want to continue daily content on this site. This article was written in advance and published automatically. Daily news will resume in a few days, or sooner, if I am able to get online while I am away.

NimbleX is a small and highly customizable distribution designed to be used for anything. The coolest thing you can do with the current version is create your own version. In fact, you don’t even need to install NimbleX to make your own version. All you have to do is go to the NimbleX site and go through the slick-looking wizard and you get your own customized distro with whatever applications and artwork you want.

Aside from this slick feature, NimbleX is basically a very slim and customizable distro. Although I cannot say for sure, I would guess that this distro would be good for older computers.

The upcoming version (NimbleX 2008, now in beta) will feature a new way of installing that is supposed to let users currently running Windows install NimbleX with one click without messing with their current data. I decided I would try it out by creating a NTFS partition and trying to install NimbleX, but I could never make it install at all. Of course, it is a beta so this sort of thing is pretty standard. In addition, the new version will also include 9 desktop enviroments for you to choose from. Talk about customizability!

If you are looking for a distro that you can customize to have exactly what you need and nothing else to slow you down, you should definetly check out NimbleX.

Yesterday I said that after I played with KDE 4 I would write an article about it. Now that I have downloaded and installed both the OpenSUSE CD with KDE 4 and the Kubuntu CD with KDE 4, I have decided that I cannot write anything that resembles a review of it. That is not because there is some horrible problem with KDE 4, though.

A Linux distro is made of many parts and the desktop enviroment is only one of them. Without the other parts, KDE is nothing but code. Right now, KDE 4 has been put onto a couple distros in a few hours with a remaster. That is useful for playing with some of the features, but I don’t feel like I can judge KDE 4, a project that took so much developer effort, when very little time has been spent making sure it is well integrated with the other software that makes up a distro. I am not criticising anyone or anything, I just don’t want to review KDE 4 until a major distro has released a stable, supported version of their distro with KDE 4.

The first release version of the RadeonHD driver, the open-source driver for AMD (ATI) video cards, has just been released, according to Phoronix. Although the driver lacks many of the features of other drivers, the development has been moving rapidly and, hopefully, a new version with some of these features will be released soon.

This driver is the result of AMD releasing specifications and code for their video cards to Novell and the rest of the opens-source community. Novell is still doing most of the development, which may be why the process has gone quite fast.

Now that we have seen the results of AMD’s work with the open-source community, the question is: what about Nvidia?

Further reading: X.Org Wiki Page 

The KDE project has released the first release candidate of KDE 4, the soon-to-be-released version of the KDE window manager. KDE 4 was previously delayed and is now expected to be finished around the beginning of December, if all goes well. If you have some time and a spare machine, download and test it.