Modify Colors
Mark Shuttleworth has announced the codename and major goals of Ubuntu’s next LTS release: Lucid Lynx. First, a definition:
According to Wiktionary, “lucid” means:
- clear; easily understood
- mentally rational; sane
- bright, luminous, translucent or transparent
And according to Urban Dictionary it means:
The Lucid Lynx will be an LTS release, meaning that it will enjoy an extended period of support and several maintenence releases over its life. This also means that it will be relatively lean on new features. Don’t expect to see anything readically new in this release. Instead, expect more reliability, stability, and speed. At least that’s the idea.
Sometimes unsynced releases and other issues cause conflicts between stability and not going obsolete. For example, last LTS release (8.04 Hardy Heron), Firefox 3 was chosen over Firefox 2, even though Firefox 3 was still in beta at the time of 8.04’s release. These sorts of issues create tension between people who believe LTS releases should focus purely on stability and those who believe its better to sacrifice a little stability for some new features.
Hopefully, though, none of these issues will arise in 10.04, which is scheduled for release in April of 2010.
Commenting Self-Check: Do I Sound Like An Idiot?
Ever wrote something in that comment box and then sat there staring at what you wrote wondering if you sound like an idiot? No, you probably just hit “post”. Anyway, let’s hypothetically assume you did think about what you were writing before you hit post (fun fact: the chance of this occurrence is 1.387×10^-46). In this case, how would you evaluate your own craziness? Allow me to introduce you to a simple method to determine your craziness rating.
Take the following (real) comment:
moron,
you typed this article using front page on windows and talking big on linux.
linux is not buggy at all. start using opensuse 11.1 and wake up.
- you moron
Next, select each produce/service you are talking about and replace it with the name of a competitor’s product/service.
moron,
you typed this article using pe on kaiku and talking big on windows.
windows is not buggy at all. start using windows me and wake up.
- you moron
Once you have these two versions, compare them. If the second one sounds less crazy or equally crazy, don’t hit post!
Linux is trash, please quit spreading FUD. I’m tired of you less than 1% of computer users infesting every tech news article with your religious zealotry and outright lies. Nobody cares about your crap OS that no one wants no matter how “free” it is. Time to start calling you all out on your BS.
This next (also real) comment author has an immediate advantage over “you moron” in that he/she has a basic understanding of the English language. (Incidentally, this means that there is a 90% change his/her first language is not English.)
OS X is trash, please quit spreading FUD. I’m tired of you less than 1% of computer users infesting every tech news article with your religious zealotry and outright lies. Nobody cares about your crap OS that no one wants no matter how “free” it is. Time to start calling you guys out on your BS.
Huh. Let’s try that again.
MS-DOS 6.22 is trash, please quit spreading FUD. I’m tired of you less than 1% of computer users infesting every tech news article with your religious zealotry and outright lies. Nobody cares about your crap OS that no one wants no matter how “free” it is. Time to start calling you guys out on your BS.
Just some advice: you shouldn’t have hit post.
Both examples are real. (A few insignificant changes were made to the wording.)
Filed under Comedy.
How do Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and Edubuntu fit in?
In addition to the highly popular Ubuntu operating system, Canonical also sponsors several “official” derivatives of Ubuntu, aimed at different types of hardware, different user preferences, and different use cases.
- Ubuntu – The main OS that everything else is based on
- Ubuntu Server Edition – Ubuntu without any GUI (by default) and designed for use on servers
- Kubuntu – Ubuntu with the KDE desktop
- Edubuntu – Ubuntu with additional applications aimed at education
- Ubuntu MID Edition – Ubuntu with a customized interface and various other tweaks for mobile internet devices
- Ubuntu Netbook Remix – A customized version of Ubuntu MID Edition for Netbooks
(Please note, the omission of Xubuntu is not a mistake. Xubuntu, Mythbuntu, and Ubuntu Studio are not supported derivatives.)
Ubuntu Logo
The list above includes every one of the Ubuntu derivatives that Canonical sponsors (at least all the onces I am aware of). In bold are the terms used to differentiate each variation from Ubuntu. The problem is that three different methods are used (edition, remix, and prefixes [ku- and edu-]) with no clear distinction. Why isn’t Ubuntu Server Edition called Serbuntu?
The Remixes
According to Ubuntu’s Trademark Policy:
We recognise and encourage the concept of a “remix.” Remixes are derived versions of Ubuntu, and it is intended that any software and hardware certifications will apply to a Remix… These changes can include configuration changes through the existing Ubuntu configuration management tools, changes to artwork and graphical themes and some variance in package selection.
According to this excerpt, the term remix applies to a distribution that incorporates only minor changes from one of the other official derivatives. This explains the choice of remix in Ubuntu Netbook Remix, as UNR is closely related to Ubuntu MID Edition.
Edubuntu Logo
Prefixes vs. Edition
Each derivative’s page on the Ubuntu website reveals a pattern between prefixes and edition.
Kubuntu is an official derivative of Ubuntu using the KDE environment instead of GNOME.
Edubuntu is a officially supported derivative of Ubuntu that is customised for Education use.
Both Kubuntu and Edubuntu are apparently considered derivatives, while Ubuntu Server Edition and Ubuntu MID Edition are considered part of Ubuntu.
Kubuntu Logo
Huh, why?
After a fair amount of digging, it is possible to make sense of all the names and terminology, but it certainly isn’t easy to understand.
Understanding how each bit of terminology is currently used, how could the naming scheme be simplified?
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and their respective logos are trademarks of Canonical.
Canonical adds Premium Service Engineers to support options
Canonical has added another option to their ever-increasing list of enterprise support options. Businesses requiring frequent support may pay for access to a Premium Service Engineer, an Ubuntu expert who works with the company’s existing team to keep the company’s Ubuntu installations running smoothly.
Ubuntu Premium Service Engineers, as opposed to more traditional Ubuntu support plans, gives businesses a single person to contact, who will already know how the servers and desktops are set up in advance of any help being needed. This type of support does not come at a cheap price, though. The Register reports that access to an Ubuntu PSE will cost $50,000 per year, compared to only a few hundred for some of Canonical’s support offerings.
Still, PSEs offer an extremely valuable resource of businesses: a person with specific Ubuntu training. Most IT people are trained primarily in Windows, particularly when it comes to supporting desktops. Paying for a PSE basically givces you a staff member who has Ubuntu training. The only significant difference is that PSEs will not usually be on-site, preventing them from actively managing computers.
About a month ago, Canonical announced plans for an Ubuntu app store, codenamed AppCenter. As expected, the first version has shown up in the Karmic Koala daily builds, now under the name Ubuntu Software Store.
What is looks like now
The Ubuntu Software Store
The main view of the Software Store displays icons for each of the software categories, such as Internet, Office, System Tools, etc.
An application's page
Each application has its own page, much like Add/Remove, that displays a summary. An install button and a price (which is always free for now) is also displayed. On some applications, there is also a link to the application’s website. Eventually, you will be able to purchase commercial applications, as well as free ones.
Downloading...
When you install an application, a new section appears on the left. You can see how many applications are being installed and, by clicking on the tab, track their progress.
In the future…
If you’re not impressed with the Ubuntu Software Store, I don’t blame you. It’s really not much more than a new interface that does the same thing Add/Remove does. The exciting parts of the Software Store don’t really come until Ubuntu 10.04, when it will replace Add/Remove, Synaptic, Software Sources, and, possibly, Update Manager. Later you will be able to buy commercial applications in addition to the free ones already available. Over the next several releases, the Ubuntu Software Store could provide one of the first realistic ways for shareware developers to sell software for Linux and, at the same time, make it much easier for new users to understand the software installation process. For now, though, we’ll just have to wait and see.
5 Annoying “Papercuts” to be Fixed in Ubuntu 9.10
Ubuntu 9.10 is coming in October, and, in addition to some new features, it will also feature 100 fewer “papercuts”. Papercuts are minor bugs that cause a usability issue. For example, a confusing icon or a badly positioned text box might be considered a papercut. To give you a better idea of what to expect, here are five common and annoying papercuts that should be fixed by 9.10.
5 – What the heck is “Auto eth0″?
Auto eth0
When you plug your computer into a wired network, you get the notification shown on the left, saying “Auto eth0 – Connection Established”. What on earth does that mean, though?
Many of you will know that eth0 is nothing more than a technical term for the default wired connection, but how should a new user know that?
Although the exact text has not yet been decided, the wording used in 9.10 will aim to be far more user friendly than “auto eth0″ is.
4 – Workspaces flying by
Desktop Wall plugin
Anyone with a trackpad can, I would guess, relate to this issue. Placing the mouse over the desktop and touching the scroll bar placed on the right side of so many trackpads causes your computer to shuffle through your workspaces like a magician going through a deck of cards — faster than you can see them.
The effect is actually quite like a magician’s trick in that it leaves you completely confused as to where your work just went, what workspace you were on, and what you were doing.
3 – Adding an icon to Ubuntu’s file system and to other OS partitions
BSOD Drive
Ubuntu provides no easy way for a new user to tell which drive holds Ubuntu and (if applicable) which holds OS X, Windows, BSD, etc. Most people don’t have to worry about which drive holds what OS, but someone who dual boots between Ubuntu and Windows might want to copy files between the two operating systems. Labeling them with an icon would make it easy to tell which is which.
2 – Clear icons for “wait to remove” and “OK to remove”
Removable Media
After clicking the eject button next to a mounted removable drive, you may be told that you need to wait before you can remove the drive. During this time, write operations to the drive are finished, then you get another message saying you can remove the drive. In order to prevent confusion, the icons for these notifications should be both clear and different. Hopefully, by 9.10, they will be.
1 – Document title instead of job number in print notifications
Which job?
Unless you keep track of everything you print by its job number, knowing that job 179 just finished is not very helpful. A more helpful notification would be that paper.odt just finished printing.
In Ubuntu 9.10, the document name will be in the header of the notification. In case you do manage your printing by jobs, the job number will probably remain in the body of the notification.
Sorry IE 6 users. You may not be able to see the pictures in this post. If you have trouble viewing the images in a modern browser, please let me know.
In the age of digital photography, almost everyone performs at least a few edits on their photos. For simple thing, programs like F-Spot or Google’s Picasa may be enough, but you may also need something more. That’s where Gimp does an excellent job, offering more tools for editing your photos. As with many applications, though, Gimp’s most powerful features come from plugins that let you do more than you could with Gimp alone. Here are three excellent Gimp plugins for photographers.
Adding vignettes
A vignette is an effect that usually makes the corners of a photo darker or lighter. When overused, it can look like a circular photo in the center with fuzzy edges, but a small vignette effectively focuses the viewer’s eyes on the subject without them even noticing. As a general rule, if you can look at a photo and tell immediately that it has a vignette on it, the vignette is too big.
Adding a vignette
You can add a vignette like this with the Vignette Script plugin. It allows you to define the area around which you would like to apply the vignette as well as customize numerous aspects of the vignette itself.
Fixing over or under exposed parts of an image
Sometimes it’s simply not possible to correctly expose all of an image. Particularly in landscapes where the sun lights parts of the picture while other parts remain in the shade, parts of the picture may be almost washed out or too dark to see. In the example below, I faked a very dark image where only the subject is properly exposed.
Fixing under exposure
The fix, of course, was a Gimp plugin. This one is called Contrast Fix. It will fix parts or all of am image that is to dark or too bright.
The finishing touch – adding a frame
Once you’ve editied your photo, you want to present it nicely. One common choice is to put a border (or frame) around the image, as in the example below:
Everything looks better in a frame.. right?
The plugin that produced the image above (or, well, the border at least) is simply called Line Border. You can adjust all the sizes and colors and position text in multiple places.
Conclusion
Hopefully some of these plugins will help you when you are next editing photos. What other Gimp plugins or external tools do you use in your photo workflow?
One of the most painful parts of writing this blog is the necessity to read mainstream news sites trying to describe free software. For example, this CNN article titled “Microsoft takes on the free world”:
(All emphasis has been added.)
“But now there’s a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it’s being cast by Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500). The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents.”
If Microsoft issuing a press release casts a shadow on free software, I don’t think free software has ever seen sunlight. That’s not the point, though.
It doesn’t take long to tell this is going to painful:
“The conflict pits Microsoft and its dogged CEO, Steve Ballmer, against the “free world” – people who believe software is pure knowledge. The leader of that faction is Richard Matthew Stallman, a computer visionary with the look and the intransigence of an Old Testament prophet.”
I very much object to the idea that Stallman leads everyone who is part of the “free world.” Actually, I object to the idea that you can define a “free world” at all. Is every Firefox user part of the “free world” or only people who write code?
“(Stallman insists that “GNU/Linux” is the proper name, and he refuses to give interviews to reporters unless they promise to call it that in every reference. In part for that reason, he was not interviewed for this article.)”
Why am I not surprised… We haven’t even hit the halfway point and the “free world” is already sounding like a bunch of bickering idiots.
“Popularly, “open-source software” became an umbrella term for all FOSS, but, again, Stallman bars reporters from using it that way as a condition of being interviewed.”
No comment. Moving on…
“Thus there is a schism in the free world between the more business-oriented advocates of open-source software – who simply think that community authorship makes for better, cheaper software – and the more ideological champions of free software proper, who see themselves as advancing a social movement.”
I actually have to complement the author or figuring this out. A lot of people just figure everyone worships Stallman.
“Linus Torvalds – a near-deity in the FOSS community”
A deity? Really? I agree with a lot of what Torvalds says, but I wouldn’t call him a deity.
“(Torvalds has gravitated toward the business-friendly open-source camp of the FOSS world and has openly criticized Stallman’s agenda in some contexts. In a March e-mail interview with InformationWeek he wrote: “The Free Software Foundation [Stallman's group] simply doesn’t have goals that I can personally sign up to. For example, the FSF considers proprietary software to be something evil and immoral. Me, I just don’t care about proprietary software.”)”
Once agian, I appreciate that this article includes another point of view. Many don’t.
“In free-software circles, though, the Microsoft-Novell entente was met with apoplectic rage.”
Sadly, that’s an understatement.
All in all, I have to give Roger Parloff, who wrote the article, some credit. I have read similar articles that made it sound like “free software advocates” were all part of a cult, whose leader was Stallman.
Mainstream news sources look for someone who can serve as a representative of the “free world.” The problem is that there is no one who can do that. Most authors end up finding Stallman, who is perfectly happy to talk like he represents everyone involved in free software projects, as long as you only talk about GNU/Linux, not Linux.
This is a difficult problem to solve. Even if you substituted a different person in as the figurehead for free software, an equal number of people would be dissatisfied.
How would you want to see free software and the people involved in it described?
Dell has been somewhat slow in adopt new versions of Ubuntu. Currently, most of Dell’s Ubuntu computers offer 8.04, which was the last long term support release. Dell has changed their minds, though, at least for netbooks, which will soon offer 9.04, the latest release.
Previously, Dell had said they planned to use only the LTS (long term support) releases, since they are supposed to be more stable and are updated and given support for a much longer period of time. It is not yet clear if the decision to upgrade all netbooks to 9.04, which is not an LTS release, will also apply to any other Ubuntu computers.
Dell’s policy on Ubuntu versions has been, and remains to be, confusing. The official word has been that they would stick to 8.04 until the next LTS arrived. The Inspiron 15n, though, currently ships with 8.10. Now it looks like some of the computers will ship with 9.04. In other words, Dell will be supporting three different versions of Ubuntu.
With Bing, Google, and Yahoo (well, until the Microsoft deal takes effect) all competing for our searches, how do they differentiate themselves? The obvious answer is their search results, of course, but do results really matter?
Try using a site like Blind Search for a few searches. There are a lot of similar sites, but they all basically do the same thing. They strip away the extra formatting and features and just show you the search results, without telling you which results come from which site. I tried 12 searches and choose Yahoo for 3, Google for 4, and Bing for 5. That may seem like a clear difference, but every single set was close. At least 50% of the links on just about any search are the same, just in a slightly different order. They’re just not that different.
Less scientifically, I certainly do not choose any search engine because it delivers better results. I, along with most of the world, happen to use Google, but neither because of it is the default for most people nor because it has better results. What, then, determines the quality of a search engine?
There are two factors for me in looking at a search engine. First, how are the pages formatted. Yahoo employs the most complicated pages, followed by Bing, and, trailing far behind, Google. While I know people who can’t stand the spareness of Google’s home page, instead choosing to use Yahoo, I like the simplicity and speed of Google. Bing has chosen a sort of middle ground. There is much less white on Bing, yet it is not as crowded as Yahoo. Partly as a consequence of this, I have spent much more time trying Bing out than Yahoo.
Second, the ‘extra features’ of the search engine. One trick every major search engine can do is to act like a calculator, recognizing equations and solving them for you. Other common tricks include finding movie show times, directions, or snippits from image or video results.
Ultimately, I don’t think search results are that important anymore. Short of somehow allowing other search engines to improve their algorithms for years without doing anything to your own, the most important thing for search engines is to have a page design that people like and the ability to detect special searches that should be handled differently (10+5 or 15cm in miles).