I’ve had a couple of small hiccups with the integrated intel video and my widescreen monitor, but this is nothing new. A quick installation of ’915resolution’ and I was up and running in widescreen once again. The built in Intel graphics work very will with the integrated compiz fusion graphic features enabled by default. Hardy Heron exibits a level of polish that is on par with OSX. The extra graphical features are not of the gee-whiz variety, like OSX, they provide a pleasing and integrated level of animation into the desktop.

Aside from being an LTS (long term support) release, 8.04 boasts several updated packages and enhancements including:

• GNOME 2.22
• Firefox 3 beta
• Pulse Audio
• Policy Kit
• Transmission
• Brasero
• KVM (virtualization) now integrated into Kernel 2.6.24
• iSCSI Support
• Active Directory Integration
• Memory Protection
• Wubi
• Xorg 7.3

You can read more about these new features, and try the Beta out for your self by visiting the realse info page.

I’m very excited about seeing what the final release will look like once its available on April 24th.

I origionally switched to Linux over 10 years ago because my modest hardware could not keep up with Windows, and I was rewarded with a reliable, stable, and responive system. Fast forward 8 years and I am now a very satisfied Ubuntu user, however, I have never been a fan of desktop enviroments such as GNOME and KDE. I normaly prefere something very light weight such as WindowMaker.However, I found a way to keep a “mostly default” Ubuntu install with a light weight desktop. I had used Xfce a couple of years ago while experimenting with Redhat 8,9 and Fedora, and I quite enjoyed it.

Xubuntu delivers a light weight desktop on Ubuntu, prefering light weight applications, and also utilizing ubuntu repositories. Ubuntu is nice, and works very well, but I just don’t like GNOME, or its heavy memory usage. I’m also cheap, and I do not like spending a lot of money on hardware. Requiring less than 192Mb of RAM, Xubuntu is now running on my main desktop, laptop, and office desktop. Its also running on my backup home workstation.

So if you are finding Ubuntu a little heavy on your machine, give Xubuntu a try! Switching from Ubuntu to Xubuntu is quick and easy, and if you do not like it, you can easily go back.

To install Xubuntu from Ubuntu type:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Enjoy, if you have any questions please leave a comment.

Note: This is the desktop version of Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a community developed operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops, and servers. Whether you use it at home, at school or at work Ubuntu contains all the applications you’ll ever need, from word processing and e-mail applications, to Web server software and programming tools. Ubuntu is and always will be free of charge. You do not pay any licensing fees. You can download, use and share Ubuntu with your friends, family, school or business for absolutely nothing.Version 7.04, named “Feisty Fawn,” adds the Ubuntu Studio, a multimedia editing and production suite, to the distribution.

The page is gone now, and is currently still available via a google cache, but not for long. Groklaw has a screenshot.

via digg

What applications are on your top 10 list?

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I’m not holding my breath about seeing this north of the 49th, hopefully, us Canadians will see something before the end of the year.

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If you want to install and use Thunderbird 2.0, here is your quick and dirty guide:

The first thing we need to do is download Thunderbird 2 from Mozilla, save it to somewhere you will remember, the default is your Desktop under Ubuntu. This brief how to will assume that you saved the file to your Desktop.

Open a Terminal Session (applications -> accessories -> Terminal)

cd Desktop

tar zxvf thunderbird-2.0.0.0.tar.gz

sudo mv thunderbird /opt/thunderbird2

Now we have Thunderbird installed, but we do not have an Icon to launch it, we need to add one. I like to keep icons for Firefox and Thunderbird on the top Panel, beside the system menu, these instructions will work if you choose to create a launch icon on the desktop.

1. Right click on the top launch bar, select “add to panel”
2. Click “Custom Application Launcher” on the pop up window. (If you chose to create an Icon on your desktop, right click your desktop and select “Create Launcher…”)
3. Set type to “Application”
4. Name: Thunderbird 2.0
5. Command: /opt/thunderbird2/thunderbird
6. Next, click on Icon, and scroll down until you see the Thunderbird icons, choose the “mozilla-thunderbird.xpm” icon.
7. Click “OK”

And thats it. Enjoy Thunderbird 2.0!

My A100 uses an ATI SB450 soundcard, which worked out of the box in 6.06, 6.10, and the early beta stages of 7.04. From what I can see, this problem is related to the release kernel not detecting the sound card model correctly.

After searching the Ubuntu forums, and Launchpad, I found this fix posted by Ubuntu forums member “djails“:

sudo rmmod snd-hda-intel

sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel probe_mask=8 model=auto

After running the above commands, your sound card should now work, however, these changes are not permanent, to make the above changes permanent, add the following line to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=8 model=auto

After applying these changes, all components of the Toshiba Satellite Pro A100 appear to be working, including the built in wireless card.

If you need help with your soundcard, or Satellite Pro A100, post below and I will do my best to help out.

Automatix adds an easy to use interface for installing 3rd party packages that are not maintained by Ubuntu, or the Ubuntu community, these typically consist of commercial packes such as Google Earth, Windows Media Codecs etc.

Here is the quick and dirty way to get started with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04):

1. sudo apt-get install python (if you do not already have python 2.4 installed)
2. wget http://www.getautomatix.com/apt/dists/feisty/main/binary-i386/automatix2_1.1-3.5-7.04feisty_i386.deb
3. sudo dpkg -i automatix2_1.1-3.5-7.04feisty_i386.deb
4. automatix2

Follow the directions on screen and enjoy. Please note that Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, 7.04 is currently beta.

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I decided to go with Ubuntu server edition for my Colocated server for many reasons, primarily of which was ease of maintence. I’ve had very little time as of late to devote to time consuming distrobutions such as Gentoo, it was fun, but it just took up too much of my time, and when it got too far out of date, it was just too much work to recover.

Some key features that really drew me to Ubuntu server edition:

• No open ports or running services by default, not even SSH!
• Single CD install, no more having to stand around and swap disks three or more times.
• Small server footprint, under 400MB.
• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) can be installed by default.

After install, and after the machine booted, the first thing that I did was edit /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out all of the lines for the cdrom. This will allow me to install software from the online repositories, without the CD.

The first thing that I had to change, was to update VIM from VIM tiny, to regular VIM.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install vim

Next, we need SSH for remote access to the new server, now I can go home and complete the setup from there.

sudo apt-get install ssh openssh-server

If you’re like me, and the nano editor drives you nuts, you’ll want to do the following:

sudo update-alternatives –config editor

My favorite part of all of this is, I only get what I want. Everything is deliberate and clean, which makes management easier. I also like the fact that I don’t have to spend 10 minutes disabling and removing services I do not need or use.

If you would like to read more about Ubuntu Server Edition, I’d start with the Ubuntu Server Guide. You may also be interested in the Ubuntu Server Ruby on Rails +Apache howto. You can also visit the Ubuntu Server Edition website.

I’ve been working as a Linux Admin for the past 9 years, and Ubuntu server was a pleseant surprise. I had made the mistake of brushing off Ubuntu as a distrobution for Newbies when it was first released, but I am glad that I tried the desktop, and finally the server edition.

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