Ubuntu – OSnews

Celebrate Ubuntu (but keep an eye on what they’re up to…)

Guest post by Perry Helion 2013-03-15 Ubuntu 72 Comments

Ubuntu has come under a decent amount of flack over the past few months, particularly over their decision to use the 'Dash Search' to return results from Amazon by default in their most recent release.

Ubuntu releases may become slightly more rolling

Guest post by nej_simon 2013-03-13 Ubuntu 9 Comments

On his blog, Mark Shuttleworth has outlined a proposal to change how Canonical handles Ubuntu releases. In the proposal, future LTS releases will receive new kernels and software (something we've already seen in 12.04.2 which had a backported Xorg stack from Quantal) and interim releases will only be supported for 7 months instead of 18. Of course, the current situation where you often have to upgrade the whole OS just to get new software and drivers isn't great, so Canonical might be on to something here.

Ubuntu SDK applications are coming

Thom Holwerda 2013-03-13 Ubuntu 5 Comments

"The Ubuntu SDK preview is just over 2 months old, but we've already seen a lot of development starting with it. Read below for a high-level look at some of the apps that are currently being written." Looks like a good start.

Shuttleworth: ‘Linux is supposed to be hard so it’s exclusive’ is “dumb”

Thom Holwerda 2013-03-08 Ubuntu 115 Comments

Mark Shuttleworth: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say." He's right. Lots of interesting insights in this blog post - I may not agree with everything Ubuntu does, but at least it's doing something.

HP launches cheap Ubuntu all-in-one PC

Submitted by Nth_Man 2013-03-05 Ubuntu 25 Comments

"HP, the worlds biggest PC vendor as of 2012, has today launched a brand new all-in-one PC running Ubuntu. But the real 'wow' factor comes from its pricing. At just GBP 349 HP have pitched the PC well within the reach of your average consumer. A similar, though not identical, model is also available with Windows 8 priced at GBP 499."

Canonical announce custom display server ‘Mir’

Thom Holwerda 2013-03-04 Ubuntu 54 Comments

"Canonical has today publicly confirmed that they are working on a new cross-platform displayer server for Ubuntu. Called 'Mir', the X Window Server replacement is tasked with 'enabling development of the next generation Unity'. Which, in yet another about-turn, is to be rebuilt in Qt/QML." It'll be used for all Ubuntu variants (phone, tablet, desktop), and the first version will be released come May.

Ubuntu Touch Preview coming to Nexus tablets this week

Thom Holwerda 2013-02-19 Ubuntu 75 Comments

After desktops and phones, Ubuntu is now bringing its Linux distribution to tablets. Coming Thursday, preview images for Google's Nexus tablets will be released, so we can all get a good long look at what Canonical is cooking up. They've published a YouTube video which details all that Ubuntu has to offer for tablets, and to be honest, it's looking quite good.

Developer preview of Ubuntu Phone for 21 February

Thom Holwerda 2013-02-15 Ubuntu 38 Comments

"Images and open source code for the Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu will be published on Thursday 21st February, supporting the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones. They are intended for enthusiasts and developers, to familiarise themselves with Ubuntu's smartphone experience and develop applications on spare handsets. Tools that manage the flashing of the phone will be available on the same day in the Ubuntu archives, making it easy to keep a device up to date with the latest version of the Touch Developer Preview." Cool. Too bad it's only for Nexus phones, and not for more popular ones.

Canonical considers rolling release model for Ubuntu

Submitted by Anonymous 2013-01-23 Ubuntu 24 Comments

"For the longest time Canonical has slapped an LTS moniker on some of their Ubuntu releases. Currently, a new major release of the operating system happens every six months, and is supported for 18 months after release. Whereas in the past when LTS versions received two years support or more, the current model - starting with 12.04 - supports new LTS releases for five years. However, a recent public Google Hangouts session revealed that Canonical has been thinking about switching from the venerable LTS model to a rolling release, starting with version 14.04."

Ubuntu phone looks like the future of computing

Guest post by the_randymon 2013-01-21 Ubuntu 40 Comments

"The first computers were gigantic, filling rooms and requiring constant care and maintenance. The computer stayed on the desk until the laptop computer, a smaller, more portable, but just as powerful machine, made it nearly obsolete. And then, the iPhone was released, followed shortly after by Android and the Palm WebOS, and the next step in computing was clear. What we did not immediately understand was if mobile computing was an accessory, or a replacement, for the traditional desktop machines." Jon-Buys at Ostatic believes the phone-becomes-computer paradigm is the next step.

Ubuntu abandons search privacy

jackson 2013-01-03 Ubuntu 33 Comments

Proprietary software like Windows often includes surveillance code to track user behavior and send this information to vendor servers. Linux has traditionally been immune to such privacy violation. Ubuntu 12.10 now includes code that, by default, collects data on Dash searches. The code integrates Amazon products into search results and can even integrate with Facebook, Twitter, BBC and others as per Ubuntu's Third Party Privacy Policies. This article at the EFF tells how it all works and how to opt out of information sharing, while Richard Stallman himself comments here.

Canonical unveils Ubuntu for phones

Thom Holwerda 2013-01-02 Ubuntu 120 Comments

Expected, but still insanely cool: Canonical has just announced Ubuntu for phones. This is a new mobile phone operating system, with its own user interface and development platform. It's built around Qt5 and QML, and the interface reminds me of MeeGo on the N9. It's supposed to be on the shelves in early 2014, but the developer preview is out today.

Ubuntu 13.04: instant purchases from the desktop

Thom Holwerda 2012-12-11 Ubuntu 75 Comments

"Perhaps most likely to raise some eyebrows is that Ubuntu 13.04 will let users purchase music or apps directly from the desktop Dash, without having to open a browser or a separate client." That's going to go down well.

Ubuntu 12.10 released

Thom Holwerda 2012-10-18 Ubuntu 121 Comments

Ubuntu 12.10 has been released, sporting the rather... Interesting tagline 'Avoid the pain of Windows 8'. Two main features are that websites can now be treated as actual applications, integrating them into Unity. The divide between local and online content when searching has also been softened, which, they claim, makes it easier to find what you're looking for. On the server side, it includes the Folsom release of OpenStack, "Cinder, for block storage and Quantum, a virtual networking API. Ubuntu's Metal-as-a-Service bare-metal provisioning tool has been updated and now supports Calxeda hyperscale hardware based on ARM".

Ubuntu asks for donations

Thom Holwerda 2012-10-10 Ubuntu 81 Comments

Donating to software projects - or, more accurately, open source projects. It's hardly new, it's hardly rare, and I'm sure most of us have donated at some point. That's probably why Canonical has opened Ubuntu up for donations - but with a twist.

Ubuntu 12.10 to ship with Amazon advertisements

Thom Holwerda 2012-09-22 Ubuntu 107 Comments

Ubuntu 12.10 will include advertisements for products on Amazon. It will look like this - if you search, product suggestions will pop up. This seems like a rather slippery slope to me, and I certainly wouldn't want this on my desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, or anywhere else. On the web - fine, I'm on your site, not mine - but my desktop is mine, and mine alone. Not that it matters - open source, someone will disable them. Biggest concern: does this mean my search queries get sent across the web?

How to Undo Unity

Howard Fosdick 2012-07-17 Ubuntu 75 Comments

Like Ubuntu's Unity interface? Great. If not, you can easily change it to look and act like Ubuntu used to. This tutorial shows how.

UEFI Secure Boot and Ubuntu

Thom Holwerda 2012-06-22 Ubuntu 55 Comments

After Fedora, Ubuntu has now also announced how it's going to handle the nonsense called "Secure" Boot. The gist: they'll use the same key as Fedora, but they claim they can't use GRUB2. "In the event that a manufacturer makes a mistake and delivers a locked-down system with a GRUB 2 image signed by the Ubuntu key, we have not been able to find legal guidance that we wouldn't then be required by the terms of the GPLv3 to disclose our private key in order that users can install a modified boot loader. At that point our certificates would of course be revoked and everyone would end up worse off." So, they're going to use the more liberally licensed efilinux loader from Intel. Only the bootloader will be signed; the kernel will not.

Ubuntu Abandons Dial-Up Users

jackson 2012-06-18 Ubuntu 67 Comments

Over at the Goodbye, Microsoft web site, Brad R. takes Ubuntu to task for abandoning dial-up modem users. Apparently Ubuntu no longer includes the GnomePPP dial-up package in the distribution, without which you can't get online via dial-up. It gets better: if you do have some way to connect, when you download something from the Ubuntu repository, the first thing Ubuntu does is update its 16+ megabyte repository index. Happy waiting! Brad concludes that "Ubuntu is for broadband users only."

Ubuntu 12.04 released

Submitted by anonymous 2012-04-26 Ubuntu 36 Comments

The Canonical team has released Ubuntu 12.04 - a new long term support release. The biggest new feature is the HUD, an addition to the traditional application menu system, where you can search for the actions you want to perform instead of having to hunt for them in menus. Unity overall has been improved, and I must say that even though this new release is simply not at all ready for Asus ZenBooks, Unity runs perfectly well on it, and to my own shock and surprise, I'm slowly warming up to it. It's starting to make sense, it looks nice (especially after some custom tweaking), has become a lot more configurable, and it's really, really, really fast.

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