Ubuntu Archive

Canonical has unveiled a complete branding overhaul, redesigning everything from the Ubuntu website to its logos and marketing material. However, what interests me more are the new Gtk+ themes, and even then, I'm not interested in the colour choices and the like. No - what stood out to me right away was not the theme itself - but the placement of the titlebar widgets.

Well, this is a welcome surprise for those of us waiting for Ubuntu 10.04, the Lucid Lynx. Several users are reporting that their iPod Touches and iPhones (including the 3GS) work in alpha 3 - without tweaking, without jailbreaking, without patching - with Nautilus and Rythmbox.

For the longest time, the default search provider in Ubuntu Linux has been Google, but this is going to change in the next release, Lucid Lynx, scheduled to release April 29. The change comes after Canonical has signed a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo!, so you can imagine who the new default search provider will be.

"The Ubuntu development community announced today the availability of Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2, a new prerelease of the next major version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This alpha is the first Ubuntu release to completely omit HAL, a Linux hardware abstraction layer that is being deprecated in favor of DeviceKit."

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, which took place last week, it was announced that the next release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, version 10.04, will no longer carry the GIMP in its default installation. This actually touches upon somethin I've been wanting to talk about, a problem that plagues both Linux and Mac OS X: Paint.NET is Windows-only.

We're a little late, but Real Life got in the way, so here we finally are. Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, announced today that Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition has been released. This version focusses on improvements in cloud computing on the server using Eucalyptus, further improvements in boot speed, as well as development on Netbook Remix. The related KDE, Xfce, and other variants have been released as well. Update by ELQ: Just a quick note to say that one of my Creative Commons videos was selected to be part of Ubuntu's Free Culture Showcase package that comes by default with the new Ubuntu version!

Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition will include private cloud capabilities, thanks to support for the open source Eucalyptus project, InfoWorld reports. Available for free download on Oct. 29, Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition will introduce Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, an open source cloud computing environment based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2. Users will be able to set up 10 to 15 private servers, leveraging the same capabilities they would use with Amazon, thereby allowing them to take their applications off the Amazon cloud and put them instead into a private cloud, or vice versa

The Ubuntu team has pushed out the beta release for Ubuntu 9.10. "Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition improves on the work of 9.04 to get you going faster, with improved startup times and a streamlined boot experience. Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition integrates Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud setup in the installer and provides improvements to system security with AppArmor, including an AppArmor profile for libvirtd to further isolate virtual machines from the host system. The Ubuntu 9.10 family of variants, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu, also reach beta status today."

Ubuntu patron and founder, Mark Shuttleworth, has detailed plans for the distribution's April 2010 release, codenamed Lucid Lynx. Citing the Lynx deodorant namesake, Shuttleworth said: "This year's Ubuntu Developer Summit is going to be the sweetest smelling Ubuntu Developer Summit ever, despite the fact that it's happening in Dallas."

"For the last 12 months, I have used Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10, and 9.04 as my primary OSes. I remain a very happy Linux convert, but I worry that Ubuntu is being unevenly developed. Certain areas have seen great improvements over the last 12 months, while other areas have languished or been largely ignored. The purpose of this article is not to whine or rant, but to bring some perspective to the evolution (or lack thereof) that Ubuntu has experienced between versions 8.04 and 9.04."

Ubuntu running on the Kindle 2? Done. "What you see there is a Kindle 2 with the Ubuntu 9.04 port to ARM running in a chrooted environment. On the screen you see xdaliclock in front of an xterm with the remains of a top command and a few mildly embarrassing typos."

"With the Ubuntu Software Store, Canonical is hoping to unify all of the different package management needs into a single, unified interface. While this will not be achieved in Ubuntu 9.10, Canonical is hoping that all of the capabilities of the update-manager, Synaptic, the computer janitor application, gdebi, and other package management-related programs will be merged into Ubuntu Software Store. When this has occurred, it will be easier on the new end-user having to just deal with a single program to provide all of this functionality."

Mark Shutttleworh, the head honcho over at Canonical and Ubuntu, has given an interview to derStandard.at during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. He talks about GNOME 3.0, the struggle to improve the user experience on the Linux desktop, as well as various other things.

The Mono discussion may be tiring, but the fact of the matter is that thanks to this discussion, various major Linux distributions are now making official statements detailing their position in the Mono/C# debate. The latest to do this is Ubuntu, which reiterated their position yesterday.