May 2006 ~ Linux Lover

Ahhhh, I love the smell of Dapper in the morning...

Tomorrow's finally the big day. The first "enterprise-ready" release of Ubuntu is officially out tomorrow, and hopefully it'll continue to make some waves.Tonight is like the calm before the storm - The Dapper Development Forum has been closed for the night, and the new Dapper support forums are still on their way.For many of us who are already running Dapper, upgrading to the final release will be a simple daily update away.In the next 6 months, I hope we continue to see the Ubuntu community grow and support each other even more. If Ubuntu does become a hit in the business desktop market, then it'll be interesting to see how it happens, and...

Free Gamer Blog

A fellow Ubuntu-er has set up an awesome blog called Free Gamer. The blog has a bunch of good commentary on free/open source games, and includes a really good breakdown of current and upcoming games by their project status (with a realistic eye)...If you're interested in next-gen Linux games and such (I know I am!), definitely check out that site...

Open source audio applications: A rebuttal

I just spotted this article over on digg: Open source audio applications need to learn from listenersAfter reading the first few paragraphs, I had to ask myself a question: What the heck is the editor talking about?I understood the opening paragraph, which points out that there's no software (albeit on any operating system) that allows the user to listen to music from any source universally (FM, MP3s, CDs, etc.), but we're basically as close as one could possibly get to having that. It's impossible for both hardware manufacturers (think Sony stereos) and software developers to allow playback from every audio source, so they choose to support the ones you're actually going to use. FM is useful to many people in a stereo, but being able to listen to podcasts in music playback software is something...

Dashboard for XGL/Compiz

There's a nice little HOWTO on setting up Compiz's "widget" plugin over at the Ubuntuforums. The widget plugin mimic's OS X's dashboard functionality. It'll also let you turn any program into a widget with Compiz's "state" plugin. There's a decent thread over in the Compiz Forums outlining how to get all of this working, if you're interest...

Upgrading to Dapper (even EASIER!)

The "Release Candidate" for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (aka. Dapper Drake) got announced today, but along with it I found a nice little tidbit in the announcement: * Because this is the Release Candidate, you need to invoke the update manager explicitly. To do this, press Alt-F2 (or open a Terminal using Applications -> Accessories ->Terminal) gksudo "update-manager -d" This step will not be necessary on the final release.I've bolded the important part for clarity.:)Things just keep getting better and better...

Upgrading to Dapper (The REALLY Easy Way)

Add this one to the big long list of reasons why I want Ubuntu to have my babies:Upgrading to Dapper without touching the terminalIf there's one thing that the Ubuntu developers are good at, it's just getting stuff done. Man, once again, good job Ubuntu devs....

More News Tidbits

GnashIf you've ever used Macromedia's Flash plugin on Linux, you'll know it leaves something to be desired. It's a version behind the plugin for Windows, it's slow, and has caused more than a couple of browser crashes for me. Fortunately, there's been fairly heavy development into an open source replacement for the Flash plugin. Gnash is this open source replacement. Recently, they released some new test packages, and there's been a decent response. Gnash can't yet handle interaction, but it can play Flash 7 stuff fairly well. If the pace of the development keeps up, hopefully we'll see a feature-complete replacement for the Flash plugin sometime next year.Wine DoorsRipped from the Wine Doors site:Wine doors is an application designed to assist users in obtaining, installing, uninstalling...

Usplash ChangeLog... oddity...

Last week, when I was doing my daily Dapper updates, I found this in the ChangeLog for usplash: * Revert artwork to 0.1-36, Frank was asked to provide better artwork over the weekend but instead appears to have spent the weekend working on a text-less version which we already said was not going to make dapper. Don't expect this to be the last change before Dapper is released.Uhhhh.... I think everyone that ever looks at the "Changes" tab in the Ubuntu update notifier saw that. Sure, the guy might have screwed up, but making him look like an ass to everyone isn't cool... (Moral to the story: Keep your ChangeLogs professiona...

Dapper CDs on ShipIt!

It looks like you can now order Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) CDs on ShipIt. If you're not familiar with the service, Canonical (the main organization behind Ubuntu) will ship you Ubuntu CDs completely for free.I did it myself for Breezy, and I ordered a few extra copies to give away to people that I know. Pretty much anytime I had to diagnose an obscure hardware problem on someone's PC over the last year, I'd just pop in an Ubuntu LiveCD, just to rule out the possibility of it being a software thing. Whenever I'd do that, I always had the opportunity to give a little blurb about Ubuntu, you know, spread the love. :)Anyways, order your CDs now, and get some for your friends and colleagu...

Banshee Roadmap

Aaron Bockover has just posted a new roadmap for Banshee.Check out the "Goals for 0.11.x/HEAD" to see what's coming up... *dro...

News Tidbits

Sauerbraten 2006-24-06 ReleasedLinux-gamers.net has the scoop on the latest release of Saurbraten.Mixx 1.5.0beta1 ReleasedMixx is a powerful DJ mixing program for Linux and Windows. As far as I can tell, it's the best open source mixing program out there. In the latest beta, they've added pitch-independant time stretch, as well as fixed a bunch of annoying bugs. It looks like the development has also started to pick up again. This is a good project to keep an eye on...WormuxI downloaded and gave Wormux a shot today. It aims to be a free Worms clone for Linux, and that it definitely succeeds in. It feels pretty polished too. If you're a Worms fan, give it a shot. (Reminds me of Worms 2...) If you don't feel like adding an apt repository to your Ubuntu system to install the game, here's direct...

GShare is a simple new way of setting up file shares in Linux. It uses Mono to set up a simple FTP server that is advertised to other machines on your network through Avahi and can be seen from other GNOME machines in Nautilus's "Network Servers" dialog. Even cooler, if you install Apple's "Bonjour for Windows", you can use it on Windows too. (It shares to Macs as well.)It's easy to compile/install and play around with... give it a sh...

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