grahambinns.com

You'll remember that I said, a while back, that I think the new Hardy Heron desktop wallpaper would make a good T-shirt?

Well whaddaya know; thanks to Kat Kinnie of the Canonical marketing team there is now just such an item. I think I may be purchasing one of those...

There's a nice story on the BBC news site:

The public perception of open source software is changing fast, said Mark Shuttleworth, who leads distribution of the Ubuntu operating system (OS).

"There has been a sea change in the way people think of Linux, which is very healthy," he said.

"We have seen a real shift in the last six months from folks seeing open source as either a super-specialist thing for people who run data centres or as an enthusiast thing, to something which is energising a lot of the straight commercial PC industry," said Mr Shuttleworth.

Hardy comes out on Friday. Ladies and gentlemen, start your bittorent clients*.

*Because it's easier on the servers than a metric assload of HTTP downloads.

Jorge Castro just sent me a link to this story from El Reg. From TFA:

"The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today's Linux desktops simply don't provide a practical alternative."

So now you know. Hardy comes out next week, by the way, so feel free to go and download an RC ISO and help with the testing :).

Incidentally, in the comments to that article was this:

"Linux is intolerant of users who do not hold a BSc in Computing and who dislike hacking wads of configuration files by hand; and we don't care because we are elitist arses."

The above is true for all versions of Linux (including Ubuntu). It is a real shame that the Linux world doesn't seem to want to create anything which can actually be used by normal end-users.

I really, really wish that this opinion wasn't as pervasive as it so obviously is. So here's a question for you: what can we, the Linux users and developers of the world, do to help make it more accessible for John and Jane Q. User? What is it that you need the most?

Why not go and grab a copy of the Hardy Live CD when it comes out (or use the release candidate if you prefer) and bung it in your PC. You can reboot into Ubuntu without making any changes to your computer and you can give it a road test (bear in mind that running from a CD doesn't make it the fastest thing in the world). If you like it, why not use Wubi to install it through Windows so that you don't have to worry about things like managing your bootloader (which you should never have to worry about unless you want to)?

Go on, give it a shot. You've nothing to lose and lots to gain.

[Edit]

It's been pointed out to me that this isn't really news, since RedHat have never really taken the desktop all that seriously. Also, they're still apparently offering some desktop distributions, though I haven't yet read up on the what and whys of that.

It's also been pointed out that there are a number of comments in RedHat's press release that are pretty clear swipes at Ubuntu, which is a shame but not unexpected.

I don't do memes as a rule, but this one's been doing the rounds on Planet Ubuntu, so I thought I'd give it a shot, too.

So, the results of the query are:

graham@bloodnok: ~$  history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " "}}'|sort -rn|head
93 bzr
66 python2.4
46 sudo
44 cd
39 grep
22 make
19 ls
18 vim
11 tail
11 lpvim

So now you know.

If you're one of the people that's here for the technical guff rather than the writing or photography guff, you'll be interested (you will be interested) to note that registration for Ubuntu Live 2008 is now open.

From t'website:

Ubuntu Live is a vibrant and important gathering of IT professionals, government and business leaders, educators, community leaders, enterprise and business users. The conference brings together the people who deploy and manage Ubuntu in organizations, companies offering services and solutions based on Ubuntu, customers of those services, users of Ubuntu, and the folks who build Ubuntu and other key open source software.

So there you go. I have no idea whether I'll be attending yet. There will be some talking about Launchpad as far as I can tell but whether that'll need me to be there I don't know (it's the company's decision at the end of the day). Still, last year's event was apparently tremendous fun, so if you've got the means and the desire, get yourself registered.