Shuttleworth: “Ubuntu ‘reaping Linux dividend’
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 [...]
RedHat runs for the hills
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 [...]
Top commands
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|head93 bzr66 python2.446 sudo44 cd39 grep22 make19 ls18 vim11 tail11 lpvim [...]
A wee rave about Hardy
I shouldn't be writing this now; I should be packing for Edinburgh, where I'm going to be going for the weekend. But I felt that it was my duty as a Canonical employee and moreover as an Ubuntu user to state the following: Hardy rocks! Now, okay, it's still in beta, which by necessity means [...]
Hardy har har
I'm – to use an American expression – jonesing to install Ubuntu 8.04 (The Hardy Heron) Beta, which has just been released (massive props to the distro team for their typically herculean effort). And this time it's going to be a full install, not an upgrade. See, when I upgraded to Gutsy during its Beta [...]
Ubuntu: storming your brain
As has by now been announced more-or-less left, right, center, top, bottom and everywhere else in the universe, Ubuntu Brainstorm went live today. The idea behind Brainstorm is pretty simple and yet immensely powerful. It offers a place for Ubuntu users to post their ideas about how Ubuntu can be improved: new features, tweaks… just [...]
Ubuntu Love, Lancaster Style
I thought you might like to hear this story, since it pertains to ourfavourite distro and also to our shop's products. Picture the scene, if you will: A man, bearded, long-haired,dashingly^Whandsome^W generally me-like, walks through the centre ofLancaster on a busy Wednesday afternoon. He's wearing, proudly, theUbuntu Hoodie as purchased from the very wonderful Canonical [...]
Juiced
I'm waiting for Ubuntu JeOS (pronounced Juice, by the way) to download at the moment so that I can do some virtualised stuff. Well, more accurately, so that I can do some virtualised stuff without having to wait for ever and ever and ever for X to start when I don't need it. Since JeOS [...]
Dell and Ubuntu, sitting in a tree, etc.
The news just came through that Dell have officially unveiled two systems available in Europe (including the UK) with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) installed on them. This is very cool, and represents another step along the road to fixing bug #1. From the press release (ubuntu.com): Dell today unveiled two consumer PCs in Europe – the [...]
Dell to offer Ubuntu on its systems
Well, it's about time, frankly. Via the BBC : Computer maker Dell has chosen Ubuntu as the operating system for its range of Linux computers for consumers. This makes me happy for a lot of reasons. For one, it's Ubuntu, which I use all the time and on whatever systems I can and second – [...]
Living on the Edgy
I’ve just done upgrading my system to Ubuntu 6.10 (The Edgy Eft). So far, so good. None of which has any bearing on anything, but I thought I’d tell you all the same.
Ubuntu for Christians
You will, I’m sure, be aware that I’m a big fan of Ubuntu Linux. It’s replaced Windows on all my machines and, gaming aside (which I don’t do much of anyway) is, for me at least, an infinitely better operating system than Microsoft’s offering. One of the great things about Open Source Software is that [...]
Not The 9 O’Clock News: Macs are safer than PCs
According to BBC News, experts are advising people to switch to Macs in order to avoid nasty things like viruses and malware. No mention of Linux, of course, which is to be expected; it can be a beast to install and offers even more of a culture shock than a Windows to OSX switch would [...]
Bad Blocks
Looks like the great hard disk problem of ’06 is due to some bad blocks that my hard drive, not having been fscked in a while, didn’t know about and so couldn’t avoid. I’m running e2fsck -c now to update the list. Once that’s done I should have a healthy partition again (I might also [...]
The best laid plans
Well I was going to go to Caffe Nero and write, but as always life has a habit of jumping in to spoil the best laid plans, so instead I’m going to be considering my options with regard to hard disks after my / partition got mounted read only because of errors and fscking it [...]
Okay, let’s see now
Whether or not I’m about to break my PC. Having installed Dapper on the laptop for the sake of compatibility, speed and, dare I say it, my desire to have everything all shiny and new, I’m upgrading from Breezy to Dapper on my main desktop system. If it all fails then I have a backup [...]
Well-read
Have I really read all the books in Amazon’s catalogue? Well of course not, nor am I ever likely to, but Amazon’s front page seems to give the impression that I have because all it’s listing as things I might be interested in are… books that I’ve already bought. From them. They also seem to [...]
!
Note to self: Please, please, please make sure that you haven’t left OpenOffice open and autosaving all day. It will overwrite any work that you’ve saved on your pen drive when you run the autoupdate script that you wrote. Thank goodness I have a copy on the laptop.
One always finds things to do…
I would be recording Fit the Fourth of A Sprinkling of Hippo Dust right now, except that I noticed this morning that I needed to move my root partition onto a different hard drive. The terminal telling me that I had run out of space on the original drive was a big hint. So here [...]
Breezyfication
Having taken the day off work through being absolutely exhausted (caused by having to sleep in a chair two nights in a row, for reasons which will become apparent to those who don’t know why already soon enough), I have managed to complete a podcast. No, really. It’s all recorded; it’s just got to be [...]
More Troubles
My hard drive troubles are continuing, I’m sorry to say, which means that my chances of getting the podcast out of the door on time are getting smaller and smaller by the minute. I’m in the process of doing some creative copying and re-partitioning, but chances are that I’m going to have to send my [...]
Back Home
And trying to catch up on bits and pieces. Bloglines told me last night that I had 872 new items to read. I kept the tastiest ones unread and then cleared the rest; it’s my own fault for subscribing to the likes of the BBC News feed. I fixed a couple of issues with the [...]
Because It Just Works, Part The Second
For all I like Ubuntu it has one unbearable, ineluctable fault: The printer will not work, not ever in a month of Sundays. It’s a known issue, and to be fair it’s an issue with Hewlett Packard’s poor product design rather than with Ubuntu itself, but it’s an annoying one nonetheless. The LaserJet 1000 simply [...]
