3 Linux/Ubuntu reviews/blog posts

1. The first little review of the new Dell offering can be found here. It sounds like a neat system.

2. A person evaluates 60 days with Ubuntu. Overall he likes it and he will continue to use Ubuntu. Of course, there are things he don't like (nothing is perfect) and there are things he don't seem to understand:

Who cares if this driver is free or not?

I care and so should he because overall he will no doubt have a more stable system and experience less problems with free drivers. For further information about this, see this article, this article or this article.

3. Mark Pilgrim, a well known developer switched to Ubuntu from Mac a year ago and in this post he evaluates that last year with Linux. He hasn't regretted switching and specifically he talks quite a bit about the hassle of keeping your system updated with security fixes and such. Windows Update is fine, but what about all your applications? Of course, this is an area where Ubuntu and other Linux distros really shines. Keeping a Linux system updated is very easy.

Powermanagement in Linux

Here I am, running Kubuntu on my Thinkpad laptop and it works pretty well. One thing I'm not too impressed with though is powermanagement but I did know it was being worked and the latest kernel had some improvements in that regard. It seems this is a focus area for the next release of Ubuntu and the improvements in the kernel is certainly helping:

Tickless kernel. The new dynticks and hi-res timers make a *huge* difference. Ben Collins mentioned 30 - 40 minutes of extra battery life with dynticks and hi-res timers enabled. This stuff is new in 2.6.21, and already in the Gutsy kernel. dynticks also make it possible for the CPU to sleep much more. Another thing that's important in that respect is HPET, basically doing something similar, but less effective. Every bit helps, however.

Read the rest of Sebastian Küglers post.

Oh...I almost forgot, but I want to repeat what is said in that post: Avoid ATI (now AMD) graphics cards/chips - their support for Linux sucks bigtime! It seems they simply just don't care. Vote with your wallet guys - buy Intel, they provide proper open source drivers!

Thinkpad Z61t hardware specifications

I just read this nice blog post about finding the hardware specs for your computer on Linux and since I run Kubuntu Edgy on my Thinkpad, I've created a list of the hardware in my Thinkpad too. That means that should be able to simply google for it my laptops hardware specs soon :)

Sudo insults

Here is a short tutorial on how to make sudo insult you if you type your password wrong :)

Update on the linux kernel monkey log Update on the free Linux driver development offer

A FAQ have been posted about this great offer and it looks like the offer has been heard:

Q: Are companies actually taking you up on this offer?
A: Yes, the initial response to this was amazing, a measurable number of new Linux drivers will be created thanks to this program.

That is just great! I hope it will be a big succes!

Beryl - 3D effects on a Linux desktop

Here is a nice video of aiglx + Beryl which gives some nice 3D effects or "bling" as some like to call it:

The next release of Ubuntu should include Beryl. It will be interesting to see how they integrate it. I don't know whether it will be available for Kubuntu (which I use), but I hope it will :)

The harder part (I think) will be to find some good uses of this cool new technology. 3D effects are nice and having a nice looking desktop is certainly not a bad thing, but it is also important to keep it usable. In what was can we use it to create a more userfriendly desktop?

Russian schools move to Linux

A school in Russia has been cought using pirated software from Microsoft. Whether the school knew it was pirated software or not is unclear, but according to the article, the school will switch to using Linux to avoid this happening again. Not everyone is happy about this though:

Teachers are not that happy about it. Apparently not many of them know much about Linux and there are no specialists around to teach them.

I guess they will have to learn it now, which you could say is what you're supposed to do in a school. You know, learn stuff ;)

The Road to KDE 4

Troy Unrau has been writing a great series of articles about the next major release of the open source desktop, KDE. The series is called "The Road to KDE" and the latest one is Phonon Makes Multimedia Easier. Phonon should make multimedia work better and more reliable.

Here is a listing of the previous articles (first one at the bottom) which I highly recommend:

Kalzium and KmPlot
Job Progress Reimagined
Full Mac OS X Support
New KOffice Technologies
SVG Rendering in Applications

3D desktop effects in Linux

Here is a nice video on Youtube that shows some effects on an Ubuntu Edgy Eft desktop with Beryl added. It should be available in the next Ubuntu release which should be ready for download sometime in April.

Hardware manufactures listen up!

The list of excuses for not providing Linux support is getting quite small since Linux Kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman just posted this great offer to develop Linux drivers:

Free Linux Driver Development!

Yes, that's right, the Linux kernel community is offering all companies free Linux driver development. No longer do you have to suffer through all of the different examples in the Linux Device Driver Kit, or pick through the thousands of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree trying to determine which one is the closest to what you need to do.

All that is needed is some kind of specification that describes how your device works, or the email address of an engineer that is willing to answer questions every once in a while. A few sample devices might be good to have so that debugging doesn't have to be done by email, but if necessary, that can be done.