FLOSS News

My favourite music player has just been updated and version 1.2 released.

I picked up the story from The H where they’ve done a great job of describing most of the new features in a single paragraph.

Mono seems to be causing a great deal of debate and discussion within the Ubuntu Community right now. I’m sure it probably always has, but it definitely seems that the intensity is building at the moment.

For those who don’t know what Mono is, from their website:

Mono is a cross platform, open source .NET development framework.

A couple of evenings ago we were invited to come and talk about what we do with the team who put together the Ubuntu UK Podcast.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers that I am heartily encouraged by this small snippet of news I picked up via Twitter this afternoon (thanks Roy)

From the Fedora Mailing List:

I have now changed the default panel configuration in F12 to include gnote instead of tomboy, and changed comps to make gnote default and tomboy optional.

This won’t replace tomboy in existing installations, but new installations will get gnote instead of tomboy.

This also means that gnote should show up on the live cd (where we excluded tomboy previously, due to no space for mono).

There seems to be something of a military campaign afoot. One that surely shows signs of desperation and anxiety on behalf of the instigator.

First we had Asus telling it’s potential customers that “It’s Better With Winblow$” using phraseology such as:

“Windows helps you easily get online and connect to your devices and services - without dealing with an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues.”

How bizarre is this?

Ubuntu Cola

It’s well over a week now since I started using the Miserware MicroMiser software. I have it installed on all the Ubuntu PCs we have at home and on two laptops too. I have noticed no adverse effects from running the software. In fact you really do forget it is there.

Remember when, back in late February, the Cabinet Office released their “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan”? Myself and many other FOSS commentators were obviously heartily encouraged and have talked about it and examined the policy in some detail.

Wow!

I started using the Beta MicroMiser software this morning. I have installed it on the following interesting computers at my home. (They all run Ubuntu. The server is on 8.10 Server edition the others are on 9.04 desktop all 32bit):

• Lobsang - Desktop PC Intel Core2 8400,
• Angua - Laptop PC Intel Core2 Mobile T5500,
• Vimes - Home Server VIA C7

I checked with MiserWare that they were OK for me to report some of the stats and they said it was OK. So, if you run the daemon on your machines, look in /var/log/syslog for lines like the following.

Lobsang reports about once per hour with:

My friend Alan sent me an invitation to sign up for a beta trial of MiserWare’s MicroMiser power saving software.

Our friends at Canonical have been busy working on a new software as a service offering called Ubuntu One. This news was broken today by the VAR guy, but we thought we would dig a little deeper into what it is all about. Ubuntu One is in short a utility for synchronising stuff between desktop computers running the favourite operating system of you and me. The home URL of the service is https://ubuntuone.com/ and if you go there it will add your launchpad account to the list of people who want to join the beta.

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now. It is time for a small face-lift.

I spend quite a bit of my time doing work for clients on Joomla! including building clean templates from a graphic designer’s images. But I haven’t needed to build a template (theme) for Wordpress before which felt like I’d been missing out on something.

As a long time fan of the Linux desktop I was interested to see the the Linux desktop usage number for personal computers increase to over 1.02%. I suspect it’s partially fueled by the popularity of Linux netbooks from the Dell (who offers an Ubuntu option) and Asus (that’s uses a special version of Xandros Linux).

It’s that time again

Fortunately, Mono is still quite trivial to remove and has not, apparently, increased its infiltration of the Ubuntu/Gnome code base as one might have been led to believe if you’d read this on the 1st April:

I ran into a problem yesterday. Having upgraded Lobsang to the soon-to-be-released Jaunty, my server, running 8.10 failed to backup my desktop machine using rdiff-backup. It looks like it is caused by a conflict between the two versions of rdiff-backup.

Thanks to a comment from Defenestration I think something called APT-Pinning might be a good solution where you have multiple versions of Ubuntu. So here’s a question for all you Ubunteros out there: