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So you've just installed Ubuntu 9.10, the cute and cuddly Karmic Koala, but now you're confronted with a most pertinent question, "What do i do now?" Ubuntu is a very complete and full-featured Linux distribution, but no operating system can come with everything you want. There's much more fun to be had in what comes after installing the OS!

AMD's Catalyst Linux driver has improved substantially over the past few years. Years ago the Catalyst Linux driver was in shambles with its performance being utterly poor, it lacked enthusiast-oriented features like CrossFire and OverDrive, and ATI customers had to wait months -- sometimes in excess of a year -- for any driver support in Linux. All of this though has changed with AMD now providing same-day Linux support, a near feature parity to the Windows Catalyst driver, and first-rate performance. Playing a critical role in improving the ATI Linux support has been Matthew Tippett, serving as the engineering manager for Linux Core Engineering since joining ATI Technologies in 2003. To put it in perspective, when Matthew started work at ATI, only the FireGL graphics cards were supported under Linux. However, today will be his last day serving ATI / Advanced Micro Devices.

Since Gnome 2.28 they decided that applications’ menus should be text only, without any icons. I actually like icons in Gnome and don’t think that they were abused in menus. Luckily there is a way to revert to the old behaviour by setting a gconf key.

Yesterday the new Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Ubuntu 9.04 desktop and server installations to Ubuntu 9.10.

This Ubuntu 9.10 Mini-Course will help you set up a secure an Ubuntu 9.10 Server using Postifx, Dovecot and Thunderbird with TLS and SMTP AUTH. The goal of this configuration is to create a secure mail server using encrypted communication to retrieve mail and to send mail through your mail server.

This document describes the installation of the automatic dialer GNUDialer, this is an alternative dialer to VICIDial, with more lightweight scripts and a far more easier GUI, it uses Asterisk and MySQL for its operation.

Wireshark is a very versatile utility to monitor all the neighborhood network activity, including disassembling packets and viewing data transmitted from anyone who is connected on your LAN (or Wireless LAN). I'm using Wireshark to monitor the activity of the network, and I explained the packets transmitted between the peers.

Canonical's Ubuntu project released the final Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, featuring faster boot times, improved audio and 3G connectivity, an enhanced Netbook Remix, and more robust cloud support, among other features. The release follows IBM's announcement that it is launching an Ubuntu-based cloud computing distribution for businesses.

Before I forget to mention it: Ubuntu 9.10, the Karmic Koala is out. Cheers, fanfare, and so on. Now some people don’t like it a bit because of Mono. For those, Debian developer (and maintainer of Mono on Debian) Joseph Michael Shields has two answers:

1. It’s stupid.
2. Get Chicken Little Remix 9.10 – Karmic Kraienköppe instead.

If Microsoft had come out with a free service pack to Vista and called it “Windows 7” it would be one thing. But we just don’t see enough of a change to warrant the purchase of an entirely new operating system. Windows XP Service Pack 2 changed that operating system a lot more than moving from Vista to W7 will.

When Canonical launched Ubuntu 9.10 on Oct. 29, Centrify Corp. — maker of Microsoft Active Directory-related tools — raised its hand and vowed to support Ubuntu Server Edition 9.10. It was a small but significant announcement that could (potentially) help Ubuntu gain a stronger foothold within corporate Windows networks. Here’s why.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Post Installation Guide. Multimedia, Java, Eye Candy, needed applications and much more!

Today @ work we had a crashed PC. The PC served as a wall monitor to show the call central display via remote desktop. They said to me: Go fix it, no matter how you do it, fix it!. So I installed ubuntu, but the pc on win2k was called sparky. They vnc'd into it just by typing sparky. Now for some strange reason that doesn't work anymore, and I did not had time to fix it. So I made a script that sets the IP as wallpaper so that they can type that in ultravnc. (Later I thought that it would be better to auto-start uVNC to the central at login, but that did not came up on my mind earlier.) (And even later I discovered the /etc/hostname file was empty, and after I set that with 'sparky' it worked again...)

KDE-based distribution Kubuntu has released version 9.10 which adds a new variant showcasing the up and coming Plasma Netbook setup. The release also adds OpenOffice KDE 4 integration and extra installer beauty thanks to artwork from KDE's Oxygen team.

Nokia's second annual Maemo Summit brought together 400 developers and power users of the Linux-based tablet community in Amsterdam over the October 9-11 weekend. Maemo Community Manager Quim Gil said the primary goal was to bring the community together for the social and interactive benefits, but the three-day program also provided a solid introduction to the new Maemo 5 release, a preview of Maemo 6, and a chance to work with the Nokia N900 — which ships with as close to a standard Linux distribution as the marketplace has seen delivered on a usable mobile phone.

Rob Weir has an eye-opening report on how the Microsoft-stuffed committee implementing fixes to OOXML is extending the "standard", which turns out to be not exactly standard, to better conform to Microsoft Office 2007, and without following usual procedures. That is utterly backwards. Normally, vendors work to make their products conform to the standard, and it's very unusual for a "standard" to be made to conform to one vendor's proprietary product. I want to reproduce the article here, because it is an object lesson, a timely one.

Opensourc3 is a magazine dedicated to Unified and Cloud Computing using open source technologies. It is published on a monthly basis and is available free to readers worldwide.

We’ve been using Mono for the production server of Orion’s Belt for a couple of months now. On this article I’d like to share our experiences using Mono. We developed our project fully on Windows with Visual Studio 2005, and at a time we started to consider Mono for a production server. Do note that the Orion’s Belt team has a Windows background, and little experience administrating Linux machines.

Just over one year after the release of OpenOffice 3.0, OpenOffice.org (OOo) project developer Joost Andrae has announced that the free office suite has been downloaded more than one hundred million times since the launch of version 3.0. OpenOffice is an open source office suite from Sun Microsystems for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems. The download total doesn't include, for example, installations included with various Linux distributions or copies included on CDs given out by magazines, so the actual number is likely much higher.

MontaVista Software announced more Market Specific Distributions (MSDs) for its MontaVista Linux 6 commercial embedded development distribution. The MSDs are separated into industrial automation, multi-core networking, Android, automotive and portable multimedia, and multifunction-printer versions, and support processors from Cavium, Freescale, Intel, and Texas Instruments, says the company.