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LXer Feature: 25-July-2010

I recently got the Compiz Screensaver running on my Ubuntu Linux system. This is a somewhat experimental plugin and so this plugin is not included by default with Compiz.

Manhattan OS comes with basically everything you need and looks simply amazing so if you want to convert a friend to Linux, this is the distro you should suggest. Sure, if you're a geek who likes to customize and install everything for himself, this may not seem like much but remember that most people never customize anything more than the background so the default application selection and look is very important.

Troy: Peter, to begin, as a first time attendee of Akademy, what was your initial impression of the event? Peter: Okay, there were a lot more people than I expected. When I arrived at the university grounds, I met a guy who was also looking for the entrance, and we started talking. This was the starting point for talking and it just continued from there - talking and talking and meeting people everywhere. It was really nice that I could talk about an issue I was having with KMail. Many other people also use KMail and knew what I was talking about. read more

One of the best references for Linux and UNIX system administrators over the years has been the "Handbooks" (either Linux Administration Handbook (LAH) or UNIX System Administration Handbook (USAH) at various points). But the last edition was published in 2000 (as USAH), and included information on then-current Red Hat Linux 6.2 and FreeBSD 3.4. A new, updated version, UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook, Fourth Edition (ULSAH), is due out any day now, and the principal authors, Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein, and Ben Whaley, agreed to answer some questions for LWN readers. Below are their answers on the book, the impact of Linux, the future for UNIX and Linux, and more.

A new version of Ubuntu Tweak has been released today: 0.5.5. There's no official announcement yet, but the new version is now available in the Ubuntu Tweak stable PPA. Looking and the BZR changelog, there's only one new major feature in Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.5: PPA Purge (which was also available in the WebUpd8 PPA by the way), which you can now use from within Ubuntu Tweak.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. - The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team

Neil Patel is the Technical lead for Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Unity at Canonical Ltd. With the current drawbacks with Gwibber's UI in mind, Neil have created some really good looking Gwibber UI mockups.

Dell has stopped selling consumer PCs preloaded with Ubuntu from its website, and doesn't know when they're coming back.

Does dumping Windows for Linux sound impossible? It isn't. And, here are ten darn good reasons that you should.

I make a point of trying as many different variations of Ubuntu as I can, this way I can be informed when I recommend one version over another to friends and family. The following is a round up of my favorites I have found over my last three years in the world of Linux.

Being able to touch type is the ability of typing without looking at the keyboard. By touch-typing, the individual uses all fingers instead of just a few fingers. Consequently, typing speed increases dramatically.

If you read the previous R600g news post from less than an hour ago this should come as no surprise, but: the ATI R600g Gallium3D driver has finally reached the milestone of being able to properly run glxgears. This GLX demo is simple and useless as a benchmark, but is an important development milestone and as talked about in that previous news piece, Jerome hopes to tackle texture support within a few days so then we will see more interesting OpenGL capabilities and we are potentially just days away from being able to run Quake with R600g and a modern ATI graphics processor (you can already do so with an open-source driver stack using the classic Mesa R600/700 driver).

Often, when modelling in 3D, it’s necessary to create a “backdrop” panoramic image. Typically this shows sky and distant land which should appear behind the foreground action. One place we’ll need this for the pilot to Lunatics is for the sky in Baikonur, Kazakhstan on launch day at the beginning of the story. I had some very particular ideas about how this should look, and I want to create just the right look. Here’s how I constructed it. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Even if you need a computer right away, there are plenty of good reasons to build one rather than buy one. You control the parts, so you get exactly what you need at the price you can best afford. You're assured of being able to upgrade any (or all) of the pieces later, when you have more money to spend. And, perhaps most importantly, you get the satisfaction of doing it yourself and maintaining complete control over it from the very instant you open the boxes. No matter how little you want to drop, building your own computer is still the best way to go.

As an open source enthusiast, there are thousands of great tools available to me. However, some things in Linux are harder than they need to be. The world of open source has come a long way, but keeping an eye on what is going on outside of the open source arena can show that there are still areas where we need to improve. Here are three tools from IBM and Apple that I would love to see incorporated into the next great Linux distribution.

In two reports filed from this week's OSCON conference, The Register says that Google will open Android's internal development kit to contributors, and that Linux maintainers are holding tough in negotiating with the search giant regarding Android's readmission to the kernel. Meanwhile, Linux 2.6.35 RC6 was released, featuring enhancements to network scalability, memory management, and sleep-wait detection.

Want to learn more about open source? Download some books for free. It doesn't matter if you're new to open source or a long-time user, there is always more to learn about. We scoured the Web for the best open source books. All of these are free books that can be downloaded and shared.

These are 5 amazing GNOME themes which are either new or recently updated. Some of them come as complete theme packs with icons, wallpapers and so on.

VLC 1.1.1 is released. And as ever, C-Korn has updated his PPA to include the latest release of VLC. This is primarily a bug fix release.