Hello everybody, this post a just a quick thank you (particularly to Tiago ‘gouki’ Faria) for being added to the Ubuntu Weblogs website, hope we’ll have a great time together!

Due to the fact that this is my first post in this website, maybe you’ll be interested checking out my latest post about Intrepid’s upcoming features.

See you soon!

I’m not a Batman fan (actually I’m not fan of any superhero movie…) but I read a lot of good reviews of the last Batman movie (The Dark Night) that I decided to go watch it.

(picture by wikipedia)

One word: AWESOME. I found it amazing, dark, powerful, evil as I was expecting after reading the title! No words for Heath Ledger’s joker, it’s unbelievable in every scene, may him rest in peace…

I finally did it!!

I wrote my post about Ubuntu 8.10 upcoming features on saturday afternoon, I thought it was a good post but I wasn’t thinking about digg…

Well, in a few hours I’ve been dugg by more than 100 people so my post was published on digg’s homepage!!! here’s a screenshot so I won’t forget:

At the moment my digg submission has been dugg more than 1100 times and counts more than 130 comments (plus the ones on my blog).

The post on my blog hit more then 23,000 visitors on sunday and 6,000 on monday:

Thank you digg, it was an amazing experience! :-)

It took me some work but… I love the result you’re watching right now, don’t you agree with me?

I’m reorganizing all the post within this blog, removing a lot of categories, converting some categories to tags, add tags to posts and things like these.

Maybe you’ll see some strange things happening here for the next few days but it will be better I promise :-)

A quick resume of what the most important (IMHO) things users will get with the next Ubuntu release: Intrepid Ibex. If you want to check the whole list please visit Intrepid’s blueprints.

1. faster login
The time that ubuntu takes to go from the gdm login prompt to an usuable desktop is too long, it will be faster.

2. better Flash experience
Intrepid will ship improved plugin finder wizard experience, better experience for sites that use the flash detection kit and improved user-experience for selection of available alternatives.

Probably we’ll also have the final Flash 10 shipped with Intrepid.

3. 3G networking
Title says it all, Intrepid will have built-in support for 3G networking with the new NetworkManager.

4. guest account
It is very common to lend someone else a laptop for a quick email check, or having one’s computer play music and be a surf station on a party.

Instead of requiring people to create guest accounts with widely known or empty passwords, Ubuntu will set up a locked down guest account with a temporary home directory by default, where an existing user must authenticate the start of a guest session. This avoids passwordless accounts, which are a security threat.

5. Clean up cruft from system, especially after upgrades
When systems are upgraded from release to release to release, and especially if they are upgraded frequently during development of next release, they gather a lot of cruft: unused packages, old kernels, etc. Intrepid will have a tool to remove cruft, based on what update-manager already does, and extending that.

6. Automatic download of printer drivers through the internet
The printer setup tool of Ubuntu 8.10 and later will automatically download LSB-packaged printer drivers from the OpenPrinting database. This way there will be no need to ship all drivers on the CDs, Intrepid will be prepared for printers being launched after our release or being supported only by closed-source drivers which we are not allowed to distribute or driver updates.

7. font selector
Fontconfig offers a variety of font related settings, which can currently only be modified by hacking a XML file together. Intrepid will have a GUI for this task, taking common settings like font ordering, antialiasing, hinting and embedded bitmaps into account, as those settings vary greatly depending on different users’ preferences.

8. faster installation from desktop DVD
Modifications to ubiquity and apt as well as triggerisation of packages in order to minimize the extra time needed by the installer when dealing with the larger set of packages found on the desktop DVD image.

9. installation from USB stick
An application will be developed to convert and write Ubuntu CD images to USB disks. In addition, Ubuntu’s existing tools will be modified to better handle installing from a removable disk.

10. new graphic for the installer
The visual design of Ubuntu’s installer has remained largely unchanged since its creation, however there are a number of areas where graphical aids will be beneficial.

and maybe (low priority):

• 10 + 1. Identity management and network authentication
• 10 + 2. PackageKit

What about the new graphic theme?
Intrepid alpha releases come with a new graphic theme for the GNOME environment but I couldn’t find a blueprint about that thus it’s not in the list.

UPDATE 1: I’d like to add a task to the wishlist: SOUND!!! In hardy sound it’s a big mess because some softwares (Flash) do not integrate with PulseAudio (this workaround does seem to be stable to me) and I constantly have to close applications to make sound work again :-(

UPDATE 2: A user told me that I forgot to write an important new feature: support for dmraid from the livecd, he’s completely right, I thought it was not so important to average users but probably I was wrong.

I released a new version today with support for collapsable regions, check it out at FBBorderLayout home page.

http://167.157.23.4/admision/
a credits line in the footer seems too much for them.

there are no contacts there, it seems the server owner is:
http://inti.faces.umss.edu.bo

if someone knows how to contact them, please let me know.

YourWay is a commercial service by my company, born to allow customers to create their own Ubuntu based Linux distribution with just a few clicks on a web page.

After a long time freeze, we decided to change the approach to YourWay service, not just leaving the customer alone with his choices but making it a face to face service.

Why this change?
When our customers ask us to create a Linux distribution they want to have control of every small part of the process and of the result, thus we understood that a standardized approach would not work for YourWay.

So what do we have now?
A general description page of the service and a “get a free estimate” button. Clicking it will lead you to a cost-estimate request form, with some question that will help us understand your needs. After this step we’ll work face to face with the customers to take care of every little part of the project.

And what if I just need some easy tweaks?
What if a customer just needs “a standard Ubuntu plus support for his language plus a couple of applications”? This will be absolutely easy, quick and cheap, I swear :-)

And what if I’m an hardware reseller?
This is the most interesting part, we can build auto-installation Ubuntu based DVD to deploy your hardware quickly and easily!

Conclusions
Visit CreaLabs YourWay website and start building your own Ubuntu based Linux distribution!

I was browsing the new Lancia Delta website, selecting my language, clicking on “enter the website”, skipping the intro and clicking on the “discover” link (I can’t provide a direct link ’cause it’s all flash).

Here I found a weird behavior, try using the scrollbar on the right and you’ll find it by yourself: the scrollbar is working in the opposite way every scrollbar in world works.

Why should a web designer invert the scrollbar behavior? Maybe I can’t understand ’cause I’m not all that creative?