Working together with the Ubuntu trademarks team we renamed our Ubuntu derivatives:

• minibuntu becomes Ubuntu mini remix
• “ubuntu in italiano” becomes Ubuntu remix italiano (which is the Italian name for “Ubuntu Italian remix)

Following up the distrowatch’s story about Ubuntu trademarks, as the first Italian Ubuntu affiliate we (CreaLabs) are trying to be a good example of how FLOSS projects should respect trademark policies living in the FLOSS ecosystem.

I encourage all *buntu derivatives to take the good move and do what we did.

A few days ago a bought a new laptop: a DELL Inspiron 1525 (T8100 processor, 4GB RAM, 320GB hard disk). I chose it because all hardware (except the wireless card) is Intel based (audio/video) and I like Intel’s policy about open source drivers.

Everything is working smoothly, I had to configure nothing! Compiz works wonderfully and everything else too.

But here comes a little problem, I need to create screencast, the built-in mic is not so good thus I plug-in an external mic and start gtk-recordMyDesktop.

Ugly surprise, the audio is choppy and I can’t get it to work… I tried some workarounds found here and there but none is working :-(

Another problem, when I record a long screencast, gtk-recordMyDesktop hangs during the export phase.

I didn’t experience none of these troubles with my old laptop (DELL Inspiron 6000).

Can someone point me in the right direction?

A quick overview of some of the most interesting (IMHO) mockup designs for the upcoming Ubuntu release, in strictly alphabetical order ;-)

Click the name to visit its official page, click on the image to enlarge it.

1. Dusk

2. Kin

3. Kith
First version:

Second version:

4. Personification

5. Wall-light

6. The hidden mockup: Union
2 of 5 designs above are deeply inspired by the Union theme, which was proposed for hardy. I think it’s still wonderful:

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!

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.

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!

Just in time for the feature freeze, likewise-open was uploaded to hardy’s universe repository.

likewise-open is a software which will allow users to join Active Directory domains easily, just a few click and all is set up.

I followed this new feature with great interest ’cause I’m working on an important linux-switch, thus I did some tests on the new packages (actually before it was uploaded to universe :-)).

I found a few bugs and I has some notes so I wrote everything using the likewise-open lauchpad bugs page. Please do some test if you can so we can confirm these bugs and help developers finding a solution.

1) prerequisites

First of all we’ll install the php5-dev package which contains some utilities we’ll need for the build process:

sudo apt-get install php5-dev

then you’ve to find out your ORACLE_HOME environment variable, try executing:

env | grep ORACLE_HOME=

If this command outputs something like:

ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server

then you can jump to section “2) Getting and compiling PDO_OCI” otherwise go on thru this section.

If this guide we’ll just see how to find out which is your ORACLE_HOME directory if you’ve installed the oracle-xe server package. If you’ve installed instantclient or anything else please refer to the product documentation. So you’ve an installed and configured oracle-xe instance on your machine, now type:

cat /etc/init.d/oracle-xe |grep ORACLE_HOME=

the command should print something like:

ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server

now we’ve to export this variable to the current terminal session, we’ll do that with this command:

export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server

and the environment variable will be configured.

2) Getting and compiling PDO_OCI

Just cut and paste these simple commands to download PDO_OCI from the web and prepare it for the build phase:

cd /tmp
pecl download pdo_oci
tar xvfz PDO_OCI-1.0.tgz
cd PDO_OCI-1.0
phpize
mkdir include
ln -s /usr/include/php5/ include/php

now everything should be setup and we can build the driver and install it with:

make && make install

If everything is fine you can continue

3) Configuring PHP and Apache

if everything is fine you can go on editing your php.ini file and adding this line:

extension=pdo_oci.so

now create a phpinfo.php file under your apache’s document root, containing this line:

<?php phpinfo();

point your browser to:

http://localhost/phpinfo.php

and search for the “environment” section, it should look like the one in the next screenshot:

if you see the ORACLE_HOME line everything it’s ok, jump to the “4) Closure” section otherwise edit /etc/apache2/envvars file and add the ORACLE_HOME configuration, it will be something like this (on a single line):

export ORACLE_HOME=/usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server

4) Closure

Restart your apache and you’re done:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Situation 1:

You go to the supermarket and buy a new PC, you’ll find that the installed copy of Windows is perfectly localized in your language by default.

Situation 2:

You go to the Apple store and buy a new MAC, you’ll find that the installed copy of MAC OS is perfectly localized in your language by default.

Situation 3:

You download a copy of Ubuntu, burn it and boot it, select your language and… find that half of the system is in English and only a few things are in your language (this happens for Italian, maybe things can be worst with other languages).

What I want to say it’s quite obvious, if Linux vendors want to penetrate the newbies market, they must provide fully localized ISO images, there are no excuses. This is my point of view.

A lot of time ago, when I entered the UCK team, I wanted to build an ISO localization team, to build and deliver a full set of Ubuntu localized images. That part of the UCK project never came to life because of some problems but I still believe in its importance. Ubuntu team seemed to be quite regardless of this problem and our solution.

We (CreaLabs) continue to build and deliver the Ubuntu Italian ISO and I know there are a few other similar projects around the world but the point is that these kind of initiatives should become more officially endorsed by Ubuntu (or any other distro, problem is the same).

I talked a few time with the Ubuntu Italian Community but in all these years no page of the site links to our ISO image. Well… I’ve to say I’m a bit sad about that ’cause this seems to mean something like “we don’t care about that”.

Now, critics apart what can/should we do? If you agree with my point of view contact your distro (many of them have localized communities) and make them read this post, we just need to talk about the problem and we’ll find how to solve it. Having a fully localized Linux delivering infrastructure can only bring more users to our beloved OS.

This is a great article:
Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) Pragmatic Visual Presentation Critique
I hope Ubuntu and Gnome developers will read and take care about those considerations.

Source: OSNews.