Sun goes shopping, buys Innotek

February 13th, 2008 | Ubuntu, Technology, Linux by th | 3 Comments

SANTA CLARA, CA February 12, 2008 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that it has entered into a stock purchase agreement to acquire innotek, the provider of the leading edge, open source virtualization software called VirtualBox. By enabling developers to more efficiently build, test and run applications on multiple platforms, VirtualBox will extend the Sun xVM platform onto the desktop and strengthen Sun’s leadership in the virtualization market. This software is available for all major operating systems at www.virtualbox.org and www.openxvm.org.

Read the announcement!

Nice Open Source Fonts

February 11th, 2008 | Ubuntu, Linux by th | No Comments

Fonts have long been weak spot with Linux. However, nowadays there are many nice open source fonts available, and font rendering is pretty much on par with commercial operating systems. Most distributions do not ship with the best anti-aliasing options enabled due “software patents”. These patents apply only in United States. Rest of the world does not need to suffer due American patent madness so here is quick fix how to enable proper font rendering in Ubuntu: sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config and select Native rendering from the next screen.

Open Font preferences from: System > Preferences > Appearance and select Fonts tab. Tune your rendering preferences, set Smoothing to Subpixel (LCDs), Hinting to Slight and Subpixel Order to RGB.

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The end result is a beautiful desktop (Click for fullscreen):

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The font in the screenshot is MgOpen Cosmetica which can be installed with command sudo apt-get install ttf-mgopen and other fonts shown in the preview window are Bitstream fonts, which are installed in Ubuntu by default.

Better menu for GNOME/Ubuntu

January 15th, 2008 | Ubuntu, Linux by th | 13 Comments

One thing I liked about OpenSuse was the better GNOME start menu. And I was delighted to find out I can easily get it for Ubuntu too! To install new menu in Ubuntu (7.10, gutsy), install package gnome-main-menu using Synaptic (or use: sudo apt-get install gnome-main-menu).  After installing  the package you can right-click on the panel where you want to place the menu, and select Add to panel… and select ‘Main menu’ applet (note: default menu button is also named as ‘main menu’ so make sure you select the right one).

To get Search box to the main menu, install Beagle (from Add/Remove applications). If you decide to use Beagle, remember to disable Tracker indexing from Control Center > Sessions.

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KDE 4.0.0 released!

January 11th, 2008 | Ubuntu, Linux by th | No Comments

The KDE project has just announced availability of KDE 4.0.0! Congratulations KDE team! KDE 4 binaries are also available for Kubuntu Gutsy.

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Ubuntu Notebook - Retro Mod

January 9th, 2008 | Ubuntu, Linux by th | 1 Comment

Now this is one cool laptop hack.

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Is Apple Killing Linux on the Desktop?

January 5th, 2008 | Linux, Apple by th | No Comments

Slashdot is running an interesting article Is Apple Killing Linux on the Desktop? Well, sometimes Linux kills OS X. Don’t forget to read the entertaining flamewar comments.

Liberating Macbook Pro

December 29th, 2007 | Ubuntu, Linux, Apple by th | 16 Comments

I’ve always wanted to install Ubuntu on my Mac. So I decided to give myself little christmas present and finally get it done. Here’s my experiences with running Linux on Intel Mac.

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Ubuntu 7.10 64bit running on Core 2 duo Macbook Pro

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34 Hacks, Tips and Tutorials to Make Your Linux Box Work Like a Mac

December 21st, 2007 | Linux, Apple by th | No Comments

Whether you love Apple’s design and functionality, or just want to play around with your computer, it can be both fun and helpful to emulate a Mac while running Linux. Read the article here, you’ll find tutorials, hacks, tools, and more that can help you copycat Mac.

DirectX 9.0c on Linux with Wine

December 16th, 2007 | Games, Linux by th | 1 Comment

DirectX 9.0c on Linux with Wine.

10 Things To Do Just After Installing Ubuntu 7.10

December 16th, 2007 | Ubuntu, Linux by th | 1 Comment

Ubuntu is a very complete OS, especially the Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), but there are still make tweaks you can do just after installing it that will make Ubuntu shine like never. I will explain here some things I do just after have ubuntu installed.