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!
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.
The end result is a beautiful desktop (Click for fullscreen):
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.
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.
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.
January 9th, 2008 | Ubuntu, Linux by th | 1 Comment
Now this is one cool laptop hack.
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.
Ubuntu 7.10 64bit running on Core 2 duo Macbook Pro
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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.
August 11th, 2007 | Ubuntu, Games, Linux by th | 4 Comments
Tips and tricks to get Half-Life 2: Deathmatch running on Linux.
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August 11th, 2007 | Ubuntu by th | No Comments
I’m running Gutsy Gibbon and noticed that Trash can naming is changed. It’s now named as Deleted Items instead of Trash 
July 24th, 2007 | Ubuntu, Linux by th | 1 Comment
The Ubuntu Live conference began in Portland Oregon July 22nd, and Ars Technica has coverage of Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote from the conference.
Shuttleworth revealed many interesting things about the future of Ubuntu, especially the server version of Ubuntu:
- Canonical wants to do same for Ubuntu server as it did for the Desktop version - make things “just work”
- KVM and Xen will receive love for easy virtualization
- Next Long Term Support (LTS) release will be Ubuntu 8.04
- LTS releases approximately every two years
And couple interesting notes about the next release, Ubuntu 7.10, also known as Gutsy Gibbon:
- Gutsy server edition will include Ebox platform, more details about the integration at Ubuntu wiki and Gutsy blueprints page at Launchpad.
- Desktop version of Gutsy will have Compiz enabled by default (if the graphics card has enough power to display the effects)
In a nutshell the future of Ubuntu, and Linux in general, is pretty interesting.
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