Currently the chatter surrounding Ubuntu is obviously focused on its next upcoming release 10.04 Lucid Lynx. However, most blog posts and news articles are all talking about the new artwork rather than any technological advances. Discussion (as ever with Ubuntu users and critics alike) seems to focus almost solely on colour. Yes that’s right. I said colour. This release will bring about quite a few changes in not only the colour scheme of the default desktop, it’s wallpaper and themes but also the ubuntu website, online shop, documentation cd covers (just mockups currently) and more besides. Which is nice. But how important is it?

The key word that so many people seem to miss here is default. It’s what the desktop arrives on your computer looking like after a fresh install or while trying out the livecd. I would happily agree that first impressions do mean a lot. Having a slick polished-looking desktop is seldom a bad thing. However, it really is the easiest thing to change whether you’ve never used Ubuntu or Linux before or you are a hoary old hedgehog like me.

What gets my goat is the extent to which the debate surrounding this tiny aspect of the OS takes such focus. The default theme released with Ubuntu has become more polished with each release but it never looked bad. As much as so many bemoan the brown, it made Ubuntu as successful as it has been. No other popular distro used quite such a distinctive and memorable scheme – most default to blues or greens and look entirely unexceptional. The proposed new colours, aubergine being amongst them (fantastic colour, shame about the taste) will hopefully still remain fairly unique to Ubuntu but time will tell.

If I were to point you in the direction of omgubuntu.co.uk and their recent post about the new wallpaper (thanks for the link mesanna!) you need only scroll down the page a few hundred lines to see all the same old arguements coming out about OS aesthetics (obviously being linked to anything even remotely OSX related as often as possible – grr macs..) Why is it impossible to create a nice looking system without being accused of stealing elements of its design from commercial alternatives? Sometimes there genuinely are only a few ways of accomplishing a particular UI successfully and once the best way has been tried and tested enough it is adopted. This is not theft. This is common sense.

Anyway.. what I’m slowly getting round to saying is that yes, re-style your site’s look, give the documentation a face-lift even create more themes and wallpapers. But don’t expect to be able to create a set of themes and wallpapers that will capture the hearts and minds of everyone. It can’t be done.

In my opinion, rather than spending all this time on the look of the thing just make is as obvious as is humanly possible that you can change how everything looks. Perhaps a notification bubble at boot with the words “You can change how I look! Click here to choose a style and find out more”. Shouldn’t be hard right? I’m thinking of adding a filter in firefox for the words “ubuntu + brown + ugly” I’m that tired of reading about this. Proof can be found again by looking at the post linked above and skimming through the comments. I will leave you with one comment which made me laugh, not because it’s right or bold or clever but because it is so fantastically idiotic.

are you serious? What the hell is wrong with ubuntu. I mean, I had a little sympathy for the whole brown thing, but honestly, you should have known everyone hates brown. Ask any girl with brown eyes and they go “eww! they look like poop!”

So, to further expand on your theory, do girls with blue eyes hate Fedora? Green eyes can’t stand openSUSE? Is this something limited only to the female of the species? Thank you Zach for sharing and bringing a smile back to my face!

Unfortunately, Windows Update doesn’t like this, specifically when it comes to installing service packs. I actually want service pack 2 for my laptop as it brings in better support for my BlueRay drive. What I need is to find a way to make my Linux and Windows installations more cosy with one another.

The way to do this is to give the Windows  partition the boot flag, booting its manager and selecting either Windows or Linux from there. Otherwise when the Vista update scans the boot manager it finds grub and gets, quite rightly I suppose, a little confused.

To setup your multiboot computer to get around this, read my tutorial.

In addition, my apologies for the lack of posts lately. Amongst other things I’ve really not been well, a recent bout with kidney stones has laid me low but I feel it’s time now to get back on top… so to speak. I have new toys too (laptop and phone), time I did something with them! Soon as I get Ubuntu set up of course. It spent last night defragging that pesky NTFS partition so today I can resize and free some hard drive space. I’m biting my nails when it comes to graphics support (I’ve always used nvidia in the past, this laptop has a Radeon 3450) but I’m sure it will handle things immaculately.

One thing this HP Laptop has impressed me with so far (I only got it yesterday) is being able to run Bloodbowl at it’s native resolution of 1440 x 900. But not just run – run smoothly with some effects and filters turned on – I’m very impressed! Note to anybody reading this who has a copy of the game – get in touch. I’d love to test the online multiplayer on this game.

That’s all for now, you should see this site return to it’s former state over the next few days. In the mean time I apologise for missing links – sorry!

EDIT

Ok, so I’ve finished moving bendavis.me to my new domain manager and host so the site is back! All I need to do is change the theme. It’s not autumn any more… time for a new look. Expect my style’s to be in flux for a while as I jangle about in the back (metaphorically) trying to plug the Christmas lights in.

September 9th, 2009 brought with it the third release of Moon OS codename Makara. It’s been on my periphery for a while now, seen in a similar vein to Elive but instead Moon OS presents itself as an installable OS rather than Elive, which I’ve alway found to be appealing if a little unpredictable. According to the website it’s powered by Ubuntu but I see a definite minty hand in how it’s laid out, certainly the grub gfx boot.

One of the stand out things I take from the website, screenshots and now I’ve booted from the cd the actual system is quite how good looking it is. Not too pretty, not too slick but slim and salubrious. I must admit I like the green. Having been an Ubuntu man for some time I’ve become used to Browns and oranges, a hint of red perhaps but mainly earthy colours on my Desktop. Green seems like a sensible progression and although I’ve never liked the green of OpenSUSE, Moon OS has it spot on.

But I digress, lets see some screenshots shall we?

As you can see, it’s a very nice looking initial desktop. I love that E17 can create fantastic effects without 3d capability. It means you get a beautiful desktop on all but the most modest computer specifications. Although I don’t have one.. yet, it would be very interesting to see a netbook remix of this distro.

One thing (and it’s really only a very small thing) is that, as the third screenshot above illustrates, Moon OS have created a branded google search homepage. Unfortunately I find it to be hideous. In fairness I think this may be due more to Enlightenments’ otherwise eye-pleasing surroundings creating such a contrast. It needs to be simpler.

While I’m running live I like to put a desktop through it’s paces a little to see how it deals with typical day to day activities. Running live is obviously going to be slower than an installation and won’t benefit from some binary hardware drivers (my Nvdia graphics card in this instance) but stability is none-the-less put to the test. Large files transfers can be tricky sometimes so moving around 10gb from one hard drive to another gives me an indication of how it will perform installed. Happily Moon OS performed perfectly and quickly. Firefox loads in a reasonable time, such that I know it will quite literally fire up; as do the gimp, exaile and pidgin. I will be looking into exaile in some detail as I’m usually a rhythmbox or banshee user. During the test enlightenment did not segfault once. Something I have experienced with Elive before; including the very mac-looking warning stating that this is bad and something has gone wrong.

The Ubuntu Jaunty origins mean that the newer notification system is also active in Moon OS and fits in rather well with the desktop appearance. After booting up I see, out of the corner of my eye, that I’m connected to the internet. It’s just a little touch but it’s nice to be notified of things in such a way.

Up next I will install Moon OS and report back with more of my findings.

For now, the hour is late and so I bid all goodnight.

Windows Users – The Charlie Browns of Computing

Quite frankly this man should be knighted, and really not just for championing Linux but by showing how much good can come 3 things: education, charity and understanding.

Please take the time to read the whole article, this man has done so much good for so many people.

On a separate note the comments really demonstrate how much support this man has. The one attacking comment only succeeds in highlighting the posters ignorance; Helios does not come across as superior – he has every right to – but he does not.

Everyone has their comfort zones and no one looks upon the internet (and computers in general) in the same way. Most people don’t want to know how their software works, or the computer that powers it for that matter and this has lead to the idea that your OS should “just work”. In theory I applaud this, daily tasks such as checking your email, writing a document watching a video online shouldn’t be difficult and I agree. I strongly believe that, were a person who’d never used a pc before (maybe not never, explaining the keyboard, the mouse and their relation to the dancing images on the big box could take a little while but you get the general idea) to be presented with – for the sake of argument – a computer running Ubuntu they would, very quickly, be able to accomplish nearly any task asked of them. As Walter writes, “some users prefer spoon feeding” and he cites this as the most oft windows user complaint. I would have to agree. Users do what they’re used to doing. Having spent (probably) years using the same operating system, remembering how it is you get to the printer setup dialogue, stashed away in a folder somewhere, you begin to believe that is the “correct” and therefore the only way in which that task can be accomplished. If the program/OS in front of them does not respond in kind it is instantly branded as complicated or confusing and “wrong”. When actually, looked at objectively, it may be a more sensible layout: or in the very least not “wrong” – just different.

Having a preference as to how your computer and its programs interact and function is a good thing, not liking how Windows operated was one of the things that first gave me the incentive to see what was out there. However, shouting and swearing at people on public forums or comments on blog posts; declaiming that Linux is awful, without actually giving it a thought-out honest trial yourself is just childish. You share nothing more with the rest of the world than the fact you are lost, arrogant and nowhere near as tech-savvy as you claim to be. Just stop it. I think I speak for the entire Linux community when I say sod off.

“Thankfully there is an entire generation of people who have learned that the environment is constantly shifting, the fundamentals always in flux, and these users have little problem jumping on to Ubuntu, or any popular Linux flavor, and getting it to work for them, regardless of the platform, the location or the application.”

I couldn’t have put it better Walter. If you work, or even just follow, the tech-world as a hobby you can no longer afford to brush aside Linux and the Open Source revolution. Linux is here to stay and it’s going to keep getting better and better.

An Intel Atom Z530 processor running at 1.6 GHz motors through your tasks and the included 1 GB of RAM holds those tasks in place. Graphics are catered for by the Intel GMA500 graphics chipset with hardware acceleration and a DVI interface. A 160 GB SATA drive is more than capable of storing your files; Remember, a typical installation of Ubuntu takes up only 3-4gb (5-6 at the very most, 10 maybe for those of us compiling programs as well as getting a little apt-happy) of that space. A quick check of my Vista (I say quick… it took around a minute to calculate the file contents…) install shows me that currently it takes up 24gb. That’s a lot of hard drive real-estate I’d rather have for my files, not the systems’.

To round off the specs it also sports Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11g wifi (a small antenna is fitted to the back of the case), 6 USB 2.0 ports; two of which are on the front and are befriended by an SD card slot and an infra-red port. Personally, I think bluetooth wouldn’t have gone amiss as it offers a far greater scope of functions than IR.. but a remote control is seldom something to scoff at.

This is also a very green pc, running only on a laptop style power-brick rated 12 volts at 1.5 amps. Can anyone say car pc! A bracket is also included allowing you to attach the machine to the back of your monitor in a slightly poor-mans imac style, I like the idea though I think I’d rather show off the unit’s tiny size than hide it.

Mini-ITX and similar technologies have been around for years and used by Linux heavily. Many products which we take for granted such as network routers often are actually embedded Linux systems. But embedded desktop systems first saw a surge of popularity with Damn Small Linux. They booted from solid-state pen drives so were blazingly fast, and ran silently on fanless Via EDEN processors. You can still buy them now and support DSL in doing so.

However, what this computer brings to the market is not a ‘live’ Linux system, with limited storage space and a need to set up alternative data-storage, but a full Desktop with all the features you could need. With the price of $359 for the Linux variant, this could be a very popular purchase indeed. Hopefully it will be and customers can start testing what can actually be done with it, like the ITX projects of old.

If you’d like to find out more you can read Rob Reilly’s Review at linux.com.

Before I could even get ready to start reviewing Flock I had to see what it was like to install it. There were a few little niggles to sort out but generally it was pretty easy.

In case there’s anyone out there who’d like to give it a try in Linux Mint – here’s a guide on how to do it.

Tutorials > Linux > Install Flock in Linux Mint

After a little discussion and some information about how wordpress.com functions from mesanna I’ve quite quickly made the first demo version of a generated button. And here it is.

So far it’s really just proof of concept, and its code is a little limited but could very easily and quickly be improved, depending on what information you actually wanted to share. The reason I’ve put the date in for now is because it’s the simplest way to show the principle involved here. The date comes from the php function of the same name in this case I used:

date("D jS M - G:i");

What I’m trying to show here is that information available on the server side: databases, xml feeds, _POST and _GET requests, anything; can quite easily be transposed into a graphic without the need for java or anything that is blocked on wordpress.com. The sky is the limit!

The image src (if you look at the code) is actually:

<img src="http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php" alt="Linux Mint Button" width="181" height="60" ⁄>

If you visit ../button.php you will see the png. For now I’ve also added basic functionality to change the statement (the “Taste Mint” bit) to whatever you want. Just bear in mind the picture’s only 181px across and the logo takes up 50px or so of that.

So, if you add “?alt=Your Text” to the end of the above link, the button will change accordingly. Note just for clarity the entire url will then look like:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Your Text

So, if you were type something like this into your browser:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Minty%20Linux

You’d get a modified graphic just so.

Obviously, no programmer worth his salt would allow the user so much scope for editing your scripts in a working public version of this, it’s just to illustrate my point.

To further polish this, I’d use my .htaccess file to make an actual img url, something like promo-button.png so it appeared to the casual user that it really was just an image. The next step I think.

Thanks to facade47 on the forums for the font and reverend_nerd for his great button.

What do you think?

But I’m not here to start reviewing Mint… yet.

I had a little idea to further the promotion and I think I may spend some of this weekend coding some examples of it to try out on this site and in forum signatures. I think promotion nowadays needs relevance and needs to do and say more than a standard banner image ever could. It’s voice could probably do with being bilingual as well.

That’s why I think json requests/php generated images could be the way forward, or at least the first few steps. Combined with a strong theme and clever use of valid html (biggest pet peeve in the world is the number of “widgets” available for various platforms which are not coded correctly – flickr case in point) anyone could make use of this and promote the OS they love.

More thoughts to come.

Ben out.