Ubuntu

Surprise, surprise!

Canonical and Skype appear to be setting us up for the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Recent updates to the Ubuntu partner repository now shows Skype as a supported package. It's all there in that magic word, partner. Skype is now a Canonical partner. Given how often I've complained about the lack of a credible open source VoIP client under Linux, this smells an awful lot like good news. Perhaps with Skype opening up to Open Source and Canonical, the days of the Linux port of Skype being the red-headed step child may, one day soon, finally be over. I can dream . . .

To install Skype via Synaptic (under Ubuntu) or KPackageKit (under Kubuntu), you'll need to activate the Lucid partner repository. For those of you running Ubuntu, fire up Synaptic, then click Settings in the menu bar and select Repositories. Click the "Other Software" tab, the click the check box labeled "lucid partner".

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Last time I wrote about the goings on surrounding Planet *buntu, I went on about one of my favorite topics; open formats and the future of information. By information, I mean content in all its wondrous forms, from plain text, to Web content, to music, to video, and to everything in between. Sadly, I find myself wanting to rant again on this topic even if it means laying into one of my favorite corporations. So I decided to start with something positive and friendly; something of beauty to prepare you for the ugliness to follow. It's only fair and it will, I hope ease the pain.

So let's go back a few days . . . It was February the 11th; my wife and I went out to a superb dinner at Benjamin's Restaurant in St. Jacobs, Ontario. My parents were babysitting and Sally and I had the evening to ourselves. It was a perfect way to celebrate the big day. Earlier that day, I received an early Valentine's Day present from Kubuntu and the KDE folk. Yes, KDE 4.4 was released to the Kubuntu repositories so I wasted no time in upgrading.

The 4.4 release will be come with Kubuntu 10.04, that old Lucid Lynx, but it was backported to 9.10 for those of us who prefer to run a stable release over alpha code. I'll tell you how to add those repositories to your system in a moment, but let me start by telling you about KDE 4.4.

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Consider this a Thanksgiving post. I know most of you are away eating, or arguing with family. Up here, in the Great White North, Thanksgiving was back in early October so I'm sort of working today. You might say I'm indulging in a different kind of bird. Just what kind of bird, however, was something I was very curious about.

Like many others, I couldn't wait to get my hands on a copy of the new killer OS from Google. I wanted to try it out. Kick the tires. Take it for a spin. That sort of thing.

So I downloaded the VMware image on the site and saved it to my disk, then created a virtual machine inside VirtualBox using the VMDK image as the disk file. Then I booted it and started looking around. It took me about 20 seconds to figure out that the login was my GMail user name and password and I was off.

Read the complete post over at the Ubuntu User Website.

Hear that clock ticking? There are only nine days left to the release of Ubuntu 9.10. It's all very exciting and that excitement was bouncing about inside my brain as I drove my son to school this morning. A little ditty was echoing in my mind along with what I might write about the big event, when suddenly it hit me. No, not another car. I was paying attention. What hit me was a fully formed vision of the future, nine days hence. Sort of like what happens on FlashForward, the series based on Robert J. Sawyer's book. Except I didn't black out. I started telling what I saw in my vision to my five year old son who, sitting quietly in the back seat, quietly ignored me.

Read the whole story on the Ubuntu User Website.

I'd like to begin by apologizing for the complete lack of controversy in today's post. I appreciate your understanding in this difficult time when I am finding it hard to really get upset about anything. But I digress.

Pick up issue #2 of Ubuntu User magazine, open it to page 16, and you'll find an article titled "Cloud View" (by yours truly), the focus of which is Canonical's new offering, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. You'll find stories hyping this for the upcoming release of Karmic Koala (a mere 14 days away as I write this) but the framework, or a technical preview thereof, was available in Ubuntu 9.04. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has partnered with Eucalyptus Systems, a company that has created an open source implementation of Amazin's EC2, or Elastic Cloud Services.

I mention this now for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm going to chat a little more about cloud computing. The second reason is that a lot has already changed since the release of my article in Ubuntu User #2.

Read the whole story on the Ubuntu User Website.