In all, over 200 updates have been integrated, and updated installation
media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded
after installation. These include security updates and corrections for
other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and
compatibility with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. — Release Notes

This one has Firefox 3.0 Final, bunch of intel driver fixes, and sudo will work even if your hostname is messed up.

Linux Podcast
A few weeks ago I read some posts about Linux related podcasts. By far my favorite so far is Linux Outlaws. If you need a podcast to add to Banshee or Rhythmbox, definitely check out this one.

Symfony 1.1 Release
Symfony 1.1 was released. I have personally used this framework for very large projects with great results. The documentation is good and we get great performance out of it.

Dear Karl,

Since you obviously require more credit for your contributions than anyone ever before, I would like to suggest Ubuntu to do the following to satify your demands:

Karlbuntu specific release:

This release will come stock with a background that reads “Make sure you are aware the system monitor was created by Karl Lattimer”.

Why don’t you do me a favor, take this as a formal request: In your release notes for anything you make, I want you to list each individual who contributed anything to the toolchain you used to create the program:

• Which distro do you run? Credit all of them
• Which compiler do you use? Credit all of them
• Which toolkit did you use? Credit all of them.
• Which desktop did you use? Credit all of them
• Which IDE did you use? Credit all of them
• What kernel did you use? Credit all of them
• Which PC brand did you use? Credit all of them
• …

Everything is where it is today because you, like everyone else, are building on past work that allows you to do what you do. You’re not a special butterfly, and your contribution, while useful, does not require special attribution any more than every piece of hardware, software, or tool in life that allowed you to do it.

Oh, your weblog in which you post these things: Every post make sure to acknowledge every contributor to apache, wordpress, php and mysql.

This post is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of anyone in the Ubuntu community.

This is definitely becoming one of my favorite programs and the most useful I own. They just released beta 2, with a bunch of cool new features:

• Accelerated 3-D graphics on Windows XP guests — Workstation 6.5 virtual machines now work with applications that use DirectX 9 accelerated graphics with shaders up through Shader Model 2.0 on Windows XP guests. Hosts can be running Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Linux.
• Virtual machine streaming — You can now download a virtual machine from a Web server and power it on without waiting for the download to complete.
• Virtual Network Editor for Linux hosts — On Linux hosts, the new Virtual Network Editor now provides a graphical user interface for creating and configuring virtual networks.

The Virtual Network Editor is definitely my favorite feature, and makes this 10x better than Virtualbox in my opinion. That and OpenBSD actually works for me in VMWare workstation, and doesn’t in virtualbox, which scares me about virtualbox’s vm and what other bugs we might not be seeing. Combine VMWare workstation with ubuntu-vm-builder and you have a lot of power at your fingertips.

(Not paid by VMWare, I just know people have been waiting for those features to be released)

So last year about this time I made a post about AMD and how they need to release specs blah blah. Well they made good on it, and we should definitely support them over Nvidia.

Nvidia may not care about Linux users, but we happen to be the people making huge purchasing decisions, advising friends, neighbors, family etc on what type of hardware to buy. Tech Report has a review of the new Radeon: AMD’s Radeon HD 4870 graphics processor. Throw your support their way, this card is a winner.

So as a technology / operating system junkie, one OS I have never got to play with is Leopard. Solaris, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu, Windows 95-XP — used them all. I actually have absolutely no urge to see what Vista is about, but I am curious about OS X just because it’s something new / fun that I wouldn’t know yet. Unfortunately that curiosity, from my perspective, still costs $600 minimum to itch. I am aware the resale value is good, so if I hated it I could resell, but that would still be a pain.

I would love to try a mac, but logically I am not coming up with reasons why it is a good idea. Here is the values going into the equation:

• Hardware Compatibility: Currently Ubuntu works on all of my hardware out of the box, with 3d acceleration
• Coding: I create Symfony web apps (php based), and code in: python, perl, c / c++
• Virtual machines: I enjoy provisioning virtual machines. These would not *have* to run on the mac
• System management: I manage a massive amount of linux systems
• Dual head: I have multiple monitors in use at any given time. These can all be configured using xrandr
• UI Toolkit Nazi: All of my apps must use the same toolkit, I can’t stand UI elements being different (gtk only right now)
• OS License: I have 5 Ubuntu desktops between work / home, this sounds costly for OS X

I guess I am trying to figure out: What can I actually do better / easier on OS X? I know the big trend these days is TextMate, but once we get past that, what does Mac offer?

Today Hardy proposed was updated with a new kernel, which looks like it should close bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/240938 — I believe that means if you have an Intel Atom based PC it should boot about 3 seconds faster after this.

OpenSUSE 11 has been released today. This release features a fast package management system called Zypper, and Xrandr packages so they can do multihead config like Ubuntu. Installer is QT4 based and looks pretty slick. Their mirrors are pretty hit up right now, so I copied their non-live cd .torrent files:
openSUSE-11.0-DVD-x86_64.torrent
openSUSE-11.0-DVD-i386.torrent

This is a big week for Linux, and any press, whether Ubuntu or not, is great press. Firefox 3.0 final was relase, and Wine 1.0 final was also released.

This is one of the coolest features ever. The longest part is just downloading the files. To optimize that:


# sudo apt-get install apt-proxy


Once that is installed, run:


# sudo ubuntu-vm-builder kvm hardy --mirror http://127.0.0.1:9999/ubuntu


Wow. There is your vm. On my *laptop* this build took:

real 2m44.658s
user 0m34.270s
sys 0m24.262s


If you want to make a vmware image, and have open-vm-tools installed already, add this line to your apt-proxy’s sources.list:

# deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sharms/ubuntu hardy main


Then:

# apt-get update


Then run:

# sudo ubuntu-vm-builder vmserver hardy --mirror http://127.0.0.1:9999/ubuntu --addpkg open-vm-tools


If you haven’t checked out the videos on youtube, here it is. Great work, this really makes things easy to grasp and understand. Thanks a ton!