Ubuntu 10.04, currently in development, has hit the second alpha release. As a quite update, here are some of the features you can see in the Alpha 2 release of Ubuntu 10.04. A new graphical boot screen manager called ‘Plymouth’ which is to replace the currently used xsplash and usplash boot screen systems. The user menu and [...]

It turns out that Avatar, the hugely successful science fiction epic film from James Cameron, was rendered using a huge Ubuntu rendering server farm, at Weta Digital. The Weta Digital server farm or ‘rendering wall’, as they call it, has a disk array capable of storing roughly 2 petabytes of data in total. The individual servers are [...]

Social media and social networking are huge now-a-days, with Twitter, Facebook and the like being hugely successful at keeping friends and family in touch. Now only that, but social networks are huge for charities, with many causes being supported and heavily promoted via social networking. Corporations and business use social networking too to promote their products and [...]

So, you’ve recently downloaded an ISO disc image in Ubuntu and want a quick and easy method to mount it as a drive? Simple. Locate the file within your file browser and give it a right-click, then from the pop-up menu click ‘Open with Archive Mounter’. Archive Mounter is a tool which mounts several types [...]

What is open-source software? Open-source software is software which is under a special type of license in which the source code, which is usually copyrighted, is instead open to all. Specifically, this refers to code which meets the Open Source Definition for code licensing or is released to the public domain, and thus available without [...]

The first alpha version of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, which will be known as Ubuntu 10.04 LTS  (long-term support) upon release, is now available for download. Want to get it immediately? See the Ubuntu Lucid Lynx alpha download links below. 32-bit Desktop Edition – x86 Desktop edition of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Alpha 1 64-bit Desktop Edition [...]

I recently discovered Ubuntu has home directory permissions default to world readable. In other words, any unprivileged user, including guests users, are able to access and read the home directory data for any other user. For those who store sensitive information on a multi-user computer, this can be a significant security problem or at least [...]

Ubuntu 9.04, known during development as Jaunty Jackalope, features a major new notifications system known as ‘notify-osd’. The new notifications are graphically very nice and appealing, however some features are not necessarily desirable to everyone. I came across certain issues with the new notifications system and have made some modifications which I would like to [...]

I recently received the an e-mail from Scott James Remnant on behalf of the Ubuntu Technical Board, regarding their Position on Mono. Here is an extract. “…the Ubuntu Technical Board sees no reason to exclude Mono or applications based upon it from the archive, or from the default installation set. Since the Mono stack is [...]

For those who haven’t heard, Ubuntu’s One Hundred Paper Cuts is an initiative of sorts, to fix 100 minor usability bugs in Ubuntu (and Kubuntu). It is being working through over a period of 10 weeks with 10 bugs scheduled to be fixed in each one week long milestone. These ‘paper cuts’ are described as [...]