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Linux

10 Things That Make Ubuntu a Neophyte's Distribution

I don’t think of myself as a neophyte when it comes to Linux or Ubuntu, but the All About Linux Blog covers 10 things that make Ubuntu great for a new Linux user.

I won’t cover them here, as he does a great job of explaining them. And I whole-heartedly agree – Ubuntu is the only distribution I would recommend for someone new to Linux. Or even to a user who’s used Linux for a while. By far the best distribution I’ve ever used, and it’s still my day to day OS at home on my two primary machines.

HTPC Case

I had picked out the Silverstone LC16M (in black) case for my upcoming Home Theater PC.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn, via a blog on Planet GNOME yesterday, that the Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) on the Silverstone case is Linux compatible. Linux drivers, linked from Silverstone, take you here: to the Imon page that has integrated Lirc support for the remote, and the VFD.

Bonus!

Installing and Configuring Ubuntu on a Laptop

LinuxDevCenter.com: Installing and Configuring Ubuntu on a Laptop. Jeremy Jones of the Weather Channel purchases a Dell, and installs Ubuntu on it.

It’s a pretty good overview, and he runs into a couple quirky things that installing Linux on a laptop always seem to have, but no more than desktop installations now. Linux installs on laptops have come a long way in the last two years or so. While I had a similar experience with HP dv1000, it always comes down to the little things. The only big thing I’m still stuck on is suspend support.

Pretty good article if you’re looking to install Linux or Ubuntu on a laptop, especially a Dell.

GNOME News

The Linux & GNOME communities are all abuzz with the announcement yesterday of BetterDesktop.org and the Tango Desktop Project.

Better Desktop has published many usability videos of folks trying to do basic projects, and share those videos to make the user experience better. (Better Desktop is sponsored by Novell).

The Tango Project goal is:

While the look and feel of an application is determined by many components the initial work has been done on unifying the look of the individual icon sets.

Sponsored by Novell/Suse, it’s interesting to see them moving forward with this, as one of my constant complaints with SUSE is it’s KDE-centric icons. Yup, I’m a user not a developer, so I like my eye candy. I have high hopes, as the team involved crosses distributions, including Novell (Ximian), Red Hat, and Mozilla developers to just name a few.

Quake IV

I’m excited to see that Quake IV will have Linux support via a client patch within a few weeks (the game went gold last week).

You have to love iD Software for doing the right thing – whether it’s Linux clients or GPL’ing the source of their games when they are done with them.

Though the PC Gamer review score of 70% is a little worrisome.

But it’s Raven and iD, and I love both studios for their quality work.

Wireless Freedom

I upgraded Ubuntu on my laptop from Colony 3 to Preview 1. I’m finally wireless again – it’s something to sit on the couch in front of the TV and surf (and blog). I needed to get everything running for my trip this weekend so I can blog the LAN party and upload the pictures in real time to Flickr.

My wireless settings for Centrino weren’t working on Colony 3, but a quick apt-get upgrade and double checking my ESSID and WEP and everything is up and running again.

What a change from Hoary – getting Centrino support was a bear and then some. From upgrading the firmware and the drivers, this time it was just a matter of activating it.

Now I have to find the instructions somewhere on the net to get the pretty blue light working again when the wireless is on. 🙂