Fedora 8 Released

Well done to the chaps at Redhat for releasing Fedora 8!

OLPC and now OSCPC…

Allrighty then, you might think…what is this guy on about? Easy…OLPC = One Laptop Per Child, and guess what: OSCPC = One SimCity Per Child! Yes, Electronic Arts (EA) has jumped on the band wagon with the One Laptop Per Child project and donated the original Sim City with every OLPC that goes out into the world.

Well, dang man…that is a mighty fine gesture! Well done EA….let’s face it….having a laptop without games can be boring at times!

Spread the Ubuntu-Tutorial word!

Following a post from Christer Edwards, let’s help him and the Ubuntu community in general, to spread the word for a exiting website that can give a lot of help and insight to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Tutorials is the website to visit for those that are experienced and those that are not. Give it a try! …and thanks Chris for the effort

The complexities of live…or O/S’s

Man that might seem to most as a very deep title, but it isn’t realy…Complexities…man all of us have a heck of a lot of them in life….mine just starts with work and ends up with a very uncomplicated Ubuntu 7.10 Beta install on my HP notebook!

Some background: I started a new work about 6 weeks ago and man, do these chaps keep me busy! I haven’t been able to do all my Ubuntu community stuff and I wasn’t happy with that, but let me set this straight! To cut to the chase, they gave me an HP notebook with the O/S I passionately dislike, Windows XP!

I wasn’t impressed, to say the least, but I had to stomach it because of some policies that were in place at the time. I battled through the couple of weeks being so used to Ubuntu and all it’s little features I loved and trying to replicate this on a Windows platform. What a utter waste of time

I eventually got an edge to get my notebook loaded with Ubuntu! The Windows side had some serious problems with a Xerox printer driver in that when you printed large documents, the driver would blue screen Windows and reboot, guess what….Ubuntu didn’t have this problem

The IT chaps were impressed to say the least and I could install Ubuntu! Yeehaw!!! I have to give all you chaps at Canonical and all the other developers a pat on the back. So far 7.10 Beta is great. I had minor niggles, but damm, this is way better than Windows XP….

Happiness is…

Just watched a dvd called Pursuit of Happiness…wonder if they actually meant in pursuit of the best O/S?

Happiness is…Ubuntu!

Hardy Heron

As you all know by now, the next release of Ubuntu, will be Hardy Heron! Wow, I need to give a medal to the people that come up with these names….:) Well, with that said, some features that need to be mentioned, if they haven’t already been mentioned, is that:

• It will come with Long Term Support (LTS),
• Supported with security updates for five years on the server and three years on the desktop.

This is just to mention a few, but if you have any more ideas for new features that should be included in the next release goto to launchpad and add them! You never know, they might be included!

…and now the wait begins…

Playing Arcade Games on Ubuntu…

As I liked playing arcade games, and still do, I thought this link would be of interest for those of us that miss playing arcade games. What’s more, the author of this article explains how you could play arcade games on Ubuntu!

Go ahead, knock yourself out and play some good oldies for a couple of hours

*buntu Translators…

Translators…mmm…what is this all about and what does this have to do with all the flavors of Ubuntu? Well, it has a lot to do with them! There is many languages out in the world and it would be a huge benefit to have *buntu translated into each language there is in the world.

Huge benefit for who? For the users, for those who might not have a full grasp on language which is not their own. If you can speak in your mother tongue then you can translate. Even with the smallest of things, proof reading, spell checking, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

If you can face the challenge and help out the translators or want to become a translator, goto the Launchpad Translation Page, select your language of choice and start translating.

Skype & Windows!

I had a bit of a laugh when I read this article that the new patch for Windows caused the Skype network to fall on it’s face due to the huge amounts re-logins from the Windows clients…. What a joke, Windows seems to kill everything descent!

And for another joke, but it’s a reality most of us will say, some users are seeing the light and starting to turn from the dark side of the force, Windows, to the better side of the force, Linux in this article. The writer hails Windows Vista as second rate! Well, I’ve, and many others like me, known this ever since Windows started up.

Well, just a little humor for the day I’d thought to share with you

Ubuntu Servers Hacked?

Well, well….I see the headlines on DIGG and nearly every other news feed that I look at and I wonder: Aren’t these people over reacting! Hacked..mmm…I don’t know. It’s more like people using known security holes / exploits on the five community maintained Ubuntu servers and getting lucky, than sitting behind a pc/laptop and hacking away for hours….

All-in-all it’s a lesson for us / the community that maintain these servers to be a bit more careful and vigilant. Let’s setup regular maintenance slots/times where we:

• Update the servers with the latest security patches,
• Do whatever maintenance items are required eg. the normal checks like: disk space, memory…,
• Check all the relevant logs, not to mentioned the importance of the security/auth logs,

A suggestion for the powers that be: Why don’t we nominate a person(s) per server as the dedicated sysadmin and give them the responsibility to maintain the server(s)?

To our admins and chaps that are hard at work resolving this by moving the servers to more secure location(s) and doing the relevant updates, thanks-a-mil for your efforts!