A few days before Ubuntu 11.04 and my thoughts…

Well the release of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhale) is only a few days away and I just wanted to share my thoughts on it…

I had ran 11.04 Alpha 2 for a while back in February and it was no good. It was unstable and crashing, I couldn’t really view any folders because Nautilus (the file manager) would continually crash.

I am now running Natty again (this time Beta 2) and I am very happy with it so far. The interface is clean, snappy and overall a joy to use. Unity is overall very nicely implemented in Natty 11.04. Of course there are improvements that can be made but it is doing well for a first release.

The only negative thing I could say at this point is that it would be nice to have Natty boot faster. Ubuntu 11.04 booting isn’t slow like it was in older versions such as Ubuntu 9.04 but it doesn’t boot nearly as fast as 10.04 was. And it boots a lot faster than Fedora, I was shocked with Fedora 14′ slow boot time (55 seconds on my test PC). But still a faster boot would be nice.

And if you don’t like Unity, Ubuntu 11.04 will still have the option of using the “Classic Ubuntu Desktop”. This option may get removed in Ubuntu 11.10.

Ubuntu 11.04 is definitely a winner in my books so far, when it comes out in few days I definitely recommend making the switch!

LimeWire gone by court order, alternative FrostWire still here for us.

Well LimeWire, the world’s favorite P2P file sharing program, was given a court order on Oct 20, 2010 “to stop distributing the LimeWire software”. Fortunately for all the people who previously used LimeWire, there is a alternative call Frostwire. Frostwire is almost identical to the free version of LimeWire so it would take almost no new knowledge for a LimeWire user to use FrostWire. And Frostwire even includes some of the features of the LimeWire Pro version like Turbo-charged downloads.

So go ahead and get FrostWire is you like and you can be download in almost no time!

Frostwire has (package) downloads available for Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu/Debian, Android and a tarball for other Linux and Unix users.

How to install a DMG file on the Mac OS

A lot of users who are unfamiliar with how the Mac OS X and how installing software on it works will go and download some software for the Mac and then wonder “A .dmg, how do I install that?”

Well here is how one would go about installing a .dmg file on a Mac computer.

1. download the .dmg file, normally it should download to the Desktop or your Downloads folder.

2. Double-click the .dmg file that you have downloaded and a new icon with a similar name will appear.

3. A Finder window may open automatically, if it doesn’t double-click the new icon and it will open the Finder window.

4. Copy (or drag n drop) the new icon (the one that appeared when you opened the dmg) to your applications directory.

That is how simple it is to install new software on a Mac computer. You may additionally create an icon for the dock.

Internet Explorer 9 released, Microsoft wanting to purge IE 6 from web

Last week Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9. It introduced new support for HTML5, CSS3 & a new JavaScript engine. And it will not include support for Windows XP, you’d need Vista or Seven to run it.

And Microsoft wants to purge Internet Explorer 6 from the web. They have even started a website devoted completely to track the removal of IE 6 from PC’s around the world.

Currently (as of Feb 2011) 12% of the world still uses IE6. The highest usage area is Mainland China where 34.5% of the people use it. The reason is that is China a lot of people use pirated copies of Windows XP which they can buy for 50 US cents. Windows XP has IE6 and it is hard to get IE7 or IE8 without using a genuine copy of Windows.

Other areas where a significant amount of people still use IE6 are South Korea (24.8%), Taiwan (10.7%), Japan (10.3%), Vietnam (10%) and South Africa (8.4%).

Microsoft will have a difficult time ripping everyone away from IE6. And not releasing IE9 for Windows XP was a big mistake if they want people to stop using IE6 because now XP users cannot upgrade from IE6 to IE9. But they can still use Firefox which is better anyway.

Adobe Photoshop and Premier may be coming to Linux!

People have for a long time not switched to Linux because there is no Adobe Photoshop or Premier available for Linux, programs which have become pretty much standard in the Graphics & Multimedia industry. But this may soon all change…

A discussion and request for the Adobe Creative Suite (including Photoshop) on Linux has been going on here for quite some time.

Recently Adobe Employee Carey Burgess stated ”The request is now most definitely on the radar of our engineering teams, so it [Linux version] can be considered for future development.”

Adobe now would like anyone who wants Adobe Creative Suite Products such as Photoshop & Premier to be produced for Linux to fill out a Feature request form. He also stated that you must “submit a request [form] for each product that you would like to see developed for Linux. (If you want them all, then show it by submitting one for each product)”.

So go ahead fill out a few forms…just make sure you stress that you “want the product for Linux”.  :)

Name decided for Ubuntu 11.10 – Oneiric Ocelot

Ubuntu 11.10, scheduled for release in October 2011, will be code named Oneiric Ocelot. This will be the hardest to pronounce out of any of the Ubuntu code names.  In fact I still can’t pronounce it! But that doesn’t really matter so much as it is just a developer code name and most people will refer to it as Ubuntu 11.10.

I will post when more information on 11.10 is available.

Banshee in Ubuntu 11.04 to use 2 music stores.

It has been announced recently that Banshee (the default media player) will include 2 music stores in 11.04. Banshee will have both the Ubuntu One Music Store and the Amazon MP3 Store. 75 percent of profits will go to Ubuntu and 25 percent will go to GNOME. GNOME will also get 25 percent of profits from the Ubuntu One Music Store in Rythembox music player.

Sales from the music stores will help support Ubuntu, so when 11.04 comes out check out the music stores and see if there is any music you like.

March Poll: Unity or GNOME?

For this month’s Poll I would like to know what you think about Unity and GNOME Shell. Which do you think will be a better desktop environment?

Play Pac-Man for free online.

Now you can take on Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde for free as Pac-Man (one of the most famous video games of all time) is available online. As many people know, the game was built into Google’s homepage for the weekend of May 21–23, 2010 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the game, what many people don’t know is that it is still available as a Google easter egg. So try a game at google.com/pacman. enjoy

Firefox 4 to be released on March 22

Mozilla has announced that Firefox 4 will be released next week, on March 22. Firefox 4 will be faster than the current version (3.x) as well introducing an updated interface that is more similar to Google Chrome.  With all the new updates Firefox will be better than ever before and may even get some Chrome users to make the switch. If you can’t wait until next week you can download the release candidate from here on the Mozilla website. And keep an eye out because I will review Firefox 4 shortly after it’s release…