The Linux distribution Ubuntu has received a major boost today with the announcement that the major PC manufacturer Dell is to provide PCs that come with Ubuntu installed. It will be interesting to see just how successful they are. The good thing is that consumers now have more choice when buying a PC. Read more here.
One of the things hampering the adoption of Linux on the desktop, in my opinion, is the fact the number of distributions just seems to be getting bigger and bigger. So, it makes a nice change to report that 2 distributions - Linspire and Ubuntu are to work more closely together (read more). Linspire is going to rebase on Ubuntu rather than Debian and Ubuntu is to gain the Click and Run technology to make installing/uninstalling applications and more importantly proprietary codecs simpler. Hopefully we will see some more consolidation of desktop focused Linux distributions in the future.
Keith Mantell (a fellow IBM colleague) recently posted on his blog about GoboLinux which has taken a completely new look at the Linux filesystem structure. The structure they use has sensible directory names with each installed program being placed into a directory of the form Program/Program Name/Version (the existing Linux filesystem is also retained for compatibility but this can be hidden from view using a kernel extension called GoboHide.). This does sound like an interesting concept and definitely something that would help the uptake of Linux on the desktop. The existing Linux filesystem directory structure, although it seems to make technical sense is not as user friendly as it could be. It will be interesting to see whether this idea takes off.
Last week while I was away I thought that rather than miss the Catherine Tate show I’d watch it online on the BBC’s web site. Unfortunately, even though I have Real Player 10 installed on Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux v4) this just wouldn’t work. Has anyone else managed to get this to work?
As a Linux user I have come to rely on GIMP as my image manipulation tool. It reminds me quite a lot of Adobe PhotoShop in that it can do all manner of things, and in the hands of an expert just about anything, but often I find it takes a while to find out how to do relatively simple things. Here are some tips I have recently discovered while working on some images for a presentation:
Screen captures
For presentations I often take screen captures and I do this using GIMP. Simply go to File>Acquire>Screen shot which allows you to grab a window, the entire screen and even chose to do it after a delay (useful if you need to manipulate the window in some way first). Once the screen capture has been acquired it is opened in GIMP for you to manipulate.
Cropping images
I have often spent time trying to crop just a small piece out of a screen capture without the necessary whitespace around it. GIMP has an option that will remove such whitespace for you which I discovered the other day. Simply choose the rectangle selction 
tool and tick the box to Auto Shrink Selection. I find this really useful.
GIMP also allows you to crop a specific sized piece out of an image (can be useful if you are restricted to a certain size). Again using the rectangle selection tool, open the Free Select drop down box and choose Fixed Size (there is an option for Fixed Aspect Ratio too but I haven’t had call to use this yet). This allows you to then specify the dimensions of the piece you wish to cut out.
By the way GIMP is not just for Linux, you can also download it for Windows here.
My home printer is an Epson Stylus D68 which I have had for about 6 months. I print to it from Red Hat Linux (RHEL4) using the Gutenprint (v5.00-rc2) drivers and most commonly print 1 page forms (Open Office documents) for my wife’s business. These have a simple single colour logo (about 1.5cm square) in all 4 corners and probably about 1/2 of the page is filled with text and form boxes. I have just printed 6 forms and it has taken about 10 minutes to do so. This seems like an absolute age to me, especially when the printer documentation talks about multiple pages per minute even on colour. Anyone got any tips on how I can speed this up (other than the obvious of printing in black and white)?
I have recently installed Ubuntu (described on their site as Linux for human beings - very apt!) on my wife’s laptop and I must admit I have been quite impressed so far. The experience starts with the Live CD (allows you to run Ubuntu from CD without installing it) which I found really useful for getting a feel for the operating system itself. I then clicked on the desktop icon to install it and found the whole installation process pretty simple (probably easier than installaing Windows!).
Everything was going fine until I got to networking. After much investigation and taking apart (thanks Chris A) we came to the conclusion that the ethernet port on the network card was broken (why can’t it just say that!). This was confirmed when I asked my sister (the laptop’s previous owner) how she used to connect to the internet and she replied “I used to have some little card that I slotted in the side as the network thingy at the back wouldn’t work”. So off to eBay I went and got a Belkin wireless PCMCIA network card (see earlier post).
When this arrived I plugged it in and much to my suprise it was recognised by Ubuntu and the drivers installed….but the promise was short lived when I discovered it couldn’t connect. It turns out a firmware upgrade and a couple of little tweaks to your /etc/network/interfaces file are required (if you are having the same problem check out the Ubuntu forums here for the solution).
Once this was working I set about configuring it for our use. Firefox and Open Office are installed so the only essential application missing was Thunderbird which I easily downloaded from the Ubuntu repositories using the Add/Remove option. I was then asked in a very “Windows update” mode if I wanted to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu packages which I did. This took some time but worked fine.
Ubuntu definitely seems to be a big step in the right direction for Linux on the desktop. It is very user friendly and I think a Windows user with fairly little experience would be able to install, configure and use it for basic day-to-day tasks without much of a problem, provided nothing went wrong. When things do (it’s often down to hardware support) you still need to drop down to the command line to run some fairly hardcore Linux commands to get things working. Hopefully as more people use Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions) more hardware manufacturers will start either open sourcing their drivers or contributing to open source driver projects to help improve the hardware support. This will be good news for the manufacturers (more customers) and good news for the consumer (more choice). Only then will Linux really start competing with Windows as a desktop platform. Keep up the good work Ubuntu.