Category: English Blog

World IPv6 Day

Today – 8 June, 2011 is the World IPv6 Day! Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.
IPv6 Day

Any website owners and network operators can join this movement. More information on World IPv6 Day can be found here.

GNOME OS!

As it is mentioned in OMG! Ubuntu, Jon McCann – a GNOME pioneer, indicated that the future of GNOME can be turned in to an OS. He said,

The future of GNOME is as a Linux based OS. It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels, user space subsystem combinations, and core libraries. That said, there may be value in defining an application development platform or SDK that exposes higher level, more consistent, and coherent API. But that is a separate issue from how we write core GNOME components like the System Settings.

It is free software and people are free to port GNOME to any other architecture or try to exchange kernels or whatever. But that is silly for us to worry about.

Kernels just aren’t that interesting. Linux isn’t an OS. Now it is our job to try to build one – finally. Let’s do it.

I think the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly.

‘The Adventures of Tintin: The secret of the Unicorn’ — official trailer released!

We already know that, the posters for the movie ‘The Adventures of Tintin: The secret of the Unicorn’ has been officially unveiled. Now it’s time for another exciting news. The first official trailer has been released at the iTunes Movie Trailer site! Watch Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock, Thomson and Thompson in action in the following trailer!

Spiel­berg and Tintin – what a combination! And this time they both are back! I am waiting …

‘The Adventures of Tintin: The secret of the Unicorn’ – official posters unveiled!

I was waiting for a l-o-n-g time for the first poster of the ‘The Adventures of Tintin: The secret of the Unicorn’. And the wait is finally over! The first two official posters for the Peter Jackson/Steven Spielberg production of the Tintin movie has been unveiled. The script for the movie is actually based on three Tintin comics: ‘The Crab with the Golden Claws‘, ‘The Secret of the Unicorn‘ and it’s sequel ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure‘.

The movie is based on the above three Tintin comics

The movie is slated for a December 23th release in the USA. But the European release is set to take place in October/November, earlier than USA! Nevertheless, being a Tintin fan for a long long time, I can’t wait to watch the movie! By the way, following is the official posters of the movie (click the images to enlarge).

Courtesy: I came to know the news from Russell John.

Countdown Banner for Natty & Oneiric

Like the all previous releases, Ubuntu officially published the countdown banner for Natty Narwhal (11.04). For using the official countdown banners for Natty on your website, head to the countdown page to grab the embed code and paste the code into your website. Take a look at the banners below.

 

Well… if you are not satisfied with the official banners, you can also use the ‘unofficial’ banners created by Valentin. Grab the code from Valentin’s website to show the banner on your website. Take a look at the Valentin’s banner.

And if you are way too advance, want to showoff the countdown banner for Oneiric Ocelot (11.10), which has not started to form at all, then you are just in luck! Valentin also designed some banners for Oneiric Ocelet too. Take a look at the banners below and grab the code for your website!

R.I.P Shipit

Finally Shipit, Canonical‘s free CD delivering process has been declared to be discontinued for the individual request. It’s been a long time (since 2005) that Canonical used to put the operating system into the hands of developers and end users. The service stops with Ubuntu 11.04 later this month. Once the code (currently in beta) is finished, end users will no longer be able apply for a free CD via Canonical’s web site.

So why did Canonical take this decision? According to Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager:

… a few reasons. Firstly, CD distribution is not really as effective as it used to be, and it is expensive. These days, particularly with the availability of low cost hi-speed Internet growing across the world, more and more people are simply downloading the ISO images and burning them to a CD or installing from a USB stick. Canonical felt like it would make better sense to reduce the investment in snail-mail CD distribution and focus it more on LoCo Teams and use those savings to invest in other areas of the project.

What’ll be the next move to reach the end users? It seems that Canonical is now planning a free online trial for Ubuntu by utilizing the cloud which marketing manager Gerry Carr promised would be a “great first step for Windows users in particular” to wet their toes on the Linux desktop.

But, don’t be disheartened, Canonical has not abandoned the project completely. The Approved LoCo team will still get the CDs from Canonical. As Jono Bacon mentioned:

… we will continue to provide Approved LoCo teams with CDs that they can use for this advocacy work. As before, we encourage these CDs to be shared and re-used …

I got my first Ubuntu CD with this program and I am a proud Ubuntu user still now for that great project. To be frankly, I ordered the CD (EdgyEft, if I could remember correctly) just out of curiosity, because it was free. But I fell in love with Ubuntu so much that, now I download it via torrent. My personal experiences tell me that, lots of people just take the advantages of the ShipIt project, get the CD and actually do nothing with that CD. A huge loss of money actually. But nevertheless, ShipIt gave lots of bumps to increase the popularity of Ubuntu. I personally think, this project should be available exclusively for the Africa and the South Asia, where the term “broadband” is still a fairy tale for the majority computer users! People there still rely on the ShipIt for collect the latest release of Ubuntu. So abandoning ShipIt could be a sudden blow to them. On the other hand, now it is a great opportunity for the LoCo teams to get more active and earn the respect from Canonical to be eligible to get the CDs for distributing. So we can expect more activities from those LoCo teams particularly.

So… Goodbye ShipIt… Thanks a lot for introducing me a wonderful world of Ubuntu. I am missing you … already!

Can’t we get an easier & handy software installation process in Ubuntu?

After eying the title of this post, you must be astonished –  why on earth I am saying that Ubuntu needs an ‘easier‘ and ‘handy‘ software installation process! Software Installation in Ubuntu is already a breeze. All one have to do is just heading to the Ubuntu Software Center, find/choose what software one needs and then hit the install button. Or one can download the .deb package and double click it to install the program. The installed program is ready for one in no time. Anyone have to admit that it is really pretty easy, even easier than Windows (where you have to click lots of ‘Next’ buttons during the installation process).

This whole procedure is easy if the computer is connected to the internet. What if the computer is in offline? You’re probably wondering who doesn’t have internet now a days! Actually there are a lots of them. Such as in my country Bangladesh, internet is not available to the majority of the computer users. Even though the minority gets the benefit of internet, they don’t have blazing fast speed. An average home user gets 10 kbps to 15 kbps download speed. Which is quite a low speed for downloading. And obviously majority users are using Windows. As there is a scarcity of internet and proper download speed, people download  necessary software installer from some online computers and then use that downloaded installer to several other offline computers to install the program.

Now compare the scenario with an Ubuntu installed offline PC. Probably the easiest way to install a software in an offline Ubuntu computer is using the Keryx. It can keep track of the source ppa and dependencies, which is quite awesome. But still not easy enough to handle for a newbie. How? Well… firstly, using a third party software to install programs is a bit ‘scary‘. Secondly, if any one wants to share the downloaded file with others then it will be a problem. Suppose I have an offline Ubuntu computer and I want to install some program. So I take my flash drive (which have Keryx inside it) and connect it to a computer which has the internet connection. Then I download the desired program with the Keryx, and install it in my offline computer. It is easy. But what if I want to install that same downloaded program to another offline Ubuntu PC? There are sure chances that the dependencies in the second PC will be conflicted. Because it downloads the dependencies according to the first PC, so the second PC will suffer from dependency issues. And that is a nightmare for an average computer user. So as a result, previously mentioned “download with one computer and install in several different computers” theory does not work here smoothly.

To be frankly, the average users don’t give a damn about the dependencies. They don’t want to search the web to find out which libraries (and which versions) are required to install a specific program. They need the system to be ‘just worked’. I’ve seen many users who are very much afraid to use Ubuntu as they don’t have internet connection in there home. And they don’t want to jumble themselves with the dependency hell.

My point is to find out that whether it is possible to implement a more easier and handy software installation process for the offline computers (like MacOSX may be). All the dependencies will be packed in a single package for a certain program. (Please don’t be confused with the projects like portable linux apps. I am talking about a complete software installation.) The user just need to download that file and drag-n-drop that file (like MacOSX) to some places (may be in the Application lens) or double click the file (like the .deb files) for installation. Or may be we can figure out a smarter way to accomplish this. Thus it would be much more handy for the newbie users as well as the offline users.

I am not sure if I made my point clear. In recent days, Ubuntu emphasis on the looks-n-feels for the users. I think it is also important to simplify the software installation process for the newcomers as well as for all the offline users. To my view it is one of the important bottle neck. May be it is a dumb idea. Some of you may point your finger to the security issues. But I didn’t find any simpler idea than this for helping the offline users. Any thought on this? Any other idea?