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Ubuntu has certainly proven not to be an option for production level servers

The Wikipedia guys would probably disagree.

this crazy "usability comes from crippling" approach

Shared by the Canonical design team. They're planning to get rid of the ability to quit applications. http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/quit/

I thought Red Hat and Canonical weren't paying this $0.02 for Fedora and Ubuntu because it went against their licensing policy. When did this change?

Ubuntu Advantage already includes patent licensing and indemnification from Canonical. They distribute MP3, H.264, and other patented technoliges from their repositories.

Red Hat also has a framework for the inclusion of patented technologies in RHEL..

I'm not saying Canonical and Red Hat include H.264 by default today with their distributions, but they easily can in the future for paying cusotmers. They currently skirt the issue by distributing codecs and other clearly patented stuff from restricted repositories and requiring manual steps to install, but that can change. We're talking a very minor percentage of the video eyeballs using one of these OS in any case.

You could say that without the profit motive, we'd never get any decent operating systems, and to that I would answer "Ubuntu".

Come again?

I'd rather recommend Kubuntu 10.04 (Long term release). I admit that it didn't work flawlessly out of the box. Also Canonical offers desktop support for 88.42£/year. And once your kids grow up they'll be able to fix your computer for free anyway ;)

Something like this is a store. A repository has no infrastructure to do access or license control, it's just an open mirror. Anyway, you can see by the glorious selection in Ubuntu's store how popular the idea is...

Why does the summary not link the actual blog post at canonical.com instead of some ad-encumbered summary?

Thanks a lot.

My slashdot "workflow":

1. Read the headline
2. Skip the summary
3. Look for a comment that references the real source of information or has a link to a mirror of the slashdotted article (The article linked in the summary is usually either a summary split on multiple pages with lots of adds or readworthy but slashdotted)
4. Read the fine article
5. Go back to slashdot, read the comments and try to add some value

PS: Sorry for the meta discussion. I still have to read the article for this story.

Why does the summary not link the actual blog post at canonical.com instead of some ad-encumbered summary?

Summaries have three purposes. First, a good executive summary adds context that may not have been in the article. Second, a good executive summary gets the point across so that readers don't get attacked by a tl;dr. Third, a well-known online encyclopedia is likely to care more about a press release if the mainstream news media have reported on it.

Why does the summary not link the actual blog post at canonical.com instead of some ad-encumbered summary?

If you do indeed want to watch legally obtained DVD's on a linux laptop, you won't be using DeCSS. DeCSS is illegal software according to the US courts.

Wrong: http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=243

Many pieces of GNOME software live on Launchpad and are not strictly part of GNOME upstream (Simple Scan, for instance).

That's the problem: Canonical is not doing the hard work to get what little they do write upstream. Stuff that is not upstream is just balkanized, fractured, non-maintainable code. It doesn't provide any benefit to the rest of the GNU/Linux community, i.e. the people that write all the rest of the code and upstream it so that Canonical can exist in the first place. Usability research is useful, but when I click your link I see one study (on Empathy) and further clicking around on the Canonical Design team site reveals that, as so much of Canonical appears to be, it's all about marketing. Seriously: ONE study and then three guides devoted to "guidelines to support the brand documentation and help create consistent brand usage."?

The census is correct in implying that Canonical has not as many modules in upstream GNOME repositories, however that is only half the story. The census counts all commits since the beginning of the project, so Red Hat has a 6-year head start. Not to mention that Red Hat is a much bigger company than Canonical.

Canonical provides a lot of things of value to GNOME and the free software community in general. The (recently established) Canonical Design Team produces research on software usability, the value of which is not easily quantifiable. Many pieces of GNOME software live on Launchpad and are not strictly part of GNOME upstream (Simple Scan, for instance). This might change if (or when) these modules are accepted in GNOME proper.

To claim that Canonical is freeloading on other companies' contributions is a bit of myopic, in my opinion. How many upstream bug reports came from Ubuntu users?

Give me a cool central control panel and have each browser be able to be hooked into it and it would be amazing.

It's called Landscape.

Comments like this (FTFA): " I no longer want to see comments promoting other Operating Systems" trigger my orneriness response.

It's a hospital, not a software store. What operating system the employees chose to advocate has nothing to do with the operation of the place. If I worked there, I think I'd be likely to start carrying my lunch in one of these: http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=123
and my coffee cup would be one of these: http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=203

Comments like this (FTFA): " I no longer want to see comments promoting other Operating Systems" trigger my orneriness response.

It's a hospital, not a software store. What operating system the employees chose to advocate has nothing to do with the operation of the place. If I worked there, I think I'd be likely to start carrying my lunch in one of these: http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=123
and my coffee cup would be one of these: http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=203

http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr

I have one and I have to say I'm very happy with it (Asus 1000HA, Atom based). It came with XP and now dual-boots Linux (Ubuntu Netbook Remix). I'm happy with the performance in both operating systems as far as the basics go, but there are times I wish it had a bit more power to it. It runs Open Office just fine as well as Firefox, Python, and a few other apps I use regularly. I even tried putting Lord of the Rings Online on it and it worked... with about 3 FPS.

UNR: http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr

And don't forget Ubuntu Netbook Remix

http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr

Let me know if you figure out the sizing on that shirt. There's a shirt size chart http://shop.canonical.com/popup_sizes.php?pID=32 which, as you can see, doesn't list the same sort of sizes. That shirt comes in XS, S, M, L, XL and the size chart lists ladies S/M, M/L, and XL. What??

Yep. Brainstorm: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

And I think I might just buy one of these: http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=440

When I was setting up our DVCS at work bzr was actually my last choice. We wanted to setup our repository in a SVN like fashion where developers had to update before committing on the server. This gave us the collaboration benefits of SVN while getting the great merging benefits of DVCS. A real plus when working in an office environment where pushing and pulling is a total nightmare because other employees don't strictly follow how to use the tools.

When I asked in the git irc channel how to do this and they called me stupid. When I asked in the hg channel they said I didn't understand DVCS and that I should go back to svn. When I asked in the bzr channel however the people were nice, helpful and linked me directly to information on their wiki on how to setup my repo.

This is the reason bzr is a winner in my opinion. I don't care if git is 1 second faster, i don't care if you can edit a commit from 40 revisions ago. If I can't even figure out how to do what I want to do because the community is too busy calling everyone stupid then I'm going to use something else. Same goes for hg, if you say that hg doesn't work that way and I misunderstand how DVCS works then I am going to go else where.

Lucky for me the bzr community sees this as a feature rather then mocking its users for it's tools own deficiencies.
http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/migration/en/why-switch-to-bazaar.html#centralized-workflow

Why Mercurial?

Why Switch to Bazaar?

I started using emacs about 7 years ago, at which point the jokes about its feature creep ("nice OS, just needs a good editor," etc.) were already probably 20 years old. A few years ago I switched to mg, which is an emacs clone that is much more lightweight. The advantage of mg is that it loads immediately, and it has all the features I actually need. So maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but -- what is currently happening in emacs development? New features? Better performance? Bug fixes? Polishing the brasswork? I'm honestly curious why it can't just go into the same kind of masterpiece-maintenance mode as some of Knuth's projects like Tex.

As far as bazaar, my impression is that it has had a much lower profile than git, and that its main selling point seems to be that it's supposed to be easier to use than git. Here is bazaar's explanation of why they think bazaar is good. Here is a similar sales job for git. Bazaar is used by ubuntu, sponsored by Canonical, and written in Python. You can get free bazaar-based hosting on Launchpad. Personally I've been happy with git.

Why would it be a guy's name? Haven't you heard of female CEOs?

Also, a Canonical blog post regarding the change says she's American.

We Linux is not so easy, and believe it or not,

Perhaps these links will be of help to you then. You seem to not be up-to-date.

• Red Hat Network/Satellite
• Novell's Endpoint Management
• Canonical's Landscape

Red Hat and Novell have quite a bit to help manage your Linux (and Windows, in Novell's case) infrastructure; this is only a quick sampling. If you're truly interested in it, you'll need to contact their representatives and have a dog-n-pony show, like the Microsoft ones you've attended.

The problem with this is that due to the exclusivity of linux, linux training is also exclusive, and thus costs are high.

[Citation needed]
You even have Canonical's desktop training for not that much. Get one of your teachers trained and let herself become the teacher.

Why not buy them from Canonical? You get 5 discs for about half the price Amazon is asking for 8.10.

I didn't even know they had a store until I saw this article.

It looks pretty good. There's a bunch of stuff, including a nice polo, a Karmic Koala t-shirt, as well as CDs, stickers, etc, etc.

The CDs are only $1.50 each, so I won't mind buying them if I have to.

I didn't even know they had a store until I saw this article.

It looks pretty good. There's a bunch of stuff, including a nice polo, a Karmic Koala t-shirt, as well as CDs, stickers, etc, etc.

The CDs are only $1.50 each, so I won't mind buying them if I have to.

I didn't even know they had a store until I saw this article.

It looks pretty good. There's a bunch of stuff, including a nice polo, a Karmic Koala t-shirt, as well as CDs, stickers, etc, etc.

The CDs are only $1.50 each, so I won't mind buying them if I have to.

I didn't even know they had a store until I saw this article.

It looks pretty good. There's a bunch of stuff, including a nice polo, a Karmic Koala t-shirt, as well as CDs, stickers, etc, etc.

The CDs are only $1.50 each, so I won't mind buying them if I have to.

I didn't even know they had a store until I saw this article.

It looks pretty good. There's a bunch of stuff, including a nice polo, a Karmic Koala t-shirt, as well as CDs, stickers, etc, etc.

The CDs are only $1.50 each, so I won't mind buying them if I have to.

Landscape

Would that be Canonical's Landscape service you are after?

I went to IBM's site, downloaded it and as I was trying to install it, dpkg (or frontend) told me a newer version was available in the repo. Sure enough:

~$ sudo aptitude install symphony
[sudo] password for (me):
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
    symphony
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 7 not upgraded.
Need to get 189MB of archives. After unpacking 455MB will be used.
Writing extended state information... Done
Get:1 http://archive.canonical.com/ jaunty/partner symphony 1.3-1jaunty1 [189MB]

Cool!

It's free to download on the internets!

So's Linux, but people still pay for it.

You've just described Ubuntu Netbook Remix. By default, it provides a netbook interface, but it's a trivial change to switch the a normal desktop. It's a standard Ubuntu install under that.

So does Linux fucktard.

http://www.canonical.com/services/support

Job done http://shop.canonical.com/product_info.php?products_id=513

I wouldn't be very suprised to see a commercial audio/video player, complete with MP3 licensing and official DVD support.

Canonical sells the Fluendo codec pack, as well as PowerDVD Linux. These would actually be great bundling options for Dell, as one of the most common complaints about a new Ubuntu install is "I can't play any mp3/divx/dvd/...". The open source codecs are installed almost automatically in the latest Ubuntu releases, but if you don't have access to the internet at that time, you're screwed...

I wouldn't be very suprised to see a commercial audio/video player, complete with MP3 licensing and official DVD support.

Canonical sells the Fluendo codec pack, as well as PowerDVD Linux. These would actually be great bundling options for Dell, as one of the most common complaints about a new Ubuntu install is "I can't play any mp3/divx/dvd/...". The open source codecs are installed almost automatically in the latest Ubuntu releases, but if you don't have access to the internet at that time, you're screwed...

This may help you: http://www.canonical.com/projects/landscape

The corporate product is http://www.canonical.com/projects/landscapeLandscape

When trying to play a DVD on my girlfriend's brand new Ubuntu build it was necessary to download 3 different media applications (settled on VLC, but even that had a fatal bug sometimes) and sift for a while through google just to install the correct libs.

Or, you could have done it the Windows way: buy proprietary DVD-playing software, install that, done.

http://shop.canonical.com/

Click on "Software" and there it is: PowerDVD.

She doesn't use the computer for too much but shouldn't the bare basics work immediately?

I don't think Windows XP comes with a DVD player pre-installed by default. If you buy a new Compaq or Dell or something it probably does have a DVD player, but nobody seems to be selling Ubuntu pre-installed with PowerDVD. Yet.

If Linux is trying to get new users, shouldn't the focus be on effectively presenting the OS to new users?

Who do you mean by "Linux" here? The Ubuntu guys are doing one thing, the Fedora guys are doing something else, etc.

But here's what a new Ubuntu user should be reading:

http://www.ubuntuguide.org/

I found Ubuntu Guide through Google. There are resources out there.

Yes, the world of Linux, even Ubuntu Linux, is not yet a shiny gleaming perfect place. But I know several people who are far less geeky than me, and they are perfectly happy using Ubuntu. The best thing is for a geek to set everything up, and then the user can just use the system.

I always tell people: "There will be problems. There are always problems. But, with Linux, they are different problems than you get in Windows... and I like Linux's problems better. The problems in Windows tend to be things like 'My machine has spyware now and it stopped working!' The problems in Linux tend to be 'I don't know how to get it to do what I want', but once you solve the Linux problems they tend to stay solved."

That's not a tidy message you could have Jerry Seinfeld deliver in a few seconds; I guess that's why I'm not in marketing.

steveha

arrogance of some loudmouthed Linux fans

There will allways be arrogant people on forums. I have found that Windows fanboys shows by far the worst combination of cluelessness and arrogance. YMMV.

I ran into a library hell and there just didn't seem any way to resolve the dependancies

An easy way to resolve library dependency problems are to simply compile the libraries yourself. With autoconfig it should be a matter of configure --prefix=/usr/local; make; make install. Additionally, most distributions now ship compatibility packages.

So my EeePC doesn't get used very much lately, and I am thinking of just putting an nlited WinXP on it.

As other posters have suggested, the Ubuntu netbook remix looks promising.

Have a look at Ubuntu Netbook Remix which is a new UI developed by Canonical especially for netbooks.

I first saw this a few weeks ago while attending a computer training class. One of my classmates had it, and I was quite impressed.

I also just picked up one of these D150 Acers and I love it. Ubuntu makes a distro with very good hardware support as well as Atom optimizations called Ubuntu Netbook Remix and it's great. http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr

I've been playing with the nightly build of Ubuntu Netbook Remix (a distro that's optimized for netbooks with the Intel Atom processors, and based on Ubuntu 9.04) and I have to say that it's great if you are a Linux user. All of the hardware is supported at the moment except for the built in mic (the mic jack works). http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr

The statistic about 4x return rates was for MSI Wind only. This could be due to problems with SUSE on their particular hardware configuration. Conversely, Dell claims that their return rates for Windows and Linux are about the same. http://blog.laptopmag.com/one-third-of-dell-inspiron-mini-9s-sold-run-linux

Also Canonical claims that "Continually repeating that we 'confirmed' a 4x return over XP when we did nothing of the sort is really not worthy of a great company like Microsoft." http://blog.canonical.com/?p=151

Installed this on my brother's MSI Wind u100 last weekend.

He absolutely loves it. It won't make you more manly, but it is a damn fine OS for the u100.