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https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixBasicSetupHowto https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixDovecotSASL Don't be scared at the mass of information. Just read alittle bit everyday for a couple of weeks and soon you will be a master

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Postfix https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixBasicSetupHowto https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixDovecotSASL Don't be scared at the mass of information. Just read alittle bit everyday for a couple of weeks and soon you will be a master

Indeed. https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2008-September/026559.html

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD

Now if someone uploaded Windows 7, *THAT* would be a leak. But for anything else than that, why can't we call it what it is?

W1nd0z3 7 4v4il4bl3 h3r3!!!! 1 m s00000 l33777!!!!!!

In the long term, what happens if all software ends up being free?

In the present, all software is free http://www.ubuntu.com/ http://thepiratebay.org/

Wouldn't there cease to be many programming jobs where there once were?

No... Most software would still be developed in-house. What will cease is companies who can make a bloated program that is badly written and gain millions for it.

Wouldn't that lead to lower paying programming jobs in turn leading to less cs graduates and lower quality software?

No. It would only serve to increase the quality of code as the fact that it compiles does not mean that it is good code. Open source software has no secrets, the quality would go up because anyone could fix it.

I know some companies do alright supporting products they've written and give away freely, but I can't see that extending to applications beyond some mission critical business system type things.

Ever heard of the Geek Squad? They make a fortune supporting products that they never even written and most are trivial applications (Windows, iTunes, etc)

I've long wondered things such as this. OSS sounds great at a glance, but I really have a poor concept of where it will go in the long run. I like writing software, but I also like being able to pay my bills.

Where do you work now? Chances are, that company will still develop applications in house, not to mention that you would be in charge of changing various OSS programs to better fit the needs of the company.

It's for rpm based commercial distros. Debian doesn't fit, and the "alien" program doesn't work on everything. Since I use Debian on servers and Debian-derived on desktop, I don't care about the LSB, I care more about the standards of the Debian project.

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianLsb

http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/lsb-base

It isn't really about the packages at all. It is more about Linux becoming "desktop agnostic". It is about how to have a library (call it the "lsb" library if you will) such that a program written to call that library can access standard elements of the desktop, such as the taskbar, the clipboard and the file open/save dialogs.

It is all about making it easier for developers to write an application for the Linux desktop that will work regardles of what desktop and what distribution the user has installed.

If you actually install any application written to this standard on your Debian system, then apt will automatically install the Debian lsb package for you as a dependency. So you don't have to "worry" about it at all, it will "just work".

How one packages such a cross-distribution program for desktop Linux is another isue. There are solutions for cross-distribution packages, but really it is simpler for the application provider to simply write the application to lsb standards, and then make an .rpm package **AND** a .deb package (from the same source) for binary distribution purposes.

'Cos, y'know, it's not like you can just install VLC from Synaptic.

(VLC is also my favourite media and DVD player on Mac.)

Ubuntu is bloated and doesn't support ARM

Au contraire:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2097004728.html

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MobileAndEmbedded/ARM-EL-port

I was going to reply suggesting something like an extended version of Windows XP Embedded when I noticed MS claims to be coming out with a new OS that seems like it may fit the bill well (assuming it doesn't end up bloated).

Personally I picked up a Linux Acer One and through Ubuntu (will probably switch to Gentoo now that I have a distcc build server set up) on it and am very pleased, but I can definitely understand how someone comfortable and familiar with Windows could want a net book with features like a solid state drive and not want Linux.

You recall fairly well. According to the abrowser web site it does indeed offer the FireFox branding, but it's not under the control of the Mozilla Foundation in the way I suggested, and there is no mention about checking the authenticity of the files at branding installation time. imho that is essential from Mozilla's point of view, because it is vital, legally, that they do not allow modified versions, or as commercial law sees it, unauthorised 'knock-offs' to carry the brand. I think my suggestion would satisfy both sides of the argument.

Hang on. Why tag this "semantics?" You taggers realize that GPL stands for "General Public License." Right?

All software, except public domain software (AFAIK), is distributed under some sort of license. It isn't a semantic issue at all. People here are holding Mozilla to a "no license" standard that simply doesn't exist.

Is all this flak simply because Mozilla finds the GPL too generic and inadequate to protect their trademark and liability concerns? Then use Iceweasel or the abrowser branding. Problem solved.

This is a truly trivial matter for such an uproar, and if Mozilla is going to build a brand that competes with IE 8, they need to defend and maintain that brand. You can't play by a different set of rules than the rest of the business world and survive. You play by the rules of engagement, and the laws, of the countries your operate in, or you get steamrolled.

This is not "semantics." This is trademark law, and MS lawyers don't take prisoners.

--
Toro

Vote against this nonsense in Ubuntu Brainstorm: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5372/

I've had problems using Eclipse on Ubuntu before, the problems you had with Eclipse may be related.

1. Don't use the repositories for Eclipse. Download the linux version directly from the eclipse website, and run it.
2. Eclipse has problems with the default gcj jvm for Ubuntu. Solution here

I suggest giving Eclipse another look. Download the latest ganymede, fix the jvm, add http://pydev.sourceforge.net/updates/ to your update sites.

They waited until an inconvenient time to improve the chances that Ubuntu would agree to their demands rather than changing the browser.

There are several Brainstorm ideas that propose a way of dealing with the EULA for the upcoming Intrepid Ibex release:

• Rebrand Firefox, ship it as Iceweasel. Iceweasel is the rebranded version of the Firefox browser, meaning it is 100% compatible with Firefox. The Debian people have been using it for years without problems.
• Ditch Firefox, ship Epiphany. Replace Firefox completely by shipping Epiphany, which is the web browser for the GNOME desktop environment.
• Do nothing. Users will be forced to accept the Mozilla EULA.

So far, the Iceweasel option seems to be the most popular by a large margin.

They waited until an inconvenient time to improve the chances that Ubuntu would agree to their demands rather than changing the browser.

There are several Brainstorm ideas that propose a way of dealing with the EULA for the upcoming Intrepid Ibex release:

• Rebrand Firefox, ship it as Iceweasel. Iceweasel is the rebranded version of the Firefox browser, meaning it is 100% compatible with Firefox. The Debian people have been using it for years without problems.
• Ditch Firefox, ship Epiphany. Replace Firefox completely by shipping Epiphany, which is the web browser for the GNOME desktop environment.
• Do nothing. Users will be forced to accept the Mozilla EULA.

So far, the Iceweasel option seems to be the most popular by a large margin.

They waited until an inconvenient time to improve the chances that Ubuntu would agree to their demands rather than changing the browser.

There are several Brainstorm ideas that propose a way of dealing with the EULA for the upcoming Intrepid Ibex release:

• Rebrand Firefox, ship it as Iceweasel. Iceweasel is the rebranded version of the Firefox browser, meaning it is 100% compatible with Firefox. The Debian people have been using it for years without problems.
• Ditch Firefox, ship Epiphany. Replace Firefox completely by shipping Epiphany, which is the web browser for the GNOME desktop environment.
• Do nothing. Users will be forced to accept the Mozilla EULA.

So far, the Iceweasel option seems to be the most popular by a large margin.

There are links there for the Launchpad bug report too.

...they just don't tell you a lot about it. what's interesting is their license says that some of the software it distributes as a part of Ubuntu may have a license agreement associated with it. it may be an open source license, it may not, the onus is on the user to find and read the license, and by using the software, the user implicitly agrees. there are also very similar terms to what's in the Mozilla license, so maybe the question is a little bigger than just Firefox? The legal page is worth a read, in any event, as use of Ubuntu implies consent to the terms, which aren't even presented.

from the Ubuntu Legal page:

Use of Ubuntu software

Your use of any software obtained from this site is subject to the terms of any license agreement provided with the software. Some of these agreements incorporate the terms of the GPL or other open source licences. Please read these agreements before installing and using the software; by installing and using the software, you will have accepted the terms of the agreements.

There's also an Ubuntu brainstorm item for this: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/13201/

That link is not source. The dead giveaway is that they are giving you the "x86" version on the download page. If I remember correctly, the tar.gz file is an interactive installer that asks where your plugins folder is. Adobe includes the tar.gz download because not every one uses a package manager that supports rpm/yum. Debian/Ubuntu uses deb.

You probably should have just installed the deb from the Ubuntu repositories since I don't think Debian has not-free repositories. Go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/web/flashplugin-nonfree , download it to your desktop, double click it, and it will install. Since you are using a deb file, it should integrate better with your package system too.

If some Debian guru knows a better way, don't be afraid to tell me I'm wrong/stupid ;-p My main system is gentoo so debs/rpms/yum aren't my specialty.

Look here http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.04/

I think Hardy Heron might be a badly chosen name.

An implementation of export look and feel could dramatically change things: Most Linux people spend a lot of time configuring their desktops, changing wallpapers, appearance settings, icons, metacity themes, compiz settings, skydomes, and god knows what else. Some people make their systems look like a mac, some make it look like vista, some make it look unique. I think it would be a significant leap if we could make a SINGLE (large) file container, with everything involved in the desktop settings, and send it to other users. The community could share beautifully tuned desktops, and we all could experiment with numerous desktops really rapidly. If we improve productivity in this arena, then everyone on windows would see amazing desktops, all changeable, and that's an important step towards solving bug#1. A large file could have all associated settings, parameters, needed files, and command sequences to configure the desktop in ONE click. Most newbies don't have the know how or the patience to learn how to really transform a desktop... we could give them a little instant gratification, as this is something that no mac or windows user can do.

Well, if you don't mind running bleeding edge software (there may be some bugs), you can enable the backports software repository:

1. System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager
2. *enter password*
3. Settings -> Repositories
4. select the Updates tab
5. check the Unsupported updates check box
6. Close
7. click past the Repositories changed message
8. Reload
9. Mark All Upgrades
10. Apply

OR there's the easy way, using the terminal:

echo 'deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy-backports main universe multiverse restricted' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

This will download the new beta of Flash for Linux (among other things). It's a big improvement over the previous version. Here's the documentation for the Back ports repository.

Though his money is undoubtedly helping, I think Ubuntu would become much more popular, much faster, if it would lose the hideous orange and brown color scheme.

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/12326/

Consider this:

Most people spend a lot of time configuring their desktops, changing wallpapers, appearance settings, icons, metacity themes, compiz settings, skydomes, and god knows what else. Some people make their systems look like a mac, some make it look like vista, some make it look unique. I think it would be a significant leap if we could make a SINGLE (large) file container, with everything involved in the desktop settings, and send it to other users. The community could share beautifully tuned desktops, and we all could experiment with numerous desktops really rapidly. If we improve productivity in this arena, then everyone on windows would see amazing desktops, all changeable, and that's an important step towards solving bug#1. A large file could have all associated settings, parameters, needed files, and command sequences to configure the desktop in ONE click. Most newbies don't have the know how or the patience to learn how to really transform a desktop... we could give them a little instant gratification, as this is something that no mac or windows user can do. And wouldn't it be cool to quickly check out if that awesome desktop fits your machine?

Where do you see any code names? http://www.ubuntu.com/
Don't blame Ubuntu if you are talking geek to non-geek friends. Do you also tell them that they run Longhorn on Conroe?

1) If you didnt like the "simplified" gnome interface try KDE
2) When you remove Evolution it has to remove anyprograms that need evolution to run
3) When you remove Evolution it will also remove a few meta-packages that are simply there to make installation easier
4) tl;dr

ok i read on a bit

My suggestion to Ubuntu folk is this - pay a bunch of people to use the current system and tell you what they don't like - and then change what *they* want not what you think they should want changed. Get people who have never used a computer, get people who have used a computer but not Ubuntu or other distros, get people who have used the current version for some months... I bet you boot times and web integration aren't anywhere near the top of the resulting wish-list.

like this but costing more money and targeting none-geeks, why bother? Sure the idea of having linux as the major OS is a nice dream, but at the end of the day how does improving it for "plebs" help the rest of us.

I'm hoping that for the N release they combine "Naughty" and "Nymph"

Canonical, the corporation that owns the Ubuntu distro (ie, Red Hat Inc's and Microsoft's direct competitor), has dropped official support of PowerPC from its work. Which means that PPC architecture versions of Ubuntu are falling behind, even to the point where the kernel in the latest releases cannot boot on PPC machines. PPC isn't just old Macs and powerful dedicated workstations. It's also the main core in many supercomputers, lots of embedded CPU devices, and the Sony PS3. Those machines need more active work to keep Ubuntu working on them.

But PPC is still supported as part of the Ubuntu project as a community effort, which is what Open Source is all about. If you've got some spare cycles, or even better some independently developed PPC code, to help Ubuntu keep running on the PowerPC architecture, please join the people supporting the community distro.

Despite my previous post, I'm going to quibble anyway.

• As somebody else already pointed out, Wireshark is not a fork.
• Ubuntu has never broken off completely from Debian.
• Firefox is sort of a fork of Mozilla, but they always shared the same HTML engine.

  As for the others you mention, they were all forked for very serious reasons. Gcc and X.org got forked after their predecessor communities self-destructed. Inkscape seems to have been forked in order to revive an moribund project (which was itself forked to revive a moribund GNOME application!). Apache forked because certain key people at NCSA decided they didn't want to work there anymore.

  Can you name a single fork that happened because somebody wanted a slightly different feature set? I mean one that actually went anywhere.

But wait. A typical Linux distribution doesn't actually support you adding other repositories or downloading packages from the web. Sure it might be technically possible, but you're going to encounter a lot of glitches, and if you ask the distro about that they'll just shrug and say it's your own fault for not using the official repositories.

Why should anyone support software that is entirely outside of (distro) standards ? Glitches mainly show up when repository maintainers don't do their job correctly.

[...] in which the only reliable way of getting your software to end users is to get the distributors to do it for you, and they usually insist on particular kinds of licensing.

... because when you can't fix issues at the source, abominations like libflashsupport have to be created.

I call shenanigans on your shenanigans on his shenanigans. Any true victim of Windows, will tell you the only way to be sure you've removed the crapware is with fresh install of another OS. Something the GP can do cause he can download one.

Yeah, I feel your pain.

I bought a Thinkpad T61 a year ago, to find out that it was chock full of crapware. Thankfully, I had a removal tool handy ...

In all seriousness, I didn't want it, but the manufacturer insisted on installing it, otherwise they wouldn't sell it to me.

There is an even easier way to defeat this nag.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

http://www.debian.org/
http://www.fedoraproject.org/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://www.opensuse.org/
http://www.slackware.org/
http://www.gentoo.org/
http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.openbsd.org/

Get it here

Yes. I do. Ubuntu even has a package: http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/msttcorefonts

Each license bought allows for tech support from Microsoft. Is there any such tech support from open source developers?

Of course there is.
https://www.redhat.com/apps/support/
http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid
http://www.novell.com/support/product/products.do
http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/prod_svc.html ....

I thought Ubiquity was the name of the Ubuntu live-CD installer.

I thought I'd heard this name before.

Actually Gnubuntu existed first (November 2005), but nothing more than an IRC channel and some artwork came of it. We started talking about gNewSense in May 2006 as a way to make Gnubuntu happen, with the first release 2 years ago today (August 25th 2006).

A quick check indicates that Gobuntu was first released July 10th 2007.

See https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2005-November/013261.html http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/130

Just reading the Debian homepage, I see much less to irritate him than I do on, say, http://www.ubuntu.com/

Ubuntu's kernel is still tainted, and Ubuntu distributes and promotes proprietary software.

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/opera9
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/unison-unified-communications

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/
http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/restricted/

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/f/flashplugin-nonfree/ etc.

Ubuntu's kernel is still tainted, and Ubuntu distributes and promotes proprietary software.

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/opera9
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/unison-unified-communications

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/
http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/restricted/

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/f/flashplugin-nonfree/ etc.

Ubuntu's kernel is still tainted, and Ubuntu distributes and promotes proprietary software.

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/opera9
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/unison-unified-communications

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/
http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/restricted/

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/f/flashplugin-nonfree/ etc.

Ubuntu's kernel is still tainted, and Ubuntu distributes and promotes proprietary software.

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/opera9
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/unison-unified-communications

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/
http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/restricted/

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/f/flashplugin-nonfree/ etc.

Ubuntu's kernel is still tainted, and Ubuntu distributes and promotes proprietary software.

http://www.ubuntu.com/news/opera9
http://www.ubuntu.com/news/unison-unified-communications

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/
http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/restricted/

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/multiverse/f/flashplugin-nonfree/ etc.

That's a good point, one I hadn't thought about. But if licensing issues are a problem for pre-installed Linux, how have existing manufacturers coped? Note that this distro is just Ubuntu with all the "restricted" (closed-source, but freely redistributable) stuff removed. I see nothing in Ubuntu's licensing that would prevent somebody from selling a system with Ubuntu pre-installed.

In any case, GNewSense's mission statement has nothing to say about the legal hassles of people selling Linux-based PCs. It's all about the way they think software should and should not be licensed.

Remember, this is the Free Software Foundation, which doesn't do anything non-ideological. To them "non-free" software is evil, and practical considerations be damned. Everything they do is about that.