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If you have a slow connection or you don't have a burner, you can get a pretty looking CD from Canonical by mail. They don't even charge for shipping.

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

Yes, however: "the delivery may take up to ten weeks"

I don't think they are paying for support. I think Canonical support costs more than $20.

Regular prices from Canonical are $250 (USD) for 9x5 (not sure what that's supposed to be, 9 hours per day, mon to fri ?) or $900 24x7. As quoted at http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid
I suppose that a retailer could strike a support deal for lower prices but USD 20 seems to be a bit on the low side.

The most important question for me before going to Best Buy to purchase is really how much of the proceeds go to the Ubuntu project. If it's 0 or a paltry sum (as I suspect) I'll go out of my way to tell people NOT to buy it from Best Buy. Preloaded on a computer, sure, but for anything else, get an Official Copy. Or, wait for a free CD from shipit and spend the money on an awesome T-shirt.

I'm picking up the sarcasm, but for what it's worth, Ubuntu do provide & ship CDs for free...

No, LTS means patch and update support for 5 years from the release date. And the bit about "paid support" is rubbish:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Please note that both LTS versions are freely available for download.

Then why would they have an entire site dedicated to it?

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

My bad, they put it back up! I cant believe they restarted that service!

https://shipit.ubuntu.com/ for the link to get the disc free

One can get free professional ubuntu CDs from ShipIt. It does take close to a month to receive them though.

Moreover, who would buy something from BestBuy's website, when they can order the exact same thing -- for free -- from Ubuntu's website and wait just as long to get it? EVEN the "but I don't want to download it" argument makes no sense here, check it out:
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/login
This is just nuts. Does BestBuy get to (legally) make a profit on this, or do they at least donate the profit back to Ubuntu?

If you have a slow connection or you don't have a burner, you can get a pretty looking CD from Canonical by mail. They don't even charge for shipping. https://shipit.ubuntu.com/

I would assume that, since the blurb says it's "the latest Long Term Support version," it includes some form of long term support.

Despite what one may infer from the somewhat misleading https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS , the "support" in Long Term Support (LTS) means that they will provide bug fixes and software updates for 3/5 years. It does not mean that you'll get direct professional support (e.g. actual tickets with an SLA, toll-free live-person support, etc).

Start here:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/apt-build

Then build nagios3 from the Intrepid sources on your Hardy system. Then, if you still miss Gentoo, remove some random files from the system and spend a few hours trying to figure out what broke. Maybe have your neighbor come over and call you an idiot even though he also doesn't know what's wrong, so you can feel like you're in the Gentoo forums.

Yes. You can get a great replacement for free, right here. Just download their software and install it. I guarantee that you'll never have to worry about a virus, trojan or other malware again.

hmmm.. anonymous plagiary. Give a link next time buddy.

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/10468/

If you can't be sure yet what else you might need to export from this machine, in particular for access as a roadwarrior too (just terminals or also file shares to get data into and out of future projects, and possibly even forwarded access to further machines on the LAN?), 3SP's SSL-Explorer might be a good package comprising VNC, RDP etc., console prompts, network paths, web forwards (mostly through a Java helper that runs from many browsers), all encrypted as the name implies, and even more in in its commercial Enterprise Edition, which has a free trial for 2 users as well.

There had been a flurry of versions (all very usable indeed) and lively discussion up until RC19, with the project even proposed for inclusion into Ubuntu, but just before the final release, suddenly not much has been heard from the project since May anymore, and http://www.3sp.com/forums/forums/show/18.page (as well as the fact that http://www.sshtools.com/showSslExplorerCommunity.do now redirects to the commercial version) gets me a bit worried - does anyone have more recent news on this promising project?

A shiny, new laptop loaded with Vista, of course. He's earned it!

And a couple of accessories to go with it: A dongle that will allow him to install Mac OS X on said laptop, and an Ubuntu CD if he would rather go that route.

Don't think he wouldn't choose one of those options, because even he knows that Windows, in its current state, is unusable.

Bill sure did pick a good time to get out. I imagine when Windows 7 receives its inevitable bashing in the press, he'll be content just giving his money away, saving the world, one gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at a time.

# What's the difference between UME packages and regular i386 packages?

• For the kernel there are a few changes to support the LPIA architecture better (TODO: check with Amit). For the user applications, they have a special rule to enable or disable resources when compiled for LPIA. We may use the hildon interface and/or disable something that we don't have/don't need. We want to improve usability for small screens and fingers.

And meanwhile the rest of us have switched to wearing much more comfortable jeans instead of slacks. As long as I'm going to have to switch, why not switch to something that's not as restrictive around the crotch?

And Apple hasn't shipped a PPC box since 2006.

You're wrong anyway as Hardy is available for PPC: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/8.04/release/

Oh, you meant UbunUtu. Yeah, I haven't seen a PPC Ubunutu release in ages.

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

http://planet.gnome.org/
http://planet.mozilla.org/
http://planet.ubuntu.com/
http://planet.i2p/ (only accessible through the i2p network)

Better question: Does Intrepid run Intrepid?

You could try Ubuntu set up as a live usb drive with persistence. Not really sure how well it works, I only came across it when looking for a way to install Ubuntu from a USB drive so I didn't test the persistence feature, so I guess the updates may end up taking extra space where they don't on FaunOS. But for distros not fitting on a boot device, you can get 8GB and 16GB usb pendrives now which can easily accommodate a full install of pretty much any Linux distro.

Yes, but while Windows became worse every year, GNU/Linux became better. You're invited to take a look at the latest Ubuntu Linux (8.04). It's fit now for multimedia and office purposes. I wrestled with various distros for a couple of years myself, but they're all getting better, all the time. (Fedora Linux is also definitely worth a look.) And then there's the BSDs, especially OpenBSD and FreeBSD, which have some of the packages from GNU/Linux in their ports collection. They're all very good Un*x systems. And let's not forget Solaris, OpenSolaris and AIX. And MacOS X, which based on BSD. After being called "dead" for more than 20 years, Un*x systems have not only made it to the desktop, are available for free for everyone, but are also ubiquitous in a way that could soon drown Windows out of the market. (cf. Gartner group studies about the future of Windows)

http://packages.debian.org/iceweasel
http://packages.ubuntu.com/firefox-3.0

Are you sure it wasn't RC1? http://packages.ubuntu.com/source/hardy-updates/firefox-3.0

There is an Ubuntu Brainstorm idea addressing this very thing, asking for Canonical to hire / fund an X.org developer (and a Gnome developer).

Love or hate Ubuntu, they are quite a boon to Linux.

No idea about the webcam (friends have the webcamless ones) but the Ubuntu site[1] says it works out of the box, though not with flash (though the Ubuntu site also has a workaround for that).

The wifi requires you to download and build the madwifi driver, but it then works fine. Last I've heard, 8.10 should see it work out of the box.

[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC/Fixes

firefox 2 is in the hardy repositories.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=firefox&searchon=names&suite=hardy&section=all

I don't get it. Ubuntu officially dropped PPC support last year.

So, why would Popular Mechanics recommend Ubuntu when you could download Yellow Dog Linux (for free as well from public mirrors), which is developed by the company hired by Sony to develop linux for the PS3. This sounds somewhat odd.

Disclaimer: I work for Terra Soft Solutions, so I've clearly got a bias here.

There is an entire community dedicated to running Ubuntu on a PS3, at PSUbuntu.com. And you don't have to upgrade your HD from whatever size your PS3 came with, although of course it's easy and you can do it. The PS3 HW works right out of the box.

Right now is a good time to join the PSUbuntu.com community, because a new wave of developers on the ubuntu-cell maillist have just joined, and are uniting with the users at PSUbuntu.com to test and smooth out the PS3/Ubuntu distro.

And there is also a fairly new X/MPlayer driver that will render full 1080p HD video on the PS3's Cell CPU, that also needs just a little testing and integration.

What I really want to see is a PS3 running Ubuntu using the PlayTV PVR device that Sony is releasing this year. With Ubuntu running it, the PS3 could be quite the killer platform for all home entertainment.

And I hear it plays games, too.

Humm. I wonder. If you take all the Tivos, WAPs, Cellphones, and other embedded devices that come with Linux install on them you might actually beat Vista "Sales"
You might also beat Vista sales if you only count retail boxes of Vista vs sales of Linux :)

BTW
https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
They will ship you a Linux CD for free.
So no download, no compile, and if you really don't want to you don't even have to install it to use it. It will work as a live-CD.
Should be as easy to install as Vista if not more so.

Are you saying that Gobuntu doesn't exist? Download it here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/gobuntu/releases/7.10/release/

or here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/gobuntu/daily/current/

Maybe part of your problem is that the FA is wrong. Mark Shuttleworth would not rather focus on gNewSense, but if the community is not interested in Canonical's Gobuntu work, then that community should go off and do their thing, and he will try to support them wherever it makes sense. In other words, if less collaboration is what they want, then that can be accommodated.

Are you saying that Gobuntu doesn't exist? Download it here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/gobuntu/releases/7.10/release/

or here:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/gobuntu/daily/current/

Maybe part of your problem is that the FA is wrong. Mark Shuttleworth would not rather focus on gNewSense, but if the community is not interested in Canonical's Gobuntu work, then that community should go off and do their thing, and he will try to support them wherever it makes sense. In other words, if less collaboration is what they want, then that can be accommodated.

Some also include fully legal DVD playback. Otherwise you're supposed to check with your local laws before loading up those libraries and codecs.

It appears that new approaches to init like upstart are trying to deal with these types of limitations. http://upstart.ubuntu.com/

if you look at http://ubuntu.com/ versus http://debian.org/ you'll notice that one is quite pretty and modern, and the other looks like it fell out of a wormhole circa 1996.

One of the things that's with Ubuntu is that it's the only group with a real sense of marketing. Granted, it's viral marketing, but if you look at http://ubuntu.com/ versus http://debian.org/ you'll notice that one is quite pretty and modern, and the other looks like it fell out of a wormhole circa 1996. I even tried talking about a site redesign on #debian on freenode once and got flamed by someone saying "why the hell should the look of a website matter?" Perhaps it somewhat matters because when I was a newbie and knew nothing about the merits of distros, I overlooked Debian as being a fairly amateurish distro because, well, its website looked amateurish. Yes, I know better now, but we should acknowledge at least a little that appearances do matter.

Of course, it's not just the website. Ubuntu also has an army of Diggers, and it's overall just a really easy distro to get started with when you know nothing about Linux, because the project has made appealing to that crowd one of its goals.

Also can you make it free from errors that may allow hackers to exploit code remotely?

You're right. Maybe they could be complete operating systems not nearly as vulnerable to attack through viruses and other malware. :-D

I'm certain I've heard of proactive virus protection before ... but where ?

AH ! Now I remember !

http://www.ubuntu.com/

Clearly prior art.

I can't tell an RPM that I want to build Gnucash with HBCI support. Or that I want ImageMagick without support for JBIG images.

For example, several package contain optional X11 interfaces. I don't know if Debian etc. put that into a separate foo-x11 package, but if they don't you automatically have to install X11 just to install foo because you could at some point need X11 to use all of foo's capabilities.

> I am pleased that there are alternatives at last, be it Apple or a future Linux that will be more innovative and user friendly by the time my current hardware dies.

Why wait that long? Download a Linux distro today and setup a dual boot system. Spend some time just looking around, figuring out what you need to make the migration. Take your time, and do a smooth transition.

Here's some free links for you:
http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

In fact I would be surprised that the hack is already out there

It is, the fix is here.