If you haven't noticed.

This will no longer be updated, whoops to me for not coming here more often. I am now residing at http://friedcpu.net and I do have another personal blog that I'm not *really* updatin gright now at http://www.thexyphr.info

Release the Gibbons!

The Gutsy Gibbon repos have opened! Myself and a few daring others are now using those repos, and prepare for the worst.

Fawndle the Feisty

Feisty is releasing tomorrow, and I and many others will be eagerly camped out on IRC, the forums, and Launchpad just itching to answer your questions, It's like open season for us.

If You haven't heard, living under a 3 ton stone, or a bear, or something Ubuntu 7.04, Codename Feisty Fawn Is going to be released tomorrow, and highlights a plethora of new software versions, and features. Many a blog has gone over the same old tired things coming in this new version, but I thought I would Highlight and explain some things that real normal user will experience, from a non technical standpoint (If I can even do that, I'm known for talking too technically!)

What you will notice first is how different the installation process is from a LiveCD, it may seem the same at first, and in fact have the same functionality, but in fact the Partitioner is way different, and is actually part of the installer now, which means it loads way faster, leaving you less time to configure, and more time letting it do it's own thing.

After installing ,and you boot your new Ubuntu Linux install, you will first notice how FAST the init (boot) processes are, On a medium-range computer it's been reported at taking under a minute, myself, it takes 30 seconds (with a ton of extra things starting, added by me.)

First thing you want to do? Surf the web? You have the brand new Firefox 2.0.0.3 with way less problems, far less memory leaking (better performance!), and an all around fancier interface, you'll be happy to check your favorite blogs, and check your mail all the time.

Then what... Watch some movies? Sure, with our new little front ends, if you don't have the right plugins to play something, it will tell you what to install, and even do it for you. How cool is that? For new users it's a common problem that they just cant find what they need to watch their anime, play their mp3s, and so on.

Oh but here's the REAL fun, you know all those fancy 3D effects you always saw on youtube videos, but never could have? Well now it's right at your fingertips, fire up Restricted-Manager and install the Proprietary drivers for your graphics card, then you can (most likely) easily flick on all of those effects from a simple interface called Desktop-Effects, It's easy, and you'll love it. Ubuntu comes with a light touch edition of compiz, where as you can do a lot more with the official releases of Beryl of compiz (soon to be merging anyway), you will find as a new user the few effects this provides are fun, and non obtrusive.

Many other notable things include:
-A new version of Gaim (Now Pidgin)
-A new version of the Gnome suite
-Open Office 2.2, even neater, and easier to use
-SODOKU (hehe)

That's about it for my quick once over of the new release, again I didn't get into the more technical aspects, but I did cover a good amount of what a new user will notice (compared to Edgy Eft and possibly Dapper Drake, depending on what they switch from).

My Newest Computer! How could I have forgotten?

I didn't post it in that last run, and I really feel like driving my blog points up to highscore, so I'll post it separately! Ages ago I was working on my new computer, only had the case for about a year.. Doesn't that just make you cry? Well I finished it!

-MSI K8N Neo4-f MoBo
-AMD64 Athlon 3700+ San Diego core
-Biostar nVidia 7300GT 256mb
-80gb SomeBrand Hard Drive
-1,024mb ram (Okay, you got me... I wanted to make it seem large)
-CD/DVD everything burner

all of that and peripherals total up so far to about 700$, just an estimate. Pretty fun eh?

Enter

After a long silence, I finally come back, Decided I wanted to get back into the blogging game, for whatever reason. There isn't a ton to catch you up on, I've been doing the same things as always, still using Feisty.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is Neigh! Have you posted your specs yet? If not, get on it, times about up =].

In other news, I'm going out for Ubuntu Member, _nothing official yet_ but, I have support of a few people, and I really think I can make it happen. I'm taking it slow, I don't want to get ahead of myself in any way.

I don't have much more in the way of life news, I'm a little worried about school things lately... I'm sure it will work out.

Here's To Gutsy Gibbon, can't wait for UDS To kick off, I'm not close to important enough to go, but I have some inside contact, and will be following gobby, will post here as things develop =]

I'm now on the UbuntuForums Beginners Team! I sort of took lead of the Launchpad side of the team, though this isn't directly the forums, duh, we decided a meeting or two ago that we want to fan out a little more, since we're so large already. We're also electing leaders of the various divisions during the next meeting; The Four Points:
1) IRC (Our Channel, ubuntuforums, etc.)
2) The Forums (Duh =])
3) Launchpad (The Answers section, for ubuntu)
4) Wiki

We might in fact be merging with other teams, or sort of taking them under wing, or the other way around.

OH, More life news, I'm becoming a bit of an eBay whore, I in the past 3 days have bought about 5 different anime titles for about 50$ pretty fancy eh? Not particularly...

-Howl's Moving Castle
-Cowboy Bebop, Full import with english subs
-Avatar Book 1
-Avatar Book 2 (I KNOW this and the last aren't anime)
-Ghost in the Shell (1st Season) Still bidding, nice and low too

Concept for a New Program

Had an idea, after talking with some people on IRC, who probably will be the only ones reading this by force of an iron first...



Anywho, the idea is simple... yet very effective... A Gnome applet, click it you get a drop down. In this drop down you can drag anything, Text, images, general files... what have you. If it was a remote image, it would save it to a local cache, or predefined saving point for that tab.



The interface would also support a widget system... imagine three tabs, Web Images, Text snippets, and Mail, on the mail tab there is a widget, this widget checks a pop address by it's own configuration. (The Main program would have a basic modular settings UI, the plugin would control what it fills it with. In this way, it's a unified look, and control. But options specific to each widget, or snippet.)



Think of it like the ultimate visual clipboard for one.



There are some crude concepts at the bottom... (My First Concept UIs!)



Secondly, it's a way to view Widgets in a standardized way... perhaps simply support Gdesklet Widgets?



Also I had thought of preset tabs... You know you can make new ones with whatever you want in it, but you can also add the prefabs for things like:



Beagle- Search at the top results at the bottom.



Gaim Intergration - As far as I know you can fetch information from gaim to set up a nice list, names, icons of people they are monitoring or maybe just a scrollable list of all of them. Whatever works.



Deskbar Intergration(?) - As Deskbar is along the same lines... though completely different... why not just integrate it into a tab? The tabs are called by hotkey or mouse click so a simple ctrl+alt+F5 or what have you would call that tab.



Just some ideas... It's completely modular so there aren't any limits!



I was thinking of calling it DropBox... but hey I'm not able to code the thing it's up to the poor guy who takes an interest.



Note Drops:





Widgets (VERY Crude Examples... Sorry):

Feisty, Feisty, Feisty

I've been reading the specs, keeping up with gobby, and I simply must say it sounds very exciting. Now I've been with Ubuntu since Hoary, and I simply must say this is the most exciting release in the making. I just hope all the addressed specs can be managed.

Also, on that note, I was talking to Amaranth on irc the other day about Beryl, Which I've seemed to leap into conversation about a few times. Anyway, some people have really become interested in Beryl as an accessibility concept. Such as the zoom feature, the more keen eyes have seen a variation of the zoom feature kicking around which actually maintains usability while zoomed. The applications there really have no bounds. some of the features intended to be eye-candy such as the negative plugin which shows negative image on a per window basis, has an application for accessibility.

I'd like to point out I'm insanely for Beryl being included in feisty. I believe it will give beryl the force it needs to really get some user input and pick up a huge following. this eventually will lead to more core developers, and an overall better product.

Not to say they're doing bad at ALL. I really just mean with more people using it more developers flare up to the product and we see an even better Beryl.

In other news, anyone score Final Fantasy XII yet? Hoping to eat up a copy monday, look amazing. As you can tell I'm a big Square fan boy.

In other, other news, I just got World of Warcraft going on the Open source ATI Drivers... using Direct3d! You can thank wine for that, along with the AMAZING people heading up the opensource driver team for Radeons. Albeit slow at a 10-20fps It's a constant entirely playable rate. And I actually removed my old windows partition for it.

Slowlt the pieces fall into motion!

MSI K8N Neo4-F
Western Digital 80gb HDD
AMD64 3700+ San Diego Core


Those are the pieces of hardware I've collected this far for my next computer. The 3700+ Is probably one of the better single cores AMD ever made. I still need to come up with the rest but it all should go well. Basically I need an optical drive, GFX Card, and a Stick of Ram to get me started.

In other news I have Beryl running now perfectly on my card 0.1.1 runs like a dream on my laptop. Occasionally when booting with it on it'll lock up but that's a known problem with beryl being worked on. Pretty cool. Jiggly windows! Will post a screenshot at some point, I want to brag.

Proposals for 'Feisty Fawn'

Here I'm going to sum up some with a nice ToC at the beginning.

- Wiki -Like Integration for Hardware help
- Integrated Network Assistant (Including basic support for WinModems Based on availabiliy)
- Community Maintained (Strictly formatted.) Help Wiki-like DB

Wiki integration for hardware help:

Imagine this, you get your network adapter working aces, you plug in a new... printer for examples sake that is known to need minor tweaking to get working. The user sees a nice alert (a la dapper toast system.) Alerting them their piece of hardware may not work out of the box and offers them information for getting it to work. It opens a Page in the browser explaining how to get this hardware working (See Point four).

This would require a locally maintained mirror reference per hardware to be done quickly and painlessly. this database would list hardware calls (As would be seen in the 'Device Manager') and translate them to a call number for example this particular printer could be 1234567 this would open wikinode 1234567 on click. A nice background task (Easily turned off at first run for non newbies) would run and check any new hardware for this. That could be replaced by some kind of hot plug script as far as I know to test new hardware and view it against this local database (Updated by a deb package weekly or something). Think of the Wine AppDB.


Integrated Network Assistant:

Refer to the above section, now think of other possible applications... the infinite problem of WiFi, and win-modems! Imagine this, a nice Network Assistant that can be run, it attempts to detect plugged in hardware by the same route as the Device Manager. this is of course assuming the user says 'My device is not listed here!' For those situations where WiFi Cards don't work but are detected, you know a nice clause for that so we don't waste time where not needed.

This would like above easily either pull from some kind of feed, or link directly to a page instructing you how to get it working, based on past use experience, and a rating system to display which guide helped the most. This guide also mind you can recommend packages assuming there is another available connection otherwise none of this happens. This is why I also suggest a similar portion of Expresso (Is it still called expresso? Oh well.) To handle this but with the packages local and the help DB watered down and organized. this is of course only for the open source non restricted drivers drivers in deb form. Such as SLmodemD (Works for my Winmodem) along with many Wifi drivers which are OSS.


- Community Maintained Hardware specific Help

What we have now for hardware help in wiki form is awesome but it's also mixed into the forum, the Bug boards, all over! I propose a single centralized user maintained, staff moderated web application to handle hardware help, notes, recommended packages, etc.

It would have a nice tagging system which local applications would search through for their hardware as discussed above. You know I have an xyz blah brand pcmcia card that just wont work! The local program intelligently searched for the model under the brands category and pulls up help from this wiki-type-thing.

The applications of this are endless.