Nikhil Dev

This is something that people have been waiting from a long time. The next LTS version of the most popular Linux distro might soon be released in another months time. The beta is already up for download here.

Looking at what all has been talked about this new distro, this definitely pushes up the expectations. Let me just highlight some of the new features that are offered in Hardy Heron.(thats the code name for 8.04)

Brand new Xorg - People at canonical have the latest xorg 7.3 put into this baby. It allows greater customizability with minimal effort.

Linux Kernel 2.6.24 - Thats an impressive effort of upgrading the kernel. For some reason when I upgraded from 7.04 to 7.10 on my laptop, the new kernel refused to work on my laptop. Hopefully, the new kernel works this time.

Gnome 2.22 - I’ve heard great things about the new gnome. Still have’nt had a look at it. Lets see how good it is.

PulseAudio - People say this is the best thing that ever happened to Ubuntu. They have upgraded to a lot more stable audio handline software.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 - I use the new version of Firefox and it simple kicks ass. It was an obvious thing for Ubuntu to include the new Firefox.

Transmission - I have used Azureus on Ubuntu and its an absolute wastage of effort and is very ineffecient. Transmission was an obvious thing to include.

World Clock Applet - One of the most noticeable changes is the world clock applet which provides a lot more information than the previous one.

There is one huge upgrade in the 8.04 Hardy Heron. Its called Wubi. This is what the Ubuntu website has to say about it.

There is a new installation option for Windows users. Wubi allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation. Wubi works with a physical CD or in stand-alone mode, by downloading an appropriate ISO to install from. It can be found on the root of the CD as Wubi.exe. A full installation within a dedicated partition is still recommended, but Wubi is a great way to try Ubuntu for a few days and weeks before committing dedicated disk resources.

I am waiting to lay my hands on this thing. There are lot of things that the new version would be teaching to other distros.

My previous title was misleading but its just the beta which has been released. Sorry for the misguiding information

One of the main reasons that I did not install Firefox 2 on my freshly reformatted Windows Xp laptop is because I have used it for more than an year at my work on a workstation that has about 4 gigs of RAM. My experience shows that the average browser used memory of Firefox 2 is about 650 mb. Now that is a Huuuuuuuuuge number for a single application to be using up. My laptop has just about 1 gig of Ram and I would not want half of it to be eaten by the browser itself.

I then heard about these great reviews about Firefox 3 and its memory management. I gave it a try and it exceeds my expectations by a huuuuuge margin. It tends to load pates as fast as Opera does and way too faster to IE 7.

Some of the main features that I like in Firefox 3 are its ability to remember the page titles, its new crash recovery, Download manager(my favourite) and the design. On the whole I give it a 8 out of 10.

In fact Cnet recently rated it as the best browser in the industry as of now. I tried giving IE 8 a try after I got to know about it but ended up getting dependency problems of other software. If installing a BROWSER is such a pain in the ass, then I can do without the internet.

The present version of Firefox 3 is Beta 4. You can download it here.

At first I was concerned with the extension compatibility of Firefox 3, but I you have read my post on making old extensions compatible, you will be able to get most of them working just fine on Firefox 3.

Its a MUST download.

I have been using the new Firefox 3 for more than a month now on my laptop and I seem to have no problem at all. In fact I like the new notification system and it works quite faster than Firefox 2. The only thing that I did not like was that a lot of extension that were made for FF 2 are not compatible with FF3. Even though there is not much difference in the way they are made.

But my friend Vivek has posted a solution on his blog with screenshots on how to cheat this thing in Firefox 3. It involves tweaking the extensions.checkCompatibility paramenter in the about:config section of the new Firefox and turning it off. Its very simple and now I can use my mouse gestures again. Wohoo.

Was going through this article and found something that really interested me. This is a short list of some of the things that you can do on a Linux machine but not on a PC or Mac.

1. Upgrade to the newest version legally and without paying money
2. Have the latest version of the operating system run faster than the previous version on the same hardware
3. Easily install and run different graphical interfaces if I don’t like the default setup
4. Install twenty programs with one command
5. Have the system automatically update all my installed programs for me.
6. Install the same copy of my OS (Ubuntu) on multiple computers without worrying about license restrictions or activation keys
7. Give away copies of the operating system and other programs that run on it without breaking any laws, governmental or ethical or moral, because it was all intended to be used this way
8. Have full control over my computer hardware and know that there are no secret back doors in my software, put there by malicious software companies or governments
9. Run without using a virus scanner, adware/spyware protection, and not reboot my computer for months, even when I do keep up with all of the latest security updates
10. Run my computer without needing to defragment my hard drive, ever
11. Try out software, decide I don’t like it, uninstall it, and know that it didn’t leave little bits of stuff in a registry that can build up and slow down my machine
12. Make a major mistake that requires a complete reinstallation and be able to do it in less than an hour, because I put all of my data on a separate partition from the operating system and program files
13. Boot into a desktop with flash and effects as cool as Windows Vista on a three year old computer…in less than 40 seconds, including the time it takes me to type my username and password to login
14. Customize anything I want, legally, including my favorite programs. I can even track down the software developers to ask them questions, contribute ideas, and get involved in the actual design/software writing process if I want to
15. Have 4+ word processor windows open working on papers, listen to music, play with flashy desktop effects, have contact with a largely happy community and have firefox, instant messaging, and email clients all open at the same time, without ever having had to beg someone for a code to make my os work, and without the system running so slow it is useless
16. Use the command “dpkg –get-selections > pkg.list” to make a full, detailed list of all software I have installed, backup my /etc and /home directories on a separate partition, and you are able to recover your system any time, easily
17. Run multiple desktops simultaneously, or even allow multiple users to log in and use the computer simultaneously
18. Resize a hard disk partition without having to delete it and without losing the data on it
19. Use the same hardware for more than 5 years before it really needs to be replaced…I have some hardware that is nearly 10 years old, running Linux, and still useful
20. Browse the web while the OS is being installed!
21. Use almost any hardware and have a driver for it included with the operating system…eliminating the need to scour the internet to find the hardware manufacturer’s website to locate one
22. Get the source code for almost anything, including the OS kernel and most of my applications

All this while what I have been looking for in a video playing software is codec support and stability with a lot of features. But just today I came across this WONDERFUL software that adds a whole new definition to what a video player should also do.

This one is called Miro and has been recently released and can be downloaded from http://www.getmiro.com/. The best about this software is that its a complete package fro video lovers. It can play almost any video format from MPG, DivX, 3GP, .MOV and lot more. In addition to this, Miro gives you the option to subscribe to video feeds that services like YouTube and Google Videos offer. So now I no longer have to go to the you tube site to watch a video.

Another awesome feature that Miro has is the ability to download YouTube video to your desktop. Just search up for a video and click on it. The video is downloaded from YouTube to your local hard drive in the .flv format. You can later play this directly from Miro of convert it using some encoder.  I have always been looking for good reliable firefox extensions to dowloaded YouTube videos to the local computer but Miro has made it the easiest. And now that YouTube is allowing higher quality video uploads, you can use YouTube as a Video storage and download them back anytime using Miro.

Go Ahead. Give it a try. I am sure you will love it.