Ubuntu News From Later March
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-28 10:52:41 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-28 10:53:47 UTC
Pundits
In the same way, the conflicts between Ubuntu and its commercial counterpart Canonical on the one hand and other free software projects on the other hand are not just about Unity, the wording of the Canonical Contributors' License Agreement, the technical differences between Mir and Wayland, or any of the half dozen other issues being so passionately discussed at any given time.
Ubuntu is famous for being a distribution where newcomers can discover Linux in a community environment. With ample support and tons of software in the repositories, it's a distro that seems to have it all.
E-mail
Add an email client to the list of homegrown open source software applications that Canonical is building for the Ubuntu operating system. A few days ago, an Ubuntu developer wrote about the touch-aware, "converged" email client his team is building for Ubuntu mobile platforms.
Tablets
The current Ubuntu 14.04 development cycle has been heavily focused on bringing the tablet spec up-to-spec for a v1.0 release this April, while work on honing the Mir display server to handle the adaptive convergent needs of larger screens has also progressed at speed.
Phones
Why does it matter? “A phone’s baseband can be exploited in a number of ways by malicious external devices that force it to surrender information about the user that can sometimes lead to suppression of protests or even death,” says Tynan. “A closed baseband does not allow for the examination of one of the most critical components of the phone, which goes against the open-source philosophy many Ubuntu users have come to embrace.”
Canonical has announced the release of a set of Ubuntu Touch images. While they have yet not been promoted to stable, they bring along a host of new and interesting additions.
Ubuntu developers are putting all the effort they can possibly muster into Ubuntu for phones, and this can be easily seen from their latest release, which is one of the biggest and most important in a while.
It is a known fact that Canonical is prepping up to get the Ubuntu Touch Qt 5.2.1-based images off the ground. As expected, there were a number of roadblocks in getting it in the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu Touch. Anyhow, it is noteworthy to add that the developers are working at an impressive speed in bringing the first promotable image for users.
Spanish mobile start-up Geeksphone is reportedly in discussions with Canonical to offer Ubuntu Touch in its new phone, the ‘Revolution’. Featuring a 4.7-inch IPS display, the dual-OS running smartphone was released last month.
The dual-core Intel-based smartphone currently packs two operating systems – Android Jelly Bean and an unbranded version of Mozilla Firefox OS.
Starting his presentation with an introduction to the fifth LTS release, 14.04 LTS, Shuttleworth proudly announced that statistics suggest that enterprises using Linux are fast moving towards Ubuntu and LTS releases. Moreover, some of the largest desktop deployments are also running on LTS releases.
'Apps'
The Ubuntu developers have set out a roadmap for the new Ubuntu Software Store during a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. The current Software Centre in Ubuntu is pretty good and has come a long way since its creation in 2009. It gives users a way to search for new software, read and write reviews, and rate the programs they download. However the Developers seem to doing a significant overhaul of the current system for its inclusion in Ubuntu Touch. The reason for this is to make it more focused on Mobile, have better user experience and to incorporate their mobile packaging format ‘Click’.
Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth (pictured) said he is “pretty confident about the pace of the app ecosystem growth” for the Ubuntu platform in the mobile market, despite the fact that it has not so far been available in commercial devices.
Ubuntu 14.04
Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS Beta 2 (Trusty Tahr) has been made available by its developers featuring a small number of changes and updates. It follows the release of the Ubuntu base (with the only beta in this release cycle) and Kubuntu.
As of nowish, the archive is frozen for 14.04 Final Beta preparation, and will continue to be frozen from here until Final release next
month.
In my usage of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its late development state on my new main production system, the ASUS Zenbook UX301LA, there's three new system setting additions to Unity in this newest Long-Term Support release that I've found to be really useful and welcomed.
“The objective of the Ubuntu Kylin project is to create a variant of Ubuntu that is more suitable for Chinese users. We are committed to provide you with a delicate, thoughtful and fully customized Chinese user experience out-of-the-box. For instance, by providing a desktop user interface localized in Chinese and installing common software that Chinese users commonly use by default. Ubuntu Kylin has been a formal member of the Ubuntu family, since UbuntuKylin 13.04. Now, we are working on 14.04,” reads the official announcement.
For a couple of years, Valve has been saying that, when properly optimized, games run faster on Linux than on Windows. Granted, the company hyped Linux — most notably, Ubuntu — for quite some time because its upcoming Steam Machine was set to use Linux as its operating system of choice, as Valve tried to forego Windows.
When trying out Ubuntu 14.04 LTS last week on the same hardware, the experience went much better. When booting Xubuntu 14.04 LTS off USB, the system quickly booted and the Xfce session started up straight away without running into any problems using the Haswell HD Graphics 5000. The first problem run into though was the Broadcom 802.11ac WiFi adapter not working... The problem comes down to the firmware for the BCM4360 not being present on the Ubuntu image. Fortunately, it's an easily correctable problem (both last year and now) by installing the bcmwl-kernel-source package from the Ubuntu archive. As soon as that was installed, the wireless network was working flawlessly, while until then I was using a USB wired network adapter due to the MacBook Air's lack of Ethernet. There were no other immediate issues and I was moving on to installing the Xfce version of the Ubuntu "Trusty Tahr" on this Apple hardware.
HiDPI
In continuation of my OS X Is No Longer On My Main System, But I Already Have Regrets article from earlier in the week, I have now found more comfort in using Unity 7 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for the ASUS Zenbook Haswell ultrabook, but the HiDPI experience with Ubuntu's Unity is still far from perfect.
Mir and Unity
While the Mir display server isn't being relied upon by the desktop in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, it is being used right now by Ubuntu Touch and Canonical developers are still working on its development in a steadfast manner for deployment in a future Ubuntu Linux release. Here's some of the latest commits to Mir.
At this week's virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit besides saying Mir will be the default on the Ubuntu desktop by 16.04 LTS and also saying systemd will be used when it's hardened (again by the 16.04 LTS time-frame) Mark had some other interesting comments.
It has been almost exactly one year since Canonical announced Mir, a replacement for the X window system. Mir was originally planned to become the default system in the Ubuntu desktop for the 13.10 (October 2013) or 14.04 (April 2014) releases, but it was delayed due to compatibility problems in multi-monitor setups. Those problems were with XMir, an X11 compatibility layer that ensures that Mir can work with existing applications built for X.
It has been almost exactly one year since Canonical announced Mir, a replacement for the X window system. Mir was originally planned to become the default system in the Ubuntu desktop for the 13.10 (October 2013) or 14.04 (April 2014) releases, but it was delayed due to compatibility problems in multi-monitor setups. Those problems were with XMir, an X11 compatibility layer that ensures that Mir can work with existing applications built for X.
The demo showcases, Mir’s capabilities as display protocol. Qt Meta-Object Language (QML) applications are used in the demo. QML is mainly used for mobile applications where touch input, fluid animations and user experience are crucial. Qt scene graph renderer is used the display compositor for Mir in the demo.
Canonical developer Daniel d'Andrada has posted a new video showing off Unity 8 as a Mir compositor.
Wil Wheaton
Not put off by his encounter with Unity, Wil goes on to mention that he opted to run the lightweight XFCE desktop on his Chromebook. Not his favourite, but one whose speed he appreciates and that evokes a nostalgia within him.
Misc.
Ubuntu One is my go-to cloud storage system. It’s a cross-platform (Linux, Mac, Android, IOS, Windows), easy to use, robust tool that anyone can use as their cloud storage. But, even the best systems can stutter or fail to work.
Developers have been porting Ubuntu and other operating systems to run on tablets and TV boxes with Rockchip RK3188 quad-core chips since mid-2013. The RK3188 chip is one of the fastest ARM Cortex-A9 processors around, and Ubuntu is surprisingly snappy on devices with the processor… but up until now there’s been no Linux support for hardware-accelerate graphics.
For some, the first thing that comes in mind when asked this question is "Linux is an operating system." This is not necessarily false, but it isn't completely true either. Linux per se is only the kernel of the operating system, the core part of it. A Linux-based operating system comprises the Linux kernel, the GNU tools and utilities (like the Bash shell, the GCC compiler or the file manipulation tools), and, on top of these, entire desktop environments (like KDE, GNOME or Xfce), along with other applications (like a music player or an image editor) and games. That being said, it is safe to call Linux an operating system when referring to it as Linux as a whole, with everything that accompanies it.
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