The countdown has begun for the release of Ubuntu 7.10. 9 more days to go.

Quotes from ubuntu.com :

What is Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a community developed, linux-based operating system that is perfect for laptops, desktops and servers. It contains all the applications you need – a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging and much more. Ubuntu is free software. You can learn more about what this means by reading our licensing.

New features since Ubuntu 7.04

GNOME 2.20

Gutsy Gibbon Beta brings you the latest and greatest GNOME 2.20 with lots of new features and improvements.

Desktop 3D effects

Compiz Fusion is enabled by default and will bring 3D desktop visual effects that improve the usability and visual appeal of the system. Ubuntu 7.10 automatically detects whether the hardware is capable of running compiz; if not, it falls back to normal desktop. Additional effects can be enabled in “System/Preferences/Appearance” under the “Visual Effects” tab. There you can also disable the effects entirely.

Desktop search

The deskbar applet is now included in the default configuration. It allows quick access to your common actions, including opening web bookmarks and searches, sending messages to your contacts, and more.

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The Tracker indexer has been added to the desktop, making it easier and faster to search for your documents, photos, music, videos, chat logs, and all other files. You can use Tracker in the search dialog, the file selector, nautilus, or the deskbar applet.

Fast user switching

It is now possible to easily switch between user sessions without the inconvenience of entering your username or password numerous times, a time-saver on computers shared by multiple users.

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Firefox plugins in Ubuntu

Firefox now comes with an improved plugin finder wizard that allows users to search and install packaged plugins easily, bringing users a richer web-browsing experience with the integrated security support of the rest of the Ubuntu system:

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In addition, users can now open the Ubuntu application installer with a list of packaged Firefox extensions available by clicking on a link in the Firefox Addons dialog:

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Dynamic screen configuration

Several drivers, including ones for ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics chips now support the X Resize and Rotate Extension (xrandr). This enables dynamic monitor detection, and resizing and rotating of video output, for no-fuss support for projectors and external monitors.

If you have this hardware and used MergedFB / Xinerama previously, you may need to update your X configuration to use this new feature.

Graphical configuration tool for X

You can now configure what driver you want to use for your graphic card, change the default resolution for all users or change your monitor’s refresh rate without having to turn to the terminal. A new GUI has been added making it easy to adjust your video and monitor settings. This tool can also set up dual screen capabilities for cards that use the Xinerama mode.

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Fully automatic printer installation

Printers are now automatically configured by merely plugging them in and turning them on. Printer setup cannot get any easier!

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Handling of non-free device drivers

Restricted-manager can now handle drivers which are free in themselves, but which require non-free firmware or other packages to operate. Only three clicks are needed to fetch and install firmware for wireless cards with Broadcom chipsets, and for a number of Winmodems commonly found in laptops, provided that you have an alternative Internet connection.

When restricted-manager detects hardware for which a restricted driver is available, a notification window pops up:

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NTFS writing

While previous Ubuntu releases only supported read access to Windows (NTFS) partitions, Gutsy Gibbon now fully supports reading and writing to them, by integrating the NTFS-3g project. This significantly eases file and document sharing with Windows.

Power consumption

Ubuntu includes the latest Linux kernel, featuring dynticks. It allows the processor to use less power and produce less heat. For laptops this means more battery life and burn-free laps and for desktops and media center PCs, a quieter, cooler environment.

AppArmor security framework

This easy-to-deploy kernel technology limits the resources an application is allowed to access and can be used to provide an added layer of protection against undiscovered security vulnerabilities in applications. Head to the AppArmor user guide to learn about this new security feature.

Additional installation profiles for Ubuntu Server

New pre-configured installation options have been added to the Ubuntu Server CD. Mail Server, File Server, Print Server, and Database Server options join existing LAMP and DNS options for pre-configured installations, easing the deployment of common server configurations.

Profile-based Authentication Configuration

Deploying authentication configuration has become a lot easier with the addition of auth-client-config. Files may be added to the profiles database, allowing for an administrator to set up a single profile for site-wide network authentication roll-outs. Find out more about AuthClientConfig.

Improved thin-client support

The speed of LTSP thin clients has been greatly improved through the use of compressed images, and LDM, the thin-client login manager included in Edubuntu, also now has support for autologin, multiple servers, and unencrypted graphics transport as an additional speed boost.

I have this problem of wasting hard drive space in my computers. It is a habbit that was born with me. When a hard drive becomes full, instead of trying to clean it up, I just buy a bigger hard drive.

Till about 4 months back, I was an unhappy user of Windows, which was before the my rediscovery of the PC with ubuntu. Last week, my primary 250 GB drive became full with all rubbish and garbages downloaded from here n there, n as always, when i tried to clean up junk, almost all data seemed valuable, which most of the data I have not accessed more than once.

I went for a 2nd SATA hard drive. I plugged it into the system, formatted it with gnome partition manager as ext3, but it got mounted as a removable disk accessable only by the root user, and not a proper hard drive that can be used regularly.

Introduction

Some distributions are fairly conservative on the available disk space and make calculated decisions on the distribution of space among partitions. Swap partitions are usually chosen to be as large as your RAM, there may be a requirement for a fairly small boot partition, and the remainder of disk space is usually assigned to the root partition. There are valid reasons to make other partitions, however.

Sometimes you need to add an additional secondary harddisk, some time after installing Linux. One sensible decision could be to provide its space to the home directories of users. This can be done by making /home a mount point for your your secondary drive.

Step Zero, and alternative Step Zero.

All of this stuff has to run with “root” privileges rather than typical Linux user privileges, so you’ll have to either:

• Take your machine to single user mode and work as root – use the command “/sbin/telinit 1″ to do this
• Or, be brave and run these systems administration commands within X-windows, running “sudo -s” from within the Terminal application.

How many drives does a Linux machine have?

Linux mounts drives “invisibly”, that is, no drive identifier is needed to access files on the drive. Rather, the drive is “mounted” over an existing directory in the filesystem. Only one drive can be mounted on “/”, at the top of the filesystem hierarchy. All other drives are mounted over directories which exist already on some other drive.

To see which drives are mounted where, and how much free space is still available on each drive, use the command df.

What to do after installing a brand new drive?

Assuming you got all the jumper setting right, and plugged in all the correct cables, your Linux system will boot and pretty much ignore your brand new hard drive until you:

• format the drive
• put a filesystem on it
• show Linux where it should mount and use it

Odds are really good you’ll want to use FDISK to format the hard drive, and mkfs.ext3 to put the filesystem on it. Here’s a reference for more information about these steps: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade.html#PARTITION

Assuming you want to use the drive as a /home drive there’s an important few final steps to take to place the drive in service on the machine.

/home differs from other mount points on Linux because there’s almost guaranteed to be some data you WANT already down in there; specifically, all of the per-user files for all of the system’s users. You’ll most probably want to start your new /home drive out with a verbatim COPY of all that /home directory data.

You can get an “instant backup” of your current /home directory by simply NOT DELETING the original files (on the “parent” drive) – mounting the new /home drive right over the existing /home directory will protect those files pretty effectively as well. Then if the /home drive dies, you’ll still have that backup in there. It’ll become instantly usable (and used!) when/if the new /home drive fails to work someday.

The dirty details

OK so I decided to add a /home drive to my Ubuntu Linux box. Here are the commands I ran for that. They’re not very pretty.

First I formatted the drive and put a filesystem on it.

$ fdisk /dev/hdb
[...]

$ mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdb1
[...]

Yuck. Don’t ask me why Linux still needs a different device name for the second step. I think the “1″ is for the first partition on the drive? It seems pretty arcane and inappropriate to have to specify things this way.

Now comes the fun part – we temporarily mount the drive elsewhere, recursively copy the /home filesystem onto the drive, then mount it as /home, then make sure the new drive gets properly re-mounted every time we reboot.

NOTE: You’ll probably want to exit all applications – most write preference data in your /home/your-name-here directory area. It’s best to copy the data when there’s nothing changing anything down in the /home area.

$ mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/disk
$ cp -vax /home /mnt/disk
$ umount /dev/hdb1

Once that’s done, we have to tell the system to use the /home drive when it boots up. For some reason this part of Linux has yet to be simplified, so we currently have to add the following totally incomprehensible line to /etc/fstab to achieve this.

$ cat >> /etc/fstab << HERE
/dev/hdb1 /home ext3 defaults,errors=remount-rw 0 1
HERE

Lastly, you don’t have to reboot to use the /home drive right away – we can dynamically bring the drive online:

$ mount -a

Wrap-up

OK so yes, this is pretty low-level, not too much fun. But trust me, it’s worth it – having a /home drive yields signifigant benefits:

• Performance improvements from separating program file IO (on the system drive) from data file IO (on the /home drive)
• /home is a prime candidate for the occasional backup to CD-RW, a DVD, or similar media.
• You’ll feel very warm and fuzzy feelings when you knowing your new /home drive can be mounted and used productively on just about any Linux machine anywhere.

Recently I find myself a bit too occupied studying Asian cultures. All these cultures are pretty ancient, and I am looking for blogs that can give me authentic information, rather than trusting Discovery Travel and Living and National Geographic. I had been searching for Indonesian Cultures in martial arts, food, festivals and other customs of Indonesia, which if I am right has a touch of the Indian cultures too. And thats perhaps why Indonesia has the first part of its name rhyming with India.

Sanskrit is one of Indonesia’s tribal name, and most words that are used in Sanskrit in India, is their tribal language today, while Sanskrit was a popular language in India in which several books and poems were composed in. Well, Sanskrit is almost extinct in India now, except amoung certain scholars who still learnsanskrit to get to read the traditional Hindu books in their original form. But the tribe that learned Sanskrit from the Indians, still use it as their language in their tribe, though naturally it would be modified a lot over the years with influences of several languages, but still, like I said, several words remain the same.

Im in the process of setting up a new office for a new kind of business that not many would have tried to start up and run independently. Well, Im gambling a bit, and am starting up a stand alone adfarm. I have rented a few servers from a Datacentre at Singapore, got a few publishers accounts from here and there, and got plenty of domain names to spare, and all I need is some 30 people, 10 in a shift, working for 6 days a week in the strategy that I have developed to make a substantial income for the office to support itself, and give me a good share of the money.

I have the office ready, and am currently in the process of buying office furniture, and computers as well. I should then look for some good decorators to give the place a good look. Since the office would be open 24 hours a day, a lot of things should be done to keep the environment just the same in all 3 shifts.