Ubuntu 10.10 to be named Maverick Meerkat

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has made an announcement regarding the October 2010 release of Ubuntu (i.e. the one after Lucid Lynx, which is due at the end of April).

This release will be quaintly codenamed “Maverick Meerkat” and Shuttleworth and Canonical have big plans for it:-

This is a time of change, and we’re not afraid to surprise people with a bold move if the opportunity for dramatic improvement presents itself. We want to put Ubuntu and free software on every single consumer PC that ships from a major manufacturer, the ultimate maverick move.

Mark expands on his vision for the next release +1:

Our new theme is “Light”, and the next cycle will embrace that at many levels. We have a continued interest in netbooks, and we’ll revamp the Ubuntu Netbook Edition user interface. As computers become lighter they become more mobile, and we’ll work to keep people connected, all day, everywhere. We’ll embrace the web, aiming for the lightest, fastest web experience on any platform. The fastest boot, the fastest network connect, the fastest browser. Our goal is to ensure that UNE is far and away the best desktop OS for a netbook, both for consumers and power users.

On the other end of the spectrum, we’ll be lightening the burden of enterprise deployment with our emphasis on hybrid cloud computing. Ubuntu Server is already very popular on public clouds like EC2 and Rackspace, and now that Dell supports the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud for private cloud infrastructure, it’s possible to build workloads that run equally well in your data center or on the cloud. We’ll focus on making it even easier to build those workloads and keep them up to date, and managing the configurations of tens, or tens of thousands, of Ubuntu machines running in the cloud.

It’s not all about work. We don’t just want to be connected to the internet, we want to be connected to each other. Social from the Start is our initiative to make the desktop a collaborative, social place. For the past five years, we’ve all been shifting more and more data into the web, to a series of accounts and networks elsewhere. Now it’s time to start to bring those social networks back into our everyday computing environment. Our addressbooks and contact lists need to be synchronized and shared, so that we have the latest information everywhere – from mobile phones to web accounts.

Any and all thoughts that Mark Shuttleworth would be taking a back seat when he stepped down as CEO can be quashed. It sounds to me that he is more driven than ever and firmly committed to expanding Ubuntu’s user base.

I had installed the Alpha 3 Lucid Lynx a few weeks back and have now upgraded to the latest beta and, aside from a couple of relatively trivial bugs and glitches, it’s running fine for me. The new design, in my opinion, is infinitely superior to the orange and brown look of old. April’s Lucid release is a Long Term Support version and they tend to play it safe with those releases and not rock the boat too much. October’s issue however, with a name like Maverick, is just begging to push the boundaries! Says Mark:

We will deliver on time, but we have huge scope for innovation in what we deliver this cycle. Once we have released the LTS we have plenty of room to shake things up a little. Let’s hear the best ideas, gather the best talent, and be a little radical in how we approach the next two year major cycle.

Can’t wait to see what they come up with!

Musings on the iPhone

Following on from my recent musings about the restrictions of the proprietary iPhone, I came across an interesting article today.

The article was written by Tim Bray and he describes how he left database giant Oracle to join Google as an Android developer. He enthuses about working on the Android platform, but his thoughts on the iPhone particulary hit a chord with me:

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I’ve been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them.

This sums up exactly how I feel about the iPhone. Well said that man!

Original article here.

Nokia N900 smartphone review

Nokia N900 smartphone

Nokia N900 smartphone

Recently, I blogged that I was going to be given the opportunity to review the Nokia N900. I’ve now had the phone for a couple of weeks and am going to set out my thoughts on it below. Before I do so, I would firstly like to say thanks to the staff at Womworld/Nokia for giving me a chance to participate in this trial. It has been a pleasure and a privilege.

I should mention that I don’t own a smartphone, nor have I used one extensively prior to this experience. (I’ve played about with other people’s iPhones a little, but never for long. iPhone owners guard their toys jealously!) My usual phone is great for phone calls and text messages (naturally), and works pretty well with web sites which are optimized for mobiles. It will often choke on a regular web site however. I also use a neat little Gmail app from Google, which is a joy to use on even the simplest of phones. This is about the sum total of my mobile phone computing experience.

Going from that relatively humble background to the Nokia N900 is quite a leap. Somehow, to call this device a “phone”, even a “smartphone”, doesn’t quite do it justice. This really is a mobile computer – which also happens to make phone calls!

In many ways, I feel that I only scratched the surface of what the phone can do (unfortunately it came during an insanely busy time at work, when I was putting in all sorts of extra hours on a new project). I didn’t really have time to get into the more esoteric features, but I’ll try to cover the basics below.

The phone’s operating system, named Maemo, is Nokia’s own (mostly) open-source creation for high-end smartphones, based on Debian Linux. Just as I received the phone, it was announced that Maemo was merging with Moblin (originally Intel’s mobile computing system, now under the auspices of the Linux Foundation). The new joint operating system will be known as Meego. Although I have zero prior experience with Maemo, I have used Moblin on my EEE PC. It was still in very early development when I tried it, and I ultimately replaced it with something else, but it’s interesting to speculate where this venture will go. Nokia seems to be embracing open source software freely these days, as they’ve already open-sourced their Symbian software too. I would guess that they want to create a strong contender to Google’s (also open-source) Android platform. It pleases me greatly to have choices like this in the mobile market. I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that I won’t buy an iPhone (although they are delicious), as I won’t be subject to Apple’s capricious decisions on what features their users can have this week. And you can cross the iPad off my Christmas list for the very same reason. How incredibly arrogant is Steve Jobs to decide that his customers don’t need Flash or USB ports!?! But I digress …

Upon opening the box, my first impression of the N900 was that it was large. It’s much larger than my usual phone and a good bit thicker too. This isn’t necessarily a criticism, merely an observation. Obviously a larger footprint offers a significantly larger screen size and I’d say a resolution of 800×480 pixels is none too shoddy! The phone has a slide-out qwerty keyboard, which again contributes somewhat to the phone size. Flipping the phone over reveals the camera lens. The phone has a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. It has built in flash, auto-focus, as well as several other capture modes such as landscape, macro etc. Inside, the phone runs off an ARM processor and has up to 1Gb RAM available to applications. It has 32Gb internal storage, which can be increased with a memory card. Software includes a built in media player for music and video, email, web browsing, instant messaging, PDF reader, calendar, maps, games, contact management, RSS reader, plus a whole host of other goodies from the App store. In short, it does everything my netbook does on a smaller scale. Oh, and did I mention it makes phone calls too!

For first time users, there is a very useful “Getting Started” link on the desktop. This launches a little video which gives a short overview of the phone’s main features. I found this very helpful and had the phone connected to my home wi-fi within seconds (it was ridiculously easy!) This allowed me to play about and surf on my internet connection rather than eating into my phone data plan. The video also shows the four virtual desktops that the phone offers. Multiple desktops are no new thing to Linux users, so this was a no-brainer too. The touchscreen interface made it very easy to navigate, as you just dragged your finger from left to right (or vice versa) and it would move on to the next screen. The web browser and media player are easy to locate and (once I figured it out) it was easy to add shortcuts for these, or any frequently used application, to one of the desktops for quick launch.

Connecting the phone to my PC was super easy too. I plugged the cable into my PC’s USB port and selected USB Mass Storage on the phone’s screen, and it showed as an extra drive in Nautilus. No messing, no software installations required. This is the way it should be! I dragged a bunch of music and video files over onto the phone without a hitch.

During the trial, I principally used the phone for text messaging, web browsing and the media player (oh, and the odd phone call or two!) Everything worked well and responded snappily. I can’t criticize the performance of the phone at all. It played video seamlessly, sound quality for MP3 files was pretty decent, and surfing on the built-in browser (a customised Mozilla browser) was responsive. Texts and Instant Messages (which I didn’t try) are under the “Conversations” icon. This would thread all messages between yourself and a contact on the one screen, which I found very useful. I hate it when you have to scroll back through 20 text messages to find out what you said to someone a couple of days back!

Overall, I’m very pleased with the software on the phone (and no, I’m not just saying that because it’s Linux!) It was intriguing to me to spot regular Linux components within the operating system, like virtual desktops or, gulp, the Terminal! (I was too scared to do anything with the terminal, in case I borked the system. I’m happy pushing the limits of my own equipment and I’ll try anything knowing that if I do break it, I can fix it. But this was someone else’s property and I couldn’t stand the guilt if I’d had to send it back with a contrite note saying “Sorry, I’ve bricked your phone!” )

There are a couple of things I wasn’t too happy with. Firstly, battery life. Now to be fair, short battery life is the bane of all smartphones. This is not a problem exclusive to the N900. But, boy, did it have a poor battery life. I listen to music going to and from work (approx. 45 mins each way). I have an iAudio 7 MP3 player, and this thing runs forever! I get about 30 – 40 hours from one charge, so 1.5 hours of music listening doesn’t even make a dent in the battery. On the N900 however, 1.5 hours of music would use up nearly a quarter of a fully charged battery. Throw in a few text messages and a couple of phone calls and your battery is fast running out. I’m quite bad for remembering to charge things, which is why I appreciate products with a long battery life. The Nokia N900 was particularly bad in this aspect.

Nokia N900 casing demonstrating how the camera lens sticks out

Nokia N900 casing

The other thing that bugged me hugely relates to the design. The camera lens on the back of the phone sticks out slightly (I’m talking maybe 2 or 3mm here). This doesn’t sound much, but it means that the phone won’t sit flat. If you press one end, it wobbles slightly.  You have to sit the phone with the camera-side down in order to interact with the screen, and every time you press the screen the phone tilts slightly. I could live with this for the occasional screen tapping, but where it becomes really annoying is when you are using the slide-out keyboard. The keyboard is small, but you quickly get used to it and could probably build up a reasonable typing speed. But, every time you press a key, the phone tilts slightly. Two-fingered typing was just too annoying. I ended up holding the phone steady with one hand, while typing with the other. You can of course hold the phone in both hands and type with your thumbs, but I would have preferred to use my hands for typing and not steadying the phone. It just seems like incredibly bad design to me. Surely they could have recessed the camera ever so slightly, so that it sat flush with the rest of the casing and you could sit the thing flat on the table. It does have a little stand which will prop the phone up at an angle, but I felt this was more for watching video. It was too awkward to use with the stand, particularly when you had to press and hold either the shift key or the function key for entering numbers or other punctuation. I can’t help but compare this to the Apple ethos of design (which I admire greatly). This casing design wouldn’t have been allowed out the door at Apple.

I also found the touchscreen to be a bit hit and miss. There is usually a knack to these things and practice makes perfect, but sometimes I would tap something and the phone will buzz slightly, so you know it has registered the input, but then nothing would happen. Maybe (probably!) I’m just a goof with idiot fingers, but it’s frustrating to have to tap 2 or 3 times before anything happens.

So, to summarise, I feel this is an excellent piece of kit, ideal for people who need serious computing on the go, but don’t want to be lumbered with even a netbook-sized computer. It can easily handle most day to day computing tasks, and is speedy, generally responsive and easy to use. With the power of Linux behind it, I’m sure it could be customised and tweaked to suit any power-user’s needs. The main shortcomings are poor battery life and they need to fix that casing!

I’d give the phone 10 out of 10 for software (with absolutely no Linux bias here!) Hardware gets 6 out of 10 and battery 4 out 10.

Linux.com Merchandise

The Linux Foundation have announced a new merchandise store today, with some fun T-Shirts, hats, mugs and other stuff.

Their announcement says:

The merchandise available in the Linux.com Store is designed to reflect the unique and varied culture associated with Linux; for example, visitors to the Linux.com Store won’t find corporate-looking “logo T’s.” The images on the T-shirts, mugs, hats, stickers and other items are designed to invoke feelings of geek pride, freedom, fun, eccentricity, and originality.

I like the sound of that!

It goes on to say:

All revenue generated from the Linux.com Store will go directly towards Linux Foundation activities, events and strategic initiatives. The Linux Foundation uses funds from a variety of revenue streams to support the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and to sustain important services such as technical events; travel grants for open source community members; a vendor-neutral forum for projects such as MeeGo; and free training resources direct from the kernel community; among others.

In addition, they are running a T-shirt design competition, where the winning entry will be sold in the merchandise store (as well as winning a trip to LinuxCon in Boston!). They ask you to “Think about what Linux means to you and how you can represent that for the general public. It can be funny or serious, but above all, it must be different. We want to gasp with amazement (in a good way) when we see it.

So if you have artistic, penguin-drawing skills, or are good with geeky buzzwords, get cracking! Otherwise, you can browse what they have on offer at the moment. This is my favourite:

"Fresh Kernels" T-Shirt from the Linux.com store

"Fresh Kernels" T-Shirt from the Linux.com store

Visit the Linux.com store

T-Shirt Design Competition

The Ubuntu Manual gets its own web page

I recently wrote about the new Ubuntu Manual, which will be launched with Lucid Lynx at the end of April this year. The manual is aimed at new users to Ubuntu and Linux and would include explanatory guides and How-Tos.

The Ubuntu team have created a separate web page dedicated to the manual, which you can view here. Right now, however, there is only a countdown clock which will expire when Lucid is released.

Good to see the Ubuntu developers are taking this project seriously, as I’m sure this will be a very helpful site for new (and not so new) users.

Ubuntu Music Store FAQ

Ubuntu have posted an FAQ on their web site to answer the most common questions that people have asked about the forthcoming Ubuntu Music Store. You can access the FAQ here.

The store will be officially titled the “Ubuntu One Music Store” and will launch with Lucid Lynx 10.04 at the end of April this year. An Ubuntu One account is required to purchase from the store, and this account will offer 2Gb of cloud storage. Any songs purchased will automatically be saved to your personal storage account and can be accessed from any computer.

As widely expected, 7digital will be the music provider, and music will be in DRM-free MP3 format. Although the store will run primarily from Rhythmbox, plugins will be available which will offer the same functionality to other players such as Amarok and Banshee. (I hope they include Exaile, which I’ve been using lately). Songs can be downloaded a maximum of 3 times, though since they are stored in Ubuntu’s cloud, this shouldn’t be a problem even if your PC is prone to crashing.

The store hasn’t appeared in any of the Lucid alpha releases yet, however the first beta release is due in a couple of weeks, so it may show up then. I’ll keep you posted!

That great anti-virus software called Ubuntu

Came across a blog post here that made me chuckle.

Some poor misguided soul posted a question on the Ubuntu forums about how to install that great anti-virus software called Ubuntu. He asked:

“A frient of mine heard of a program that will make you never get viruses again. Its called Ubuntu. I go to the site and download the program, but it wont install. How do I install it. I got like a lot of viruses and dont like that it makes my computer slow and sends stuff to friends. I just want to chat with my friends and internet without getting viruses.
This is the good site to ask about this, right.
Srry for my bad english.”

According to the article, the forum members welcomed the poster to the community and pointed him towards Wubi. Unfortunately the forum thread seems to have been taken down, but I’m happy that the guy wasn’t laughed out the door, because some people just love to mock the uninitiated.

I hope he managed to get his Ubuntu anti-virus software installed!

Read the original article at Thameera’s Column.

Update on the Ubuntu Music Store

I had written a while back about the proposal to include a music store in Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. This would enable users to purchase songs directly from Rhythmbox and have them automatically added to their music collection.

More information has been popping up here and there, though I understand the Store itself hasn’t débuted in any of the Lucid alpha releases so far (haven’t tried any yet). I’ve read in a few places that 7Digital has been chosen as the music provider, so that is probably confirmed.

I came across a web site Popey.com which has something of a scoop with screenshots of the proposed store, and I’ve copied one of their images below.

Ubuntu Music Store interface

Ubuntu Music Store interface

Head over to Popey.com to see lots more (full size) images of the store interface.