OMG! Ubuntu

Intrusion 2

Four more games have been added to the Humble Indie Bundle 8.

The pay-what-you-want offer now boasts an impressive collection of 11 gaming titles, all of which are available for Linux.

So far the Humble Indie Bundle 8 has raised over $1.8 million in sales of this bundle, with Linux users once again paying, on average, more than their Windows and Mac counterparts.

New Titles

The additional four games are automatically available to anyone who has already bought this bundle. Check your receipt page for the appropriate links.

If you haven’t yet parted with your cash then you’ll need to beat the ‘average price’ – $5.72 at the time of writing – to get all eleven titles. But since this bundle would cost over $150 normally, it’s hardly a big ask.

The new games are:

• Naval strategy game Oil Rush
• Physics-based platformer Tiny & Big in Grandpa’s Leftovers
• Geometric puzzler English Country Tune
• Side-scrolling shooter Intrusion 2

Humble Indie Bundle Website

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PC cases for the most part look like… Well, look like a word I shouldn’t use on this site.

But with a bit of imagination, some paint, and plenty of LEDs a boring box can be transformed into a terrific-looking tower. Just like the following: a planned case mod by Ubuntu ISO tester Jackson Doak.

A render of Jackson’s dream Ubuntu PC Case Mod

Based on a Power Mac case, Jackson aims to use plenty of orange, plenty of LEDs and possibly even orange-coloured liquid as part of a water cooling system. The completed system will be used to test daily ISOs – so not only will it look Ubuntu, it’ll be helping Ubuntu, too.

Admittedly the size of the case means that it’s not quite as sublime as the mini Ubuntu PC concept we showed you a year back, but it is delicious enough to have my mouth-watering.

Head over to Jackson’s blog for the full skinny on his plans and if you’ve seen any awesome case mods – Ubuntu related or not – feel free to share them in the comments.

Comments are now closed.

Folks. Its one thing to not like the case, or Jackson’s design, it’s another to attack him personally or build an avalanche of negativity.

Don’t like it,? That’s cool. No skin off my nose – but how about being constructive whilst being snarky? Maybe suggest alternative cases he could use, or tweaks to his design, or how you’d go about modding a Power Mac case?

What was below (yes, i’ve pruned it for balance) was a cesspit of ass-hattery.

To the inevitable cries of censorship: your free speech hasn’t been curtailed. You can still go outside and express how much you dislike this case in all manner of offensive ways. I just don’t have to let you be a douche in my living room.

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Own Microsoft Surface Pro tablet? If you do and you want to make it insanely cooler, you could install Ubuntu on it.  

The Surface Pro, with an Intel i5 CPU, 4GB RAM and speedy 64GB SSD, not to mention a 10-point touch screen, does make for a dream Ubuntu PC/tablet hybrid on paper.

Geek.com’s Russell Holly has posted an indepth guide on installing Ubuntu on the device – which does require a fair bit of faffing to get up and running. Holly reports that while the ‘stylus, touch input, and keyboard covers will work’ out of the box, WiFi doesn’t, and that the ‘…Unity interface isn’t particularly useful when everything is this small.’

Game anyway? Hit the link below for the full tutorial.

Install Ubuntu on Surface Pro

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Mark Shuttleworth has marked Ubuntu’s ‘Bug #1‘ as fixed,

The bug, opened back in 2004 a month before the first release of Ubuntu was made, concerned Microsoft’s dominant market position. The desired ‘fix’ for the bug was listed as ‘…the majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software.’

Has that happened?

Actually, it sort of has – just not in the way most of us would’ve guessed back in 2004.

Android is an open-source Linux-based operating system that commands a hefty share of the computing market; and sales of Chromebooks, powered another open-source Linux-based OS, are increasing by the month.

With more even more devices powered by open-source, including FirefoxOS and Intel/Samsung’s upcoming Tizen, on the horizon the footprint of free software on the wider computing market is only going to grow larger at the expense of Microsoft and their Windows OS.

As Mark Shuttleworth reasons:

“Personal computing today is a broader proposition than it was in 2004: phones, tablets, wearables and other devices are all part of the mix for our digital lives. From a competitive perspective, that broader market has healthy competition, with IOS and Android representing a meaningful share.

Android may not be my or your first choice of Linux, but it is without doubt an open source platform that offers both practical and economic benefits to users and industry. So we have both competition, and good representation for open source, in personal computing.

Even though we have only played a small part in that shift, I think it’s important for us to recognize that the shift has taken place. So from Ubuntu’s perspective, this bug is now closed.”

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Ubuntu Billboard in Ukraine

Ubuntu has been forced to axe a competition offering an Ubuntu-loaded Dell XPS laptop as a prize after just two weeks.

The ‘Billboard Photo’ contest, launched on May 14th, tasked Russian and Ukrainian Ubuntu users with locating and photographing one of several Dell-branded Ubuntu laptop advertisements on show in a handful of cities. The image deemed most original would win a Dell laptop, while 2 runners-up would snag some Ubuntu merchandise.

As of today the contest is officially over because, what Ubuntu’s David Planella refers to as ‘extenuating circumstances’, the billboards have been removed.

And no billboards means no contest.

No more entries will be accepted; and Planella says that anyone who submitted a picture to the contest pool on Flickr will be contacted with further details.

The (relatively) good news is that few will be inconvenienced by the contest curtailing, with only a single entry having been submitted since its launch – an image that was taken before the contest was announced!

What happens to the prizes, including a laptop and slick Ubuntu-branded messenger bag? Unknown at present.

But Dell, if you’re reading this, a) loving your work and b) feel free to send them my way! ;)

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Wake up! There’s a new Humble Indie Bundle waiting to have your cash thrown at it!

Yes, I know. It’s not even been a month since the last offering, but this one is special: it brings some shiny new games to Linux for the very first time.

The drill, as always, remains the same: the Humble folks have some games and you can buy them during the next 2 weeks for however much you like.

Games on offer in this latest bundle are:

• Adventure game Dear Esther*
• Platformer Capsized
• The action-packed Awesomenauts 
• Puzzler Thomas Was Alone
• Sandbox puzzle game Little Inferno

Pay more than the average price at the time of purchase you’ll also nab:

• Top-down actioner Hotline Miami
• Discovery game Proteus
  

Offer up more than $1 and you get a key to redeem all of the games on Steam.

Getting The Bundle

Head over to the Humble Bundle website to buy the bundle and find further information on the games, system requirements, etc.

All of the games will be available to redeem (‘installed without buying again’) through the Ubuntu Software Center (though at the time of writing only Capsized is showing up).

Go to Humble Indie Bundle 8

*Dear Esther Linux currently uses WINE. A Native Linux port will be released at a later date.

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Opera’s popular  e-mail feature is to be removed from the browser and released as a standalone application, developers have announced.

The decision to remove the feature, which was first added in 2000, is part of several major changes planned for Opera 15. The next generation version of the browser, currently available for testing as ‘Opera Next’, sees Opera swap out its Presto rendering engine in favour of Google’s new Webkit-fork ‘Blink’.

But rather than ditch with the integrated e-mail client, called M2, entirely Opera developers have decided to package it up and release it as a separate, standalone product.

Not on Linux Yet – Opera Mail RC on Mac OS X

“It’s almost ready, so today we want to introduce to you, the first release candidate of Opera Mail,’ the Opera’s Adam Minchinton writes on the desktop team blog, ‘So please download it and send us your feedback.”

Now for the not so good news. Downloads of Opera Mail’s Release Candidate are currently only available for Windows and Mac OS X, though – thankfully – Opera devs have confirmed that the app will be coming to Linux.

Mail Apps

Following Mozilla’s axing of direct development on Thunderbird, and the lightweight mail app Geary failing to get funding, some users may have felt that the future of the desktop e-mail client was looking doomed.

But this news, along with that of innovative app Inky’s plans for Linux, means mail app fans need not worry just yet…

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Popular PC sport simulation game ‘Football Manager’ will support Linux with its next major release, games developers Sports Interactive have said.

The news means that the upcoming Football Manager 2014 will be the first official release of the series on Linux.

Thanks to Steam, the game will be available to buy on one platform, but install and play on all; you won’t need to buy it again to play it on your Macbook or Windows partition.

Furthermore, the Linux release will support “cross play”, enabling connection with/playing against Mac and PC users.

What Is Football Manager?

Football Manager is a football management simulation game. The goal (pun intended) is to buy, sell, build and train the ultimate football team, play them against others in various tournaments and cups with the aim of coming out top.

The game is made by Sports Interactive and published by Sega and is a continuation of the Championship Manager series started in 1989 by the same developers. Legal fallout from a split with publisher Edios Interactive forced the developers to change the name.

Football Manager is released annually for PC and Mac users, though PSP and XBox 360 versions have been produced in the past.

Football Manager 2014 is expected to see a release date sometime around October.

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We wondered whether it was the ‘coolest Ubuntu PC ever built’. Not wanting to downplay such a reputation, the Cirrus7 Nimbus will be fashionably late to market. 

But only just.

The German company behind the device, Cirrus7, have said that they ‘can not keep [to] the planned release date’ of late May. Instead, the Nimbus will be launched a month late, seeing release in late June,.

Unlike other small form-factor PCs on sale the Nimbus is fanless. It cools the CPU ‘passively’ by way of laser-cut aluminium layers stacked on top of one another to form a case that double up as a heatsink. No other form of cooling is used – or even needed, say the company.

Pricing, Performance & Power Use

Alongside a revised release date for the metal marvel comes the first indication of how much you can expect to pay for it.

Pricing starts at €499 for a dual-core Intel Celeron* G1610T clocked at 2.3Ghz, rising to €758 for a quad-core Intel i7-3770T clocked at 2.5 GHz. Several intermediary options, such as i3 and i5 choices, are also available.

Is this good value? For a bit of context the Intel i3-powered Lenovo Q190 retails for €400+ – a lower price, but with a far weaker processor than that offered by the cheapest Nimbus.

Price/performance ratios aside, the choice of CPU will also dictate the power on offer from the integrated graphics. The i5 and i7 options offer Intel HD 4000 (as used by Apple in the MacBook Pro); but the lower-end models are paired with far less capable offerings.

Not that super-stellar graphic performance is going to be top of the want list for anyone shopping for a low-power, small-profile PC to start with. Anyone hoping to do hardcore gaming or HD video editing on a PC like this should have a quiet word with themselves…

Later in the year the company say we can look forward to options featuring Intel’s new super performant and super power-friendly Haswell CPUs.

For more details on the specifications of the Nimbus see our previous post.

Pre-Orders

Intrigued? Cirrus7 are advising anyone interested in purchasing a Nimbus to get in touch via preorder@cirrus7.com.

Mailing, they say, does not constitute an obligation to buy but will offer up early notifications about release dates and availability.

*They may be Celeron by name, but not in performance

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A video demonstrating a new set of animations for Ubuntu Touch has been posted online.

In the clip, Ubuntu designers showcase a range of visual effects for use in ‘core movements’ on Touch, including animations for switching between applications, unlocking the screen, and pressing buttons.

[Video Since Removed by Ubuntu]

Ubuntu’s Designers are calling the motion theme ‘Paper’, with the visuals created around the idea of evoking ‘…the theme of paper wherever possible.’ Eschewing traditional papery-effects like curls and folds, the team have opted for a more ‘suggestive’ approach using layers and stacking.

The video also shows a number of application designs using the new ‘Suru’ UI.

Earlier in the week Ubuntu designers also demoed a video of their new RSS reader concept called ‘Shorts‘.

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Tizen, the open-source Linux software platform aiming to power everything from smartphones to smart TVs, is seemingly coming to laptops.

Intel demoed a Tizen laptop experience at the Tizen Conference 2013 in San Francisco, USA, earlier this month. And it wasn’t demoed on any old heap of hardware, either: Intel were showing off the OS newcomer on an i7 Ivybridge Ultrabook.

The Tizen OS experience is powered by ‘Tizen Shell’ – a UI built upon GNOME-Shell.

While parts of the desktop are familiar Tizen developers have also made a number of modifications to it, including creating a set of moveable desktop widgets and introducing a HTML5 run-time for powering web-apps.

You can check out the full OS experience in the video below, taken by the folks over at Tizen Experts.

As Tizen is an open-source project all code will be published on the official website later in the year. Better yet, installable images for Ivy Bridge laptops may also be made available for download (with a suite of developer tools pre-installed) in an attempt to woo developers into using the OS for developing Tizen smartphone apps.

Tizen Time?

With Ubuntu-powered laptops beginning to increase in both availability and visibility; and with Google’s Chromebook enjoying phenomenal success, could an alternative OS find success on laptops? It just might.

Sporting industry backers like Intel and Samsung, both of whom are actively steering its development, Tizen certainly has enough clout behind it to carve a niche.

Laptops aside, this year certainly will see more of Tizen in the news as the first Tizen smartphone from Samsung is set to go on sale later this year.

Front page image credit: TizenExperts.com

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Gnome 3.8 introduced a bundle of nifty changes like new applications for Weather, Clock, Documents and Note Taking, improved search in the Activites, Privacy Settings and so on.

Amongst those was a changes was swapping the old Application Overview categories for Category folders.

In essence the new categories folders are no different than the old categories sidebar. They categorise applications by what they do, so apps like Calculator and File Archiver go to “Utilities”; music and movie players appear under “Sound & Video”; GIMP, Inkscape and Pinta show up in “Graphics”, etc.

What makes them different is that the old Categories were shown as sidebar right of the Applications grid, whereby the new folders are displayed right in the grid itself and clicking on them invokes a popover that shows the applications themselves.

Utilities Folder in GNOME 3.8

It’s pretty swish.

But there’s only one problem: by default GNOME only provides two folders – Utilities and Sundry. Everything else is appears on the one screen, making hunting for apps by eye a little overwhelming.

Every app. Happy swimming.

The good news is that it’s relatively easy to add new folders to group applications into – and this is exactly what this article is about.

Getting your hands dirty

The first thing you need to do is fire up “dconf Editor”.

Don’t know how? Simply press the “Super key” (may have a Windows logo on it) and type “dc” into the search field. The app will pop out as you type so that you can click on it.

Search for Dconf Editor

Once Dconf is open navigate to org > gnome > shell in the sidebar. In the right pane you will see an item heading reading: app-folder-categories followed by its contents: ['Utilities', 'Sundry']

Dconf in Action

Double click on the contents field so that it becomes editable. Delete all of the text inside it and replace it with the following:

['Utilities', 'Sundry', 'Office', 'Network', 'Internet', 'Graphics', 'Multimedia', 'System', 'Development', 'Accessories', 'System Settings', 'Other']

This will automatically sort your applications into appropriate folders, like so:

Categorised Applications Overview

Which looks a tad more organised then before:

Uncategorised applications overview

Going Further

For those of you that want a wee bit more power and feel like playing a bit more you can remove some of those categories, just watch the semantic of the regular expression to be like this:

['Category1', 'Category2', 'Category3', ... 'CategoryN']

Regrettably creating custom category is not yet possible, so you are stuck with the built-in ones.

But what if I mess up?

Oh, don’t you worry about that. There is “Set to Default” button at the bottom right of DConf-Editor that will restore the selected setting to it’s default value:

“Set to Default” button in Dconf

Mark Shuttleworth – Ubuntu founder, multitasker

He’s the founder of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical, and serves as the creative force behind not only the Unity desktop but its expansion to phones, tablets and TVs. 

In short, Mark Shuttleworth is a very busy man.

But in the weeks following a new Ubuntu release he puts himself in front of the community for a Question & Answer session. Enthusiasts, developers, users, plucky bloggers, and even the odd troll, get the chance to ask the ‘Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life’ quite literally anything.

An IRC log of the entire Q&A can be found at this link. But since we value your eyes – and your time – we’ve picked out the best questions, made them a wee bit more readable, and grouped them by topic for your perusal below.

Someone give us a cookie ;)

Unity 8 & Mir Is it wise to use Unity 8 for the first time on a LTS release?

The current plan is to stretch for Unity 8 in 14.04 LTS, but we are confident we can have Unity 7 running there just fine. We already support Unity 7 and it’s getting faster and cleaner as we go,

I’ve heard that Unity 8 is just “a Qt front-end for GNOME.” How is Unity 8 supposed to function?

Unity 8 on the Desktop is Still a WIP

With the work that’s going into phone and mobile we’re rapidly building a great community around a new portfolio of apps. Those apps will all stretch from phone to desktop (and to TV).

We would like to attract developers from a wide range of backgrounds, including GNOME and KDE and make it easy for them to deliver amazing experiences on Unity. We’re not going to get into an ideological fight, and we think developers should choose.

We’ve built a lot of foundations to support that [and] we’re seeing amazing commitments from games companies and others who have done well on IOS and Android. But i’d like to bring as much of the FLOSS ecosystem along with us too. Everyone’s welcome.

What are the intentions from NVIDIA and AMD to support Mir? Have they expressed any informal views on that matter?

“I find it bizarre to be criticised for writing open source software…”

Too soon to tell, but history suggests that open source communities are prone to hystrionics up front and pragmatism in the long term - so the hystrionics (sic) were unsurprising and a pragmatic result would be equally unsurprising.

The decision making in Mir was solid: Wayland did not meet our needs or yours, we chose to invest in something, and we chose to do it in a very quality-driven way. I find it bizarre to be criticised for writing open source software, and writing it with quality and performance in mind from the start and much of the mud that was flung was unjustified. But that’s the hystrionics (sic) part, it will happen again I’m sure.

Mir is pretty fantastic already – crisp, clean, fast, focused.

How Will GNOME’s development decisions affect Unity 8?

We’ll work as closely with both GNOME and KDE as we can. We have both great relationships and terrible relationships in both cases. There are individuals in GNOME and in KDE that are, respectively, either fantastic or impossible to work with - so disregard any bland statements about how ‘KDE’ and ‘Canonical’ engage. because, as always, it boils down to figuring out who wants to work together, and who doesn’t.

We will do great stuff with both and hopefully act as a central anchor for common standards like we did with indicators, with KDE. It’s difficult to disregard mudslinging, but if you can’t, it becomes impossible to imagine getting anything done together.

Miscellaneous Will the major PC manufacturers (Dell, Lenovo, HP) increase availability and model range of Ubuntu-preinstalled laptops in Europe?

In the last six months [there have been] a lot of new models from HP, Asus, Dell etc in Europe, and elsewhere. That will, I expect, continue.

How do I, as a K/L/Xubuntu user fit into Canonical’s long term plans?

I hope we continue to strengthen our relationships in the broader Ubuntu tent, and add more options too. I love that all of those options exist and invest a good deal to make it possible.

There is work to be done – every cycle, meshing all these gears takes work but we certainly don’t take decisions to exclude elements of our own community. It’s often a nice headline -grabbing hypothesis for a blogger, but there’s no substance to it. At a bare minimum, you will always be able to run any X environment on Ubuntu. We’ve gone to a lot of effort to retain that.

Now, if a particular person or upstream wants to refuse the ability to engage, that would be weird, but it would be their brand of weird, not mine. So anyway, of all the options you listed, i see no reason why they would cease to exist.

What is Your opinion on Windows 8?

Windows 8 – Popular Topic, Less Popular OS

Bold choices, right vision, stumbled at the gate but the race is just beginning.

Change is hard. The vision of convergence is the right one so i respect Microsoft for seeing that and focusing on that, but they stumbled with the actual release.

I think they left their actual desktop too much in the past (Win 7.5) and the pushed their tablet too much to the foreground (tiles with a mouse). But they are smart and hungry and being an underdog is wonderfully motivating.

For example they are doing a very impressive job on being an open cloud Azure has been transformed from PAAS into IAAS, and in many regards, damn-good-IAAS too.

Sorry to disappoint the prejudiced.

Ubuntu Touch When will the chip supplier supporting Ubuntu Touch be revealed? It was promised after MWC.

We have a preference to announce things in the most impactful way possible and it isn’t the right time to announce that, here [in an IRC channel]. But well spotted, it’s an important step, and i’m very happy that we have made good progress on the silicon front.

When in the ongoing processes will you know “Ubuntu is going to make it on the phone”?

Ubuntu on a phone – marvellous stuff

That’s straightforwardly a question of market adoption.

We have a nice % of PC shipments, and growing. can we achieve the same in the phone, in a year? I think so, based on conversations so far but we’ll know for sure in 2014.

What is very encouraging at the moment is the interest from top tier app developers; it is an easy port for them from Android / BB10 and a lot of their developers use Ubuntu so… why not!

Our Questions

Having choked on my own words when meeting Mssr Shuttleworth at the Ubuntu Phone unveiling back in January, I managed to seize this opportunity to put a few queries of my own to the chap in charge…

Canonical will be Computex next month with Ubuntu Touch for phones and tablets – but will Ubuntu TV also feature?

Aspects of the TV are in active development, but the heart of our team is focused on the phone.

We did enough of the TV to prove our design core, and then we’ve put in place a thread of investment on some background pieces that are needed, to do with TV standards. When we want to connect those pieces, or when someone else steps up, it will happen.

But being great on the phone is the most important thing [as] the volumes are there, and developers are there.

Back in 2011 you announced the goal of having 200 million Ubuntu users by 2015. Does this figure include Ubuntu Touch, or do you have a separate aim for mobile uptake?

Yes, that is only achievable with mobile, hence the focus on the phone.

It’s been suggested that Ubuntu Touch is Canonical’s ‘last roll of the dice’; the last chance to try and get profitable. The cutbacks on release support cycles and axing the physical UDS seem to reinforce this idea for some. How committed in the long-term is Canonical to making Touch a success, and supporting its other projects (cloud, desktop, etc)?

“[Ubuntu Touch] might be a once in a lifetime chance to break out of the cycle of platforms controlled by giants.”

Perfectly committed.

We have great design, great engineering, and are engaging with industry. We could do more, but at diminishing marginal returns. It is a stretch to do both. I would like Ubuntu to be more than just a developer desktop but we will always be that. Regardless, to be more, we have to lead, and that’s hard.

Looking around the world, I don’t see others who could potentially do so, putting in nearly the same level of effort. So I would very much like to see that pay off, because this might be a once in a lifetime chance to break out of the cycle of platforms controlled by giants.

And I think it’s worth taking that gap, and appreciate all the support we get from like-minded, passionate, smart people. so, Ubuntu is a success as a developer desktop which supports our needs on the cloud just fine.

To lead something like a convergent client worldwide is a project worth doing, dontcha’ think?

Quote of the Session

In response to a question on the ‘new’ virtual Ubuntu Developer Summits (vUDS), Mark showed he wasn’t beneath a bit of self-deprecation:

“I really like the vUDS thing. What a great example of the sky NOT falling in after all. Much better the second time.

Sort of like… Unity”

The latest stable release of Google Chrome fixes an issue that prevented it being installed on Ubuntu 13.04. 

A dependency change in last month’s release of Ubuntu 13.04 meant that anyone attempting to install Chrome using Google’s official installer was met with an error. The ‘libudev0′ package required by Chrome to run is no longer available from the Ubuntu repositories.

Ubuntu 12.10, 12.04 or earlier were unaffected.

The good news is that, with yesterday’s release of Google Chrome 27, this roadblock has been solved. Google Chrome, with all its Pepper-Flash and PDF-plugin glory, installs without hitch on Ubuntu 13.04 and, for those already using it, 13.10.

Hit the button below to download Google Chrome for Linux.

Download Google Chrome for Linux