Upgrading to Dapper (even EASIER!)

The "Release Candidate" for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (aka. Dapper Drake) got announced today, but along with it I found a nice little tidbit in the announcement:

 * Because this is the Release Candidate, you need to invoke the
  update manager explicitly.  To do this, press Alt-F2 (or open
  a Terminal using Applications -> Accessories ->Terminal)

     gksudo "update-manager -d"

  This step will not be necessary on the final release.

I've bolded the important part for clarity.

:)

Things just keep getting better and better...

Upgrading to Dapper (The REALLY Easy Way)

Add this one to the big long list of reasons why I want Ubuntu to have my babies:

Upgrading to Dapper without touching the terminal

If there's one thing that the Ubuntu developers are good at, it's just getting stuff done. Man, once again, good job Ubuntu devs. :)

More News Tidbits

Gnash
If you've ever used Macromedia's Flash plugin on Linux, you'll know it leaves something to be desired. It's a version behind the plugin for Windows, it's slow, and has caused more than a couple of browser crashes for me. Fortunately, there's been fairly heavy development into an open source replacement for the Flash plugin. Gnash is this open source replacement. Recently, they released some new test packages, and there's been a decent response. Gnash can't yet handle interaction, but it can play Flash 7 stuff fairly well. If the pace of the development keeps up, hopefully we'll see a feature-complete replacement for the Flash plugin sometime next year.

Wine Doors
Ripped from the Wine Doors site:

Wine doors is an application designed to assist users in obtaining, installing, uninstalling and working around the caveats associated with wine applications. Although wine doors is intended to be a replacement for winetools it is not limited to release cycles for the applications available to install, instead a web service will be provided, this web service will serve XML Pack Lists and Application Packs as well as various other resources.

As soon as I stumbled across this, I got pretty excited. Winetools is a really really really disorganized application that makes it somewhat easier to install Windows apps through WINE. (It's a crappy Tcl/Tk app with a terrible UI. There's also been lots of controversy over whether it does good or evil in the WINE community, as it installs some DLLs and sets up some settings that can cause problems for WINE users and make it harder to track down WINE bugs.) Fortunately, it appears that Wine Doors is likely to be the successor to Winetools, as it implements a bunch of really good ideas, as well as good UI that follow's GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). If you want to get a better idea of the features of Wine Doors, check out the screenshots or the main page.

Jokosher
If someone walked up to me on the street and asked me, "What's the best thing Linux has going for it in the next 3 years?", I would respond with two words: Quality applications. Jokosher is a great example of the types of quality applications that have been springing up lately. Jokosher is a multitrack audio editor/recorder that's pretty simple to use. These screenshots do a fairly good job at explaining what it can do. Again, this is definitely another application to keep an eye on in the future.

Usplash ChangeLog... oddity...

Last week, when I was doing my daily Dapper updates, I found this in the ChangeLog for usplash:

   * Revert artwork to 0.1-36, Frank was asked to provide better artwork
  over the weekend but instead appears to have spent the weekend working
  on a text-less version which we already said was not going to make
  dapper.

  Don't expect this to be the last change before Dapper is released.

Uhhhh.... I think everyone that ever looks at the "Changes" tab in the Ubuntu update notifier saw that. Sure, the guy might have screwed up, but making him look like an ass to everyone isn't cool... (Moral to the story: Keep your ChangeLogs professional.)

Dapper CDs on ShipIt!

It looks like you can now order Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) CDs on ShipIt. If you're not familiar with the service, Canonical (the main organization behind Ubuntu) will ship you Ubuntu CDs completely for free.

I did it myself for Breezy, and I ordered a few extra copies to give away to people that I know. Pretty much anytime I had to diagnose an obscure hardware problem on someone's PC over the last year, I'd just pop in an Ubuntu LiveCD, just to rule out the possibility of it being a software thing. Whenever I'd do that, I always had the opportunity to give a little blurb about Ubuntu, you know, spread the love. :)

Anyways, order your CDs now, and get some for your friends and colleagues.

Banshee Roadmap

Aaron Bockover has just posted a new roadmap for Banshee.
Check out the "Goals for 0.11.x/HEAD" to see what's coming up... *drool*

News Tidbits

Sauerbraten 2006-24-06 Released
Linux-gamers.net has the scoop on the latest release of Saurbraten.

Mixx 1.5.0beta1 Released
Mixx is a powerful DJ mixing program for Linux and Windows. As far as I can tell, it's the best open source mixing program out there. In the latest beta, they've added pitch-independant time stretch, as well as fixed a bunch of annoying bugs. It looks like the development has also started to pick up again. This is a good project to keep an eye on...

Wormux
I downloaded and gave Wormux a shot today. It aims to be a free Worms clone for Linux, and that it definitely succeeds in. It feels pretty polished too. If you're a Worms fan, give it a shot. (Reminds me of Worms 2...) If you don't feel like adding an apt repository to your Ubuntu system to install the game, here's direct links to the two .debs you need: wormux-data-0.7.1, wormux-0.7.1 (just download the .deb from the directory corresponding to your distro)

GShare 0.90

GShare is a simple new way of setting up file shares in Linux. It uses Mono to set up a simple FTP server that is advertised to other machines on your network through Avahi and can be seen from other GNOME machines in Nautilus's "Network Servers" dialog. Even cooler, if you install Apple's "Bonjour for Windows", you can use it on Windows too. (It shares to Macs as well.)

It's easy to compile/install and play around with... give it a shot!