An Ubuntu user published a piece on his blog last week about using .desktop files to deliver malware under Gnome and KDE. He exposes a serious problem that serves to remind over-zealous free-software advocates that Linux, like everything else, has flaws. But in a world where Linux market share remains negligible, do these flaws translate […]
Generally, a fresh installation of Ubuntu is pretty usable out-of-the-box. But some aspects of the default configuration seem pretty silly to me. Here are the ones I’d change first if I were in charge of Ubuntu.
By default, almost every file on an Ubuntu system is readable by everyone. This means that, under a non-privileged account, I can read system configuration files that normal users have no reason to view, and which might be exploited by a malicious user to gain root access to the system.
I wanted to view the Wikipedia article on OpenOffice recently, so I googled ‘openoffice’, correctly assuming that the link I was looking for would be near the top of the results. While doing this, I noticed that a Google query for OpenOffice also turns up a couple of paid ‘sponsored links’ on the right side […]
tuxradar.com has published a well-done series of benchmarking tests comparing Ubuntu Intrepid and Jaunty with Windows Vista and 7, both on 32- and 64-bit platforms. The results suggest that–surprise–Windows 7 is not noticeably faster than Vista. Moreover, it’s much slower than Ubuntu. While the authors of the article go to great lengths to point out […]
Google enjoys a pretty favorable image within the free-software community. In some respects, it deserves this reputation, as it strongly supports many open-source projects. On the other hand, Google is reluctant to open the code of most of its own software. Given this hesitancy, can we trust the company to be always on Ubuntu’s side?
There’s been some speculation (albeit with minimal supporting evidence) that Microsoft is crafting a ‘software center’ for Windows that will resemble the package-management system Ubuntu users have known and loved for years. While I don’t doubt the possibility that Microsoft might try to implement something like that, I strongly suspect that it will fail. Here’s […]
In an interview with linuxdevices.com, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes Linux, argues that Microsoft’s failure to anticipate the pace of hardware development over the long-term contributed substantially to the trouble that the company now finds itself in. This is an interesting insight, and adds some precision to explanations of […]
Very few Ubuntu users, at least outside of the enterprise, pay for support. Instead, they turn to various free resources, ranging from IRC channels to the documentation wiki to the official Ubuntu Forums, when they run into trouble. While free support in the Ubuntu world is often
In my other life, I spend a lot of time studying the French Revolution. Unsurprisingly, that pursuit rarely intersects with my interest in Ubuntu. The one connection that I can draw between revolutionary France and the free-software community, however, is their shared obsession with ideological evangelism, or spreading their own supposed freedoms to the rest […]
Although I don’t plan on using Windows 7 unless threatened with violence, I thought it would be interesting to see what Microsoft’s pushing these days as state-of-the-art technology. Many of the new features planned for the next release of Windows, however, seem more like catch-up than innovation.
In particular, here’s a list of features new to Windows that have been around in the Linux world for more than a little while.
A Wisconsin woman recently bought a computer from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed and was shocked and angry to discover that Windows and Microsoft Office were no where to be found on her new machine. A few months ago, we were told returns of Linux netbooks were astonishingly high, due to confusion among consumers who expected […]
In what represents the final victory in the long struggle between the free-software community and Broadcom, the developers of the open-source b43 wireless driver announced a few days ago that they’ve succeeded in reverse-engineering firmware for Broadcom-based cards. Because Broadcom had long refused to release specifications or a Linux driver for its devices, the b43 […]
The New York Times ran a story today about Ubuntu and its prospects for beating Microsoft. Focusing on Mark Shuttleworth, the South African billionaire who founded the Ubuntu project and leads Canonical, the Times reporter concludes that the idea of Linux on every desktop remains a bit “quixotic,” and suggests that Ubuntu has only come […]
It’s paper-writing time again, which means I’ve spent many long hours lately with OpenOffice Writer (for now, I’m still using version 2.4). Writer is a great application and a useful tool for getting work done. But there are some components that I continue to find endlessly frustrating, namely…
…The Following List:
There’s some reason to believe that Empathy is the next big thing in instant-messaging on the Ubuntu desktop. There have been passionate calls for its adoption in Ubuntu 9.04 as a replacement for Pidgin, and the Gnome people seem to be pushing it (not surprisingly, since it’s developed under their auspices) for future releases–note the […]
There’s been some discussion lately about promoting Linux as a gaming platform in order to win the struggle against proprietary operating systems. It’s an interesting idea, but I don’t think it meshes well with reality. Here’s why. First, this concept presupposes that “Gamers are adventurous folks,” and “Linux adopters often need to be adventurous in […]
2008 was a great year. The United States got a new president. I got a college degree, complete with the associated crushing personal debt (a nice complement to the crushing national debt incurred by my country). More importantly, however, new features were introduced to Ubuntu and Linux. Although it comes a bit belatedly (today being the first day of 2009), here’s a list of my favorite innovations in 2008:
For a long time, ndiswrapper, which uses Windows wireless drivers to make wireless cards work on Linux, was a vitally important component of many Ubuntu systems. In many cases, it was the only way for users to access wireless Internet. Unfortunately, the ndiswrapper project’s pulse has seemed to go from faint to non-existent over the […]
Lead Ubuntu developer Mark Shuttleworth posted an item on his blog yesterday about the future of notifications in Ubuntu. This (or at least something similar) is what users can expect to see in Ubuntu 9.04 when it’s released in April:
A few thoughts:
Jeremy Allison of the Samba project made some interesting remarks in an interview last week about the nationalist flavors of Linux distributions. To sum up: SUSE is popular with Germans and other Europeans; Red Hat and Fedora are for Americans; the Chinese have Red Flag Linux; and Ubuntu “seems to be more third world.” In […]
