Hellow's Blog

With the holiday season in full swing, I felt it would be a good idea to post about some good online resources for Christmas planning and the like.

http://northpole.com/ – This site has a lot of good resources for parents and activities for younger children.

http://www.youtube.com/holidaysolutions – This Youtube channel resulted from a partnership between Youtube and Target. The channel contains many videos on party and gift ideas, recipes, etc.

http://www.allthingschristmas.com/ – This site has many ideas around decorations, games, etc. It even has it’s own forum community.

Twitter also has a few good hashtags going for the holidays. See #Christmas and #holidays.

For the last few weeks, I have been testing Ubuntu Karmic Koala Beta.

I have never seen a better beta release.

I have encountered no moderate or above level bugs, I have not had a single application crash, and it has overall been the best and most complete beta release that I have seen. The only complaint that I have is the fact that – and this might be a local problem – but apt-get is much slower with installing packages, specifically the template extraction part; Not really sure what is causing this, it might be the overall system load is affecting it.

Ubuntu Karmic has introduced the “Ubuntu Software Center” in place of “Add/Remove Programs” or something similarly titled. It is a improvement upon the older interface for newbies – although I do prefer apt-get myself .

Ubuntu Software Center Home (Click for full size)

Karmic has also began including Empathy in place of Pidgin as “default”. I can’t speak well for this change, as I prefer Pidgin’s interface and maturity over Empathy. I don’t feel it is developed enough to be included as “default”, although it is easily changeable (the beauty of Linux). Empathy vs Pidgin: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EmpathyVsPidginUsability

Another change is that Ubuntu One is included as default. For those of you that don’t know, Ubuntu One is a project by Canonical to create a program like Dropbox for Linux only, at this point. Ubuntu One provides 2GB of storage right off, and you can get 50GB of storage for $10 a month. It is a great solution for syncing files between computers and sharing files between other Ubuntu One users. You can log in with your Launchpad OpenID, if you have one. Project homepage: https://one.ubuntu.com/.

Ubuntu One Web Interface (Click for full size)

Another detail about Karmic that dosen’t really fit in anywhere else is that it will be shipping with the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, a big improvement upon the older kernel shipped in Jaunty.

Now, before I close this, I would like to send out a little piece of advice for those thinking of upgrading when Karmic is released: Upgrade before the “official” release. There is little risk of a severe bug being discovered less than 10 days before the official release, so you should be safe with upgrading a few days before. The Ubuntu servers are slammed on release day, so this might sound a little like common sense, but meh.

Alright, time to stop rambling.

~ Collin Pruitt (Hellow)

Now, what are your experiences with Karmic Koala? Post them in a comment below:

The Ubuntu Web Presence Team has contributed another fine round of web buttons for our next release: Ubuntu Karmic Koala:

And, for those of you who can’t/won’t view Javascript, here’s a static HTML image for you:

The code for all of these can be found at the following address: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/countdown