One Shot Design

For those of you who want to access their Facebook chat without a browser, Pidgin now features a plugin for that.

On my personal home computer I permanently switched from Windows to Linux in 2001. The latest Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution automatically updates itself and allows to do all the mundane stuff like handling electronic mail, surfing the internet, viewing and editing text or spreadsheet documents.

There are outstanding free applications allowing me to create and retouch high-colour graphics, rip and apply audio filters to songs, manage and hand-edit my music and photographic library, and securely store all my critical data. The X Windows System allows to place applications windows in any of its multiple screens and keeping a movies window on all screens on top of all applications.

Linux is good and I love Open Source. My only dissapointment however is the difficulty of setting up and flawlessly running multimedia (music or video) composition software. There is also a file management system issue: since the file and folder owner alone has write priviledge, I have often found myself unable to write files on a wearable Linux device’s memory card. For example I cannot place files on my HTC memory card under Linux. I need to resort to Windows or OSX to do that.

Which is why I pondered wether to get a Mac mini and I eventually ended up doing it.

Google announced a Cloud Computing operating system targeted at netbooks. The announcement met with mitigated response. Some GNU/Linux users do feel that this initiative is adding to an already fragmented Linux panorama where Ubuntu seems to be standing out.

Matt Asay of CNET.com wrote an interesting article exploring the common history of Oracle Corporation and Red Hat Linux, and the possibility of Oracle to focuse on Ubuntu Linux in order to break away from Red Hat. Asay’s conclusion makes a lot of sense, because Canonical’s Debian-based Ubuntu is the GNU/Linux distribution with the best popularity and the biggest adoption rate at the moment. The only problem though is that Canonical is not for sale.

In April 2009, Oracle commited to acquiring SUN Microsystems, who introduced the Solaris OS. I mentionned earlier on this forum about Nexenta, an operating system based on Ubuntu code and the Solaris kernel. With this choice, Oracle would still be able to capitalize on the extensive Debian and Ubuntu repositories.

Debian and all the other GNU/Linux distributions based on it are the first lineage of operating systems to support USB 3.0.  Sarah Sharp, a Linux developer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center explains how to manually enable USB 3.0 on Debian.