Ubuntu UDS R - Keynote

like the stage, looking good. Good things to happen in the next cycle but a lot of it on the back side. Which isn't a bad thing at all.

Mono 3.0 is out

Mono 3.0 is out - Miguel de Icaza

hmm .. so now how do I get that onto my Ubuntu box. Hope this is also soon used within Unity3D.

Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) release

Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) released!

.. this is the first release in years I didn't have much time or motivation to install prior to release. Ubuntu 12.04 is a great release. And I haven't seen any compelling new feature that makes me switch. My laptop has Ubuntu 12.10 installed now. I'll post my usual findings as I used it for some time.

Open Source Culture: Problem #1

I like how Canonical decided to be more open about secret projects they work on. At least that they now involve some people outside of Canonical to get feedback is great. I think a lot of problems with the new "Amazon Suggestions" feature could have been avoided like that. Sometimes it just takes an outside perspective to see some problems.

And I don't think it is a problem between Open Source and secret projects. Sometimes this is a much better approach then to be open from the start. It's more about the psychological side than code improvements or testing. Often Projects fail because motivation of the contributors fades away. People just tend to move on as they loose interest.

That's why I really dislike bad comments to some newly released code. It's new, surely it has it's problems, just like anything new has. At least some others seem to share my opinion. I think Jono Bacon put it right on his blog:

The Genesis Of Free Software Projects | jonobacon@home: "when sometime decides to create Free Software either as an individual or as a company, they have the right to create the first iteration of that feature however they choose. Their investment of time, money, or both in building Free Software earns them a right to put together a first cut that meets their needs…this is the very nature of scratching an itch."

Comments like "you should have used X instead!" are just wrong. Especially for things that are open and you get for free. Even more so if the one releasing something didn't event get paid to do so. The only thing these comments do is discouraging someone which cares about free and open software. So people writing such bad things are only discouraging other people to do such tings. You are destroying your own system here.

This is something I still see way too often on blogs. This is really bad for open software ...

A Major Corporate Sponsor For Open Source needed?

Scott McNealy: The World Lacks A Major Corporate Sponsor For Open Source | TechCrunch

hmm ... maybe

Linux on the (consumer) Desktop

Linux on the (consumer) Desktop

so much still to do. I hope that at least Canonical has plans for most of these. And I think that Ubuntu should jump to the systemd wagon. Riding one will streamline the efforts and resources needed to create an awesome product. Event if upstart is a better implementation (which I don't know much about) freeing the resources for years to come is something I would prefer.

What Killed the Linux Desktop (so far)

What Killed the Linux Desktop - Miguel de Icaza

... (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions. ...

good and valid points raised. This needs to be addressed somehow...

Eclipse Bug 368543

Bug 368543 – Odd Display of WindowBuilder in Eclipse 3.8/4.2 on Linux

Thumbs Up to the Eclipse project. I reported an annoying bug which makes the visual UI editor unusable for me. Not even 24h have passed and they are all over it. There is already a quickfix and a patch. Great work ... hope this is fixed with 4.2.1

OUYA - A Video Game Console

OUYA: A New Kind of Video Game Console by OUYA — Kickstarter

This looks very interesting. Potentially a cheap, good looking device to play around with. I'm sure that it will be possible to run something like Ubuntu on it as well. This will make a great little desktop like that. Potentially also a good media box.

Software isn’t Dead

DoctorMo's Blog » Blog Archive » Software isn’t Dead

he's got a good point there. I like the cathedral metaphor :). And it's interesting that Microsofts "Metro" UI makes programming simpler by making the UI simpler (=more mobile like). Less feature bloated, less to code. But also a lot needs to be reinvented for this "new" UI. From this point of view half of it feels like a step back to the 90s. Thank God they didn't reintroduce the commandline.

Never build upon closed-source frameworks

#AltDevBlogADay » Never build upon closed-source frameworks

yeah, just the way it is. At least if you can choose.

Game Over for Moonlight

Moonlight sent into twilight - Update - The H Open Source: News and Features

sad, sad thing. But expected ...

MOAI: Multi-Platform Development

As Tim Schafer postet a movie about how they are going to use MOAI in their latest game. So I had to have a closer look at it. A few months back I already once noticed MOAI but I didn't care much about it. Nor did I have a closer look at it. Now that this changed here are my first thoughts on it.

MOAI is primarly intended for 2D mobile game development. But it's also possible to develop and distribute Windows and Mac games with a Linux port soon to follow. At least that's what their Website tells us. Mostly as a user of MOAI you code using LUA which is a pretty neat programming language. Overall it looks like a fast multi-platform 2D game development environment.

Zipline Games is the company behind MOAI. They make money from selling Games and Cloud Services (which MOAI fully integrates with). I especially like the Cloud stuff as that's definitely something I would want to use in my games.

My biggest problem with MOAI is the currently missing Linux support. As I develop my private projects solely on Linux (Ubuntu) I can't do much right now. The only possibility is to build the Linux part yourself from the Linux branch. But last time I checked they said it will be integrated soon. So I'm waiting for that.

Right now I mostly use libGDX which offers similar things except for iOS support (which they work on) and Cloud integration. Otherwise they seem very similar. But cloud for me would be a big plus and I would move my development efforts to MOAI with proper Linux support.  I hope that's gonna be released soon.

Ubuntu 12.04 - dislikes

As usual, after the official release of the Precise Pangolin and my first impressions, my dislikes on this nice and polished Ubuntu 12.04 release.

• They removed my favorite Launcher Feature. As I wrote before, I really loved the Launcher window dodge feature. It was great to work with and with the new edge resistance it would have been so much better to use. Really a shame they did that. Autohide feels like such a big step back from such an intelligent feature. (It's possible to get this feature back.)
• They changed how Meta+1/2/3/.. behaves. It now only raises the last focused window from these. Before it did raise all windows which I found much better. I used this a lot so now it's a bit more cumbersome.
• Skype still doesn't work properly. Distorted audio is the norm for every notification. Basically this makes me hate Skype. Didn't try to call anyone so far, so don't know how the audio is there. I think I need to apply my old Skype audio hack to fix this, again.
• Just like last time I still need to manually edit the Pulseaudio config file and set "enable-lfe-remixing = yes" for my subwoofer to work with normal stereo sound (like music playback). This is annoying and one of the only things I need to edit a config file for (which I still hate to do).
• I start to hate it more and more when applications create directories in my home folder. And I'm not even talking about hidden directories here (which is bad as well, a .ssh, .config and .local should be all there is). The default Backup application creates a deja-dup/[computername] directory for Ubuntu One syncing. Why not use something like Ubuntu One/Backups/deja-dup/[computername]? If I use Ubuntu One that directory will be there anyways.
• Compiz Scale window switching seems to have problems sometimes. It happens that some windows end up on the wrong Workspace after switching. Not really sure how to reproduce it, just happens sometimes.
• When the computer is Idle and the display deactivates it starts to do something. The fans start to spin faster (and with that also louder). As soon as I do something to reactivate the screen it stops. Annoying as usually you can barely hear the fans even while doing normal activities like browsing the web. Like this I can't leave the computer on while doing something else.
• Focus stealing got a lot better. It only happens very rarely anymore (like while running Synaptic). Still annoying, but mostly gone now.

Thank good that most of my old dislikes from Ubuntu 11.10 are fixed now. Especially the Unity related ones. Unity is pretty great to use now. Generally, my dislikes seem to move more to niche areas. This is a very good thing.

Ubuntu 12.04 - first impressions

So I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 for a few months now. Mostly on my netbook but also for about three weeks on my new XT3 Laptop and a few days on my main machine at home. There is a lot to like about this release. It's well polished and refined. The Unity interface really starts to shine now. So like with the last release here are my first impressions on Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin":

• Unity is fast. It feels very snappy to use even on my aging netbook. It's great to use like this.
• Finally, the most important aspects of Unity can be easily customized. And even more using MyUnity from the Software Center.
• The Unity multi-monitor improvements are very welcome. As a developer I usually use at least two monitors. With this release of Unity it is fairly usable, at least on pair with Windows.
• Love the changed Unity Dash front page. The old one was never of use to me. This might have (after some time) the applications right there that I actually want to launch.
• Overall the "attention-to-details" changes made are all really nice and all over the place. Everything behaves better, simpler, faster.
• Linux hardware support is getting to a point where you can expect it to work better than windows (just like with my netbook as well as my brand new laptop). Microsoft really needs Windows 8 and it needs it soon or they gonna loose the edge they had for so long.
• The newest XBMC Media Center is very easy to install and very nice to use. With all the Android and iOS apps out there acting as great remotes this is awesome! And it's as simple as logout and login to get to it and have a great media center experience.
• Improvements to the Software Center are great. I'm starting to use it more often.
• Desura is also awesome and has a lot more Linux games now. It went from 48 games about 6 months ago to 130+ now. Also I should mention that you can play a lot of GoG.com games easily on Linux (DOSBox/Wine). Just if the Desura games arn't enough for you.
• Wine has improved a lot. It works well with a lot more games and it integrates much better into the system.
• My Wacom Tablet, Webcam and Android Phone seem to work as expected. No configuration or modifications needed.
• Startup speed is great. With an SSD Ubuntu tend to use half the time Windows 7 takes to the login screen. At least on my Desktop and Notebook this is the case. I have no need to hibernate my computers. The difference isn't big with the short start times already there.
• Most of the first impressions for Ubuntu 11.10 still apply here.

I like this release, it's a good improvement over the last releases (as usual). But as with any LTS release software packages are not as up-to-date as I'd like. So I already can't wait for an other "normal" release that isn't as conservative. Ubuntu 12.10 will be more to my taste. And I already can't wait for it.

As usual a list of things I didn't like will follow shortly after the final release. As some things I already found might be fixed by then. I think the dislike list is going to be shorter than for any other release I've written one, but we'll see ...

It's like everywhere!

well done video.

Kill All Proprietary Drivers For Good

[Phoronix] Qualcomm Calls To "Kill All Proprietary Drivers For Good"

! ... likely too awesome to get real anytime soon ...

Stabyourself.net - Mari0

Stabyourself.net - Mari0

Two of the best games merged! Soo epic...

Ubuntu Design: Micro, Macro

Ubuntu Design: Micro, Macro

From the comments (by Sicofante):

Besides that, Ubuntu/Canonical don't seem to be certain what an LTS is about. What's a very experimental feature such as the HUD doing there? How can you play so irresponsibly with features like dodge, completely removing it against any common sense and logical considerations? How can you go back and forth with basic applications like the default music manager? You do things like those with ordinary releases, not LTS releases.

well said. Don't understand that stuff either. Too many basic things changed for this LTS.

Multiple Canvases Support for AWT

Badlogic Games • View topic - Multiple Canvases Support (WIP)

love that my code was already useful to someone else. So now there is a working AWT backend for libGDX as well as a SWT backend which are both able to render to multiple canvases. nicely done. This is how Open Source is supposed to work ...