crossover.is.free.for.today

Crossover a commercial compatibility layer for running Windows applications to Linux and Mac is being given away by Codeweavers for free...just for today!
CEO Jeremy White offered a challenge to George W. Bush. If the president achieved one of White's six "Lame Duck" goals during the twilight of his 2nd term, White would make Windows-API enabler & WINE GUI CrossOver free to customers for one day. Codeweavers' main page was temporarily replaced due to the day's unusually high traffic ;)

A day from now Ubuntu 8.10 will be officially released and two days from now will be All Souls' Day or "Undas" (as we pinoys call it) something like Dia de los Muertos only we don't have the grim fandango-like images. It's a time to remember those that touched our lives and for most pinoys, a time to bond with relatives. See you guys next week.

Can't.resist.the.urge...to.upgrade

Oh boy, I've tested Ubuntu 8.10 Beta (Intrepid Ibex) for 3 days via Wubi and I have a strong urge to drop Ubuntu 8.04 and upgrade to the beta release. Its only about 20days more but this particular release seems quite stable on two of the notebooks I've tested that I just got to do the upgrade. I have not encountered any bug that I'd consider a show stopper and the only one I saw thats annoying was the fact that the security key for wifi is not stored by the network manager (which prompts you again on the next reboot), but thats ok I'm pretty sure it will be solved on the next update. I've downloaded the alternate- installer iso yesterday, burned it on a cd and upgraded the system and what did I get? A warm fuzzy feeling that I got a new and improved version of my favorite desktop linux distro :) ...they say pulseaudio will be better in Ibex, I'll check this later. Also my Lazarus was broken but it just might be the libraries getting messed up after the initial upgrade(via cd)...I went online this morning and the update manager prompted me for a partial upgrade, which basically means there have been a considerable amount of difference between my packages as opposed to the online repositories (the iso must have been a few weeks older already). I'm still running an online upgrade while I'm writing this blog and from the looks of things (ISP slowdowns and all) It will probably take 2 hours or the rest of the day before the upgrade is done.

For the brave ones you can upgrade your system online (slower but more complete) by typing this on the commandline:

update-manager --devel-release

then click on the upgrade button.

or use the alternate installer cd:

The upgrade script is supposed to run once the cd gets loaded but there is a bug in the script (path issues I presume) that prevents it from launching and would therefore do nothing on the GUI side...so drop down to your terminal and type this instead:

./cdrom/cdromupgrade

On a totally unrelated but equally cool news, a friend of mine sent me a url to Google powered search site that uses commandline interface similar to sh and aptly called it goosh...greate use of ajax btw :)

Good luck and may the force be with you!

the.countdown.begins

It's October once again and another Ubuntu release is due (don't you just loved the predictable release cycle?) I'm currently downloading Ubuntu 8.10 beta a.k.a. Intrepid Ibex and will be testing it as soon as its finished. I'm actually very satisfied with the previous release (Hardy Heron) but I'd also like to see what the new release will put into the whole Ubuntu experience table. Aside from tons of bug fixes (and bugs to uncover, since this is beta) a slew of new features are added into Ubuntu. Some of the more notable improvements are (based on Ubuntu.com):

• X.Org 7.4. Which bring better support for hot-pluggable input devices and at the same time allow the greate majority of users to run without a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. This ensures that users spend more time using the system rather that fixing it. A new failsafe X is introduced, to give better tools for troubleshooting X startup failures...I'd wish better support for dual screen monitor btw. Also fglrx (thats ATI folks) and two of the older nvidia binary drivers are not available for X.Org 7.4 yet, so users of these drivers will be automatically switched to the corresponding open source drivers.
  
• Linux kernel 2.6.27. Better hardware support and bug-fixes obviously
• Encrypted private directory. Support for an encrypted secret folder in your home directory. Nice!
• Guest session. The User Switcher panel applet (package fast-user-switch-applet) now provides an extra entry for starting a Guest session. This creates a temporary password-less user account with restricted privileges: the account cannot access any users' home directories, nor permanently store data. This is sufficiently safe to lend your laptop to someone else for a quick email check.
• Network Manager 0.7. Includes system wide settings (i.e., no need to log in in order to get a connection) and management of 3G connections (GSM/CDMA). I just hope it works out of the box.
• "Last successful boot" recovery entry. Ubuntu 8.10 will retain a copy of your running kernel and make it available from the boot loader as a "Last successful boot" option . This makes it possible for old kernel packages to be safely auto-removed by the package manager, instead of being kept indefinitely(and eating disk space).
• DKMS. allowing kernel drivers to be automatically rebuilt when new kernels are released. This makes it possible for kernel package updates to be made available immediately without waiting for rebuilds of driver packages, and without third-party driver packages becoming out of date when installing these kernel updates.