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Ubuntu’s Ayatana team is creating a new enhanced GTK+ to enable RGBA support. This would allow themes much like Window’s Aero Glass to be created. Furthermore, if testing goes well, this theme could be the default theme for Ubuntu installations. While some may not want Linux to be a Windows clone, many users have become accustom to the eye candy the Aero Glass style presents and Ubuntu’s current brown and orange theme is not the most appealing. Ubuntu’s goal is to chip away at Microsoft’s marketshare and making the default look better is one way to accomplish that goal. Here is a preview of what the theme could look like:

Full Article: OMG!Ubuntu!

The latest version of the popular Linux distribution, Intrepid Ibex 8.10, has hit the net. If you are interested in grabbing it, here are the torrent links to help conserve the official servers’ bandwidth. Here are the regular downloads, but they will probably be slow for a bit while everyone rushes to get the latest version and update their installations. I’ll provide more coverage through the day as it comes about.

During a press briefing at LinuxWorld today in San Francisco, IBM announced a new partnership with Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical to offer “Microsoft-free” personal computers with IBM’s Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony software. The goal is to provide a preintegrated stack that can serve as a complete alternative to Windows and Microsoft Office.

IBM hopes that disillusionment with Vista and uncertainty about Microsoft’s long-term roadmap will create an opening for Linux to emerge as a stronger contender in the desktop market. The Linux and Lotus bundle will give consumers a low-cost desktop productivity option that is built around open standards from the ground up.

IBM’s Jeff Smith describes the desktop as “one of the last bastions of proprietary technology” and notes that it is “disproportionately dominated by one vendor.”

Full Article: ArsTechnica

Things are heating up between Microsoft and IBM and things could get interesting. This comes after IBM has begun a challenge to take back Microsoft Exchange users to the IBM Notes service. These two industry giants are definitely jockeying against each other in many other markets such as the data center business and it seems IBM wants to bring the fight to the desktop. It’ll be interesting on how Microsoft responds to IBM calling them out like this.

OSCON Billionaire, cosmonaut and founder of the fast-growing Ubuntu Linux distro Mark Shuttleworth dreams impossible dreams.

No, not a return to the stars. He believes in something that’s far harder for mortal open source engineers to achieve.

That dream? To produce a desktop more beautiful to ordinary users than legions of Apple programmers supping on the milk of chief exec Steve Jobs’ alleged brilliance are capable of producing. That includes a desktop not funded by a clutter of annoying banner or Flash-based ads, but paid for by subscription-based services.

Now you’re done dreaming, go home and code for the victory.

In a Tuesday evening O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) keynote, Shuttleworth called on delegates to make a concerted effort not just to catch Apple but to overtake the company in the quality of the desktop experience they deliver users.

His company Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor, is working to make the Ubuntu desktop “more beautiful” in the next two years, he told OSCON.

“I think the great task in front of us in the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something stable and usable and not pretty, to something that’s art,” Shuttleworth said.

“Think of the way the iPhone uses a pure software experience, it abstracts away all the hardware,” he said. “You can paint anything on the screen because it’s all software.”

Full Article: The Register

I applaud their efforts, but if they are going to take on Apple they need to work on their interface – alot. The current brown on brown theme in Intrepid Ibex is not pretty like Apple at all. Apple does a great job at making the interface what sells their products. Sleek and fashionable products sell and that’s exactly what Apple is doing. Ubuntu would need to go beyond the software too if they want to take on Apple and make their own products. Ubuntu has the capital in Shuttleworth, it’s just to what extent they are able to go.

Click for a larger view.

KDE 4.1 appears to be shaping out quite well. Above you will see the default Plasma Theme. KDE 4.1 is scheduled to be released on July 29th.

On Wednesday, DeviceVM, the company behind the distribution, said the hardware manufacturer would be putting Splashtop — which Asus calls “Express Gate” — into a million motherboards a month. Splashtop includes a Firefox-derived browser and the Skype internet-telephony application.

Splashtop is described by DeviceVM as a “secure web-surfing environment”, and is embedded on motherboards so that it can be booted within seconds, as an alternative to booting up a full operating system. It first appeared on high-end Asus motherboards in October 2007 and has since been put onto the more mainstream M3 series, but, according to Joe Hsieh, general manager of Asus’ motherboard business unit, it will now be extended to the entire range.

“In response to great user feedback, our plan is to proliferate Express Gate across our entire motherboard-product portfolio, starting with over one million motherboards per month,” Hsieh said. “Consumers want to turn their PCs on and off like any other appliance, and Express Gate has made that possible.”

Full Article: ZDNet

I am not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand it is nice to see instant-on systems in the near future. But it also locks you into this OS only if you want to use the feature. Also, you would be forced to use online office applications since you cannot put an entire office suite in the embedded chip. However, it will be interesting to see where this goes.

Today Ubuntu’s latest version 8.04 Hardy Heron has been released. It is a LTS version which it has long term support, important for those using it in corporate settings. I’ll probably try it out sometime this weekend when I have a chance to install it. Below are links to both the Ubuntu release website as well as the Kubuntu release website for KDE.

Ubuntu | Kubuntu

The daily productivity enhancement site, Lifehacker, has put together a very nice screenshot tour of the latest Ubuntu beta release, Hardy Heron or Ubuntu 8.04. If you aren’t familiar with Ubuntu, it is the increasingly popular Linux distribution that releases a new version every six months. The next release is expected in late April and the beta releases have just been coming out. It really does look like a nice system even for being beta. I don’t usually delve into using beta operating systems, but Ubuntu usually has outstanding beta releases with very few bugs. I urge you to take a look at the Lifehacker article if you are interested.

Full Article: Lifehacker

Now that the feature-freeze of the next Ubuntu release Hardy Herron 8.04 has passed, the Ubuntu team has announced the name of its next release 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. While it is not exactly the easiest name to say compared to all the past Ubuntu releases, the Ubuntu development team hopes their latest mascot can help inspire them with its “rugged adventurousness of a mountain goat to navigate tricky terrain”. According to Mark Shuttleworth, the plan is to re-engineer the user interaction model so that Ubuntu will work with everything from high end workstations to ultra portable notebooks and maintain great performance. While all the particulars of Intrepid Ibex are yet to be known, we will at least know what to call it.
In case you are like me and never heard of an ibex before it is a ” type of wild mountain goat with large recurved horns that are transversely ridged in front. Ibex are found in Eurasia, North Africa, and East Africa.”

Picture source: Wikipedia
Source: Ubuntu List Archives