Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" is due out in just a few days and shipping with it is the Linux 2.6.22 kernel. One of the interesting additions to the Linux kernel since the 2.6.20-based Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" release has been the tickless kernel feature. If you hadn't read out tickless kernel article from earlier this year, the tickless kernel feature (CONFIG_NO_HZ) is designed to improve the power efficiency especially on servers and portable devices.

One of the less-touted changes for Ubuntu 7.10 is the merge of the Ubuntu Studio repositories into the main ones (hosted by Canonical). This means you'll be able to install entire categories of multimedia software (audio, video, graphics) with a single command (or via Synaptic, as usual). You don't care, right?

Aren’t you tired of those audio players with billions of useless features that clutter up their graphical interface? I am. Most of the time, the player looks good on paper, but when I’m faced with the interface, I don’t even know where to start in order to play my music. There are a lot of buttons, lists, combo boxes a bit everywhere and their usage is not so intuitive.

Yesterday we took a look at Desktop Effects with Compiz. Today we turn to all the improvements for Firefox including the a better way to install plugins and the arrival of Gnash, a Free flash player.

Kubuntu 7.10 RC was announced as available several days ago. I installed it immediately, and I have to say, I’m very impressed! Although it’s still just a release candidate, it has all of the necessary ingredients: stability, responsiveness, innovation and coherency.

People seem to have quite high expectations of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), and to be honest, I don’t think they’ll be disappointed. Gutsy seems to be shaping up to be the best Ubuntu release ever, and it’s due for release next Thursday (18 October).There’s one particular aspect of Gutsy that I think is more important than most, and that is that it allows you to choose your level of freedom. I’d even go as far to say that this is an historic Linux distribution release, because of that.

It's always been my impression that, appearances to the contrary, Linux aficionados are no different than the rest of us. So I wasn't surprised when I saw a post on the Ubuntu Women forum, from a guy, who's wondering if there are "any good places online to meet like-minded free software women." (The "free," of course, refers to the software.)

I feel that is important for me to further analyze the benefits of open source software. In a previous post, I highlighted the cost-savings of open source and did not mention any of the other advantages that it provides. This post should provide a more balanced view of open source and the intrinsic benefits that free software provides.

On October 11, 2005, proprietary software maker Xara announced its plans to open the source code to its flagship vector graphics package Xara Xtreme, and with the help of community developers port it to Linux. Today, two years later, the project is stagnant and on the verge of irrelevance, primarily because the company couldn't figure out how to work with the open source community.

Well, so we missed a day. Fear not, today we soldier on to Desktop Effects with Compiz Fusion. It can be safely said that few features are as keenly desired as Desktop Effects. Ever since Compiz was announced XXX years ago, users and developers have been playing with the bling-tastic effects and wondering when it will hit a desktop near them. Well, the wait is no longer. Ubuntu 7.10 is the first major distro to ship Compiz enabled by default, for all users to have fun with.

As promised in my previous post on installing VirtualBox Open Source Edititon today I’ll be going over installing the Guest Addition tools for better integration between host and guest. These steps have not been tested on other Linux distributions but I’m sure they’ll work about the same way. I tested these on Kubuntu 7.04 running atop Kubuntu 7.10 beta as the host.

The release candidate of Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” has been released.

The Ubuntu developers are hurrying to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software that the open source and free software communities have to offer. This is the Ubuntu 7.10 release candidate, which brings a host of excellent new features.

Downloading—no matter what operating system you are using—is ubiquitous. If you’ve been on the internet you will have downloaded something at some point: PDFs, pictures, ISOs, movies, music files, streaming videos to name a few. This article will take a detailed look at KGet, a very versatile GUI download manager for the KDE desktop which is easy to use and has plenty of easily configurable options. It isn’t perfect (but the upcoming KDE4 may rectify that) but we’ll go with what we’ve got and put it through it paces.

Frozen Bubble is a pop-cap style game that puts the user into a world of colored balls, ice and penguins. While that might sound a bit silly, that's the whole point. The game works on the same principle as several very popular pop-cap style games such as "Dinosaur Eggs" and even the classic game "Puzzle Bobble" that started it all. The concept of Frozen Bubble is simple.

Brian Kent is a prolific font designer. At 32 years old he's already amassed an impressive collection of handmade fonts. He's also a really nice guy and has agreed to let me package his free fonts for Ubuntu.

I've used Brian's fonts in many design projects. Some of my favourite fonts from his collection include...

The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) believes the media is controlled by a small group of corporations. In response, it created the open source video player Miro as a way to make media available to the masses.

Previously I outlined how to install Ubuntu over the network using a netboot install CD or USB image. This tutorial takes it a step further and allows you to boot your machine from the network environment and select from a list of what you would like to install. This comes to the same end result as the previous tutorial (an installed machine without having to burn a CD), but doesn’t require the boot CD or USB image.

Today, COR Entertainment is scheduled to release version 6.10 of Alien Arena 2007, the popular free software, 3-D, first-person shooter built atop id Software's Quake II engine, which was released under the GPL in 2001. The new release of Alien Arena comes with seven new arenas, a better arsenal of weaponry, and a new game mode for one-on-one duels.

Here’s a strange story from the folks at CRN — the old reseller publication from CMP Publications. They mention that demand is soft for the latest Linspire release. Hmmm. I have to admit I’ve never even tried Linspire. And I bet most mainstream Windows folks have never even heard of it. The article speaks broadly about Linux not doing very well on the desktop. And it barely mentions Ubuntu.

If you spend most of your time in OpenOffice.org, you might want to be able to manage to-do lists and tasks without leaving the comfort of the office suite. Since Writer doesn't have such a feature, you can create your own no-frills task tool and at the same time sharpen your OOoBasic skills.

I’ve previously written on how to install VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.10, install VMware Server on Ubuntu 7.04 and install VMware Tools, but installing VirtualBox has a few of its own benefits. One, it is actually Open Source / Free Software whereas VMware is freeware. This is very important to a lot of people, myself included.

Gaupol provides support for a variety of different text-based subtitle files, and can help you get that video or DVD project corrected, synchronized, and back on track. The designers created this program for GNOME using GTK, and coded it to make batch processing and translating a snap. It works a lot like a standard text-editor, with find and replace, spell check, italics, and more.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has once more claimed that Linux and open source violates Microsoft's intellectual property and patents. Canonical's CEO Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ballmer has it all wrong.

In an interview with Linux-Watch, Shuttleworth, the man behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, explained why he thinks Ballmer's latest claims against Linux and open source are so much nonsense.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Release Candidate for version 7.10 of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Gobuntu, and Xubuntu codenamed "Gutsy Gibbon". The Release Candidate includes installable live Desktop CDs, server images, alternate text-mode installation CDs, and an upgrade wizard for users of the current stable release.

After posting my previous tutorial on Manually Installing Firefox I noticed that the Katapult Launcher in Kubuntu was not aware of my newly installed application. Apparently you need to refresh Katapult before it’ll see the changes.