Someone on the United Kingdom Ubuntu mailing list pointed out this excellent interview with Mark Shuttleworth on the show “Open Season”. I hadn’t listened to the show before but it was very well done. One thing that didn’t get quite answered was a point about how Ubuntu manages to ensure that every package is reliable despite the high proportion of volunteers who have commit access. The show’s hosts seemed totally blown away by the fact that around 50% of people working directly on Ubuntu’s core packages are volunteers not employed by Canonical.

Sure, some open source projects get all the glory, like, say, Audacity or Gallery. Everyone knows about them and they’ve been downloaded 17 gazillion times. But what about the unsung heroes? Here are 15 who deserve a bit more attention. Give ‘em some love, huh?

With the up-and-coming release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon coming, we’re pleased to announce another Ubuntu Open Week, this time taking place the week following the Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon launch - Mon 22nd Oct - Sat 27th Oct on #ubuntu-classroom on Freenode. The sessions take place from 15.00 UTC to 21.00UTC

Yesterday we took a look at all the handy new features of X in Ubuntu 7.10 and today we turn to Fast User Switching which allows you to easily share your computer with others.

For Distros with lots of Kernel upgrades Like Ubuntu Gutsy now that it is still in Beta, it is annoying to start every day your PC and see that your grub list keep growing and growing.

Clean this unused kernel images is not only good for haven a cleaner grub menu, but also to gain disk space, as all those kernel images uses a lot of space in your disk.

I will show you this under Ubuntu, but should work for other distros just taking care of the names of their kernel images, and also its package managers.

In this short screencast we look at various ways of connecting printers in Ubuntu. We don't look at troubleshooting printer issues, as that will be covered in a later screencast, what we do cover is:-

• Printer audio detection in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) - Note: Gutsy is not yet released so we do not recommend running it on production hardware, and some features may change between now and the release date.
• Automatic detection of network printers
• Manually configuring network printers
• Connecting to Windows shared printers.
• Printing test pages

Cinelerra, one of the only serious video editing and compositing tools available for Linux, can cause frustration for users trying to install it on Ubuntu Studio. Fortunately, after several attempts, I found a way to install it easily.

Yes, we all know Ubuntu has strong momentum on the desktop. But what about the server? Glad you asked. There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting Ubuntu 7.10 — Gutsy Gibbon — will mark the beginning of a strong server push for Canonical.

The GIMP image editor is preparing for the start of a new development cycle, and you can have your say in the way the next version looks by submitting a mock-up to the GIMP UI Brainstorm blog. User interface designer Peter Sikking spoke with us about the project and how it fits into the larger work of creating the GIMP's UI.

So I’ve spent the last few evenings building a local Ubuntu repository mirror for localized network installations.  While installing a machine today I noticed a new option within the partitioner.  Encryption! 

Yesterday we kicked this whole thing off and took a look at Deskbar and Tracker. Today we turn our attention to X, the graphical subsystem of any Ubuntu (or Linux or Unix machine). As any existing Ubuntu user knows, not only do you need to configure X, but breakages can happen. Thankfully with Ubuntu 7.10, there comes a few new features to help out with these problems, including better auto detection and configuration, Bulletproof X and graphical X config, for those times when you really to play with something. But first, some explanations.

In this screencast we look at the Nautilus file manager. This includes:-

• Configuration preference in nautilus
• Managing files and folders
• Mounting and correctly unmounting external storage devices (USB sticks and memory cards)
• Dealing with trash
• Bookmarks

Canonical Ltd., the company that supports Ubuntu Linux, is trying to work out a deal with hardware vendors such as Dell Inc. to make Ubuntu available preinstalled on servers.

I was browsing the Ubuntu questions the other day when I came across a question about changing the bootup and console screen resolution for Ubuntu server edition. The question was:

The Terminally Incoherent blog has posted a rundown of lightweight web browsers.

Most of modern browsers tend to eating up to tons of your memory, and think nothing of it. So here are some browsers designed for fast action, and minimal operating footprint. These are perfect for your old decrepit little computer that you have raised from the dead using some lightweight linux distro.

When Seiko Instruments said it is now offering Linux drivers for its Smart Label Printer 450 and offered to send me one to test, I was happy to hear it, because it seemed like an example of how Linux is being recognized for even non-mass-market hardware devices. While the printer does work as advertised, it is clear that Linux support is a work in progress.

Skype 1.4 for Linux after five months of testing. Now that it's officially out of beta -- along with a slew of bug fixes and new features -- developers are calling it a recommended release.

As we close in on the release of Ubuntu 7.10, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon during the development cycle, we thought we would tell you a little bit about some of the new features and improvements that make the release exciting. So over the next ten days, we will talk about one rocking feature each day until the 18th of October, when Ubuntu 7.10 goes live.

So I’ve decided that Konqueror is just not the web browser that some people want it to be. Call me spoiled / ruined for having spent so much time on Firefox, but I just can’t use it to be as productive as I want to be so I’ve installed Firefox on my Kubuntu installation. For those of you that are in similar situations keep reading and find out how to manually install Firefox within KDE.

For anyone who ever loved and played the famous Worms PC game series, then Wormux is the game for you. Even if you weren't much of a fan (like myself) of the original Works series, you'll find Wormux none the less captivating and enjoyable, and even addictive in some respects.

Well I am a bit pleasantly surprised to say that I’m very much enjoying my time in KDE right now. There are some bugs, as is to be expected, but for the most part I’m continuing to be very productive and I’m learning a lot.

It’s time to give Dell a little credit, folks. By agreeing to offer Ubuntu on selected systems earlier this year, the company has opened itself up to a flood of ideas from passionate Linux users. In fact, the Dell IdeaStorm website remains flooded with thousands of Ubuntu-focused comments from the Linux community. And Dell itself continues to prepare for Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, the next major upgrade from Canonical.

For Firefox users who are constantly referring to multiple pages, tabbed browsing is not a feature, but a way of life. There are enough of us that the Firefox addon page lists more than 110 extensions related to tabs. These extensions feature everything from simple add-ons to various means of saving tab addresses and sessions to thumbnails and collections of functions, as well as one or two uncategorizable ideas.

DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, modem, etc., necessary for running many old DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux and FreeBSD. However, it is not restricted to running only games.

I have just upgraded my new Dell computer that came with Ubuntu 7.04 to the pre-release version of Ubuntu 7.10 (Beta). Please read my initial review of this system.

After a large download and subsequent reboot, this computer came up in much better shape than it was in 7.04.