"I can't live without my radio," LL Cool J once declaimed. Me, I can't live without my music library: there isn't a day that goes by when I don't have Miles Davis or Brian Eno (or, when I'm feeling more ruminative, Merzbow) on the speakers. To that end I tried out Songbird, a Mozilla-derive open source music player and web-sharing platform. In time it could be to WMP and even Winamp what Firefox is to IE -- but, again, in time.

One of the programs that, when I first saw it in Kubuntu, I thought that I would never have any use for. After using it for a bit I now miss it on systems that don't have it. That program is called Katapult and it does more than just Katapult you into a program launch.

It has been quite some time since I updated this blog. Frankly, I’ve been swamped at my day job. But I’m still using Ubuntu on my Dell PC at home. And I expect big things from Ubuntu and Canonical’s backers in 2008. Here are three Ubuntu trends worth watching in 2008.

After more than 11 years of development, Flightgear 1.0 has arrived. Flightgear can be played on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, as well as other *nix platforms including FreeBSD, Solaris, and IRIX. Distributed under the GPL, Flightgear is one of the first major Free Software games and has become a flight simulator that rivals it's commercial counterparts. It is a stellar example of enthusiasts coming together to create something for the community.

Firefox 3 Beta 2 is now available for download. This is the tenth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

Now that we have shared that Ubuntu 7.10 is available for sale on select Dell systems, I'd like to take the opportunity to give an update on what customers can expect with this offering. Most of the Ubuntu 7.04 technical details are still valid for this release, but there are a number of changes that I'd like to point out:

I recently discovered Liferea, an RSS reader/aggregator that uses Mozilla’s xulrunner as its web browsing engine. Its interface resembles that of a mail client such as Mozilla Thunderbird (a.k.a. icedove), and it works in much the same way, marking items as read when you click on them. Here’s a screen shot of Liferea in action:

The good folks at Dell have added DVD playback capability to the image that they preinstall for folks who buy Dell computers with Ubuntu.

One of the key requests from customers interested in Linux is the ability to watch their favorite DVD movies. (See idea Preinstalled  Linux must play commercial DVDs from IdeaStorm user jonmca... but we ended up taking some advice from jmxz to use LinDVD.). We totally agree and that's why we now include built-in DVD movie playback with all Ubuntu 7.10 systems.

Everybody likes to know when they have mail. It’s become a routine to get up in the morning and check before you go to work or school. Later throughout the day, most people don’t check it as often. This is where mail notifiers come in. Linux has many notification applications, and many of them work very well.

The first thing we can say about the Linux desktop in 2007 is that there are more users than ever. The Linux Foundation 2006 survey had fewer than 10,000 people signing in. This year more than 20,000 Linux desktop users reported in.

Don’t want to wait for you terminal application to load, and don’t want to have to switch between it and your other windows?

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #70, for the week December 9th - December 15th, 2007 is now available. In this issue we cover the countdown to Hardy Alpha 2, new MOTU & community members, Ubuntu Forums interview, Bazaar 1.0 release, and as always, much, much more!

I had enough with eating crap with Vista. My last line of patience warned off when I happened to wait about 5 seconds when changing from one MS Doc file to another and also happened that I was running with time to finish a project report.

Did you know that you can surf the internet in text mode using a Linux terminal? This is made possible thru free/open-source text-based web browser. But why surf the web in plain text while there are plenty of easy-to-use graphical browsers available? To answer that question, I have here a list of some of the advantages in using a text-based internet browser:

For anyone who is keen to migrate to Linux platform, but can’t live without Windows application, then Wine can be a great solution for you.

We didn't quite finish up our server kernel vs. desktop kernel comparison, so today we'll wrap that up, plus we'll dig into the included services in Ubuntu Server, amaze at a couple of interesting blunders, and decide what this thing is good for — fueling the tireless Canonical hype machine, or something actually useful?

Mark Shuttleworth says he's more lucky than smart, but his record says otherwise. He's a technologist, venture capitalist, social experimenter, philanthropist, and Russian-trained space traveler. Oh, and Mark Shuttleworth originated the world's fastest-growing Linux distribution, Ubuntu.

I’ve been chatting in the sounder and ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing lists and something most Ubuntu users might not realize is that the Ubuntu ‘Desktop’ disks are packed almost to their limits. There is talk of removing the last remaining ‘WinFOSS’ (Firefox, Thunderbird and Abiword for Windows), but even that will only free up about 15 MB.

Personas is a prototype that builds upon the ideas that:

• themes today are too hard to find, install and use
• graphic designers should be able to style the browser without having to code
• browsers can be more than just desktop software, they can include online components
• people just want their computer to be a little more fun and personal