It’s the moment I’ve been dreading all week, when I realize that I’ve hit a wall with Ubuntu and can go no further. Today, the wall in question is ACPI support, which in version 7.10 is simply broken.

I find myself today sitting in the Dallas/Ft Worth Airport in Texas waiting for my flight.  I had a few hours to kill so I picked up a copy of Time magazine to help pass the time.  (The one with the iPhone on the cover).  I was surprised to see an advertisement inside for the One Laptop Per Child project and the “Give 1, Get 1” promotion.

As more and more traditional publishers accept digital images, artists are turning to free and open source software (FOSS) tools to create cartoons and illustrations.

I've been hearing the phrase "This is the year of the Linux desktop" for 10 years. For me, it's been a true statement for each of those years, because GNU/Linux has been my primary desktop operating system since 1997. But for most people around the world, this is the year of the the Windows desktop, same as it was last year and the year before.

I've been a full-fledged Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon user for more than a week now, I'm completely off Microsoft Windows and I couldn't be happier. For some reason, however, I keep getting emails and posts urging me to try other supposedly superior Linux distributions for newbies - PCLinuxOS and SimplyMEPIS, among others. Intrigued, I have decided to check this out for myself. Is Ubuntu the best or merely the best backed distro?

Handwriting recognition, like its cousins speech recognition and optical character recognition, is a domain still dominated by proprietary products. Where there are Linux solutions, such as the one in Nokia's Maemo Internet tablets, they are often closed source plugins protected by patent claims. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to find CellWriter, a small, straightforward handwriting recognition tool that integrates easily with modern Linux desktops.

One of the things that Alex Faaborg presented back in July was a mockup of what a cool tab switching (Ctrl+Tab) interface would look like in a browser. As it stands right now no versions of Firefox have an advanced interface for switching between tabs, but that could become a thing of the past.

I came across an Article on the relevance of Compiz-Fusion in Linux particularly in Ubuntu. The Author, Matt Hartley, has published two different articles Here and Here to emphasize the same thing. His main argument is that Compiz makes Linux Complicated.

Firefox 2.0 is just over a year old, but the Mozilla developers are out today with the first beta for Mozilla Firefox 3.0. Firefox 3.0 (known as Gran Paradiso) uses the Gecko 1.9 engine, and features a number of improvements including improved add-on support, remote bookmarks, OpenID compliance, AirBag crash reporting integration, microformats support, saving web pages as PDF files, and other reworks that affect the bookmarks, searching, etc.

For the first time every Linux’ Skype client now features full video support. With this feature the Linux client catches up with the Windows and MacOS client. The most important features listed in the changelog are:

If you're like most people, you probably named VMware or Xen first. Many of you probably know of one or more of the following: Parallels, QEMU, KVM, Virtuozzo and OpenVZ. However, few of you probably know about VirtualBox. And chances are if you know about VirtualBox 1.502, you're already running it because it manages the trifecta of being good, free and, sort of, open source.

Freeciv is a turn-based strategy game similar to the Civilization series of games.

Freeciv is a Free and Open Source empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization. The game commences in prehistory and your mission is to lead your tribe from the stone age to the space age…

The latest 2.1.0 release of Freeciv has been in development for almost two years. Packages for Ubuntu 7.10 are available at GetDeb.

The other evening I was sat talking to Becky about Christmas. We were discussing gift ideas for family and friends. As per normal I wasn't very helpful and my mind went blank. I'm not overly good at coming up with ideas for great Christmas presents.

Anyhow, last night I thought about it some more and came up with a cool idea [subjective.] It occurred to me that this year I could give my family and friends something really useful — I could give them an Ubuntu CD! So I visited the Shipit service and placed an order.

It then occurred to me that there may well be other geeks out there struggling to come up with ideas for gifts — so I started thinking about a Christmas marketing campaign for Ubuntu.

By now all of you have likely heard of the Google concept call the 'Gphone.' Yet there remains a lot of speculation in regards to its future. Will it will always remain a mobile OS, or will Google ever enter the hardware market remains to be seen? However, I can point you to a few things that I believe will indeed, come to light sooner than later. Some of them might surprise you.

The GNOME team is out with the road-map for GNOME 2.22, 2.24, and future releases. There's quite a few changes planned, but a few in particular had caught our attention.

Well the Linux desktop is certainly here and I can prove it because as of today I'm officially an Ubuntu user and even though things aren't perfect, I feel like I've finally escaped from jail. Those of you contemplating the move from Windows, however, had better be prepared to make some compromises and even a few sacrifices.

Jes Hall (canllaith), a KDE developer, has taken Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) through its paces and finds much to like. Amongst other changes in 7.10 she discusses, Jes admits that she enjoys the six month development cycle, saying:

One big helper for surfing comfort and speed is provided through an add-on called Adblock Plus. As the name suggests, it eliminates ad banners. During installation, the user can subscribe to filter lists that are then automatically updated to recognize and block new domain addresses used to transport ads. The add-on also appends a "Block" tab onto Java and Flash animations and surfaces. One click and that particular object will never appear again.

I have been using Ubuntu for quite a while now, but one thing I really dislike is that all the themes are huge space wasters compared to Windows XP. This finally got me angry enough to create a customized version of the Clearlooks theme that tries to be very compact but still maintain its beautiful look. I like the result quite a lot, I have been using this theme for more than two weeks now and it works great. It is especially nice for intense applications like Eclipse.

After several weeks of anguish I've finally recreated my Windows XP file backup regime under Gutsy Gibbon, overcoming my fear of the Linux command line in the process.