As my colleague Sam Varghese has written , after nearly two weeks of flawless operation, my first Ubuntu Linux installation unexpectedly became unstable, crashed and was unable to be booted. Puzzled that an OS with the reputed stability of Ubuntu could behave like this, I searched forums and user groups for an explanation. What I found led me to believe that an open source package manager called Automatix that I installed was the cause. As a result, I am going to try an experiment: same computer, two disks, two clean installs, two operating systems - Vista and Ubuntu. But is there an issue with Linux and video codecs?

So there you are. You’re an average geek with a nice cluster of Linux systems. All configured to act together in whatever you’re doing with it.

One of the reoccurring ideas in revisions of the desktop is to tie it more closely to the Internet. The idea was last popular in the late 1990s, when one example of it was the use of KDE's Konqueror for both web browsing and file management. Now, with the GNOME Online Desktop (GOD), the idea has been revived to reflect the rise of social networks and file sharing. The revisions to the standard GNOME desktop are easy to learn, but how you view them will probably depend on how much you participate in the phenomena they're designed to accommodate.

Microsoft's rivalry with Google heated up considerably this past year when rumors surfaced that Google might release its own operating system to compete with Windows. Has Google finally jumped into the fray with its own OS?

ManDVD is an application for creating video DVDs from a wide variety of video formats. Using this application, you can also create eye-pleasing menus with video, audio, and chapters.

At CIO.com today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth gives a nice year-ending top ten list on a topic he’s surely familiar with on the most intimate of levels: Ubuntu.

This is a detailed description about setting up an Ubuntu based server (Ubuntu 7.10) to act as file- and printserver for Windows(tm) workstations in small workgroups. This howto uses the tdb backend for SAMBA to store passwords and account information. This is suitable for workgroups for up to 250 users and is easier to set up than an LDAP backend.

Mencoder is part of the MPlayer media player package. While MPlayer can play audio and video files, mencoder converts and manages multimedia files. The application has a ton of graphical user interfaces, but you can use it from the command line to produce video files in almost any format you want. Here's how.

qBittorrent is a Bittorrent client using C++ / libtorrent and a Qt4 Graphical User Interface. It aims to be a good alternative to other bittorrent clients. It has more and more features such as an integrated search engine, UPnP, encryption, PeX, a torrent creation tool .

Welcome to another edition of Compiz Fusion Community News. In this edition, I will be covering numerous bug fixes that have been made to Compiz and Fusion as well as covering some new features that just came in and some interesting user plugins found on our forum. Among those being atlantis2, fireflies, smackpad, Autumn, cubedbus and filedebug.

Please note: We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 Beta 1 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only. Firefox 3 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the ninth 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.

The Macedonia Ministry of Education and Science will deploy more than 180,000 workstations running Canonical’s Edubuntu 7.04 as part of its "Computer for Every Child" project.

David Mikos has been busy adding tons of improvement to atlantis plugin, fishes now move in school, another cool new addition is water and waves to complete the picture of a fish tank. It would be added to git packages soon.

Last month, following the availability of Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" was the release of Mythbuntu 7.10. Mythbuntu is an Ubuntu derivative and has been around for less than a year, but they have been making great progress with this MythTV-optimized distribution. We have been testing out Mythbuntu 7.10 in several different configurations over the past few weeks and today we have our thoughts to share on it as well as a rough overview for those that may have not yet tried this Linux distribution.

Here's your data. Click the image to see it larger. [image] Now, here's how you enter your critera. Copy your headings and paste them somewhere else in the spreadsheet. Then type the values you want. Click this image to see it larger.

Welcome to part 4 of our media player roundup. Today we'll be covering a couple of interesting players that most older Linux users may remember, and most new users may not even know exists. We'll also be covering players that don't typically fit what would be considered the norm for a media player, but which provide you with quite a wide range of possible applications for daily use.

Mozilla has hit back at claims that multiple bugs in its forthcoming Firefox 3 browser will be ignored in order to meet release schedules. IDG analyst Gregg Keizer reported that fixes for as many as eight in ten identified bugs would be ready in time for the scheduled release of Firefox 3 (Gran Paradiso) next year. Keizer cited notes from a Mozilla development meeting to support his claims, carried in a story in the New York Times last Thursday.

Midori is a lightweight web browser. Midori Features:

* Full integration with GTK+2.
* Fast rendering with WebKit.
* Tabs, windows and session management.

Ubuntu JeOS 7.10 has been released. JeOS is a official derivative of Ubuntu 7.10 that is designed for virtual appliances.

The Ubuntu team is happy to announce the first release of Ubuntu JeOS, Ubuntu JeOS 7.10. Pronounced “juice”, Ubuntu JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) is an efficient variant of Ubuntu configured specifically for virtual appliances.

I found a really quick fix today for disabling ipv6 completely on Ubuntu 7.10 (not yet tested on previous versions). This might be of interest to some of you that have had networking problems, as I’ve heard disabling ipv6 at least within the browser has been a help here.

Today I have received this wonderful envelope from Canonical LTD with two Ubuntu 7.10 CD’s inside. One for the 32-bit computer and the other for the 64-bit computer. Although by now I have already installed the Ubuntu Operating System on my laptop, these eye-catching seed-ee’s live for another purpose.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #66 for the week November 11th - November 17th, 2007 is now available. In this issue we cover the LoCo teams up next for official approval, the welcoming of a new MOTU, some news from the good folks in Ubuntuforums, and, as always, much much more.

A standard Linux system has an incredible amount of files installed. Looking for a file location can be a painful task to do though a file browser. Fortunately, there is a nifty command line available by default on any Linux distribution: find.

Mozilla ruffled some penguin feathers last month when the organization revealed that Firefox 3 would get an extensive visual refresh to maximize integration with Windows and Mac OS X, but not Linux. After the decision was widely criticized by Linux enthusiasts, Mozilla reversed its position and decided to revisit Linux theming.

I finally encrypted some partitions of my hard drive. An external hard drive that I just bought (320 Mb) allowed me to back up my entire /home partition and consider encrypting it. I mainly used this tutorial, but I derived a little from it about the unlocking system : I did not want to input a password while the machine boots, I wanted it to be transparent while I log in. This how to provides more complete information, if needed.