Who says introducing a particular distro has to be boring? There are ways to make things interesting. OS-tans, for one, seemed to work as a way for people to identify various operating systems, mainly the Windows variants but there are also Linux-OS-tans or Distro-tans too. Characteristics of various distros are made evident in the personification that they have made.

Enter Ubunchu - a manga specifically made to introduce Ubuntu to new

users. It’s set in a high school where you have a club with three members: a Linux user, a Windows user and a Mac user. Interestingly enough, it’s through the Mac user that the other two end up trying Ubuntu.

It might not appear to be serious but still, it’s still amusing and others might find themselves relating in one way or another. Also, there are translations of the manga available now and if you find out that there’s no available translation for your language yet, then maybe you could try making one. It would be awesome if you could directly translate it from its original language.

Thanks to Hiroshi Seo for sharing his work with us!:)  I hope this manga will be updated often so there’s something new Ubuntu users could look forward to, especially those who love manga.

Trying out Moblin got me interested because I found the user interface interesting enough and it seemed to make sense for a netbook user such as myself. The screen real estate is maximized with such a user interface instead of the regular GNOME or KDE with panels and stuff. I found the panel of Moblin nifty because it’s automatically hidden when it’s not needed.

So, yeah, I think it would be cool if Moblin and Ubuntu joined forces and have an Ubuntu Moblin Remix. Turns out that there will be one such experiment which we will see when Karmic Koala or Ubuntu 9.10 is released this October. You could even check the wiki page about Mobile Karmic Moblin Remix.

One of the issues though is that Moblin uses RPM packages and not DEBs. So how now, right? And there are no migration plans for those who want to use Ubuntu Moblin Remix. This is a release that’s made for demonstration purposes. Oh well. I’d still like to try out anyway! Especially when I saw the screenshot on the internetnews.com blog. Of course the screenshot had the usual brown Human theme of Ubuntu, that’s why I am hoping for the best!

Maybe it’s time for a new desktop environment geared towards netbook users. There are a lot of combinations of window managers and docking apps but wouldn’t it be easier if by default, there is an easy to use interface for newbies who happen to be netbook users? Ubuntu Moblin Remix might show that a new interface might be better and this could be the beginning of an awesome netbook future ahead of us.

Possible Linux distros to use Moblin are: Ubuntu, Xandros and Red Flag. Novell also announced a Moblin version of SUSE for Acer Aspire One and MSI Wind. I already blogged about Moblin so you have a better idea of what it looks like, right?

Xandros is said to be the best distro for Windows users while Ubuntu and SUSE have a lot of users, especially Ubuntu because of how user friendly it is. So I get the feeling that combining Moblin with these distros could be beneficial. The user interface of Moblin seems to maximize the screen real estate very well. Aside from that, the common tasks and activities are easily seen on the zones pre-defined in Moblin.

Will these netbooks be available within the quarter? I am hoping that Moblin will be polished early next quarter so that more users could get a feel of things there. I’d like to see more feedback about the user interface. Of course it is different from the rest of usual desktop environments so there might be much resistance or acceptance.

One of my friends has been talking about OpenSUSE on the PS3 but today I chanced upon a blog entry talking about Ubuntu on the PS3 and the cool applications you could run on it.

The list includes the following:

• Last.fm - for your music playing needs
• Twitux - if you’re addicted to Twitter, you must have this!
• CheckGmail - because you can’t leave it alone
• ScummVM andd Beneath a Steel Sky - adventure gamers will probably want to check this out

My friend might hate Ubuntu so I’d show him the blog entry and maybe it would help him change his mind. I am not really a big fan of the PlayStation 3 as a gaming console so I am just passing on this information to those of you who are.

If you’d like to install Ubuntu on your PS3, MaximumPC has a blog entry about installing it on your PS3.

School’s starting in my country in two weeks’ time and now I read about Dell Latitude 2100s as K-12 friendly. Interestingly enough these nifty netbooks have rubberized casings so that it won’t easily slip from the hands of students. And the units are quite colorful too.

Some nifty features:

• optional touchscreen
• webcam (say, “Hi, Teacher!”)
• labeling window - personalize your netbook so they know who owns which unit
• network activity light that warns teachers if their students are using the WiFi connection instead of focusing on their studies
• you could get it with Ubuntu, instead of Windows
• 3-cell or 6-cell battery
• option to choose between an SSD and a HDD - if you know your learners might be better off with an SSD, why not?

If you’ve been imagining a future with students all using laptops and netbooks, it would have to be designed specifically for them. Not just the software that they will use but the design of the unit itself. I think that Dell’s considerations in the design they have are well thought of.

Here I am crossing my fingers that more schools will embrace the Linux-powered units!

Looks like good things are up ahead for us Acer Aspire One users who have installed or upgraded to Jaunty Jackalope/Ubuntu 9.04 I’ve just fixed the sound problem and LED for wifi issue with just one package which is linux-backports-modules-jaunty so that was such a happy happy thing!

The notes for the Acer Aspire One are straight to the point so it was easy to see the things one needs to do to make certain things work like wifi and sound. I suppose I was a bit lucky that after installing linux-backports-modules-jaunty I had no more problem with the sound. Now I can plug in my earphones to my netbook and my laptop speakers are not activated unlike right after the upgrade.

One of the interesting things of note is that ext4 is said to work just fine. Oh well, I just upgraded so I am still on ext3 but I’d try to see if anyone I know personally know is on ext4 and get feedback from them.

Ah yes, finally was able to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 or Jaunty Jackalope the other night. I decided to check it out already because it’s been quite a while since it was released and my internet connection was better. In any case, here are some observations after the upgrade :

• Wifi was gone. But no worries. There’s a new wifi driver included apparently. For a time I was using Madwifi with Intrepid Ibex but JM Ibanez told me that there is a newer driver, which is ath5k. It was disabled, somehow, so basically we just had to enable it and then I had wifi going. The nice thing about wifi now is that even if i resume from suspend, I could connect to the wifi network. It wasn’t like that when I was using Madwifi on Intrepid.
• No video playback. I am not sure what the cause of this is yet. But I’ve observed that I could not play any videos at all. SMplayer warns me about my mplayer as having the older version. For some strange reason I could hear the sounds but there are no graphics whatsoever.
• Certain settings were overwritten. My default browser is now Epiphany — which wasn’t because I’ve set it to Firefox waaay back.
• They changed the screen configuration tool’s name to “Display” instead of “Screen Resolution” — Not a bad idea, IMHO, considering it’s not just about the screen resolutions anymore but the entire setup of your display screen/s, especially if you’re using an extended monitor setup.

I have nothing to say about performance yet. But in any case, Jaunty Jackalope seems to be running just fine on my Acer Aspire One. No noisy fan issues, my volume control keys work, my screen brightness buttons are fine too. Still no wifi LED indicator but I’d manage anyway.

The name sounds like an expression from some novel, movie or TV show.  (It’s usually “Jumping Jupiter!” or something like that.)  But you get my drift, right?  Ubuntu’s latest release is out! That’s why I expect to check for upgrades really soon.  Though of course, I am still wary as I have no time to fix things this weekend just in case the upgrade does break something.  (You never know, right?)  as much as I’d like to hope, I am still paranoid.

So what’s to expect in Jaunty Jackalope

Some things that I don’t quite look forward to all involve Intel graphic cards and the wifi issues. Most of us at work are using Acer laptops with Intel graphics cards. ~_~  Oh well, we’d see.  I think one of us has started using Jaunty Jackalope so it’s better to ask him first.

In terms of apps, there’s no doubt I am looking forward to things like Brasero and a better user interface for those who want to configure their extended screens.