These Things Matter To Me

There’s currently some discussion in the Ubuntu community about how much proprietary stuff to include in Ubuntu by default (different from letting you grab stuff from the vendor on your own after the install). This is almost always about graphics drivers.

Community member Ante Karamatić had some interesting thoughts on the issue, and then made some points about the state of open source Linux gui bling, too:

Proprietary drivers in Ubuntu by default? Don’t. Just don’t do that. I don’t want them. If someone wants them (or must use them); great, make it as an installer option. ‘Yes, I want fancy graphics, even if nobody could help me solve tons of bugs and even if that would break suspend and hibernate and even if that would maybe mean braking GPL‘ would be an OK option in installer

OTOH, both compiz and beryl have serious issues and they should stop working on creating newer, even more useless plug-ins and start fixing some usability bugs; ‘java + beryl sometimes doesn’t work‘, ‘beryl crashes all the time‘, ‘don’t destroy my workspaces‘, ‘F9 is fetch all in evolution; now it doesn’t work‘, ‘what’s with the flickering in xmoto while running beryl and apt-get update‘, etc, etc…

• Portland’s citywide wifi access launched. Right now it covers SW downtown Portland and industrial SE (coverage map here). It will eventually cover ALL of Portland. Portland’s Future Awesome coverage here. Discussion group here.
• Firebug 1.0 Beta, a Firefox extension to troubleshoot and monitor client-side web-dev stuff. Related: Firefox Web Developer extension.
• Microsoft has some One Laptop Per Child laptops, and is trying to get Windows on them. (They currently run a version of Fedora Linux.) What’s going on?
• 10 Drupal modules you can’t live without (You had me at “10.”)

• How to screencast on Linux
• Guess what ubuntuvideo.com has
• Miguel de Icaza on Groklaw’s over-the-top analysis of Novell’s support of OpenXML in OpenOffice (it’s true, Groklaw has demonstrated a bit of ignorance here. Almost every distro’s interpretation of a project can be a little unique)
• Last week was Ubuntu Open Week, where newbies, the curious, and the besotted could meet up in different irc channels and talk about specific topics. Here are the logs.
• An image of the One Laptop Per Child laptop is available as a VMware image, FYI

Click To Play

Wowza… So… Parallels for Mac OS X has been out a for a bit. But it’s previously been best described as “…like VMware Workstation for a Mac.” In other words, cool, but nothing beyond VMware, and if VMware actually had a product out for OS X, then you’d probably grab that.

But last Friday Parallels released a new feature that is pretty compelling, and raises the bar for the concept of “abstraction.” Rather than having a parent window that hosts all of the guest OS’s windows, there is a “coherence mode” option that has each window of the guest OS appear as an individual window in the host OS, making itSO the experience of using an application in the either guest OS or host OS, is pretty darn similar. Certain keyboard commands and drag and drop is supported between the two environments. The video above demonstrates this better than all these words. Check it out!