What is Ubuntu TV ??!!

It is a smart TV platform, kind of like Google TV, which can handle cable or satellite service, online video streaming and more. It lets you search, record, and watch programmes, stream videos onto your phones and tablets and so on.  It flaunts the latest Unity interface like in Ubuntu Desktop and looks super sleek.

Only one demo TV was showcased at CES and Canonical plans to partner up with TV manufacturers to bring Ubuntu TVs to the market by the end of the year. Here is a teaser :

Prospects

Showcasing Ubuntu TV at CES could open up several oppurtunities for Canonical to strike a deal with an OEM to ship the product. It sure is a cool product and if it hits the stands will push the brand of Ubuntu further and into the households. There are’nt any videos of it in action. But by concept, design and technology it looks to be a cool product. Go Ubuntu.

• The still experimental Btrfs file system, meanwhile, has been updated with faster scrubbing, more detailed corruption messages, and manual inspection tools and  upgraded with automatic backup of critical filesystem metadata.
• Ext4 now supports block sizes up to 1MB, which decreases the time spent doing block allocations.
• The kernel now supports Qualcomm’s Hexagon digital signal processor (DSP) as well as  the DRM/KMS driver for Intel GPUs (graphics processing units). This will enable the more efficient and Intel-specific RC6 graphics power-saving feature by default.
• A process scheduler divides the available CPU bandwidth between all processes that need to run.
• The TCP stack now includes an  “Proportional Rate Reduction” algorithm that speeds the recovery of the connection after lost packets.
•  Advancement of Broadcom’s Brcmsmac and Brcmfmac Brcm80211 drivers from the staging area into the network subsystem. Also advancing to the subsystem is the Ath6kl Wi-Fi driver for the Atheros’ AR6003 chip.

Currently available in beta release of Ubuntu 12.04 . You can also upgrade an existing system by hitting Terminal and using the following command:

sudo update-manager -d

We would surely like to share  your Kernel 3.2 experience below in comments

MGSE and MATE

MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions) and MATE  (a gnome 2 fork compatible with gtk3 applications) are the highlights of this Mint release. MATE is available only on the DVD version.

MGSE sets up a more conventional panel based desktop on top of Gnome Shell. It adds a bottom panel with a Mint menu, window switcher, and workspace switcher. All the features of Gnome Shell are maintained and MGSE components can be switched off individually to obtain a vanilla Gnome 3 desktop.  This is exactly how to exploit the ability to extend Gnome shell using javascript.  Well done Mint team.

The desktop with MSGE

MATE is a Gnome 2 fork that is in it’s infancy. It maintains a classic Gnome 2 desktop (yes, with applets and all !!) compliant with Gnome 3 applications. Mint is the first distribution (that I am aware of) to ship MATE (although only on DVD). Regular Mint users could upgrade with no worries and continue using a Gnome 2 environment they are so used to. MATE can be setup by installing mint-meta-mate package.

Needless to say Mint has shipped with some awesome themes and icons. The artworks team can be proud too.

The Activities view

MSGE neither here nor there ?

Critics feel MGSE is in a wilderness in between gnome 3 and legacy. But in all fairness, it felt extremely intuitive to use the desktop with MGSE. I know you must be thinking “Having the Mint Menu and the gnome shell Activities view is redundant”. But I found myself using the panel and menu more often when involved in more focused activities like writing an article or scripting something and the Activities view when I am relaxed watching a movie alongside occasionally checking my twitter feed. Quoting Linux Mint website, MSGE lets you have a task-centric desktop. That is spot on.

MSGE a Unity killer ?

There are quite a few users who left Ubuntu because of Unity. For many of them Mint must have been the obvious choice. This was because they preferred a window centric desktop over an application/activity centric one. Mint have served those users right with MSGE.  But I do not see people who love Unity as an application/activity centric interface moving to Mint. There is a fundamental difference between the two UIs. It is a matter of taste.

Applications

Linux Mint ships Linux kernel 3.0.0 and Gnome 3.2. Default applications are more or less Ubuntu 11.10 like except for Pidgin for IM. Some additional applications would include X-Chat for IRC, mintNanny parental control, mintUpload client etc. The DVD version would include codecs and much more. Synaptic and GDebi are present for package management.It even ships ndiswrapper on the CD (whoever uses that !).

DuckDuckGo Partnership

Linux Mint also shakes hand with the tracking free, search engine DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is the default search engine in Firefox shipped with Mint. Mint and DuckDuckGo would share the search revenue. Good for both the cool projects.

Verdict

Mint did more than just fine. Certainly establishes as one of the front running Linux distributions out there. Solid release.

How does it work?

Gnome Pie is triggered by keyboard shortcuts. Then a “pie” appears on the screen. By default there are five kinds of pies. One is a main menu pie which ports your main menu entries to a pie. The others are a media playback pie, a bookmarks pie, a window controller pie, applications pie and a session pie. There is an option to add custom options as well.

Here is gnome-pie in action :

How can I try it !!

You can install gnome pie on Ubuntu by adding a PPA. Run the following to do so:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:simonschneegans/testing
sudo apt-get update sudo
apt-get install gnome-pie

Arch Linux users can install gnome-pie from this AUR package. Others can find the code hosted at Github.

A little background

It is often experienced that after performing quite a “humongous” task your computer might seem sluggish. For example, extracting a huge file. During and for some time after extracting files, your system is quite irresponsive. Why is this ?

Linux has a tendency to “swap off” stuff from RAM to the hard disk when it runs short of memory. This causes the sluggishness as read/write to the hard disk is way slower than that to RAM. This tendancy can be customized in our favour i.e decrease the tendancy in this case, because we need as much possible process memory on our RAM than on the hard disk.

It is also often seen that after/during performing a memory consuming task, file browsing goes slow. This is because pagecache and swapcache are retained at the expense of  dentries and inodes (which kindof keeps track of the filesystem). This too can be controlled manually in Linux.

So how to do it?

The balance between “Swapping off to hard disk” and “Retaining in RAM” is maintained by an integer stored in the file /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. A value of 100 means that kernel will aggressively swap off application memory to hard disk. A value closer to 0 will rather retain application memory in RAM and hence system becomes more responsive. But remember that pursuing this might cause your system to run out of RAM. Hence default value is set as 60 in most distributions. You can check the  current value using :

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

You can temporarily set a value (10 in the example) by running the following as root :

echo 10>/proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The change can be made permanent by adding vm.swappiness=10 on your /etc/sysctl.conf file.

Similarly the coice between retaining swapcache and dentries and inodes is monitored by an integer in /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure. The default value is 100. Any value less than 100 will tend to make file browsing faster as dentries and inodes are retained in cache actively. You can temporarily change the value using

echo 50>/proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure

Again the change can be made permenant by adding the line vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50 to your /etc/sysctl.conf file.

You can experiment with different values and choose a value which seems to suite you. Hope this helps !!

You can read our in depth preview of Ubuntu 11.10 here. For a quick glimpse, read along…

Whats on the CD ?

• The Unity Desktop interface, both the standard and 2D versions
• Linux Kernel 3.0
• Gnome 3.2 sans gnome-shell which can be installed from the repositories
• Firefox 7
• New look software center
• Dejadup backup utility
• Libre Office 3.4.3
• Ubuntu One sync service with 5 GB free storage
• Banshee Music player with Ubuntu One music store support
• Thunderbird Mail client
• Integrated social networking experience with Empathy, Gwibber and the Me menu.
• LightDM replacing GDM

A  few screenshots !

The desktop

The Dash

The Software Center

 All in all…

It is a more polished release from Ubuntu after rather unfinished 11.04. Unity has seen several performance and usability enhancements to strengthen it’s stance in the on-going “war of desktop interfaces” in Linux. There is no questioning the default applications on the CD. So highly recommended install for anyone who uses 11.04 currently. Unity haters can stay away and ponder options like Lubuntu which certainly looks a viable alternative.

We really appreciate the work gone into 11.10 from the awesome Ubuntu community. Time to look forward to 12.04 LTS !!

Unity Updates

“Whats new in Unity ?” must be the question in all of your minds. So lets kick off with Unity updates. This time out, Ubuntu ships both Unity and Unity 2D. Unity 2D is a QT implementation of Unity which is suitable for low end machines which can not ofer graphics acceleration. Unity looks considerably different from what it used to be in 11.04. Here are a list of changes which in no way is extensive, but certainly the highlights:

1. The Unity dash is now transparent and assumes colour of the background anf fades out the launcher and panel.
2. The dash layout is revamped, there are applications, files and music lens present.
3. The applications lens is integrated with software center ratings and categories.
4. The music lens categorises music on basis of genres.
5. Files menu zeitgeist integration is more consistant now.
6. The Ubuntu button in the panel is replaced with one on the launcher.
7. The maximized window controls are now hidden by default. It appears on hovering over the left corner of the panel.
8. Unity is customizable using Compiz Config Settings Manager for eg: opacity, removable volumes displayed etc
9. Alt-tab switcher gives live previews of open windows.
10. An integrated messaging menuon the panel.
11. The session switcher button now doubles up as settings button.

Here are a few screenshots :

The new look dash

The files lens

Unity 2D

Softwares in and out

There are quite a few changes on the default applications front also. Here is a quick list

• Deja Dup is on the CD as the default backup service.

Deja Dup

• Evolution is replaced by thunderbird as default mail client

Thunderbird

• The redsigned Gwibber is in the CD as well
• LightDM repplaces GDM as the display manager. It is customized to fit in perfectly with the Unity looks.
• Synaptic package manager is off the CD and the newly redesigned software center will act as the only apt-get front end.

The new look software center

Additionaly GNOME has been updated to latest snapshot 3.1.5 and Linux kernel 3 is also on the CD. Firefox 7 from the aurora channel is the default browser.

Software repository now includes GNOME Shell which works fine without breaking anything (unlike in 11.04). Synaptic Package manager can also be installed from the Software Center.

 To conclude,

In the breif live session I ran, I did get a couple of Unity crashes, which hopefully will be ironed out before the release. There is one more beta release on September 22nd before the final release on October 13th. Looks like an exciting release for lovers of the Unity interface. We shall be taking a look at the Server, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu and Ubuntu Studio 11.10 versions in the coming days. So stay tuned.

The paid plans are also changing. The current Mobile plan to Music Streaming for Android and iPhone will now include 20GB of storage built in for $3.99 per month. Existing mobile plan subscribers will be instantly upgraded to the new Music Streaming plan and automatically get the 20GB of storage. You can still buy additional storage as you need it, in the same 20GB increments and at the same price of $2.99 per month. The web interface is also set to be revamped. It comes with improved navigation and help section.

The Ubuntu One App developer programme is also open now. People with ideas for cloud based applications can join the programme here.

Thats it. Beats dropbox !!

Now Ubuntu one defenitely has better storage plans and features than dropbox. So make the switch friends.

A little bit of history

Haiku began in 2001 as OpenBeOS when Be, Inc , the company behind BeOS was taken over by Palm, Inc. Later in 2004, the project was rebranded as “Haiku” (after a trademark infringement notice from Palm) and got financial backing from Haiku Inc. , a non-profit organization. Since then the developement got the push it needed and went on to make first alpha release in 2009. The community built a hibrid kernel, a fork of NewOS, themselves and built a BeOS style interface around it. Now in 2011, Haiku is in limelight with an impressive alpha 3 release.

The user experience

I downloaded Haiku image and booted it off a USB drive. Honestly I did not expect it to even boot without a glitch. But surprise surprise, Haiku boots up into a graphical loading screen (which many linux distros are yet to achieve).

Loading Screen

Within seconds I was into a desktop which I could easily get around and customize. Finally this is how it looked.

Haiku Desktop

The top corner has a menu and applets to manage processes, and network. Haiku set up my ethernet connection automatically, but did not have a driver for my wireless card (forgivable). The web browser got me online without any trouble, but rendered certain websites poorly (especially twitter).Hopefully these glitches will be ironed out soon.

The Web Browser

I had a quick look through the default applications available. The media player worked very well. I did not have to install any codecs to play any videos and audios. The basic functionalities for video/audio playback are available and works well. Satisfied on that front.

Spock's last moments from "Star Trek - The wrath of Khan" playing in the media player

There are a host of other apps available like an image viewer, document viewer, IRC client, image editor, text editor and terminal and so on. There are plenty more which I did not try out. A quick googling also assured me that there are a decend amount of applications that work on Haiku.I loved the way you could group applications as tabs !!

Support for filesystems was also impressive. My Linux partitions could be mounted with a click !!

Overall I felt Haiku is very very good for an alpha version of a “new” Operating System and decided to install it on my hard disk. I was even more impressed with the installer which guided me to finish the installation in less than five minutes !!

Performance

All I would say is “super quick”. Everything is instantaneous on Haiku. Booting, launching apps, everything is quick. On the stability front the only app that crashed on me was the web browser which I felt could improve a lot. Otherwise, Haiku is very stable. The resource utilization is very low. It was lightning fast on my machine :

So ?

I would not recommend installation of Haiku on any machine as of now. But Keep an eye open for it, because it has been impressive at alpha 3 stage; so Final release must be awesome. Even then, the amount of applications available would not be as vast compared to windows, linux or mac anytime soon. But lets not be negative. Lets support this awesome community

Working

Pydiction generates a list of functions and classes from given moduls and lets you just press first few letters and hit tab to auto-complete (or to give suggestions) !! There is a python script in the package that lets you generate custom dictionaries from modules you use. Here is a screenshot of pydiction in action :

Installation

You can download the latest version of Pydiction from here. Downolad the archive to your home directory and run the following commands to install the plugin.

Source code

mkdir .vim .vim/after .vim/after/ftplugin/

Source code

unzip pydiction-1.2.zip
cd pydiction-1.2
mv python_pydiction.vim ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/
mkdir ~/.vim/pydiction/
mv complete-dict ~/.vim/pydiction/
mv pydiction.py ~/.vim/pydiction/
echo "filetype plugin on" >> .vimrc
echo "let g:pydiction_location='~/.vim/pydiction/complete-dict'"

Source code

python ~/.vim/pydiction/pydiction.py [modules list]