Karmic Koala Ubuntu 9.10 - What to expect and the release date | Alpha Download

Brandon Davenport Jul 10, 2009 Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Us Linux, News

Whats so great about Karmic Koala? Here is a short list of things that will get you exited about the final late 2009 release.

1. New Theme
I list this first because we've been promised this for so long, and even though we were promised it was actually happening in Karmic, i'm just not so sure anymore. I hope to see it, but i won't set myself up to be crushed if we don't =]
2. Flawless PulseAudio
Oh yes, we've been waiting on this for all too long. Audio should finally be close to perfect. If you're like me, and haven't had any real problems with it, please move along to the next item.
3. Firefox 3.5
The wonderful new version of Mozilla Firefox that adds support for Ogg Theora/Vorbis, audio and video, respectively for HTML 5's Open Web Video (also supported in Midori using WebKit) should be a significant upgrade from the current version.
4. Faster Boot Times
This is a general thing that we should see improve a lot in Karmic and Karmic +1. Self-explanatory, move along now.
5. Ext4 now Default
Ext4 support was just added in 9.04, and now it will be the default for new installs of 9.10. If you don't know already, Ext4 brings a lot of nice changes, over Ext3, and will generally improve filesystem performance.
6. GNU GRUB 2
The boot loader for new installation will now be GNU GRUB 2, which is a complete rewrite of GRUB which make it faster, cleaner, safer, as well as more robust, portable, and powerful.
7. Plymouth
Goodbye, USpash! Plymouth will be making our graphical boot experiance cleaner with no more of that annoying flickering of the display at startup. It makes Ubuntu look more polished, or at least less unpolised.[Update, see below]
8. New Linux Kernel
The newest Linux Kernel 2.6.31 will be included in which we can hope to see ATI kernel-based mode-setting (KMS) and memory managemnt support in. The current 2.6.30 Kernel will already be old by then.
9. New Intel Drivers
Again, this will solve major performance problems that Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 had with Intel drivers. Gah, i hate Intel. Sorry, i had to throw that in there.
10. New NVIDIA Drivers
The new NVIDIA drivers add VDPAU and CUDA support resulting in, you guessed it-- more performance enhancements!
11. GNOME 2.28 (and Testing GNOME 3)
Not only will Ubuntu ship with all the enhancements of GNOME 2.28, but users will be able to test GNOME 3 in Karmic! Cool stuff.
12. PackageKit
Oh yes. It's a much nicer way to manage and update applications than Add/Remove and Update Manager that actually uses PolicyKit. This will certainly be quite a refreshing change.
13. Empathy
Lastly, the most controversial of the changes, Empathy will take the place of both Pidgin and Ekiga. I would like to take this opportunity to support this decision. Hopefully, even if you still prefer Pidgin for yourself, you can appreciate what Empathy brings for new users. It has been discussed for over half a year at UDS Jaunty and Karmic, and there are a number of reasons it should happen:

New users: Pidgin has lots of features and plugins that may cater to some of us just better, but Empathy has a friendlier UI for new users. We want to make Ubuntu the best experience for those migrating to it. The rest of us have no trouble keeping Pidgin.

Integration: Empathy integrates well into the GNOME desktop. A lot of cool stuff is possible with it. 'Nuff said (you can learn more on your own).

Features: Empathy is mostly feature complete, and the lack of OTR is something that new users will not know or use. I agree it is important, but it is still available in Pidgin until Empathy implements it.

Telepathy: Empathy uses the awesome Telepathy framework. It supports libpurple for all networks only currently in Pidgin.

Voice/Video: Empathy already has VoIP support for audio and video chatting, which means it can replace both Pidgin and Ekiga.

Feature Gap: Yes, Telepathy might be a tiny bit behind in a few places, but none of them are showstoppers, and it is far ahead in others. Including it in Karmic will mean that the feature gap between Empathy and Pidgin will close and reverse much sooner, not to mention we'd like Empathy to be awesome in Ubuntu Karmic +1 10.04 LTS.

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Download

Alpha 1 is the first in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Karmic development cycle.

The primary changes from Jaunty have been the re-merging of changes from Debian, updating to the current Linux kernel, and updating GNOME to the current development release, the Ubuntu developers said in an emailed announcement yesterday.

The team said that the desktop CD wasn’t ready for release this time so only the alternate and server CDs were to be available. “The desktop CD will follow in the next Alpha release,” they said.

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/alpha-1/ (Ubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-1/ (Kubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-1/ (Xubuntu)

Zune HD - Hands on video, Specs and features

Brandon Davenport Jul 9, 2009 Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Us Gadgets, Microsoft, News

Introducing Zune HD

Zune HD is the next iteration of the Zune device family and brings a new level of listening and viewing experiences to the portable media player category.

• Zune HD comes with a built-in HD Radio receiver so users can listen to higher-quality sound than traditional radio on the go. Users also will have access to the additional song and artist data broadcast by HD Radio stations as well as additional channels from their favorite stations multicasting in HD. If you don't like the song playing on your station's HD channel, switch to its HD2 or HD3 channels for additional programming.
• The bright OLED touch screen interface allows users to flip through music, movies and other content with ease, and the 16:9 widescreen format display (480x272 resolution) offers a premium viewing experience on the go.
• The HD-compatible output lets Zune HD customers playback supported HD video files from the device through a premium high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) audiovisual docking station (sold separately) direct to an HD TV in 720p.*
• Zune HD will include a full-screen Internet browser optimized for multitouch functionality.
• Zune HD is Wi-Fi enabled, allowing for instant streaming to the device from the more than 5 million-track Zune music store.

More information on Zune and related images is available at http://www.zune.net/press and http://www.zune.net/ZuneHD.

Specs

• 3.6 inchish OLED full touch screen.
• NVIDIA Tegra powered.
• 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and 120GB versions.
• HDMI Connection to stream straight to your TV.
• HD Radio.
• Web Browser.
• WiFi compatible, with wireless marketplace.
• Released, early fall.
• International release of the Zune device itself.
• Home AV packs, Car packs, Charge packs.

Unconfirmed rumors (A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment or confirm):

• Camera?
• Company insiders tipped us off with the possibility of a limited edition dock accessory in various colors.
• 3D Xbox Game Support?
• Windows Mobile 7 preview bits included? (Maybe these reports mean an early WinMo 7 beta?)

The best features of Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5 is a pretty substantial update to the popular open-source browser, and it's just around the corner. See what features, fixes, and clever new tools are worth getting excited about in the next big release. Many thanks to the Mozilla Links blog, which covers Firefox news and updates like a glove. Now that we've thrown out the 10 features that are getting us jazzed for a final 3.5 release, let's hear what you're most looking forward to, and what remains unrequited among your Firefox desires, in the comments.

What the hell is Google Chrome OS?

Brandon Davenport Jul 9, 2009 Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Us

Here's what Google says: "Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks" and "most of the user experience takes place on the web." That is, it's "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel" with the web as the platform. It runs on x86 processors (like your standard Core 2 Duo) and ARM processors (like inside every mobile smartphone). Underneath lies security architecture that's completely redesigned to be virus-resistant and easy to update. Okay, that tells us, um, not much.

After all, Google's Android is a mobile OS that runs on top of a Linux kernel. But Chrome OS is different! Android is designed to work on phones and set-top boxes and other random gadgets. Chrome OS is "designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems" for "people who spend most of their time on the web." Hey wait, they both run on netbooks? Hmm!

Since the official blog post is all Google has said about Chrome OS and it doesn't say much, let's do something I learned in college, turning tiny paragraphs into pages of "deep reading."

It seems like there are two possibilities for what Chrome OS is, on a general level. The more mundane—and frankly uninspired—possibility is that it's essentially a Linux distro with a custom user interface running the Chrome browser. As someone quipped on Twitter (sorry I don't remember who), if you uninstall everything but Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu, would that be the Firefox OS? What's the difference between Chrome OS and a version of Chrome with Google Gears on Intel's pretty Moblin OS?

The other possibility is more interesting. Look at this closely: "Most of the user experience takes place on the web." The software architecture is simply "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." That sounds familiar. A lot like Mike Arrington's CrunchPad, actually, which boots directly into the WebKit browser running on top of Linux.

Read article here

HTTP Live Streaming standard in iPhone 3.0 OS

Brandon Davenport Jul 9, 2009 Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Us Apple, News, iPhone

At the March unveiling of iPhone 3.0, Apple only dropped a subtle hint about new streaming video features in the new operating system (literally limited to writing "streaming video" on the slide of other features, below), leaving out any details about how it would work and not even mentioning the feature in any detail in the presentation.

For the last decade, Apple has been selling QuickTime Streaming Server, which uses an RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) server to stream live or rebroadcast video feeds to viewers. Apple uses this technology to stream some of its own live events. However, despite offering royalty free streaming and also delivering it as an open source project, QuickTime's RTSP streaming server hasn't gained the traction it was once expected to achieve.

A large part of this is due to the fact that RTSP traffic is blocked by many firewalls, making it difficult to deliver streams reliably. The audio and video conferencing used by iChat also relies on RTSP, causing some users frustrating problems for the same reason. Getting RTSP video streaming to work on the iPhone would be even more difficult, as it routinely moves between mobile and WiFi networks.

Apple attempted to solve the RTSP problem long ago in QuickTime Streaming Server by creating an option to bundle up RTSP streaming video traffic into HTTP packets, which appear identical to standard web traffic and therefore are permitted through most firewalls. This involves a extra layer of overhead however, resulting in a greater demand for bandwidth. For the iPhone, Apple decided to pursue a different strategy, which it calls HTTP Live Streaming.

HTTP Live Streaming
The technology behind HTTP Live Streaming leaked into public knowledge in May when Apple submitted it to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a draft standard on track to become an RFC (or Request For Comments, the memorandum used by the Internet Society to define how technologies work in order to foster cooperation and compatibility between the vendors implementing them).

Apple's HTTP Live Streaming proposed draft looks a lot like a method Microsoft began selling last year, called Smooth Streaming. The difference is that Apple's proposed IETF standard can use anybody's encoder and broadcast server, and will work with any client software designed to receive the stream. In contrast, Microsoft's Smooth Streaming is of course designed to exclusively use Microsoft Expression Encoder, Microsoft Internet Information Server with a Smooth Streaming extension, and requires Microsoft's Silverlight 2 on the client.

Essentially, Apple wants a standard for streaming video that anyone can use so that it can continue selling hardware without being either shut out of the market by proprietary software, or held captive by it; Microsoft, as a software vendor, wants to create another captive market where it has the power to shut out competitors at its whim. In parallel to Microsoft's Silverlight Smooth Streaming, Adobe also offers an equivalent Flash-based streaming server of its own.

If this is all beginning to sound familiar, it's because video streaming has followed much of the same historical trajectory as multimedia playback, making the history of streaming another chapter in the history of QuickTime.

The advent of streaming
Back in the mid 90s, Apple's pioneering advancement of software-based desktop video authoring and playback gave the company a strong lead in multimedia computing. With the arrival of the Internet however, there seemed to be a huge potential for sending efficient streams of video to users (primarily over dial-up) instead of relying on CD-ROMs for distribution of large video files or expecting users to directly download huge videos over dial-up connections.

Internet media streaming was popularized by Progressive Networks in 1995 with its proprietary RealAudio streaming format. In 1997, the company was renamed RealNetworks and launched a RealVideo service as part of RealPlayer 4.0. It also partnered with Netscape to develop what would become the RTSP standard for streaming.

Real had been founded by Microsoft millionaire Rob Glaser. Microsoft owned ten percent of the company and licensed Real's streaming formats in NetShow, its product aimed at killing Netscape's streaming server. Microsoft's NetShow incorporated Real's streaming formats for compatibility with existing content, but hoped to eventually shift Internet streaming to its own new ActiveX Streaming Format (ASF). Despite its interests in Real, Microsoft's growing ambitions resulted in the company pitting itself against RealPlayer with its own Windows Media Player in 1998, a phoenix that rose from the ashes of 1996's Active Movie/DirectShow player, which themselves were rebranded versions of the company's ill fated QuickTime competitor originally named Video For Windows.

Just as QuickTime suddenly failed to work properly under Windows 98 and Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player suddenly stopped playing Real's streaming formats, as Glaser testified in the Microsoft Monopoly trial. Real executive David Richards also testified that Microsoft was pressuring AOL to drop support for Real and use Microsoft's own streaming software instead, citing an email on the subject from AOL's CEO to Glaser which warned, "They want to kill you guys so badly, it is ugly."

Microsoft hoped to own the future of streaming and digital playback both, so it took on Real and Apple at once, pushing the idea of streaming ASF (the Real killer) via MMS (Microsoft Media Server, the new name for NetShow and not to be confused with the mobile messaging protocol) and establishing ActiveX Authoring Format (AAF) as its QuickTime killer.

In 1998 AAF was rejected by the ISO in favor of QuickTime as the basis for the new MPEG-4 media container format. By 2003 MMS, which used its own proprietary system for streaming media, had been deprecated by Microsoft in favor of its own new RTSP server, Windows Media Server 9. After the ActiveX brand was sufficiently tainted by widespread security flaws, the A in ASF and AAF was changed to stand for "Advanced." Most recently, Microsoft was forced to drop its ASF and adopt the MPEG-4 container to support Smooth Streaming.

During its streaming battle with Microsoft, and without any other revenue streams to fall back on, Real turned itself into an adware vendor that attempted to leverage its existing value in RealPlayer to inundate users with marketing partners' messages and attempts to sell them subscription music. It also filed suit against Microsoft and won an antitrust settlement of $460 million in 2005.

Best free Joomla 1.0 / 1.5 themes and templates ever

This is my top favorite list of joomla themes/templates. The list consists of only free templates so this is a great way to spice up your Joomla! site. It has themes like, Jamba, Novus, RedEvo, JP, Trentco and more. This is a great source for a budgeted web designer looking for a way to spice up the look of their site, without breaking the bank. What is joomla? Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

White iPhone 3GS Discoloration Due to Third-Party Cases, Not Overheating?

Brandon Davenport Jul 6, 2009 Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Me Follow Us Apple, News, iPhone

Reports of overheating and discoloration on the new white iPhone 3GS have been circulating over the past week or so, but a new report [Google translation] from frenchiPhone (via Hardmac) claims that the discoloration is due to contact with some third-party cases and not associated with overheating. The discoloration reportedly can be removed by wiping the back of the iPhone with alcohol.

- After numerous calls to Apple technical service and maintenance of contact with a level 3 (engineer) the problem seems to come not from a hot 3GS but contact with some covers! This was evident by ourselves on a device with a small sticker (a warning not to listen to music too loud) remained stuck, part of the hull below remained white.

- A simple solution to the problem is to clean the back of the iPhone with alcohol, tested by myself I can confirm that it works and reassure you it is safe for your precious

No details have yet been revealed on which third-party cases may be responsible for the discoloration.