Ubuntu 12.10 Disc Artwork Available for Download

The Ubuntu 12.10 is less than a week away from release, and pre-orders for the official Live DVD are now being taken.
But what will the artwork look like?

Ubuntu 12.10 Disc Artwork

The official artwork for Ubuntu 12.10′s sleeve and disc has been added to the Ubuntu Wiki.
There no dramatic departure from the last few sets releases. The same ‘front’ image is used on the ‘disc’ itself, and the back page once again uses the default wallpaper as its backdrop.  

If you like the artwork, but don’t fancy buying a copy, it’s freely downloadable from the Ubuntu Wiki for you to print and assemble.

Ubuntu 12.10 Disc Artwork

Ubuntu Website Adds New ‘Donations’ Page

Canonical have today launched a new ‘contributions’ page through which users can donate money to the Ubuntu project.
           They say that the initiative will help people to ’..choose to financially support different aspects of Canonical’s work, from gaming and app, desktop, phone and tablet, to co-ordination of upstreams or supporting Ubuntu flavours.”

             Canonical have offered a ‘donate’ page of sorts, though you’d have been hard-pressed to find it. From today, however, you’ll be hard-pressed to miss it!

             Funding an OS as large and increasingly complex as Ubuntu doesn’t come cheap. As well as the personal pockets of Ubuntu’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical have created several revenue streams over the years – from super expensive enterprise support to corporate customers, to gaining a small slice of percentage every time a track is sold through the Ubuntu One Music Store.

But as a famous supermarket chain in the UK is fond of saying: every little helps.

               And for Ubuntu going forward, as it diversifies into new technology markets like TV and mobile, such a statement will have never seemed truer.

Donation – Humble Style

Taking inspiration from the Humble Indie Bundle, the new ‘donate form’ sports sliders through which you can ‘gesture’ what areas you’d like your donation to go to.

This ‘granularity’ will, Canonical say, help them to focus on ‘which favourite features or projects deserve the bulk of our attention’.
So what areas can divy your donation between?

• Make the desktop more amazing
• Performance optimisation for games and apps
• Improve hardware support on more PCs
• Phone and tablet versions of Ubuntu
• Community participation in Ubuntu development
• Better coordination with Debian and upstreams
• Better support for flavours like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu
• Tip to Canonical – they help make it happen

As you configure your contribution the pictograms at the bottom of the page change accordingly:

• $0 – Nothing. Use Ubuntu for free.
• $2 – The price of a grande extra shot mocha latta chino
• $5 – The price of pint of Micro-brew Nevada Pale Ale
• $7 – The price of a Royale with cheese
• $10 – The price of a movie. For one.
• $15 – The price of King Kong versus Godzilla on DVD
• $20 - The price of Peace, Love and Linux t-shirt
• $30 - The price of stainless steel copper-bottom frying pan
• $50 - The price of vintage SNES game bundle
• $60 - The price of pair of vintage acid wash Levi 501s
• $100 - The price of pair of LP Matador bongo drums
• $200 - The price of pair of sexed Emu chicks
• $500 - The price of flight from New York to London (one way)
• $1000 - The price of an eight year-old dromedary camel

Some of the pictograms are quite funny (see Emu chicks at the top of this post) however the choice when selecting ‘$0‘ is a little harsh…

Payment Methods

So far only Paypal is the only accepted form of Payment. Canonical’s Jono Bacon says that this is only temporary and that ‘other payment mechanisms are currently being explored’.

Where the Money Goes

If you dropping some coins in Ubuntu’s pocket it’s only fair that you know specifically what the money will be used for. Community Manager Jono Bacon is clear:

“When a donation occurs, Canonical will act as a steward for the money and ensure it is managed fairly and in accordance of the user’s wishes…ensuring it goes to the part of the project outlined in the form. Importantly, Canonical will not be using the money for any Canonical business-orientated functions; all of the donations will be used to fund the Ubuntu project and continue it’s growth and development.”

Finding It is Easy

As altruistic as donating is it should never be compulsory. And although this ‘change’ means that anyone downloading Ubuntu from the official website from today onwards will be greeted with this form before their download, it is still completely optional.

Personally I find the opt-out text - ‘Not now, take me to the download’ - rather small and as it’s well below the fold of the page I worry that some users will have trouble finding it.

A direct link to the contributions page can be accessed by clicking on the button below.

New Ubuntu 12.10 T-Shirts & Hats Go On Sale

New Ubuntu merchandise has gone on sale in the Canonical Store ahead of October’s release of Ubuntu 12.10.

‘Quetzal’

Since Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) the mascot of each release has graced the front of the ‘official t-shirt’.  As Ubuntu 12.10 is the ‘Quantal Quetzal’ the latest design makes use of the fine long-tailed Quetzal logo we’ve seen a lot of over the  last 5 months.

The Quetzal design is available in mens sizes small through XX-large, and female sizes small through X-large for the quantifiable sum of £10.25/$17.39. 

Do you think this design is better than past efforts?

“Ubuntu Icons”

Another new design on sale this cycle is features a variety of Ubuntu’s ‘pictogram’ icons (including ‘cloud’, ‘mobile’, ‘tv’, ‘server’ and ‘monitor’) all linked together to an Ubuntu logo in the center.

So far this design is only available in mens sizes small through xx-large, but is marginally cheaper than the Quetzal design, costing £10.23/$17.35 excluding postage and packaging.

Hats

If covering your torso in Ubuntu-branded niceties isn’t enough for you then there are two new hat designs to add to your xmas lists.
The first, a bold orange ‘cap’, is unmistakably Ubuntu and not that expensive either, costing £7.50/$12.72. 
The second is a subtly-branded but cosy looking beanie that will set you back £6.80/$11.53.

All of these items, as well as pre-orders for the Ubuntu 12.10 DVD, can be purchased  from the Canonical Store.

A Wine Named Ubuntu (No, Really)

By Joey Sneddon, posted August 12, 2012

S

We’ve written about Ubuntu Cola, Ubuntu car license plates, and even Ubuntu crop circles as part of our ‘Ubuntu in the Wild‘ strand.
But a wine? That’s new to me 
The familiarly-named beverage was produced in 2007, 2008 and 2009 by Portuguese wine makers Niepoort as part of celebrations making the then World Cup host nation of South Africa.
Both this wine and the OS are named after the African philosophy of Ubuntu, whose meaning is commonly distilled into the sentence: ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.
‘Wine’ is also the name of a compatibility layer that allows some Windows apps to run on Linux-based distributions like Ubuntu.

Taste

My palette can’t deduce one wine from another (they all taste foul and sour to me)so  I won’t be hunting down a bottle of this (increasingly rare) vintage to sip whilst I work.
So, if you’re curious as to whether the taste matches the label,  you’ll have to find a bottle yourself, or rely on the following quote.

…intense red and black fruit aromas with spicy and wet stone notes  …and an excellent acidity providing a long lasting after taste.”

For more information on the  Ubuntu wine head to the  Niepoor Vinhos website @ niepoort-vinhos.

com/en/fabulous/Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Shaped Crop Circles Appear in Italy

Ever wondered what operating system aliens use? The truth, readers, is out there.

Well ‘out there’ in as far as Carcia, Italy.

It’s here that, over the last few weeks, Ubuntu-shaped impressions have appeared in wheat fields belonging to Joseph Fasciana’s family.

Many of the designs (for there are more than one) span between 600 to 800 square meters.

So what is causing the grain-groping geometry? UFOs? Aliens? Pranksters?

OMG! HQ is a fair distance from Carica so we can – exclusively – reveal that it wasn’t us (scouts honor).

The Italian Police are also keeping their heads firmly out of the clouds too, putting the circles down to pranksters influenced by a recent episode of paranornal show ‘Mystery’ which explained precisely how to make crop circles.

Joshua and his family are less convinced by this explanation however.


“This time of year the wheat [will bend and break] if we walk in the middle,’ he told Italian blog


 ‘There are [no] signs of people who walk, nor wheels of vehicles; nothing that suggests that they were created by a human hand.’


“We have looked carefully, the designs are so perfect that they seem to be made ​​with a compass and the ears are intertwined.”

You can see and read more on the shapes at ctzen.it (Italian). 

But the answer as to what is making them – and why they chose to draw the Ubuntu logo – remains a mystery…

Luca, via Ctzen.it

Press Reaction to Ubuntu 12.04

It’s been almost 4 whole days since Ubuntu 12.04 was released – but what sort of reaction has it received from the mainstream technology press?
Let’s take a tour through a maze of quotes and reaction from some of the internet’s leading voices..

Engadget were traditionally brief in their nod to the release, but mention that ‘Pangolin does include some rather notable tweaks.’
But reviewer Terrence O’Brien seemed most excited about the ‘…vastly improved performance and power management.’
‘Ubuntu, for all of its finer points has never been particularly battery friendly. But Canonical is promising that is going to change. We’ll have to wait to find out once we get this bad boy installed on some machines of our own.’
Whitson Gordon over at Lifehacker was passionate about the HUD, citing it as being ‘…enough to get us upgrading as soon as possible’. 

Patrick Quinn of LXer was eloquent in giving his take, saying that  “…with each release the focus on the user becomes more and more evident, culminating with this, Ubuntu’s Unity finally stating to leave that dark tunnel and enter into the warm light of general acceptance.” 
Ars Technica‘s Ryan Paul, in one of the tech press’s more in-depth run-downs of the release, was succinct in his summation, calling the release ‘…an incremental update that is fairly reliable, but doesn’t introduce many ambitious changes. Advanced users will benefit from the introduction of the HUD, but most users won’t notice major differences.”

Mike Williams of PC Advisor notes that there are a ‘stack of worthwhile improvements everywhere you look’, and cites ‘significant performance improvements mean the fancy visual effects work smoothly even on systems with basic integrated graphics.’
The ever on-the-level Computer Active were far more enthusiastic in selling the benefits of the OS to their readership, giving the release a full 5/5 stars and billing it as ‘an excellent alternative to Windows.’
Tim Smith, in writing the review, addresses the ‘Unity’ issue from the get go, advising that ‘[Unity is] worth persevering with even if you don’t like it at first.’ 
‘Ubuntu is a great operating system that …can be used to give a new lease of life to older computers. [It is] is much more convenient when wanting to quickly check some information on the internet.’

Where’s the negative?

So where’s the negative stuff; the list of annoying quirks in Pangolin?
It’s worth remembering that the majority of the mainstream tech press only dip in to Ubuntu twice a year, and then only spending a short time with it to write their posts.
So far the ‘negatives’ have been fairly coy or subtle – Terry Relph-Knight from ZDnet, for example, cites the lack of ‘creative software that’s comparable to the proprietary apps available for Windows and Mac OS X’ as a negative. Something that is hardly Ubuntu-specific.
Fellow ZDnet writer – and it’s fair to say general critic of Ubuntu – J.A. Watson, reports a less than pleasant experience with installing the release on a Samsung netbook.
But overall the general feeling i’ve got from the reviews I’ve read is that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is a notable success. 

[How To] Access Google Drive Via Nautilus in Ubuntu

Google’s newly-launched ‘Drive’ feature may have failed to give Linux users a client from the get go – but that doesn’t mean we need to go without entirely.

A temporary solution is available for those willing to try it.  It’s not as elegant or featured as the clients Google provides for Windows and Mac users, but it may help bide the time for avid Google-users looking to make the most of Drive before something more official arrives.

Google Docs Drive FS:

The package comes courtesy of Luca Invernizzi, and is based on the discontinued ‘google docs fs’ project that ”[allows] you to connect to Google Docs and treat it as a file system.”

Sounds technical, but put simply it means you can access the files and documents in your Google Drive as you would any other folder.

But there are limitations to this approach.

The majority of features billed in the Google Drive clients themselves are not provided in this fix – the most notable of which is the inability to add files, sync files or otherwise access the folder whilst offline; uploading additional files to the Drive also doesn’t seem to function fully.

        With the disclaimers out of the way lets see how you get it all set up.

First you need to add the packages provided by Luca and available in his PPA (11.10 only at present): -

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:invernizzi/google-docs-fs
• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install google-docs-fs

Once everything that’s needed has been installed log out and back in.

• Open Nautilus
• Create a new folder in your Home folder titled ‘Drive’
• Open a Terminal and run: -
• gmount Drive username@gmail.com
• Input your password
• Your Google Drive is now mounted in the ‘Drive’ folder.