Ubuntu certainly has its fans - perhaps more than any other Linux distro. One person you can rest assured isn't part of that group: EEEUbuntu developer Andrew Wyatt. In case you aren't familiar with the project, EEEUbuntu is a customized Linux distro tailored to Asus' line of netbooks.

It was a SourceForge community choice award winner this year - for best new project. Now, however, it looks as though the distribution's future may be in jeopardy. On his personal blog, Wyatt expresses his frustration at receiving blame for problems actually caused by things like wonky Intel video drivers and kernel bugs.

Things which he feels are the result of carelessness of Ubuntu developers. "...They missed something as stupid as the ntel tiling kernel bug which caused every Intel card out there to crawl during any OpenGL function. There is no excuse for their release of alpha grade drivers and less than alpha grade kernel code into their release distribution," Wyatt writes.

He also hits on an issue that has given me grief in the past on multiple laptops - knowing what to do when you shut the lid. "Who needs suspend anyway, not like its a useful feature and all on an ultraportable." If it bothers me, I can certainly see how it would vex someone who develops a Ubuntu-based OS.

In closing his post, Wyatt gets in one last parting shot: "Maybe I should buy a copy of Windows 7, I hear that it actually works. How can we expect non-techical users to use this pile of garbage that is 'Linux'?"

Ouch.

[via ITWire]

Canonical has decided -- in response to user requests -- to give paid users of its Ubuntu One online sync and storage tool a big, fat boost in drive space. One recently made its way into Karmic Koala -- which has just reached beta.

When beta testing began in May, it looked as though free accounts would get 2GB (the same as Dropbox) and premium users would receive 10GB. That may have been a tough sell, since the same $10 per month scores 50GB from Dropbox.

In response to beta tester feedback, however, Canonical has decided to pony up. Paid users of the service will now get 50GB.

I'll still give the edge to Dropbox since it's also available on Windows, Mac, and now the iPhone as well. On top of that, there's also the option of a 100GB account if you need extra elbow room. If you're only using Linux, can make do with 50GB, and want to support Canonical, however, Ubuntu One is a solid choice.

[via Works With U]

The Beta release of Canonical's new baby, Ubuntu 9.10 'Karmic Koala', is now available for download.

As well as the usual host of version updates to each of the components (including Firefox finally getting an official update to 3.5), changes in 9.10 include a visual refresh, a boot sequence improved in both appearance and performance, inclusion of the new 'Ubuntu Software Center' (which replaces 'Add/Remove' in the applications menu), Gnome 2.28 (which sees the Pidgin IM client replaced with Empathy), rapid application development with Quickly, Ubuntu One file sharing, Linux kernel 2.6.31, Intel's new UXA video driver architecture for improved performance on Intel hardware, ext4 as the default filesystem (replacing ext3), GRUB2 as the default bootloader, improved iSCSI support, updated and improved AppArmor and Uncomplicated Firewall - you can read the full list on the Beta page.

Ubuntu 9.10 is available for download in both ISO format (directly and via Bittorrent) and for the first time in Cloud image format for use with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon's EC2.

Only one Beta version of Karmic Koala will be available - the release candidate arrives October 22nd (the release date for Windows 7!) before the final release lands on October 29th.

As the Moblin Project continues forging ahead with their sleek, fast-booting Linux remix for netbooks the gang at Canonical continues to keep pace. There's a new GUI for the Ubuntu Netbook Remix which premiered over the weekend.

While it's not yet on public display at the UNR web page, there are plenty of images of the restyled interface over at Ubuntu Mini. It's much less cluttered than the previous version, which is an important improvement for an OS designed for diminutive netbook displays.

Continuing with the streamlining of the UI, application launches no longer call an animation - just a simple notifier in the center of the screen. Adding apps to your favorites is now much easier as well. You no longer need to drag an item to the Go Home apple. A simple click on the add to favorites button next to an app's icon is all it takes.

If you'd like to take the new interface for a spin, you can grab the alpha ISO image from the Karmic Koala download page.

[via Liliputing]

Sure, Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope will be out in a few months and Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex has been available since October. But the folks at Canonical are still supporting Ubuntu 8.04 because it's what's considered a Long Term Support (LTS) release. And they've just pushed out the second major update: Ubuntu 8.04.2.

The latest version won't have all of the new features that show up in Ubuntu 8.10 like the new BitTorrent and VNC clients or the latest Gnome and KDE desktop software. But Ubuntu 8.04.2 does feature a bunch of bug fixes and security fixes. So if you're still running an older version, or want to install a fresh version of Ubuntu Linux that will be supported through April of 2011, you might want to check it out.

[via Ubuntu Unleashed]

Canonical has made the Mobile Internet Device (MID) version of Ubuntu available to developers. Developers can now make the necessary changes to their desktop applications to better match the smaller screen sizes and processing power of these devices as well as take advantage of the touchscreen interface to improve the user experience.

Ubuntu MID is based on the desktop version of the Ubuntu operating system but has the necessary tweaks made to run efficiently on smaller and less powerful devices like the Samsung Q1U which currently ships with Vista. We had an opportunity to demo this unit running on Vista with the standard 800MHz CPU and 1GB of RAM and the Q1U was really sluggish and not as responsive as we would like.

Hopefully, Ubuntu MID will be well optimized to make devices like the Q1U more usable as it will include a Gecko based browser, email, calendaring and media player specifically designed for these types of devices.

But does the recent announcement of Ubuntu Linux Remix and Symbian going open source possibly take some of the potential Ubuntu MID sales away?

At any given time on the planet, there's a technology trade show in progress. Some are more significant than others, and there's no formula to figure if any given one will be worth the airfare. We're guessing that a few ultraportable laptop manufacturers, as well as a few of us (cough) normal folk, are a little intrigued with the news emerging from the Computex exhibit halls today.

Canonical let slip some further information and screen shots of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the Ubuntu derived operating system for ultraportables. The quick and dirty information: it looks suspiciously as if the Ubuntu image is made to work solely on Intel Atom processors. How radically different is that from the other Intel processors used previously in ultraportables? Will it be a significant enough difference that it won't run with other Intel chips? Are VIA machines left in the dust? Maybe, maybe not, but we're guessing it'll affect performance on some level.

It seems that Canonical and Intel are working with various manufacturers to get Ubuntu Netbook Remix into our hot little hands, but it probably won't happen much before late 2008. They were so kind, however, as to release some screenshots of the demo version.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix looks... well, a little bit like the "Easy Mode" settings in the Eee PC's customized Xandros. Maybe not quite as simplistic, but we have this funny feeling that many people picturing "Ubuntu on an ultraportable" were thinking more along the lines of the traditional look with a few GUI tweaks. We're not sure if this is really a good or bad thing, as yet. Ultraportables are different animals, and used in a different manner than a desktop. Perhaps a different looking user interface is enough of a disconnect to make it all work (and keep us from trying to install the sorts of things on our ultraportables that they aren't intended to run due to processing limitations).

What will be interesting, and promises to push Linux on ultraportables to the next level, is all that scary stuff on the backend. The most intriguing bit of this conversation seems to focus on the use of Moblin, and the push for developers to get Ubuntu packages to work well -- really well -- with the specific requirements of the processor and ultraportable hardware.

You can practically set your watch by Canonical's release schedule for the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Every six months, the organization releases a major upgrade. While open source developers are constantly tweaking and improving Ubuntu, these major releases typically include better hardware support, new software, and the latest kernel and desktop environment updates.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth says the team is now going a bit further. Not only will Ubuntu 8.10, 9.04, 9.10, and 10.04 be released at regular intervals, but Canonical will be releasing point upgrades for Ubuntu 8.04 every three months. Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron gets this special treatment because it's an LTS or Long Term Support release. That means Ubuntu 10.04, which will be released in April, 2010, will get the same kind of support.

Shuttleworth does suggest that he'd be willing to throw out the release schedule (or at least amend it a teensy weensy bit) if another major Linux distributor like Red Hat, Novel, or Debian were willing to collaborate on a coordinated release.

For our part, we'd like to see Apple and Microsoft enter into that agreement. If there was a new version of Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu out every 6 months, or even every 2 years, consumers would always have the option of picking among the latest, and most up to date operating systems, whether free and open source or commercial and closed source. Not that this will ever happen, but sometimes it's nice to dream.

Yesterda we showed you how to install Windows XP in a virtual machine using Ubuntu Linux and VirtualBox. But Virtual Box ain't the only game in town when it comes to virtualization software for Linux. If you go to to the add/remove applications window in Ubuntu and click on the third party applications option, you'll see that VMWare Player is available. And starting this week, you can also download and install Parallels Workstation for Linux.

Parallels is probably best known for making virtualization software for OS X that enables Mac users to run Windows without rebooting. Unlike VirtualBox and the VMWare Player, Parellels charges $50 for a licensed copy of its Workstation software. But there's a 15 day free trial, so you can try the software out of a while before deciding whether its worth the asking price.

Of course, VirtualBox and VMWare Player are both pretty easy to use and work quite well, which leads us to wonder why anyone would pay for virtualization software for Linux that doesn't appear to offer any advanced features at the moment? We're not morally opposed to companies releasing commercial software for Linux, and we even think it's great that you can find commercial software using the add/remove applications window. But if you're going to charge for an application designed to run on Linux, you should really make sure it offers some benefits that you can't already get from free and open source software.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution has made incredible strides since its launch in 2004. Sure, giant stacks of cash in Mark Shuttleworth's war chest, used to conquer programming "bounties" for usability, features and bugfixes, have helped to aid the fledgling distribution.

Still, the rapid advance of Ubuntu towards the mainstream desktop cannot be ignored. If you're driving up the 101, Northbound, just after the Ralston exit in Redwood City, CA, you'll have an extra reason to stand up and pay attention to the upstart: This billboard proclaiming "Ubuntu: Linux for (servers and) human beings"

If you've missed all the hype about Ubuntu, you can download the latest ISO image from Ubuntu.com.

[via Digg]