(There may be other ways of doing this, but FWIW…) If you’ve ever wanted to reduce workspace clutter by merging two terminal instances, you can do this easily by creating a tabbed view within one of the instances (SHIFT+CTRL+T) and dragging the tab (or tabs) you wish to merge to the other instance. Simple eh?
Can’t confirm if this works in KDE, but I suspect it does 
Want to understand the difference between free and non-free, restricted and unrestricted software? The following system notifications provide a big clue:
System notification Ubuntu Linux style
System notification Windows 7 Starter Edition style
FOSS to the rescue again. Earlier today I found myself using a pencil and paper to work out some IP address-CIDR prefix combinations required to make up an address range that I needed to add to Firestarter’s policy rules. I thought, “This is madness, there’s got to be something in the Ubuntu repositories”. There was, of course, both command line and GUI tools. I use GNOME so installed the GNOME Internet Protocol Calculator, which was written by Samuel Abels, a Debian community member (I think). What a straightforward and excellent tool this is. Wish I’d had it 10 years ago when I was supporting NT4 networks.
GNOME Internet Protocol Calculator
Quote of the week is from the French Police Save Millions Switching To Ubuntu story on SlashDot.
“Moving from Microsoft XP to Vista would not have brought us many advantages and Microsoft said it would require training of users. Moving from XP to Ubuntu, however, proved very easy. The two biggest differences are the icons and the games. Games are not our priority.”
Version status of some key web development related packages in the repositories of the upcoming Ubuntu Linux 9.04:
Languages: Groovy 1.5 (1.5.7-1) Perl 5.10 (5.10.0-19ubuntu1) PHP 5.2 (5.2.6.dfsg.1-3ubuntu2) Python 2.6 (2.6.1-0ubuntu3) Python 3.0 (3.0.1-0ubuntu2) Ruby 1.8 (1.8.7.72-3) Ruby 1.9 (1.9.0.2-9ubuntu1) Databases: MySQL 5.1 (5.1.31-1ubuntu2) PostgreSQL 8.3 (8.3.6-1build1) SQLite 3.6 (3.6.10-1) Web Servers: Apache 2.2 (2.2.11-2ubuntu1) lighttpd 1.4 (1.4.19-5ubuntu6) nginx 0.6 (0.6.35-0ubuntu1) Frameworks & Applications: CakePHP 1.2 (1.2.0.7692-rc3-1) Catalyst 5.7 (5.7015-0ubuntu1) CherryPy 3.0 (3.0.2-2) Django 1.0.2 (1.0.2-1) Drupal 5 (5.15-1ubuntu1) Drupal 6 (6.6-3) Grails --- (not included in 9.04) MoinMoin 1.8 (1.8.1-1.1ubuntu1) phpBB 3.0 (3.0.4-0ubuntu1) Pylons 0.9.6 (0.9.6.2-2) Rails 2.1 (2.1.0-6) TurboGears 1.0.8 (1.0.8-1)
Ubuntu 9.04 packages: full list of packages (text only)
A belated farewell to the Feisty Fawn, the Ubuntu release that tipped the seesaw for me, finally persuading me to abandon Windows for my day to day computing. I noticed the support “end of life” notice on the ubuntu.com website yesterday and couldn’t help but sigh.
I joined the Ubuntu party with version 6.06, but it wasn’t until 7.04 that I felt comfortable making the jump. Feisty ran as well on my desktops and server as it did on our relatively low-spec family laptop. Of course it wasn’t perfect, but it was plenty good enough. I don’t mind admitting that I would get a warm, tingly feeling (put your mind back in the gutter!) whenever I saw the splash screen as the system booted. That boot logo had come to represent security, reliability, power, freedom, ease-of-use, and crucially, Ubuntu’s inclusive and tolerant community.
A big thanks to all who made it possible: GNU, the kernel maintainers, Debian, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical, the Ubuntu developers and community, and the tens of thousands of programmers, hackers, project managers, bug reporters, documentation writers, financial contributers, etc. etc. from the Free and open source software communities who have made and continue to make it all possible. What an awesome and worthy endeavour GNU/Linux is.
Here’s looking forward to Intrepid!
Quote of the day:
“No one is going to get fired for buying Linux in the data center”*
Linux at 17 - What Windows promised to be
(*Well, I suppose they might if they purchased a distribution that was actually free-as-in-beer, but the point stands…)
Wikipedia is in the process of migrating its 400-odd servers from a mix of RedHat and Fedora installations to the server edition of Ubuntu. It’s a great coup for the Ubuntu project and the feedback gained from Wikipedia’s operations will no doubt be very valuable indeed.
One obvious point to make is that given the profile of Wikipedia’s operations, any issues they may encounter while adopting Ubuntu Server are going to be exposed in a very public way. But hey, it’s all going to be character building stuff!
The article also highlights another encouraging possibility:
Despite these efforts to push Ubuntu in the server market, Canonical has had difficulty competing with Red Hat and Novell for enterprise server marketshare. Some changing trends could, however, soon give Ubuntu an advantage. Organizations are increasingly turning toward free, community-driven Linux distributions as in-house Linux expertise becomes more accessible. During a presentation at the LinuxWorld conference earlier this year, 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman said that Ubuntu and CentOS will both gain enterprise acceptance as a result of this trend.
