The Linuxologist

UbuntuSun is the proposed theme for Ubuntu’s upcoming release 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx, which is expected to be released on the 29th of April 2010. The idea behind UbuntuSun is to bridge the gap between people’s dark/light preferences.

As some people like dark themes and some people like bright themes, why not combine them into one set of matching themes with different shades? This is an idea for a Metacity theme that is based on the idea of having the sun shine into your windows. Could there be a better leitmotiv for the window design of a lucid release? The theme could be combined with any GTK theme if they are modified to have flat menu and tool bars.

Users will be able to choose from three different moods that represents the three different positions of the sun: Dawn, Day and Dusk.

Luckily, ingolemo over @ gnome-look.org took it upon himself to make these mock-ups real. So now you can use it on your working Ubuntu installation. Unfortunately Dusk didn’t turn out as awesome as the mockup, but Dawn and Day are quite impressive. Hopefully ingolemo, will update the themes and continually fine-tune them.

Download the themes from here.

This blog hasn’t been neglected for quite some time, and been feeling really guilty about it. So lets kick off  our emergence with some humor:

Here is the full line in case you want to try it in your terminal:

who girl; look; talk; date; strip; touch; unzip; finger; head; mount; uptime; fsck; more; more; yes; yes; more; umount; make clean; sleep

This last September, IBM and Canonical – the company behind Ubuntu- teamed up to bring Linux-powered netbooks to African markets. Commentators wondered, and rightly so, why Africa?

Well wonder no more! The deal isn’t exclusively African no more. IBM and Canonical are bringing Linux-powered netbooks stateside. The idea is to have IBM’s Client For Smart Work on top of a Linux OS.

With Microsoft’s Windows 7 just around the corner, the timing for such announcement couldn’t have been more perfect. Canonical and IBM claim that migrating to Windows 7 would cost up to $2000 per computer, with hardware upgrades contributing to most of the cost.

“If a company is a ‘Windows shop,’ at some point it will need to evaluate the significant costs of migrating its base to Microsoft’s next desktop and bolstering its defenses against virus and other attacks,” said Bob Picciano, general manager, IBM Lotus in a statement. “American businesses have asked for a compelling alternative and today we are delivering IBM Client for Smart Work in the U.S.”

I really wish that the IBM/Canonical team pull would pull an Apple, who announced iMacs, Macbooks, and Mac Minis literally from thin air, or at least see the deal come to fruition within a couple of weeks.

Update: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Computerworld notes that these are targeted for businesses and aren’t really a desktop replacement for Windows. He also breaks down the cloud computing pricing:

Option A: A Starting Point

$3 LotusLive iNotes per user/month.

E-Mail, calendaring

TOTAL:$ 36 per user per year.

Option B: Add Social software capabilities to Option A

$9.75 LotusLive Connections per user/month

Dashboard, file sharing, personal profile networking, contact management, groups, project management, instant messaging.

TOTAL: $ 153 per user/year.

Option C: A Typical Solution

$74.50 Lotus Notes/iNotes

E-Mail, calendar, todo, contacts), Lotus Sametime entry (Instant messaging, chat, presence awareness), Lotus Quickr entry (file sharing)

TOTAL:$74.50 per user first year; $25.75 per user each additional year for the IBM Lotus software

Option D: Add virtual desktop capabilities

$49 per user first year. $10/user/year for subsequent years.

Supports Windows and Linux guests.

Gnome-look.org has tons of wallpapers to decorate your favorite desktop. However the website isn’t really friendly to download them all. You have to go through a long list of wallpapers, click through each and download the wallpaper from the wallpaper page. Luckily, with the power of the command terminal and ftp you can get tons of wallpapers with a single command!

First you need to create a directory in your home directory, lets call it Wallpapers
mkdir ~/Wallpapers

Now you need to connect to gnome.org ftp servers
ftp ftp.gnome.org
Next you will be asked to enter a username and password. “anonymous” will be your username and just press enter when prompted for the password.
Now lets navigate to the wallpapers on their servers
cd /pub/GNOME/teams/art.gnome.org/backgrounds
You will also need to turn prompting off, you don’t want it bugging you asking you if you want to download each single file
prompt off
Now lets download all 1280×1024 (assuming thats your resolution)
mget *1280x1024.jpg

Great huh? Now why don’t you rotate your wallpapers? Here check our 3 Great Ways To Rotate Your Linux Desktop article.

Inspired by the popular Fake Steve Jobs blog, The Linux Foundation invited 4 prominent Linux industry leaders to guest tweet as Linus Torvalds. Users are invited to vote for their favorite fake Linus. The winner and all 4 fake Linus Trovalds will be revealed at LinuxCon 2009.

They also made a hilarious promotion video parodying Eminem’s “Please Stand Up” video:

Chuck Norris dubs Linus a hero. He can divide by zero. He can do an infinite loop in a milli-sec, and round-house Chuck Norris in the neck! The code Linus writes is always bug free!

To see the Fake Linus tweets just search for hashtags #FLT1 #FLT2 #FLT3 #FLT4. They will be tweeting from The Linux Foundation’s twitter account.

For more information on visit The Linux Foundation.