Mar 17 2010

Lucid Lynx Alpha 3

Category: FOSS, UbuntuSuvir @ 11:05 am

I could not wait anymore. Yesterday, I upgraded ubuntu to the latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. This one is called Lucid Lynx. Dunno how these guys ever come up with names. Its great how the next version comes out every 6 months on the dot. The LTS i.e. Long Term Support releases come out every one in two years.

Generally its advisable to wait till the beta, since its relatively more stable. But its pretty stable till now. Although, I did encounter some random nautilus crashes. Should be fixed by april when the stable release version releases.

Some new features of Lucid Lynx (that I have noticed till now) :
1. New default theme – bbye dirty brown default theme. The new theme is biased towards purple instead of brown which was favored by the ‘Human’ theme.
2. Much faster bootup. It can be lesser than 10 seconds on netbooks. My own laptop used to boot up in 30-40 seconds in the previous version. Now, it does it in around 15 seconds.
3. The latest GNOME just seems zippier. Its quicker than karmic. I reckon it looks better too … or maybe thats just compiz …
4. Some new software – the main one I noticed was Gwibber – its a neat social networking app. So now I can use facebook and twitter from desktop itself.

A bit about the ubuntu version numbering – it is <version number>.<month>.
Found out about this recently, though i’d share it. This is the reason, 10.04 releases in april … 9.10 karmic released in october … 9.04 in april …

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Mar 17 2010

Contributing to FOSS

Category: FOSS, TechnicalSuvir @ 10:49 am

Its been a long time since i’ve blogged, and I will not try and make any excuses explaining myself. Today, I am gonna talk about some of the stuff I have been upto and itching to blog about.

Two things that I am really into at the moment –

Firstly,..the goodness of ubuntu…

I have been an ubuntu user for around 3 years now. Its a great operating system, it has all the software you could ever need. It has the most gorgeous eye candy you could get on a computer screen. It has a huge and very helpful community which is always ready to help you. Just google your problems, and the solution is there within the first few hits.

Second, a natural extension of using Ubuntu is that you learn to appreciate the FOSS i.e. Free and Open Source philosophy. Its amazing how some amazing people from around the world devote time and the result is much greater than the sum of the parts.

As a programmer, I am pretty intrigued and inspired by the open source development workflow. So, I decided to contribute to the “open source” development. But how?

Well, I started with analyzing what were the two greatest open source softwares that I used. They were Ubuntu and Python. So now,

Python : Went to python dev, and tried to figure out how to get started. Install subversion, checkout a working copy of a branch, find and fix bugs, submit patches … sounds good …

Ubuntu : Really good help for newbie contributors. They have an entire set of youtube videos to guide you along. They start with the basics and you basically start by helping maintain the packages in the universe repository ( see here for more on that). Hence, the title MOTU (Masters of the Universe) ..

For now, I am biased toward Ubuntu because of the (apparently) easier learning curve. Lets see whats in store … will update the blog with new stuff…

Do you / intend / plan to contribute to any open source software? Please leave your comments …

P.S. If you still dont know what ubuntu is, go here. Download it, ship it .. its all free.

In case, you have not heard of python, go here — a beautiful programming language.

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