Request Feisty (7.04) CDs Now April 11, 2007
Posted by Carthik in ubuntu.34 comments
Shipit is now accepting advance orders for Feisty CDs.
You can also request Kubuntu and Edubuntu CDs. I wish there were Xubuntu CDs for those that like their toast lightweight.
You can request 10 or less CDs using shipit. For mass orders (for your LUG, class, or country) try the special request form after you login.
Of course, the responsible thing to do is to download the CD image and burn it when it becomes available. Remember the CDs are shipped free of cost, and there is always someone else without a stable and fast internet connection who could use these shipped cds.
Ubuntu-tan Wallpapers Make Up for Missing Ubuntu Mascot April 11, 2007
Posted by Carthik in looks and feel, ubuntu.35 comments
There is some small talk about the need for an Ubuntu Mascot at the Ubuntu-sounder mailing list. Though there are suggestions for a space-helmet sporting penguin, the idea hasn’t come to anything so far. In an email in the thread, there was link to some OS-tans to temporarily make up for the lack of a mascot. Its about time Ubuntu got a chweet-overloaded mascot,for the kids if not for us, don’t you think?
Without much further ado, here’s a couple of OS-tans for you to love, and to optionally invite to reside on your desktop 
To avoid flooding the planet with pictures, there are two more pics, and some more details below.
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Convert/Import from PDF and Keep the Formatting April 10, 2007
Posted by Carthik in applications, guides, microsoft, office, ubuntu.53 comments
I have often wanted to convert a PDF file to a MS Word (.doc) file or an openoffice.org file. Usually I just copy the text from the PDF file and paste it in the new word document. Soon, this gets pretty tiring.
Recently I found a way to convert a pdf file to other formats, including .doc and .odt which preserves the formatting of the text pretty well. It is not perfect preserved but it is way better than having no formatting at all.
The secret goes by the name KWord. KWord is a KDE application that has a pdf “import” feature which lets you import either entire pdf documents or just a few pages from a pdf document while preserving the formatting! Of course – this only works for pdf documents which are not scanned images of pages. I tried it out on files created using 
Getting Details about My Laptop Battery – and Taking Care of it April 8, 2007
Posted by Carthik in guides, maintenance, ubuntu.65 comments
Recently I have noticed that the “stamina” of my Acer notebook’s battery has been getting progressively worse. The laptop is hardly a year old and yet I get only 3/4ths of the time I used to get with it when I bought it. I wanted to know more details about how my battery’s doing.
(img credit: Sean Dreilinger on Flickr)
To find out all the details you would want to know about you battery, browse to the directory
/proc/acpi/battery/ and then to the directory that has your battery in it.
Once there, see the contents of the files to learn more about your battery. Here’s what my files tell me:
So, as you can see, my battery does not charge to its full design capacity of 4400 mAh. It only charges to 3134 mAh, which is almost 3/4ths of the original capacity. Looks like my battery is on the downhill slide.
Since it is a Lithium Ion battery, I went looking for details on how to take good care of it. It is a good thing I did, because it demystified me – Letting your battery drain to “dead” before recharging it is not good. I really thought it was, but it is not. Wish I had known this earlier! I found an excellent page online with details of what factors affect the performance and lifespan on Lithium Ion batteries. The page includes graphs to show stored charge levels, temperature, discharge load etc affect battery longevity. In case you don’t have the time to read the page, here’s some points for you to remember to ensure a long life for your LiON battery:
- Avoid frequent discharges to 0% stored charge.
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- Several partial discharges with frequent recharges is better, since Lithium-Ion batteries have no “memory”
- You still have to allow it to go from full charge to near-empty charge once in 30 charge cycles to make sure that the battery charge monitor is properly calibrated
- Avoid Heat
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- Don’t leave the laptop in the car
- If you are going to use the laptop connected to power for a week or more continuously, take the battery out. This will save it from the heat and from the charge-discharge problems
- The batteries deteriorate even when they are stored cool!
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- Don’t buy a replacement battery or a spare battery until the time when you really need it!
- If you have to store a Lithium Ion battery – store it at 40% charge and store it in a refrigerator
Take care of your battery, because there is no way to restore capacity to failed batteries. Also, an average battery is good for 300-500 charge/discharge cycles, or about 1-2 years. The main physical reason for the degradation of performance seems to be increased internal resistance, which causes the battery to be unable to deliver the charge stored in it to the outside world (the internal resistance eats it up ). Chemical decomposition of components also reduces the charge delivery capacity over time. So it is best to do the most you can to slow down the degradation by following the tips above.
Beryl & Compiz Reunite to Form “Composite Community” April 5, 2007
Posted by Carthik in news.9 comments
Beryl and Compiz come together again. There is talk of a Compiz-Core with Compiz-Extra being where the main action will be.
- The Compiz-Extra division (what we think of as Compiz) will merge with the
Beryl project to form a new community with the temporary name of “Composite
Community”.- The codebase of the new community will consist of the best plugins,
decorators, settings tools and related applications from the Beryl and Compiz
communities. We will create a code review panel consisting of the best
developers from each community who will see that any code included in a
release package meets the highest standards and is suitable for distribution
in an officially supported package. Support for existing packages will be
continued at least until the first stable release of the new project.
Here’s the announcement from the Beryl Dev Blog
Congratulations to all involved!
Feisty CDs to be Available Through Shipit April 4, 2007
Posted by Carthik in news, ubuntu, Ubuntu Sites.63 comments
Unlike Edgy, which was not available through shipit, free cds of Feisty Fawn, the upcoming release may be available for free shipping.
I logged into the shipit website and was greeted by this:
Yippee!!
Update: You can now pre-order the CDs
Encrypt GMail using GPG Keys April 4, 2007
Posted by Carthik in Friends Etc., ubuntu.27 comments
FireGPG is the firefox plugin you need to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify emails in Gmail using your trusty GPG keys. The installation instructions are heavy on sentence ending exclamations, but they let us know that you can use this extension in Linux.
“Want to” Vs. “Have to” April 1, 2007
Posted by Carthik in commentary, microsoft, ubuntu.42 comments
So what is this ground-shattering revelation that forced me to write at 2:45 AM?
It is one of those things that literally make you sit up, and think for a moment. When you are done thinking, you want to write it down – such thoughts don’t happen too often, you see. So here it is:
More people use Windows not because they want to, but because they have to.
More people use Linux not because they have to, but because they want to.
The balance is tipping. Soon, there will be fewer people who will be willing to do what they have to at a high price, and more more people willing to change things so they can use the platform they want to use.
I’ll probably regret writing this a few years from now. It is, after all, so obvious.
What I won’t regret is writing this down before I go to sleep tonight.
Feisty Feedback – Free For All March 29, 2007
Posted by Carthik in ubuntu.45 comments
I installed Feisty Beta on my main laptop and I must say it is very impressive. In fact, I am more impressed with Feisty than any other release so far, especially when it comes to making life easier for new linux users and non-geek users. More than once, I was pleasantly surprised by the detail that seems to have gone into making life easier for regular desktop users, and this includes the documentation. Another thing I noticed was that on the IRC channels, there seem to be a lot less people complaining about random problems with Feisty. I still remember how busy #ubuntu+1 used to be after a beta release in the past. Since I don’t have any quantitative information, this has to remain a subjective observation for now.
Oh and yes, the rule that states that the busy-ness of a blogger’s life is inversely proportional to the frequency of blog posts is true 
I have ideas for a couple of posts, and an interview, on my mind for about 2 weeks now. Wish I had the time and peace-of-mind to share it with all of you.
I am maintaining a log of the features in Feisty that impressed me most. I decided to completely reinstall Feisty on the laptop, since upgrading never gives one a very good view of what life is like for someone who is installing Ubuntu from a specific release. I will try and summarize what others like about Feisty too. To help me with that, please let me know what your experiences have been with Feisty so far.
What do you love about it?
and more importantly,
What do you dislike most?
Extra points for originality, and for not repeating what other commenters have said
Watch this space for more. See you in a day or two!
Linux is Mainstream, Paul. April 4, 2007
Posted by Carthik in commentary, ubuntu.134 comments
Paul Thurrott writes at internet-nexus about the previous post I’d written about how more people “want” to use Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux.
First off, it’s great to have Paul’s attention. Paul is an opinion leader in the Windows-centered world.
I would like to point out some small misconceptions he seems to have:
I never said that most people want to use Linux, or that most people use Windows since they have to. The word I used was more, and in this case, I meant it to mean that the numbers seem to be increasing – which is a good sign, as far as I am concerned.
That aside, the following is what worries me most, Paul says:
Paul, we Ubuntu users belong in the 99.99% you mention, too. Have you used Ubuntu lately, and have you been able to compare how easy it is to use Ubuntu on a day to day basis? Heck, it installs much faster and easier than Windows, and if you support open-source friendly hardware providers, like Intel, then everything works great – much faster than you can say “install windows driver”.
Then again, he says:
We Linux users are part of the mainstream now, Paul. Linux is not just for geeks. For one, governments the world over are adapting to change, and thus driving it faster. In a few years, entire cities/states/countries will see vastly increased number of Linux users. People who use them in offices/schools will tell the others. I trust them to. Good news can’t be stopped from spreading. Oh, and Bill Gates’ (or Microsoft’s) first clients were geek hobbyists(a minority that was not part of the mainstream), and computers used to be a hobby back then. Look at where we are now.
While no amount of personal examples from me, or from other Linux users can convince someone that this is the case, it cannot hurt to have a list of “normal” “mainstream” people who use Ubuntu — how they do, why etc. I just checked and there seems to be no such list. If you read this blog, and don’t do programming/computer related stuff for a living, please drop us a comment here, saying you use Ubuntu. Let’s see where this goes.
Our world view is inclusive, Paul – anyone who has the hardware for a computer should be able to use the computer for free. We will get there. Ubuntu is amazingy easy to setup and use. GNOME, even KDE, are much much more intuitive and easy to use (from the usability point of view) than Windows. Of course, this is a subjective statement. I wish there was a study report I could point to. Could Canonical sponsor an Ubuntu Usability Study, comparing it to OSX and Windows? Just so that we have something to point at?