I’ve just received my early holidays present to myself, a new Lenovo X201T tablet laptop. Its a great piece of hardware and feels very robust and gives the feel of solid engineering which has created something will lasts a long time.

I went for the top end version, Intel i7 processor, 8Gb RAM and top end Intel wireless network card. Here are my experiences so far with the Lenovo X201T tablet latptop.

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I am really enjoying the new version of Ubuntu, 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. I especially like the Unity desktop of the netbook edition.

Unfortunately my Asus netbooks (Asus Eee PC1000, Asus Eee PC 1201N) are affected by the hibernate suspend bug that affects some machine.

Good news though as there is a simple fix to this bug, documented in the Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release notes. Here are the details of the fix.

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I do find it helpful to quickly sketch out what I want the poster to generally look like.  I also found that using separate layers for background images, text boxes and text helped when building up more interesting designs.

Once I’ve created my posters I can save them as a standard Adobe pdf file.  You can of course save them as postscript as well as lots of other formats too.

As the default file format of Inkscape is SVG, you can also view your posters using the Ubuntu Image Viewer or The Gimp.

According to the Inkscape site:

“Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more.  There is also a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.“

There is a great online guide to using Inkscape called Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing program which is also available as a book.

There are more features I’d like to learn with Inkscape, to make even better posters, but it shows how good the tool is in that I can be productive so quickly.  Have a look at the Inkscape advanced tutorial for making your posters even more snazzy.

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket

Launchpad | GUI | Introducing | TestDrive Lucid |

One of the easiest ways to get involved with testing a new release of Ubuntu is to use TestDrive. TestDrive makes it very easy to download and run the latest daily Ubuntu development snapshot in a virtual machine  (KVM, Virtualbox, etc.) without affecting the rest of your system.

Actually, TestDrive can be configured to download and run any URL-accessable ISO image in a virtual machine, although the primary goal is to provide feedback on the current Ubuntu release under development. Here is how to get going with TestDrive.

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I am in the process of installing the Ubuntu Enterprise cloud using the Ubuntu server edition. I intend to use the cloud for developer services to see how feasible it is to make those services a real commodity.

For example, continuous integration is a service that is growing in use for software development and has on occasion peaks of very high load. Some of the load could be distributed to the cloud as a service, reducing the need for extra capacity internally (which would not be maximised) and turning that service into an operational cost rather than a capital cost.

Some useful links for configuring and using Ubuntu Enterprise cloud:

Home | Getting started | Installation | VM Images | Architecture (pdf) | Forums | HybridFox |

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket

Ubuntu is a way to use your computer (PC, Laptop, etc) to do all the common things you currently do with Windows or Mac but without the software licensing costs and restrictions. Ubuntu is free to use and has thousands software packages to choose from, however Ubuntu provides you with a good selection by default to get you started quickly (browser, office, music and photo managers, multimedia and games, etc).

Here are some ways to get more familiar with Ubuntu and make the most of community driven software.

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When running Scala on Ubuntu Linux, scala myscript.scala, if the network configuration in your /etc/hosts file does not have a loop back address you can experience the following error:

Could not connect to compilation daemon.

Edit your /etc/hosts file, gksudo gedit /etc/hosts and ensure there are the following lines at the top of the file:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 mycomputer

Where mycompter is the name you gave your Ubuntu computer when you installed it.

It would seem that the scala compilation daemon does not pick up the network address when running scripts. The same problem occurs when there is no network, but I have not found a workaround as yet (except to find a wireless hotspot).

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 ShareAlike License, including custom images & stylesheets. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at @jr0cket

Ubuntu 10.04 is released on Thursday 29th April 2010 and we are running a release party in Central London (for those that need something local and cant make OggCamp in Liverpool. The party aims to help people try-out and work with the Ubuntu Linux distribution and anything mildly related.

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When I started thinking about cloud computing, I asked myself some questions:

• Is cloud something new?
• Do we know what cloud is?
• Is cloud just the sum of all the services available on the Internet?
• Are we really moving towards something new (the cloud) or away from something current/legacy (the local data centre)?

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