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People tend to go directly to Ubuntu.com, Kubuntu.org, Xubuntu.com and Edubuntu.org to grab the latest downloads. That is fine, but for a day like today, being the Feisty release, you are going to be either downloading forever, or constantly losing connection.

So here is what I would do if I were you. Go to another distros website (i.e. Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo, Debian…) and go to their download section. They tend to have a list of mirrors somewhere in there. Find a mirror closer to your location. If the mirror has any of the distros listed, then there will be Ubuntu a directory or two up. Most universities maintain Linux mirrors to the main distributions. For instance on one of my local mirrors here in Chicago, I downloaded all of the ISOs available for final release in less than one hour. 2MB/s to be exact. Now, once you have downloaded those ISOs, be a pal and seed them with your favorite torrent application. Remember to throttle your bandwidth a little bit though if you plan on seeding multiple ISOs.

Other than that, HAPPY RELEASE DAY EVERYONE!

This is just a quick blog post in reply to Andrew Cowie’s post about Learning Linux.

Andrew posted a great book by O’Reilly for beginners all about Running Linux. Like Andrew I would also recommend another O’Reilly published book that might be a tad to much for some beginners, however it will teach beginners the behind the scenes of the Linux OS, and prepare them for the LPIC Linux Certification. The book is exactly that, LPI Linux Certification In A Nutshell.

This book is command line intensive, however I think learning and knowing your way around the command line, the major commands, and configuration files as well as directory structure is something every user should know. Not only does it make you a better Linux user, but it definitely makes your life easier, and of course makes you smarter, possibly even smart enough to earn that illustrious LPI Linux Certification. Oh, and you can pick the book up for around $20 nowadays.

The Flourish Conference, put on by the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a great success. Today had many interesting speakers such as Chris DiBona from Google, Peter Brown from the Free Software Foundation, John Quigley from Cleversafe, Tom Callaway from Red Hat, John Doppke from IBM and others. A special thanks goes out to UIC members such as Samir Faci and Thomas Sakkos. They did an amazing job for their first ever Flourish Open Source business conference.

I would also like to thank all of the Ubuntu Chicago crowd who came out, and when I mean came out, they came out. We knew of 8 of us for sure, but upon arriving the Ubuntu area was flooded with members and visitors. I feel bad for Fedora as they had only 1 guy with some CDs, shirts, hats, and one of the “One Laptop Per Child” laptops. He was pretty much sitting in the den of Ubuntu. Battle of the Distros went off with a hitch, which somehow ended up with me and Tom Callaway from Red Hat/Fedora hugging and showing that Ubuntu and Fedora can play nice together! Tom great hug by the way Special thanks to Freddy and Chad for a great Ubuntu talk, Matthew for letting us use his laptop (even though he had some of the ugliest wallpapers I have ever seen) to show off Ubuntu. During the battle of the distros, Freddy asked the crowd how many were using Ubuntu, and I would approximate 90% of the hands went into the air. I am almost willing to bet the other 5 or so that didn’t raise their hand were running either Windows or Mac OS X. Oh, and then there was Tom running Fedora of course.

I learned a ton today. I got to see the latest Fedora Core 7 update and I must say they are on the ball. The artwork is simply wonderful and the fingerprint scanner to log in was awesome. So if you have a laptop with the fingerprint scanner, you will be asked to type in your password, or scan your finger. How cool is that? Tom also did a talk on virtualization in Linux and I was impressed big time. His talk was brilliant. He talked about VMWare, Xen, KVM, and Parallels. It was awesome to see how Xen uses its own Linux kernel and the hypervisor to communicate directly with the hardware. Good stuff.

There should be images soon as well as video of pieces of the event that I will eventually link to. Before I go though, I want to leave you with what is the quote of the day that occurred during the battle of the distros, by who else, ME!

“I am not a fan of battle of the distros for a couple of reasons. First we have media outlets such as Slashdot, Digg, and OSNews that do enough by spreading FUD and starting flamewars between the different distros. I don’t care which release you use, as long as it is a free and open source solution and you like it. I would rather see the distributions coming together and collaborating more instead of constantly arguing who is the best and who isn’t.”

That isn’t spot on, but it is damn close. I was also quoted for responding to the Fedora presentation when they stated that they are based off of Red Hat which has more than 10 years under its belt, and my response was “and Ubuntu is two and half, and ummm, 8 million plus users, and constantly rated number one!” I had to get a little fun in there. All in all great day and a lot of fun. Hopefully next year we can get some famous Ubuntu speaker (*cough*Mark*cough*) to give a talk

Oh, one more quote that I thought was great from a Xubuntu user, wow there are a lot of Xubuntu users in Chicago, and mostly on brand new hardware. Anyways, when talking about desktop environments, and GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Fluxbox and what not and who was the best, his response was, “same cat, different skin. You can only skin it so many ways, it is still the same damn thing.” So true!

Yes, I am blaming this one on the great Mark Shuttleworth!

“The $20 million ride will make him the 450th person to enter orbit and by his own admission “the first nerd in space”. He is now making final preparations in a quarantine unit at Baikonur Cosmodrome. Simonyi is set to return on April 20th, together with the current ISS crew.”

This quote is in reference to Microsoft’s Charles Simonyi going to space. My only problem with this is that Mark beat him there years ago. But…Does Mark consider himself a nerd?

It is pretty cool nonetheless that if you have the money, space exploration is possible. I would without a doubt be scared to death on that 8 minute ride up, but I think once getting there it would be amazing. So Mark, do you consider yourself a nerd? If so, make sure you contact Charles and let him know Ubuntu beat um to the punch

OK, a couple posts down I made light of the Windows vulnerability that is aimed at the animated cursors was fixed just a few hours after my post. Well so we thought. It seems the fix broke Windows XP SP2 systems. If you have Realtek HD Audio then you stand a good chance of not being able to open the audio control center after applying this patch. OH, and you will also be warned that an illegal DLL relocation has occurred. OK, no big deal you say, well guess what, the exploit is not only still there, but even wider now. So who cares? Well the crackers that will be sending out tons of nude Britney Spears images for those who click and get infected. That is an awesome deal!

“A Microsoft spokesman said in an e-mail that Microsoft was first aware of the issues around the update for Windows XP SP2 during the testing process for the patch. He also said the number of customers affected by the glitch appears “limited” at this point, but the company is recommending that users appply the hotfix.”

Interesting, it says that Microsoft was aware of the issue during testing, but because the glitch appears “limited” they went ahead and released it. Limited strikes me though, as Realtek audio chipsets are some of the most popular chipsets there are, and are in a majority of manufactured PCs as well as some custom built PCs where people didn’t upgrade to a Soundblaster setup or such. I guess causing this issue on more than 25,000 university machines is also considered limited as well.

OK, so I promise to not disrespect Microsoft in this post, as I really don’t have to. They have been doing a great job disrespecting themselves of late. So why all of this Microsoft stuff on your blog Mr. Rich? Well a number of people read this blog, not just Planet Ubuntu, but quiet a few other planets and aggregators. My job is to promote Free and Open Source, well it isn’t my job, but my hobby. No better way to promote it than by showing off the continuous flaws in Microsoft. Well Linux has flaws too, and you are correct. However in the world of Free and Open Source software, you usually don’t get the amount of stupid updates that you do elsewhere for one, and two who cares what the reports say, Linux is far more secure than Windows, if it wasn’t so secure, stable, and blazing fast, than can someone explain why it controls more than 60% of the worlds web servers?

The Linux desktop is getting better everyday, and no matter your skill level, Linux has more to offer than Windows will ever have, oh and lets not forget Apple who is over in the corner sitting pretty right now. You may not be able to game or do your AutoCAD like you can with Windows, but everything else is good to go. I have been using Linux forever and the only reason I had the need for a Windows box was to game and do some AutoCAD. Other than that I have been able to follow along in college with my trusty Linux setup producing projects and products that are on par with the rest of the class and at times even better, but of course that is more me than it is Linux

Here is my offer to you, if you have been thinking about trying out this “Linux” thing, go for it. No matter your age, your race, sex, creed, religion, or knowledge, unlike Microsoft, we (Linux) do not discriminate! Give it a try right now!

I have been using an application for years now and it has become one that I cannot live without. The application is KDict, the KDE client for the DICT protocol. It allows you to search through dictionary databases for a single word or a phrase, and then provides you with a list of definitions.

Another nice thing about KDict is that it also has a super sweet Kicker applet that will allow you to enter a word or phrase right into your Kicker, and then press enter for the output. Take a look at the following screenshots, I have searched for the word Linux, go figure

This is the Kicker applet for KDict

This is the main window with definition for Linux

So if you are interested, install the KDict package using either Adept, Synaptic, apt-get, aptitude, or whatever way you want. Once you have it installed you can access it via KMenu through the Internet submenu and then under the “More Applications” submenu. It is called the Online Dictionary which is KDict. To setup the Kicker applet, right click on your Kicker and select “Add Applet to Panel…” The click on Dictionary. Type in a word, and then press enter, you should be good to go.