Yesterday I decided to try out the live cd of Opensolaris 2008.05 and decided to install it on my laptop after playing around with it for some time. The install process was painfully slow, but was very easy. If you already had Ubuntu (or any other OS for that matter), then OpenSolaris’s Grub menu would not have autodetected the other OS like Ubuntu does. There would be only one single entry for Open Solaris.
I wanted my Ubuntu back and so searched the web for info regarding this and found one. He has given steps to first install Solaris and then Ubuntu, but this holds true the other way round too.
You would need the desktop live CD of Ubuntu for this, so that you can recover Ubuntu’s grub.
- After booting to Ubuntu Live system, open up the terminal and type
sudo grub.
- You will get a grub prompt - here type
find /boot/grub/stage1
- Use this information to set the root device (this may be different for you)
root (hd0,0)
- Then install grub
setup (hd0)
- And
quit
This would get back the Ubuntu’s old grub, but now you have to make an entry for OpenSolaris.
Edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add this new entry at the bottom
title Open Solaris
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
makeactive
boot
This would enable you to boot to Open Solaris too now. There were problems with my Atheros drivers as usual and I have to find a way to install the madwifi drivers as I did on my Ubuntu. If anyone got wifi working on Acer Aspire 5050 with OpenSolaris, please do leave a comment here.
If you want to use the latest snapshot of Beryl, Compiz, OpenCompositing Compiz Tools and Plugins, Emerald, kiba-dock on your Ubuntu Feisty, then you should add Treviño’s repositories. Once you add these repositories, you can install them by using apt-get.
Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file and add the following to it.
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb feisty eyecandy
deb-src http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb feisty eyecandy
After you do that, update your packages and then install your required package.
Full Circle is an e-magazine run by the Ubuntu community that covers the world of Ubuntu, open source, and technology. The Issue 1 is out now which has various tutorials, interviews, reviews unlike issue 0 which was a special preview edition containing the history of Ubuntu distros.
Currently there is only the english version with other languages coming out soon. This issue includes:
- Installing Ubuntu Feisty Fawn
- Howtos: Linux directory structure, MythTV, Scribus, and more
- Interview with Deluge BitTorrent Client developer
- News, reviews and more.
You can also contribute to the magazine on the wiki into various categories.
Dell has started to ship PCs with Ubuntu preinstalled instead of Windows and we were all waiting for the first impression. Here is a detailed review of the Ubuntu-Dell experience in the Ubuntu forums.
Ubuntu guy with dell TShirt
I received my XPS with Ubuntu today. The first thing I will say is that when the Fedex guy delivered it he asked if Dell was having some kind of liquidation sale because he has delivered more Dells today than ever before. He told me that he had already delivered five and there were eleven more on the truck. (Just throwing that out there.)
You can also buy your Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled right over at the Dell website. Lets hope that other manufacturers too come out and support GNU/Linux.
Read Review of Dell XPS 410n with Ubuntu Feisty preinstalled - Ubuntu Forums
This is my 300th post(it took so long to reach here) and it matches with the release of Fedora 7. For those linux users who started with Ubuntu, Fedora is a RedHat sponsored community project to develop a great GNU/Linux distribution - which will be used for developing the enterprise version of RedHat Linux.
Fedora is a nice distro and I used to use it some 4 years ago before I switched over to the debian way of package management. But Fedora too made its own package management (maybe in FC4?) called yum.
Even though there are people out there who say that Fedora has become the next Slackware, Fedora too has its own fan following - so is Slackware. It is a nice distro to use for the average linux user, even though I doubt whether it would be so easy to use as Mandriva or SuSE.
The Ubuntu team has announced that there would be a Ubuntu Mobile edition in October for the 7.10 release. They would be working with Intel, which recently announced a low-power processor and chipset architecture for full Internet use.
Ubuntu Feisty Fawn which will be released soon this month (19 Apr) can be ordered through Ubuntu’s ShipIt. Feisty has been getting good reviews and has various features which make moving from Windows to GNU/Linux.
The built-in migration assistant can move data from your old OS to Ubuntu - with support for multiple users too. There are also new games like sudoku and chess. Also if you try to play any multimedia file which requires codecs to be downloaded, Ubuntu does this automatically for you. It also has better networking for wired and wireless access, kernel with VMI enabled - which means better paravirtualization, better artwork and one-click activation of desktop effects.
Ubuntu Studio aims to be a multimedia editing flavor of Ubuntu for the Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast or professional who is already familiar with the Ubuntu-Gnome environment. Their ultimate goal is to build a solid Ubuntu distro based on Ubuntu-Gnome by Feisty Fawn. This distro has various packages for audio, graphics and video editing. Take a look at their wiki for more info.
The Open Source Advocate has a thorough usability analysis of Ubuntu and tells us what makes it “ready to use” for us. He takes each step for completing an operation and categorizes them into Very Easy, Easy, Medium, Hard and Very Hard. He also explains what can be made to improve the user experience.
Fedora Core 6 is now available as a live CD. This is great news to the old fedora fans out there. Fedora is a project that is sponsored by RedHat and is contributed by many developers around the world. These people create high quality open source software which can be used by anyone.
It was a great distro back in those old days. But after Ubuntu came along, it lost its place. I haven’t tried FC for the past 2 years and this live CD would be a nice way to try it.
The live CD is available for i386 architecture only and you can download it from the official website or from torrents. It is about 683mb.