Review: Ubuntu 8.04, a definite show stopper!

As usual, as May approached, I went to the ubuntu portal to get my copy of new Hardy Heron, for the past 4 releases, this has been the modus operandi. I get my copy, try it out, explore the feature, be happy for some days, but it used to fade out soon, for some reason or so. Butby the time 7.10 released, I had got my laptop, and Ubuntu refused to run on it. So I was away from the tux for quite a few months. Even when I got my Hardy Heron CD, i did'nt give much hope of running it in my laptop. In fact the CD pouch remained unopened for over a week, until I thought of trying it on my desktop.
First of all, I have an AMD desktop, with Nvidia board, so I knew, there are possibilities of driver issues, but I was proved wrong, and I got my Ubuntu going in 20 minutes. Nothing really noticeable from the previous versions. The same old brown theme, the drum sound everything the same. But again, I began to notice subtle but definite makeovers. First of all, my update manager "suggested" if I would want to use the restricted NVidia graphics drivers so that I can get the maximum out of my card. I gleefully accepted the request, and by the time I also noticed, my bluetooth dongle was infact working perfect, Ubuntu had installed required drivers for it. I paired up my PDA to it and downloaded some songs.
Now, I got excited, I went on to install all the updates, and began setting the OS up. The Compiz was already active with the Nvidia Driver in place, all the Aero effects and more was in the offering. Suddenly I remembered, during installation, it had even ripped the users and their documents & setting from the Windows XP, that was really a handy option, now I had all my documents ready in the Linux desktop.
In the meantime I also tried the same installation in my laptop, that too running on an AMD/Nvidia combo. No problems at all, everything went smooth, and while I was downloading updates I noticed, the internet is pretty fast, compared to windows. All the drivers also got into place automatically, bluetooth, ethernet, wifi, everything got detected, even my Webcam started rolling, once I installed cheese (I had issues with it on my Windows ).
Now, I went through the packages, somehow I got a feeling that in this release, the Ubuntu people have gone soft on the restricted drivers, it was easily locatable and installable, right from my graphics card driver to installing mp3 codecs,, all done in the background. When I opened youtube, I was asked whether I want to install flash (yeah, that is also restricted software), and went ahead to install flash 9.0. The same when I installed my favourite amarok, I could get mp3 songs songs rightaway. Another thing I noticed was, it was easier to locate installed software from the main menu itself, even if it is a gnome package or KDE package. And the number of packages and support has increased many folds. I could access my NTFS drives in read/write mode, get windows TTF fonts installed, burn DVDs etc. I could not login to my G.ho.st Virtual PC though, I am not sure why. The login kept on failing.
For the first time I felt Ubuntu has outshined Windows (Vista). The plenty availability of software packages, crash free environment, and more importantly very userfriendly and neat interface, now anyone can shift to Ubuntu from Windows with ease. It really is worth a try. I have not logged onto my windows for the past one week. And I send files from my desktop to laptop via bluetooth.
On the negatives, Canonical is not anymore sending you 50 CDs just as you request, so that you can have Ubuntu's hung above your car's rearview mirror. And every two days, I get an updated kernel worth 50 MB, so my internet is put to full use.

If you people want me to, I will blog more about this Hardy Heron release, but only if you would ask me to, and tell me what you want to know, so start sending me your opinions and comments.
-codevalley

Adode says "No 64-bit Flash"! GNU,GPL say "yes!"

Adode has been in the recieving end of criticisms lately, as they were not moving a step forward to support 64bit platforms for the flash player. Their recommendation is to install a 32-bit browser and use the 32-bit flash player, definitely not acceptable at any means. This has especially haunted the 64-bit Linux users, as most of the distros comes bundled with 64-bit browsers. Despite various online petitions and forum posts, Adobe is still not making a move towards the future.
But the crisis has almost come to and end with Open Source flash players for both Linux and Windows. The first step towards this was the GplFlash project started when there were no Flash player at all for Linux, and lost its importance once Macromedia released a 32-bit Flash player. But with the 64-bit issue propping up, the project was revived in 2005 and this was called GplFlash2, but it seems GplFlash2 has been stopped due to messy code, and it seems new design would be adopted. So there is no chance of it being released in the near future.
But, GNU has done their part to help the 64-bit users with Gnash project which is nothing but GNU Flash project. This is fully supported and is a full fledged player that supports the Mozilla based browsers, such as firefox. So now anyone can view their favourite Flash websites without the Adobe's proprietery Flash player. Gnash supports upto swf v7.0, which is a good news. but the bad news is that there is no Windows based binary for Gnash, though there is one for GplFlash1.
Here is the Gnash ftp download link.
Here is the Gnash homepage.
codevalley

Adobe Flex...redefining the web

Once Adobe bought Macromedia, it was looking out to make the most out of the deal. And as everyone knows Macromedia's flagship product is Flash, and almost 80% of today's browsers are Flash enabled. Now the drawback with Flash was, it was good for animations and intros, but it's loosely held at the back by a language called Actionscript. It was not a powerful tool to employ databases and other deep web applications.
Now Adobe knew this very well and they were straight onto business when they released the first version of Adobe Flex, in March 2004 which combines the power of Flash with a coventional programming model. It includes support for major technologies like cold fusion, Java etc. it is used to develop Rich Internet Applications.
Flex uses Actionscript 3.0 and MXML(Macromedia XML) for coding. It's compiled using JIT compiler to produce swf files on the fly. Flex can be considered as the direct competitor to AJAX, OpenLazlo etc.
Flex can add more eye-candy to your web application without losing the strong connectivity capabilities. It's already used by major players like SAP, Harley-Davidson etc to build there website.
But all good things comes with a price and so does Flex. The flex builder which is the IDE to build flex apps, is based on Eclipse. There is also two other priced modules are Flex Data services and Flex Charting. The latter is used to create highly customized charts and graphs and the former for providing addition services for managing data. The Flex SDK, though is free of cost and can be downloaded from the Adobe website. It provides the Command line compiler, debugger and the libraries.
Flex is here to stay, or atleast that is what Adode thinks, take a look at this Flex based website to judge for yourself. http://harley-davidson.com
Latest Flex release : Flex 2.0
Manufacturer : Adobe
You can download flex SDK here
codevalley