MikeTT's blog

Ubuntu Dapper Drake now officially postponed

Posted Fri, 2006-03-17 12:00 by MikeTT

The Ubuntu developer now officially decided to postpone the upcoming Dapper Drake release to 1st July 2006. That is 6 weeks later than planned. Therefore the version number will be changed to 6.06. In the future the decimal point will most probably be changed to a hyphen, because most of the developer find the decimal point irritating.

So let's wait for Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6-06 on 1st July 2006 :)

Gnome 2.14 has just been released

Posted Thu, 2006-03-16 11:24 by MikeTT

Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 2.14, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform Free desktop environment.

Released on schedule, to the day, it is the culmination of six months effort by GNOME contributors around the world: hackers, documentors, usability and accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, sysadmins, companies, artists, users and testers. Due to their hard work, it is another great release to be proud of - thanks very much to every contributor!

You'll find plenty of information about GNOME 2.14 in the extensive release notes, linked from the 2.14 start page.

All about GNOME 2.14: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/

Some of the key new features:

1. The creation of an admin suite, including a lock down editor, Pessulus, and a user profile editor, Sabayon

2. A new search bar, called Deskbar, which can search through local files, programs and contacts as well as on the web

Ubuntu 6.04 will be postponed

Posted Mon, 2006-03-13 16:40 by MikeTT

The decision has not yet been made but it seems that the release date will be postponed by 6 weeks. Originally Ubuntu 6.04 should be released on 20th April, but Shuttleworth wants to have more time for testing and improvements. The reason therefore is, that Dapper Drake will have extended support and it will be positioned as a enterprise distribution. That means it needs to be suitable for enterprise environments as well.

It is not yet sure if it will keep the name Ubuntu 6.04 as it will be released in June. Maybe we're talking about Ubuntu 6.06 :)

Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake) Flight-CD 5 available

Posted Mon, 2006-03-13 16:31 by MikeTT

Flight-CD 5 has just been released as another preview of Dapper Drake. It features an improved installer for the Live-CD and a new standard theme called "Ubuntulooks". Some additional ATI graphic cards like the X850 are supported now.

Download here: http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/dapper/flight-5/

Ubuntu 5.10 installer vulnerability

Posted Mon, 2006-03-13 16:25 by MikeTT

A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases:
Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)

The following packages are affected:
base-config
passwd

The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to
version 2.67ubuntu20 (base-config) and 1:4.0.3-37ubuntu8 (passwd). In
general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the
necessary changes.

Details follow:
Karl Øie discovered that the Ubuntu 5.10 installer failed to clean
passwords in the installer log files. Since these files were
world-readable, any local user could see the password of the first
user account, which has full sudo privileges by default.

The updated packages remove the passwords and additionally make the
log files readable only by root.

This does not affect the Ubuntu 4.10, 5.04, or the upcoming 6.04
installer. However, if you upgraded from Ubuntu 5.10 to the current
development version of Ubuntu 6.04 ('Dapper Drake'), please ensure

Best search engine for Ubuntu

Posted Sat, 2005-12-10 11:02 by MikeTT

Hi Ubuntu fans!

I'm in need of a good search engine. I mean Google does alright, but isn't there a specific search engine out there especially for Linux or Open Source?

As I'm using Ubuntu as my main operating system I sometimes just want to have search results in this area. Even better would be a search engine only for Ubuntu, of course :)

So leave me a comment if you know something about it...

OpenOpenOffice or how to open OpenDocument in MS Office

Posted Thu, 2005-10-20 12:01 by MikeTT

Microsoft doesn't support the free office fileformat OpenDocument in its Office suites. They don't even want to implement it in the future. The Australian group "Open Source Victoria" (a cooperation of more than 100 companies) wants to change that. They want to develop a plugin to teach Microsoft Office handling with OpenDocument.

The plugin is called "OpenOpenOffice" (short: O3) and is based on the MS-Office filters of OpenOffice.org. It is not yet clear when the plugin will be finished and under what conditions (licence etc.).

Details about the project can be found at http://www.phase-n.com/openopenoffice.

Their motto: "OpenOpenOffice opens OpenDocument documents in Office". If Microsoft will not add OpenDocument to Office, the