Ubuntu 8.04, code name Hardy Heron was released 2 days ago and since my internet machine has nothing better to do while I finish up the game, I went for a full system upgrade right away. Ubuntu does go from strength to strength with each release of the OS and the story with Hardy is no different. I have been using Gutsy for the past 6 months now and with the release of Hardy, I think XP is in serious danger of losing it’s number one spot in my list of preferred OSes. I just don’t boot into XP these days on my internet PC and my reservations on Vista are well known. Ubuntu at the moment is all you could want from an OS, though some nagging issues clearly remain. I however do use XP for all my programming stuff, unfortunately that’s where the bulk of the gaming market is. I however do plan to release the Doofus game for Linux once I release a Windows version.

I have praised Ubuntu before on this blog, but it is funny how Canonical has consistently managed to do a good job and stick to it’s motto of providing a simple and yet promising Linux distribution that even a common, or should I say a non tech savvy person could use. They have successfully managed to change the “Linux is for Geeks” attitude into something people can look and use in their everyday lives. Lets be fair, there are others that are fast catching up and can be considered equally impressive, yet Ubuntu has managed to stay ahead of the curve, just that little bit. It’s just those small things and annoyances that Ubuntu has managed to address successfully that has led to it’s popularity. Some people would argue that Ubuntu could not have stood so tall if it weren’t standing on shoulders of teams like Fedora SUSE and of course Debian, and without whose support and work Ubuntu could not have been possible. Yes, thats indeed true. However, Ubuntu has made a difference by actually using and in some cases integrating the great work done by all these teams and putting together a strong stable distro which could easily be considered as the best of the Linux distros out there.

Little things go a long way. Many people have heard about Linux, probably more than you might think. However, very few have actually used it. Why? It’s a headache to partition your disks and actually have a Linux partition. A average-joe user dreads things like that. Walk in Wubi! Now some might say having Linux on an NTFS partition is not something new. It could be done with several other distros long before Ubuntu was around, but how many of the other distros allow this to be done with a simple few clicks? I threw in the Ubuntu CD in the drive under XP and the first thing that popped up was the Wubi installer. I could install an entire Linux distro in about 4-5 clicks and a couple of restarts of the machine. I am a long time Linux user, but even I was surprised how trivial it was to install Linux with Wubi. Now I wouldn’t recommend using Wubi for the experienced user, however this option is rather cool for a person who has never seen or used Linux before..

However, not every aspect of the distro is flawless. There are some issues that still need work. It may not be all the distro’s fault either. Somethings are still a miss with the community as a whole. Technical issues like sound and WiFi are the ones that comes to mind. There are some issues there that need to be sorted out. Needless to say such issues are no doubt small and Ubuntu has address a lot of them with Hardy. The only real complaint I have is, I still can’t seem to get my front headphone jack to work, not with Gutsy and not with Hardy. But I guess this is some weired ALSA problem. Fortunately the NVIDIA driver is doing a fine job. I remember there was a time when h/w vendors didn’t seem too interested with Linux but I must say things are changing for the better. It wasn’t that long ago, when you couldn’t find a decent driver for your graphics card, now most leading distros come bundled with one.

As a parting note, a few suggestions on download and upgrade. I would recommend using bittorrent since  found it far faster than using the overloaded Ubuntu servers. The CD ISOs can be found on all mirrors. Try this link if you want DVD ISO torrents. Also remember if you are upgrading from a CD use the “alternate” version of the install ISO. It is best to use the Update manager to do an upgrade of the OS, it’s the safest method. If you have downloaded the alternate version of the ISO, you can update without having to actually burn a CD ROM. Linux can directly mount ISOs and you don’t need any special software to do that. Make a directory under /mnt called “isocdrom” and use the command

sudo mount -o loop -t iso9660 ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso /mnt/isocdrom/

to mount the ISO directly. Then use the command

sudo /mnt/isocdrom/cdromupgrade

to start the upgrade and follow the instructions. Remember to use the full path “/mnt/isocdrom/cdromupgrade” while starting the upgrade.

It’s no secret Microsoft has been pushing for it’s Office Open XML (OOXML) standard with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for quite sometime now, some might say against the already standardized Open Document Format (ODF) used by OpenOffice.org. It would seem MS is trying for a final push at it at the ballot resolution meeting this Februrary. I must admit this topic is not new and I had earlier refrained from commenting on this topic, since there are already too many blogs that have similar content and for a fact that I hate to be on any one side of the fence. The reason given by Microsoft over it’s rival seems to be that OOXML is more application friendly than ODF and more importantly far more compatible with legacy Microsoft Office formats. The argument put forth by Microsoft is, “There could be more than one XML standard and more than one document format in the market.” Yes there could be, but then again why does Microsoft want it’s format standardized? The fact is users (, like you and me) couldn’t care less what the internals of XML formats are made up of as long as they get the work done. They could just be happy with the OOXML format used by Office 2007 or, for the “poor” people (, like me) who can’t obviously afford MS Office, can be happy with OpenOffice.org. So why push for standardization now when MS Office suites already use and do a pretty good job with proprietary formats, and MS already has 90% of the market?

MS vs OSS battle is nothing new and this just adds more to what has already become a endless debate. However, I like to look at this from a neutral position, someone who is sitting on the fence and not on any one side. To me the reasons given by Microsoft for standardization of the OOXML seem downright selfish. The OOXML format is clearly tailored for Microsoft products and interoperability with MS Office packages. It doesn’t take into account any other vendors or Office suites. People have often said that the OOXML specification is more complex. For products other than the MS line, OOXML is more difficult to adhere to accurately. There is even some talk about the OOXML format bring encumbered with patents which might not allow it’s adoption in any OSS products without infringement of some sort. This to me looks like typical market muscling by Microsoft. It’s argument over ODF holds little ground, even though it’s Office products are far superior to OpenOffice.org or any of it’s other competitors.

It would seem that this post is more about bashing Microsoft, but it is not. Standardization is a complex process that requires serious thought. The very definition of the term means party and vendor neutral standards, which the OOXML format fails to address. It may be true that the format is superior (, I don’t really know or care for that matter) to ODF, but should it be made a standard? You can guess the answer to that one yourself!

In some interesting news, at least for cross-platform and Open-Source developers and particularly to Linux-KDE enthusiasts, Trolltech was acquired by Nokia. I have worked on 2 projects using Qt, but I generally find favour with wxWidgets since I find the moc-compiler thingie to be too much of a compile burden when it comes to complex UI, not to mention the really suspicious licenses for Qt. However that is besides the point. The question to ask is what does Nokia gain with having a framework like Qt under it’s belt? Very clearly Nokia is interested in Qtopia. I first remember reading about it 2 years ago when I was still working with Qt, and it looked pretty impressive at that time. It seems to be have all the bells and whistles for serious mobile development. However, the thing that bothers me is the future of the toolkit/framework in general and all the projects using Qt. Where does Nokia take the toolkit from here? Nokia isn’t a company that licenses toolkits or frameworks. So that is a question one is obviously tempted to ask. My strong suspicion is that fact that Nokia is feeling the pressure from platforms like Windows Mobile and iPhone, and if they want to have at least some semblance of a development environment over these obviously more developer friendly platforms, Qt was the obvious choice. But that still leaves me with one more question; Why aquire Trolltech when you could just use, well, the Qt framework?

In the above linked article they mention that they intend to continue working with the OSS community and intend to port Qt to their mobile devices. That is smart. It would obviously mean a myriad of already existing and upcoming Open-Source applications for Nokia devices at no cost. In any case, KDE itself is quite secure, no need to worry there, but the thing that strikes me as odd is the fact that most Nokia Linux devices (, and I myself didn’t know this until I read this), use Gnome and might well, continue to do so.