Peng’s links for Sunday, 31 January

• Lior Kaplan: Hamakor, the Israeli Free Software Society, calls for the annulment of Software Patents. People have been calling for the end of software patents since it’s getting (almost) to the point where it’s getting tough to determine whether a new patent contains prior art due to so many patents being granted. I found this post on Planet Debian and I’m glad to see the Israeli Free Software Society taking the lead on this.
• MJ Ray: Get the Survey Monkey Off Your Back. I’ve long thought using surveymonkey was a pain in the rear because they (seem to) ask for so much from people who are just voting on a survey. It turns out that surveymonkey may be not just a pain in the rear but also violating UK accessibility and privacy laws.
• Lasse Havelund: OpenOffice.org is “a piece of crap” – or is it? OOo has gotten some pretty bad press lately so Lasse did a personal recreation of a study that had a group of teenagers try their hands at word processing and presentation management tasks using both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007, all in the name of seeing how OOo really compared. He tends to use LaTeX for his writing and hasn’t used either OOo or Office 2007 much “over the last few years.” I won’t spoil his results so you need to read his post. You may be glad you took the time to read it and you can follow his links to get more background info on the test.
• Siegfried Gevatter: GNOME Activity Journal, and installing it on Ubuntu. I’ve been hearing about this app (formerly known as GNOME Zeitgeist) and am curious about it. Siegfried some nice info on why you’d want to use it as well as some easy steps for getting it installed.
• Stephan Hermann: Is it just me, or… People have been kvetching about non-free software being included in distros like Ubuntu ever since it first came out. Stephan writes such a good post on the matter that I doubt I could have said it better myself.
• DesktopLinux.com: Second Lucid Linux alpha said to offer 15-second start-ups. Eric Brown takes a good look at the latest early test release of Ubuntu 10.04, listing both the good and bad to be seen in this bleeding edge release, including some kvetching about support for some proprietary software being included (see previous link).
• Google Chrome Blog: Over 1,500 new features for Google Chrome. Google Chrome dev Nick Baum writes about some of the new features in Chrome and includes a video walk-through for installing an extension (not one that I personally use but you may find it helpful). The post is mostly about using Chrome on a Windows-based box but some of the info is also good for Mac and GNU/Linux users, as well as users of Chromium. There’s also a great tips post on the Chrome blog about managing tabs that you may find helpful.
• Launchpad New: ACTION: Back up old sources from PPAs. It turns out that Personal Package Archives on Launchpad are a little too popular. You may need to back up some of the packages you’ve gotten from PPAs. Jonathan Lange has some info every user of software from a PPA should have.
• Bastian Venthur: How to find packages installed/updated yesterday? If you’re like me you take regular updates to the software you run and every now and then you find a problem has cropped up after updating. The problem is that sometimes you don’t recall what got updated to know where to start tracking down your issue. Bastian asked he readers for ways to find out which packages got updated or installed and he got some really good responses. This is one post you’ll want to add to your permanent reference/resource list.
• Nick Mamatas: Ursula K. LeGuin to Google: Hands off my books! Not every author is satisfied with the proposed solution to the problem of Google’s plan to digitize books to make available online.
• Carlos Garnacho: Multi-touch support in Linux/Xorg/GTK+. Apple made other OS’s jealous with their ability to use two fingers to select and modify content on their smartphones and DMPs (Digital Media Players). Now GNU/Linux users can use it, if they can resolve the dependencies, that is.
• Steve Langasek: Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS released. The Ubuntu devs have released the fourth maintenance update to Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” LTS (Long Term Support). Since Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” will also be an LTS release this will be the last maintenance release for 8.04 LTS but there are about 70 updates in this update so if you run Ubuntu 8.04 you’ll want to take this update.
• Mike Hommey: Feeling alone. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an experiment to see how much info your browser lets web servers know about you. I’m kind of worried about how much information they report about me.
• NewsAskew: Green Hornet #1 FREE! May 10, 2010… All right all you lovers of comics and Jay & Silent Bob. Kevin Smith has been lending his talents to comic books, including being the writer for the very first of the new series of Green Hornet comic books. Thanks to Free Comic Book Day you have a chance to pick it up without having to shell out any cash for it. And without risking an arrest for shoplifting!
• Nigel Tao: The Road to One Point Zerodom. Nigel is the author of the SuperSwitcher app, and he’s glad to announce that he has a goal of getting Superswitcher 1.0 out in time for the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I. Can’t. Wait.

I have more things to post but I want to give them their own posts so if you’ll allow a  little commercial promotion, I found a great product that you may join me in wanting to buy.

• QMx Insider: Put a Firefly in Your Pocket for $9.95! Fans of the Joss Whedon show Firefly and it’s follow-up movie Serenity will be glad to know that you can finally own your own Firefly-class ship without having to spend an arm and a leg. Shiny!

Have a most excellent start of February 2010!

Looking toward 9.04, and bididng adieu to 7.10

Maximum PC has a nice write up on the upcoming release of Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope”. As I’ve said before, 9.04 is looking really nice with the info I’ve seen so far, and this article makes the case even better that the next release could be one sweet little collection of code. As soon as I can see a notice that Ubuntu 9.04 has reached beta status I’ll make sure it gets posted for all to try, and I’ll snag it and give it a nice little test so I can give you guys an early look through my peepers. Thanks to Nanci, who spotted the article on Google News and made sure I saw it. (You could have blogged it yourself, sis. I wouldn’t have minded. )

For those of you who are running Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, the Ubuntu devs have announced that they will stop providing “security and critical fixes” for it on Saturday, 18 April. This date is eighteen months after Gutsy was released, as is the standard practice for non Long Term Support (LTS) releases. The current LTS version is 8.04 “Hardy Heron”, which will be supported for three years (for desktop systems, five years for servers) with security updates and other packages.

For more info on the end of life announcement for Ubuntu 7.10 you can ready the official notice on the ubuntu-announce maillist archive.

For the record, the version is 9.04, not 9.0; it’s based on the year it’s released (2009) and the month it’s released (April, which equals 04), which is always a two digit number. The version number does not shorten to zaro (“0″), just as the October releases nevershorten to simply “.1″. It may seem like a nitpicky thing to fuss about, but it’s the difference between being accurate and, well, not.