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A brand new Linux distribution is on the scene, and this one comes with a neat party trick. Hybryde Linux is an Ubuntu-based distro with a twist – it allows for users to change Desktop Environments without the need for logging out of the system with its unique Hy-menu application.

The French developers have just released Hybryde Evolution v1, based on Ubuntu 12.04, and coming with nine different desktop environments by default. These include KDE, GNOME 3, GNOME Classic, Unity, Elightenment 17, LXDE, XFCE, Openbox, and FVWM. The system smartly and fluidly transfers over open windows and applications to the new Desktop.

It’s great way to try out different Desktop Environments with a lot less commitment, and should be good for developers wanting to check how there applications work on different environments. In the current atmosphere of animosity towards standard Desktop Environments, it will hopefully be a step in the right direction for distributions to come.

You can download a 32-bit ISO from the Hybryde website.

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Build a Faster Web Server!
Apache-beating software to supercharge your server

Set up Raspberry Pi!
How to get started with the £25 computer

Backup & Restore
Protect your files the open source way

The Linux Skill Shortage
Shawn Powers talks with us about companies that crave Linux users

HTPC super-test
Essential small-screen software revealed

Also inside
- Ubuntu 12.04 Reviewed
- Build a blog with Django
- The Making of Slackware
- Create your own podcast

…and much more!

Linux User is now available for Android via Zinio!

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It has been a long time since GIMP 2.6 came out, the last version of the powerful image manipulation program, launching as a viable alternative to Adobe’s offering. With this pedigree, the latest version of GIMP has a lot to live up to, and the three years of development certainly seem to have helped its cause.

There have been a lot of major changes made to the way GIMP works, and the developers have been keen to promote the new single window mode especially. It’s been a feature requested by the community for a long time, being able to integrate the dockable toolbars into the main GIMP window. While the floating windows were created originally to emulate the look of Photoshop, they never really worked the same way, and there was plenty of times when we just lost the bars as they suddenly moved off screen during start up. The new, completely optional, mode smartly places the tool bars in the main window, allowing you to drag them around and modify completely as you see fit, with multiple columns and different tools. It works great once you get used to the little quirks.

In general a lot of the tools and interface have been overhauled, with the ability to group layers a godsend for those doing some heavy layer work. The text tool now allows you to type directly onto the canvas, and the selection and boundary limited tools have greatly improved with some smarter anti-aliasing. It does feel like a genuine upgrade, with even the smallest gripes or concerns about the previous version properly addressed.

Then there’s all the cool little extras we never even though about, like the ability to do some basic maths in size value boxes, which is great if you’ve ever got out a calculator when you need to do some image resizing but want to keep the same ratio. You can also now rotate paint brushes, which is probably quite useful if you’re having to “paint” an image from the clipboard.

So GIMP 2.8 definitely shows that the extended development time has been put to good use. Everything seems like an improvement, with some of the previous limitations or time consuming tasks either fixed or better enough that they’re not a problem. An essential upgrade.

Verdict

5/5

This new version of GIMP is vastly upgraded over its predecessor, with a mixture of community requested tool and UI overhauls complete with cool extra additions that all generally aid the workflow. If you’ve been on the fence in the past, the best free and open-source image editor just got a lot better.

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We’re happy to announce the arrival of Greatdigitalmags.com, our portal for digital versions of all the excellent Imagine Publishing magazines. Here you’ll find digital links to Linux User & Developer and all of our sister mags, including Android Magazine, How It Works, and the rest of our technology and gaming titles.

Here you can find links to get the magazines on Linux and Android via Zinio, the cross-platform newsstand service. Zinio is also available on Blackberry’s RIM OS, any OS running Adobe Air, and iOS. Speaking of iOS, if you’re so inclined you can also find links for the mags on Apple Newsstand.

So if you’re tired of papercuts, head over to Greatdigitalmags.com!

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It’s that time of the year again, and last night in London, Samsung showcased the new Galaxy S III. The latest entry in the very successful Galaxy S line of Android devices continues the tradition of including cutting edge technology along with a growing screen size.

The screen on the S III is similar to the Galaxy Nexus phone, a 720p Super AMOLED display, albeit much larger at 4.8”. This has obviously made the phone taller, and in the process made it a touch thicker and heavier at 8.6mm and 133 grams respectively. The phone will be running the latest version of Android, 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and have the usual array of Samsung specific extras such as their proprietary launcher and a new Siri like assistant called S Voice.

Power has not been confirmed, however it’s expected to contain the new Exynos 4 Quad processor, a quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex A9 chip flanked by a now standard 1 GB of RAM. This is comparable to the recently released HTC One X.

The phone will be out towards the end of the month in Europe, and a 4G LTE version will be out in the summer for North America.

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After a lengthy development process, GIMP 2.8 has finally been seen fit for release. After four years of GIMP 2.6, the 2.7 series of alphas and betas were upgraded to a 2.8 release candidate last month. The new version of GIMP comes with a lot of new features that are bound to please some of the programs more advanced and power users.

Firstly, the headline feature is a single window mode, bringing all the floating tool windows into one unified window. This is an optional addition though, and the original multi-window layout can still be used. There’s also a new way to group layers, useful for when you have a lot of different layers in one working image. Otherwise, you can now rotate brushes, add and edit text much easier, and rules for saving and exporting are better represented in the menu structure.

You can get the source code for GIMP 2.8 from the GIMP FTP server, with binaries on their way shortly.

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Formerly an Arch remix designed for users looking for a distribution offering the power and flexibility of Arch but with a desktop environment installed by default, Chakra has come on in leaps and bounds since the project’s founders made the decision to fork away from its upstream.

The second release of the Archimedes family, Chakra Linux 2012.04 boasts some significant improvements over its predecessors – but, unfortunately, not everything about the new release is quite so positive.

Available in Live CD and Live DVD formats, with the former offering only a minimal KDE desktop with little in the way of bundled software, Chakra is an attractive distribution with cutting-edge packages. Out of the box, the Live CD includes KDE 4.8.2 with Chakra’s attractive theme applied, the 3.2.8 Linux kernel, Qt 4.8.1 and QtWebkit 2.2.1.

Installation of Chakra can be a problem for newcomers: unlike rival distributions, the installer doesn’t handle automatic partitioning of drives. Instead, it expects the user to manually create partitions and assign mount points – not a problem for anyone used to Linux, but a serious omission for a distribution which prides itself on its ‘keep it simple, stupid’ philosophy.

The biggest surprise of this release, however, is the switch from OpenOffice.org fork LibreOffice to the Calligra Office Suite. Designed as a modern replacement for KOffice, Calligra is a truly impressive package which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, project manager, illustration tools, flow charting package and even a mind-mapping utility.

While not exclusive to Chakra, it is the first distribution to include the software by default – no real surprise, given that the stable release came out just days before Chakra 2012.04 went live itself.

Although the cutting-edge software and attractive GUI fit in nicely with Chakra’s stated philosophy of keeping it simple for newcomers to Linux, the second major change with this latest release doesn’t: the abandoning of graphical package management.

Previous releases had used the appset-qt package to provide a more intuitive interface over the pacman package manager, which can be somewhat hostile to newcomers. Sadly, Chakra 2012.04 sees this removed – although, hopefully temporarily.

The team explains in the release notes that none of the available pacman frontends, including appset-qt, were able to handle more complex updates from the Chakra repositories – resulting in users being bombarded with warnings. While the situation is hopefully temporary, the Chakra team have yet to offer a timescale for adding graphical package management back in to the distribution.

That rather troublesome regression aside, Chakra remains a great choice for anyone thinking about making the move from a more mainstream distribution. The KDE Plasma interface is impressively smooth, while the bundled software makes sure you can probably live without using the package manager – for a while, at least.

Speaking of bundled software, web developers will be interested to hear that Chakra comes with two browsers: while rekonq is, unsurprisingly given the distribution’s KDE focus, the default, there’s also QupZilla for those who prefer a more Mozilla-themed experience. Naturally, it’s also possible to install Chromium, Firefox and other alternatives from the Chakra repositories.

These packages, and a selection of others, can be installed quickly and easily using a concept Chakra calls ‘bundles.’ Taking the place of a traditional package, the software is compressed into a customised ‘Chakra Bundle’ and made available via the distro’s Bundle Manager. One click installs the software, and with packages including Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin and Inkscape available as bundles, suddenly the loss of graphical package management doesn’t sting as much.

Verdict: 4/5

The loss of graphical package management and a troublesome installation process aside, this latest release of Chakra is impressive. The user interface is clean and crisp, while the Bundle Manager makes installation of commonly required software quicker than on any other distribution we’ve seen. Coupled with the excellent Calligra suite, this is a distribution to keep an eye on.

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Mozilla are moving into shiny new offices in London town, and to celebrate this move the kind folks behind Firefox are going to hold a series of community focused events this month. There’ll be general fun times interspersed with some dev conferences to appeal to the broad range of Firefox users. Here’s the list:

GeekQuiz fueled by Mountain Dew Mozilla

10th May 2012

Join Mozilla for its first ever Geek Quiz where food, drinks and last but not least, the best geeky prizes you can find in town will be provided.

Mozilla MDN Hack Day in London

12th May 2012

Join Mozilla’s Developer Engagement team for a day of full-stack Web hackery and good times with HTML5 and friends, Apps & Games, Firefox Addons and Open Web documentation. The Mozilla developer team will be on hand to talk about:
· HTML5 Game development
· HTML5 Apps & Mozilla Marketplace
· Firefox Addons & Developer Tools
· How to contribute to Open Web Developer Documentation
· Identity & Personas
The developer team attending will include: Rob Hawkes (@robhawkes), Christian Heilmann (@codepo8), Desigan Chinniah (@cyberdees), Amie Tyrell, Priya Patel and many more folks from Mozilla London.

Monday Mobile Madness fueled by Mozilla

14th May 2012

Join Mozilla for a casual night of drinks, music and banter together with the mobile communities of InMobi, Swedish Beers, BlueVia, Ribot, Londroid, Droidcon, Over The Air and more.

GeekBowling fueled by Mozilla

16th May 2012

Join Mozilla for an evening full of fun competition, and delicious food and drinks. Geeky dancing is optional.

Bring your strike skills on and see you at London Palace Superbowl in Elephant & Castle.

Sounds like an action packed week with the Mozilla guys then, although we’re not sure whether to be mildly offended and/or worried about the over use of the term “Geek” to describe all their events. Entry is free though, so if you’re in the area, check them out!

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Yesterday I went to the UK Parliament TV site to tune into a speech by an MP, and failed because “Silverlight does not appear to be correctly installed on this computer.” At the bottom of a sequence of instructions, it said, “Linux users: please see the help pages for installer”, and I was led, via another page, to an installation page for Novell Moonlight.

Moonlight is a partial re-implementation of Silverlight which is intended by Microsoft to replace Flash as the ‘de facto standard’ for online advertising and video. Moonlight was developed under licence from Microsoft by a group of Mono developers who worked for Novell, but is not implemented on Firefox and is excluded by some Linux distros.

Fedora’s engineering manager, Tom ‘spot’ Callaway, noted that Microsoft’s Covenant to End Users of Moonlight is “specifically worded to apply only to end-users, and makes the following noteworthy distinction: ‘an entity or individual cannot qualify both as an End User and a Distributor for use of the same copy of a Moonlight Implementation.’ It grants no patent rights to Distributors… once you distribute, you stop being considered an ‘End User’ by Microsoft, and are no longer protected by this ‘covenant’ (unless you’re Novell or Microsoft).”

The covenant also reserves the right for Microsoft to discontinue the agreement at any time, and forbids use of “GPLv3 or a similar licence”. Callaway gives a clear enunciation of the problem. “If Microsoft was serious about encouraging adoption of the Silverlight/Moonlight technology in FOSS,” he wrote, “they would do so with an unrestricted patent grant for all end-users and distributors for code under any FOSS licence.”

Moonlight gives credibility to Microsoft’s claim that Silverlight is multi-platform, accessible to free software developers and a “part of the open web.” But when Miguel de Icaza indicated that he wanted Microsoft to contribute technology to ECMA he drew the evasive response from Bob Muglia of Microsoft that the firm was “trying to balance standards with its ability to rapidly innovate the Silverlight platform” – or, as it is expressed elsewhere, to strike “a balance between standards and the real world,” which in effect, is a declaration that Silverlight will not conform to open standards.

Few of the options for watching video on the web are truly open or free, and those that are free are not pushed by the major players.

Conversely, the developers of Firefox, take the position that they can’t and won’t support the H.264 format, because, although H.264 has some technical advantages, and has been ‘recognised’ as an ‘industry standard’ format for implementations of HTML5, the codec is patent and royalty encumbered, which inhibits its use with free and open source software. H.264 is not an open standard but an industry-led compromise developed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). In the view of proponents of the open web, a patent-encumbered codec works against the interests of startups, web designers, developers and users, and is a barrier to entry for free and open source software developers. The last of the US patents on H.264 does not expire until 2028.

Formats which are not knowingly patent encumbered and are released under open source licences include Ogg Theora and Dirac.

Most Linux users have made an unhappy compromise with Flash, which is ubiquitous but proprietary, and has performance issues on Linux. Meanwhile, Microsoft is using its desktop and browser monopolies to push for its own proprietary methodologies and codecs through Silverlight. Neither Apple nor Microsoft has any great interest in pushing for an unencumbered format, so we have reached an impasse. Except that Google has dropped support for H.264 in Google Chrome and is trying to focus support on its own WebM format, which is the one format supported by a major commercial enterprise that is patent and royalty free.

By definition, a standard assumes a level of commonality that enables multiple implementations which are totally conversant with one another. The basic requirement of a standard is that it preserves the integrity and neutrality of the data. In the view of Tim Berners-Lee: “The lesson from the proliferation of new applications and services on top of the web infrastructure is that innovation will happen provided it has a platform of open technical standards, a flexible, scalable architecture, and access to these standards on royalty-free ($0 fee patent licences) terms.”

I never did hear that speech in Parliament. The irony of this story, of course, is that the UK Government has said it is committed to open standards.

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The Raspberry Pi has become an elusive piece of kit, with only a few thousand out in the wild and 300,000 pre-orders still to ship. And while there has been little communication with those that have pre-ordered, this will soon change as element14 has announced that by the end of next week, all 110,000 of their customers will be told when they should receive their Raspberry Pi. However, they should all receive them no later than the end of June.

And that’s not all, folks still wanting to get their hands on one of the coveted RasPis may be contacted over the next five days to place a pre-order with element14, with people who have registered an interest in the system on the e14 website given priority. 70,000 units will be up for pre-order, and they will apparently ship sometime in July or August.

If you can’t wait then there are a few people on eBay who would be happy to sell you one…just be prepared to pay the equivalent of mid-range PC.

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Over the last 18 months Ubuntu, the Linux world’s most widely recognised distribution, has undergone the most intense period of development of its eight-year existence. This period of transition hasn’t been easy for Canonical, which has taken on the monumental task of reinventing Ubuntu’s GUI in the face of vocal opposition from a sizeable portion of its user base.

When we recently interviewed Canonical CEO, Jane Silber, she spoke quite candidly about the run up to Unity, not to mention the perception of arrogance to their approach. Encapsulated within just a few sentences she also managed to touch on what some consider being the company’s biggest triumph, and others its most fundamental flaw.

On the plus side, Unity proves that open source software development and UI design don’t have to be disparate or incompatible disciplines. “If you go back three years nobody was talking about design, nobody was doing user research,” said Silber. “It is actually something we have had great influence on, by calling attention to it and putting our efforts there.”

There’s no doubt that design, ergonomics and usability are pillars of modern software design and key areas in which open source has lacked any real focus in the past. As Unity’s many critics might argue, however, focus is exactly what Unity lacks. And this is all but confirmed in Jane Silber’s next sentence:

“I think, whether you like Unity or not, its existence has helped raise the bar across a number of projects.”

Silber is, of course, referring to the recently announced Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu for Android projects, probably not to mention an unannounced tablet offering among other plans. This is where the real focus of Unity lies, not the product we’re evaluating today.

For these particular projects Unity makes perfect sense and we’re excited about what Unity can offer in touch-screen, TV and small form factor scenarios – it opens up a whole new world of possibilities, but this long-term promise comes at the cost of their flagship desktop offering.

Having already weighed up the core features of Ubuntu 12.04 from both positive and negative perspectives, we’ll save you from the already heavily publicised minutiae. Speaking in broad strokes Unity does little to improve usability; conversely, it’s actually quite detrimental in some areas. While it is no doubt a marvellous test bed, most desktop users aren’t reaping any kind of reward for this. Ubuntu has lost its focus.

Unity is almost as relevant to Ubuntu 12.04 as ASIMO is to Honda’s latest hatchback. It’s a technical exploration of a future problem – a concept destined for products still some years away from mainstream availability.

When you boil Unity down to its most basic premise, one core complaint that existed in 11.04 still exists today and is summarised quite nicely in a passage from Linux User’s Ubuntu 11.10 review:

“There’s a fundamental flaw no measure of tweaking and iteration can truly remedy: it’s too difficult and time consuming to find what you’re looking for.”

Ultimately Ubuntu12.04 is not a pleasant experience for home office or professional users requiring either more mouse clicks or time away from the mouse typing searches.

It puts us in mind of Sir Clive Sinclair’s C5 personal electric vehicle. It was a product arguably 30 years ahead of its time, but Sinclair’s quintessentially British electric three-wheeler, with its canopy permanently open to the elements, simply wasn’t compatible with the quintessentially British weather. Once off the production line no amount of iteration could have saved it – it was never going to work.

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Related Ubuntu articles

Ubuntu 12.04 – Canonical CEO Jane Silber talks Unity, community and ‘continuous computing’

5 reasons to be excited about Ubuntu 12.04

5 problems with Ubuntu 12.04

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It’s a big day in the world of Linux, as Canonical finally unleashes Ubuntu 12.04, the Precise Pangolin. As a Long Term Service (LTS) version, it’s an important release for the distro that is bound to be desirable for business and enterprise users. It’s also the first LTS since Canonical made the divisive switch to the Unity Desktop Environment.

The development of the new version of Ubuntu has centered on stability, but there have still been some updates, changes, and additions. Most noticeably at first are updates to the way Unity works, such as optimising the Dash for better keyboard navigation. The search functionality features more customization options, allowing the addition sources, and removal of native sources such as the software repository.

Of course the biggest addition is the HUD, Canonical’s attempt at further shaping the future of the graphical interface. Allowing for context sensitive and interpretive searches of application menus, you merely type what you wish to do, similar to searching for apps in the Dash or GNOME 3. Much like Unity itself, it’s another controversial move by Canonical, and it remains to be seen how well it will perform.

The release doesn’t just affect Ubuntu and its users either – as the base for many popular distributions, such as Linux Mint, Ultimate Edition, and Comice OS, major updates will shortly be arriving for these. Not to mention the immediate availability of the other Ubuntu flavours such as Kubuntu, Lubuntu, etc.

You can grab Ubuntu 12.04 from the Ubuntu release page now, although if you’re still unsure you can check out our definitive feature on Ubuntu 12.04 in the current issue of Linux User & Developer 112 on sale now.

Related Ubuntu articles

Ubuntu 12.04 – Jane Silber talks Unity, community and ‘continuous computing’

5 awesome features in Ubuntu 12.04

Five problems with Ubuntu 12.04 – part 1

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