Intrepid was the first release to include the Ubuntu Live USB creator. Guest sessions were also introduced to provide a temporary user account with restricted privileges with the idea that one could lend a computer to a friend or colleague for simple tasks like a quick email check. Encrypted private directories with the use of the ecryptfs package provided users with an alternative to the drawbacks inherit to the optional full-partition encryption using LVM and LUKS.

Intrepid did all of this and more using Gnome 2.24 and the Linux 2.6.27 kernel. As much as Intrepid forged ahead, it has finally reached the end of its 18 month life cycle. Users will be encouraged to upgrade their Intrepid installations to at least 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope to continue receiving security updates and critical bug fixes.

I am currently in the process of downloading all of the CD isos through the use of the torrents. Those will be seeded out over the next few months, probably until the first point release, 10.04.1, which we should see in July. I also have 5-packs of Ubuntu Desktop, Server, and Kubuntu Desktop CDs on order through Canonical that I hope to have in a week or so.

You can visit the “How to get Ubuntu” section of Ubuntu’s website which lists all of the available ways to get a copy of your own. The fastest way of course is to download a copy which can be burned to a CD or made into a bootable USB drive. You can also order your own CDs like I have. If all else fails, you can request a CD to be sent to you which can take up to six weeks to arrive.

Another option that is not so well known is to get in contact with one of Ubuntu’s many LoCo teams scattered around the globe and request a CD from them. They usually get a number of CDs to help spread the news about Ubuntu. The United States has plenty of state/region based teams to cover almost every state. Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, Australia (sorry, no Antarctica, yet) all have country based teams. The Loco Team List provides all of the contact information for each team and whether or not they provide any local support.

Version 2.02.54-1ubuntu4:

* Some idiot thought it’d be a good idea if device mapper didn’t respond
to “add” events, like those during boot. Take their change out back
and shoot it in the head. LP: #561390.

Tell it like it is, Scott.

Some people have experienced a problem with Thunderbird failing to start after upgrading to 3.0.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu2 (see [1]). An updated version which fixes this bug has been uploaded already and the affected binaries removed from the archive. If you have already updated to the affected version and you are experiencing this problem, then you will need to recover manually in order to use Thunderbird again.

The issue is that under certain conditions, the thunderbird wrapper script replaces your profile with a recursive symlink. If you are running the affected version and thunderbird no longer starts, please open a terminal and run “ls -ld ~/.*thunderbird*”. If you see output similar to the following, then you are affected by this bug and will need to proceed with the instructions following.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 chr1s chr1s   24 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.mozilla-thunderbird -> /home/chr1s/.thunderbird
lrwxrwxrwx 1 chr1s chr1s   24 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.thunderbird -> /home/chr1s/.thunderbird
drwx—— 3 chr1s chr1s 4096 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.thunderbird.upstream

To recover from this, you need to:
1) Delete the recursive symlink (~/.thunderbird) by running “rm ~/.thunderbird”.
***Only do this if you see the output above, else you could be deleting your profile. If you are unsure, then rename the file instead***
2) Move ~/.thunderbird.upstream to ~/.thunderbird by running “mv ~/.thunderbird.upstream ~/.thunderbird”

Once you have done this, you will be able to open Thunderbird again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards
Chris

[1] – https://launchpad.net/bugs/563893

Video courtesy of Paolo Sammicheli & Leo Iannacone

• A revamp of the Ubuntu Netbook Edition user interface.
• Focusing on hybrid could computing with Ubuntu Server.
• Integrating the social networks within the Ubuntu Desktop and making it easier to sync and shared our contact lists.

Ubuntu has made a habit of using the interim releases between LTS editions as testbeds for branching out in new directions. With the first release of Gnome 3.0 due out this year, Maverick Meerkat looks to be no exception.

A “paper cuts” bug, originally filed in June 2009, explained the choice of icon to represent the button implied that it was for text editing or word processing. As the discussion went on, it was decided that the text-based display was for more advanced users and therefore the choice to enable it be made into an “advanced option”.

The current verison of Gnome being packaged with Lucid does away with this toggle button so that the location bar is always in button mode. There is however a keyboard shortcut, CTRL+L, to toggle it to text-based temporarily. Using / to start typing a location will also initiate the toggle.

If you want the location bar to be text-based all of the time, you can use gconf-editor to enable it. The key to change is:

/apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry

… which will need to be check-marked. You can do the same with gconftool-2 at a command line.

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry --type=bool true

To turn it back off, set it to false.

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/always_use_location_entry --type=bool false

Both the keyboard shortcuts and gconf settings work with Nautilus in both Karmic using Gnome 2.28.1 and Lucid Beta-1 using Gnome 2.29.92. I’m unsure if they work pre-Karmic.

Someguy77: how do I prevent ubuntu from auto placing a icon to my devices on my dekstop? [sic]

Ubuntu, or more correctly Nautilus, Gnome’s file manager, places an icon onto the desktop to show when certain devices, or volumes, are mounted to the system. You can turn this off by running gconf-editor (ALT+F2 to open the run dialog box, type gconf-editor and click Run) and disabling the volumes_visible setting under /apps/nautilus/desktop.

You can also disable it by issuing the following command in a terminal window:

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/desktop/volumes_visible --type=boolean false

ARCHAN> How do i make history not stored ? i dont want places > recent doc to store  my recent files

Gnome doesn’t offer an option to turn off the tracking of recently open documents, but you can employ a simple hack to prevent it from happening. Your Places > Recent Documents menu listing pulls data from ~/.recently-used.xbel which stores your recent document’s meta data. It’ll be recreated if you just delete it. Rather, remove it and make a directory with that same name.

rm ~/.recently-used.xbel && mkdir ~/.recently-used.xbel

You can also use this same trick to eliminate your bash history at the command line. Every command you issue at the command line is saved to ~/.bash_history after you close or exit a bash session. Just replace the file with a directory of the same name.

rm ~/.bash_history && mkdir ~/.bash_history

If you ever need or want to use those features again, just remove the directories. The files will be recreated on their own as needed.

rm -r ~/.recently-used.xbel
rm -r ~/.bash_history

Above, I showed how to do it with command lines but you can do the same through a nautilus window (file browser). At your home directory, use CTRL-H to toggle between hiding and showing hidden files (the ones that start with a period) so that you can find the files and delete/create as necessary.