Google recently released a developer preview of Chrome, but I’ve found that the Chromium daily builds for Ubuntu are more up to date. Unfortunately, reading the instructions on their site about how to add the repositories can be rather confusing. I’ll show you here how to install Chromium in just three commands.  Choose your release below and just copy and paste these three commands into your terminal. This will install the correct repositories, download the repository keys and install Chromium.

9.04 – Jaunty Jackalope

sudo wget http://starryhope.com/apt/chromium_jaunty.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chromium_jaunty.list
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

8.10 – Intrepid Ibex

sudo wget http://starryhope.com/apt/chromium_intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chromium_intrepid.list
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

8.04 – Hardy Heron

sudo wget http://starryhope.com/apt/chromium_hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/chromium_hardy.list
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0xfbef0d696de1c72ba5a835fe5a9bf3bb4e5e17b5
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

You should now see an entry for “Chromium Web Browser” in your Applications -> Internet menu.  Launch Chromium and enjoy!

Please remember that Chromium is still very much a work in progress. Many things do not work (plugins like Flash, being the most obvious example), but you can use it for most sites without problems. I’ve found Chromium to be much faster than Firefox and look forward to a final release. So, until then, enjoy playing around with the daily developer builds, and if you find any bugs, remember to file them with the developers!

I’ve been looking for ways to move some of my online activities out of the browser and into their own processes. One service I often use is Last.fm. Using the standalone client works more reliably and keeps Last.fm from bogging down Firefox. Thankfully, it’s easy to use Last.fm from its own Linux client, and there’s even a special Debian/Ubuntu repository that makes installation really simple.

To add this repository and install the Last.fm client, open a terminal window and run the following commands (you can copy and paste them).

sudo wget http://starryhope.com/apt/lastfm.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/lastfm.list
wget -q http://apt.last.fm/last.fm.repo.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install lastfm

For those who are interested, the first line adds the Last.fm repository to your repository list (more on repositories here). The second line will add the necessary repository keys to your system. Finally, the third line will refresh apt and install the Last.fm client.

When everything has finished installing, you should see the Last.fm client in your Applications -> Sound & Video menu.

Start the program, enter your Last.fm credentials, and enjoy!

For more information, visit http://apt.last.fm/

A quick look at Amazon would suggests that Windows XP is the most popular OS for netbooks. In fact, every one of the top 25 netbooks on Amazon comes with Windows XP! This is not because there are no Linux netbooks available. In fact, there are lots of Linux netbooks available at Amazon.

So why is Linux losing out? Is it just business as usual, where Microsoft is playing dirty in an attempt to save their crumbling empire? Do people just not know what Linux is and that it’s available? Is the Linux community just not big enough to make an impact (or are they just not putting their money were their mouths are)? Personally, I think it’s a combination of all of these things. What do you think?

After doing some quick googling, I realized that this motherboard series is actually quite popular and that people are using them for all sorts of tasks. Some make them into entertainment centers, low-powered servers, car computers and even hackintoshes. This peeked my interest and I decided to try it out for myself, after all, using some of my old computer parts (HD and DVD drive), I could make this new desktop for less than $200, what did I have to loose?

So, are these Intel motherboards with their low-power Atom processors really all that people claim? Could I run Ubuntu (my main goal), Windows 7 and OS X all on this dirt cheap hardware?  Here’s what I found out.

My Hardware

• Intel Desktop Board D945GCLF2D with integrated Intel Atom processor
• Compucase Mini ITX case 8K01BS-SA12U
• 2GB of Kingston DDR2 RAM
• Old 400 GB Seagate SATA hard drive
• Old IDE DVD drive

Build your own

• Intel Desktop Motherboard with Atom Processor, about $90 – Intel D945GCLF2
• Mini ITX Case, about $60 – Mini ITX Cases
• 2GB of RAM, about $25 – Kingston ValueRam 2GB
• Hard Drive, about $50 – Western Digital Caviar Blue 250 GB Hard Drive or pick out a bigger one
• Optical Drive, about $25 – Optical Drives

This motherboard is really small, and you can buy some incredibly small cases to put it in. The smaller cases don’t have much room for add-ons (but really, how often do we really fill our cases with addons?). It seems that just about everything can be added by USB these days. In fact, I decided not even to install an internal DVD drive, because I don’t need a DVD drive for everyday use.

I found the case to be very nice and I have no complaints. Putting everything together was a snap and both the case and motherboard came with adequate instructions. The real question here is about performance with different operating systems.

Ubuntu 9.04

Since I do most of my daily work and programming in Ubuntu, this was the most important OS for me. I was going to try installing from a USB flash drive, which everyone claims is easy, but found it easier to just hook up my old IDE DVD drive temporarily and use my trusty Ubuntu Jaunty install CD. Everything went like normal, the Ubuntu install is incredibly simple these days. I had Jaunty up and running in less than 20 minutes.

I’m happy to report that all of the hardware worked perfectly with absolutely no tweaking – I never opened a terminal once while setting up this machine – it just works!  I was immediately surprised by the performance of the machine. The dual-core Atom 330 processor runs at 1.6 GHz and I figured that performance would be pretty poor.

The machine boots Ubuntu quickly and launches applications seemingly just as fast as my Core 2 Duo system. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it works very well for daily use. I don’t use any really power-hungry applications (besides Firefox, which seems to demand more resources every day) and spend a lot of time in Vim and the browser. Video performance is acceptable and Compiz works flawlessly.  I didn’t do any benchmarks, but I can say that I find the performance to be acceptable.

Windows 7

I decided to install the release candidate of Windows 7, again expecting poor performance. (Note, if you want to dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows, it’s best to install Windows first). Windows 7 also installed on this hardware without any tweaking, I didn’t even need to download any drivers. To my amazement, everything just worked. Even all the fancy visual effects worked out of the box!

Windows 7 takes significantly longer to boot than Ubuntu, but boot times were acceptable. Performance seemed reasonable to me (although, installing AVG anti virus really made things work a lot slower). I installed several applications and didn’t run into any problems. I’m not a heavy windows user (pretty much Windows free since late 2005) so I can’t compare the performance to other machines. I can say that I found it usable. For a part-time Windows user, or for those who just like to surf the web and organize their photos, this hardware should be sufficient for running Windows 7.

OS X

I did some quick searches, and found a lot of reports of successful OS X instillation on this motherboard. I have an old Macbook for when I need OS X (which is rare), so installing OS X was not a priority for me. I did give it a try, however, using one of the newer methods which allows you to install from a Leopard retail DVD. I’m not an advocate of cracking or stealing software, so this method seems more palatable to me (it still breaks Apple’s EULA, but not the DMCA).

I followed several different tutorials and was able to get OS X installed on a spare hard drive. I wasn’t, however, able to get things to work perfectly. I had problems with the video drivers that I found online, and all of my 5 attempted installations ended in a machine that either would not boot properly or had messed up video.

I’m quite sure that it’s possible to install Leopard on this hardware, especially since so many others have reported success. If you’re willing to put in the time and effort, you can probably make it work. Personally, Ubuntu does 99% of what I need, so I’ll stick with the free, open source and legal OS that “just works” on my hardware rather than spend days trying to make a hackintosh.

Conclusion

I think this computer would be a wonderful addition to any household. It’s a perfect computer for anyone who’s not a power user (you don’t want use it for gaming, to do high-end video processing or run virtual machines), for kids, grandparents, anyone really. I would feel good about giving this computer for just about any of my friends or relatives. Why not build your own and give it a try?

So, how many users does Ubuntu have? It’s really hard to tell. In October, 2007, Canonical claimed that there were over 6 million users of Ubuntu. Then in October, 2008, in an interview with IneternetNews.com a Canonical spokesman claimed that

“In terms of numbers we’re very confident this is an 8 million plus user base of active users. That is a hard thing to count and there are lots of issues about methodology for counting but I have seen nothing that sheds doubts on that.”

With this in mind, lets look at some indicators and statistics from around the web to see just how popular Ubuntu really is. Has it gained in popularity since 2007, or has another distro come in to take Ubuntu’s place?

Note: this article is in no way a scientific study of Ubuntu’s popularity, it is just a collection of interesting stats from around the net. Have fun with it!

1. DistroWatch.com

Like last time around, we’ll start things out with distrowatch.com. While not the best indicator of a distro’s popularity, it is a traditionally accepted measure of popularity in the Linux community. When we wrote our original article back in November of 2007, PCLinuxOS topped the distrowatch list, but that apparently didn’t last for long, as Ubuntu is once again back on top (and overall yearly stats at distrowatch.com show Ubuntu in the number one position from 2005-present).

DistroWatch.com’s most popular linux distributions for the past 6 months

1. Ubuntu
2. Fedora
3. openSUSE
4. Mint
5. Debian
6. Mandriva
7. PCLinuxOS
8. Puppy
9. Sabayon
10. CentOS

This is the list that we’ll use going forward to compare the top distros.

2. Website popularity

There are several companies that specialize in ranking websites. None of these sites are perfect and many people discount them all together. We thought it would be interesting to see how some of the top Linux distribution websites stack up in these net rankings. Here are current rankings for the top 10 distros (from the Distrowatch list). The November 2007 results are included in parenthesis.

Netcraft Rankings

1. www.ubuntu.com: 694 (up from 1,649)
2. www.OpenSUSE.org: 1,823 (up from 4,622)
3. www.debian.org: 1,938 (down from 1,719)
4. fedoraproject.org: 2,164 (up from 4,314)
5. www.centos.org: 3,054 (not on the list in 2007)
6. www.linuxmint.com: 3,150 (way up from 41,331)
7. www.mandriva.com: 10,049 (down from 7,691)
8. www.pclinuxos.com: 10,479 (up from 11,144)
9. www.puppylinux.org: 14,196 (not on the list in 2007)
10. www.sabayonlinux.org: 36,494 (down from 28,549)

Alexa Rankings

1. www.ubuntu.com: 2,327 (up from 2,445)
2. www.debian.org: 4,475 (down from 3,499)
3. www.OpenSUSE.org: 10,889 (down from 7,878)
4. fedoraproject.org: 12,992 (down from 11,127)
5. www.centos.org: 16,198 (not on the list in 2007)
6. www.linuxmint.com: 29,146 (up from 69,753)
7. www.mandriva.com: 30,945 (down from 18,497)
8. www.puppylinux.org: 62,103 (not on the list in 2007)
9. www.pclinuxos.com: 80,114 (down from 57,390)
10. www.sabayonlinux.org: 120,109 (down from 72,331)

So, it seems that Ubuntu is, according to these sites, the most visited of the distros from distrowatch’s top 10. It’s also interesting to note that Linux Mint’s rankings have dramatically improved since 2007. Perhaps Mint’s popularity has something to do with their focus on being user friendly (and not brown)?

Blogging Trends

Sites like Technorati and BlogPulse allow you to track how often people are blogging about a certain topic. We compared Ubuntu’s blog buzz to other top Linux distros and found that people are writing about Ubuntu far more than any other Linux distro.

BlogPulse

We took the top three distros from distrowatch and compared them on BlogPulse.

Technorati

Technorati shows very similar results when comparing Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Debian over the last 180 days.

As you can see, people are blogging about Ubuntu far more often than other distros. (We’d also like to note that a good amount of blog posts that contain the word “fedora” are about the hat and not the Linux distro).

Google Trends

Again we decided to look at Google Trends to see which distros people are searching for. Of course, there is a lot of room for error as someone could be searching for the philosophy of Ubuntu, for a new Fedora hat, or for The Red Hat Society.

First we compare our top 4 distros from above. You can clearly see that from the second half of 2006, there are far more searches for Ubuntu than for Debian, Fedora (including Fedora Core, and Red Hat searches) or openSUSE (including SUSE).

Next we compare Ubuntu to the rest of the top 10 distros combined (including variations of the distro names such as Red Hat). It seems that since mid 2007, Ubuntu is being searched for more often than all the other distros combined.

Here we compare Ubuntu to Linux, Unix, FreeBSD and Solaris. Clearly Linux has the lead, but Ubuntu gets really close around release dates. In 2007, we thought this trend would lead to “Ubuntu” overtaking “Linux” as a search term, but this clearly has not happened.

Finally, for some perspective, we compare Ubuntu, Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Twitter

Since our original article was published, searching Twitter trends has become an interesting way of finding out what people are talking about.  We used Twist to compare the same top 4 distros. Here is a graph comparing tweets over the last 30 days. (Once again, a whole lot of the “fedora” tweets are about the hat, not the Linux distro).

And finally, we compare Ubuntu with Linux, Mac and Windows.

Conclusion

It appears that Ubuntu is still the most popular Linux distribution. According to some stats, it’s more popular now than ever. Of course, these stats don’t really tell us how many people actually use Ubuntu. They do, however, give an interesting insight into Ubuntu’s relative popularity on the internet. They also re-emphasize just how far Ubuntu (and Linux in general) have to go to catch up with Mac and Windows.

Remember, this was all just for fun, no need to get upset if you don’t like something you see here (or if we left out your favorite distro). Whatever your favorite OS is, the most important thing is that it works for you and that you can be productive using it. So, until next time, happy computing!

Here is a quick video that I put together to show off some of the features of the Facebook app.

Give Apps for Ubuntu a try by visiting http://apps.facebook.com/ubuntuapps.

Youtube Link: Find, Share, and Install Ubuntu Apps on Facebook

Not only is it useful for storing daily documents and sharing files with friends, it can also be quite useful for keeping your application settings in sync across computers. One example is syncing Tomboy notes across computers. Tomboy is an extremly handly note taking application for Linux, but I always found it annoying that it was so hard to sync across machines. With Dropbox, it’s amazingly simple.

If you’re not already a Dropbox user, sign up at www.getdropbox.com. Once you have the software installed, you should have a folder in your home directory called “Dropbox”. All of the files in this directory will automatically be synced with Dropbox and with other computers where you install the application.

Now that Dropbox is installed, just create a folder called “tomboy” (or whatever you like) inside your “Dropbox” directory. Now in your Tomboy prefernces, click on the Synchronization tab and choose “Local Folder” and browse to your “tomboy” folder.

To syncronize your notes, simply click “Tools” and “Syncronize Notes” at the top of any Tomboy note … and that’s it!  Repeat these steps for all your other computers and you’ll have fully syncronized Tomboy Notes on all your machines. This also protects against accidentally loosing your notes if something happens to your computers, you’ll always have a copy saved at Dropbox.

Pre-installed Linux Notebooks

Browsershots generates screenshots of your site in up to 56 different browsers.  You can easily test your design in such obscure browsers as Kazehakase, K-Meleon, and Galeon.  Of course all the standard browsers are there too, the most useful being older versions of IE and Firefox on Windows and several versions of Safari for Mac OS.  Give Browsershots.org a try, it’s free!

Note: While preparing this post, I found a bug in my design that causes problems with IE 7.
Microsoft …  Grrr.