This past weekend, I was a "Nifty Guest" at Penguicon. Being a nifty guest is both an honor and a curse. On one hand, you get that fancy "NIFTY" on your name badge, but on the other hand you need to dance like a monkey whenever asked. Thankfully my dancing was held to a minimum this year.

German insurance company LVM has switched 10,000 laptop and desktop machines over to Ubuntu Linux with the help of Ubuntu creator Canonical (announcement). Some early reports on the net have hailed this as a victory for Linux, but it seems like the company was already a mixed shop of Windows and Linux machines with a long history of reliance on open source software.

The Ubuntu Technical Board has voted not to install the non-free extras package by default during a standard Ubuntu Install. This an option that, if selected, installs proprietary software including hardware drivers, media codecs and the Flash player. It has been opt-in rather than opt out since its first appearance.

With an announcement on the security mailing list, Canonical has confirmed that support for Ubuntu 9.10 will cease on April 29 2011. This came as no surprise as it adheres to the expected support cycle of a .10 Ubuntu release, and 9.10 is now 18 months old.

Remastersys is a complete system backup tool, but it can also be used to create your own customized remix of an Ubuntu or Debian installation. Basically, you customize a running system and create an install disk that will recreate it. If you've ever wanted to create your own distribution, you won't believe how simple this is to use. Mikebuntu, here we come...

For legacy reasons we standardized our environment on Ubuntu Server. Generally when a new Ubuntu LTS release comes out, we, like many others, start deploying any new installations on the new release while we start planning upgrades for our most out-of-date servers.

Google Inc. continues to make incremental improvements to web search, and in this vein, Instant search was added in 2010. For better or worse, the accompanying search suggestions cannot be disabled. This drop down list is intended to save time, but it also gives some clues about what other people are searching for.

Despite some premature reports on the net, Canonical isn’t moving to a rolling release schedule for Ubuntu. However, the organisation is open to making some changes to the way that some software packages are updated. It’s seems likely that a mechanism that supports the adding of up to date application packages outside of the normal software repository updates is probably on the cards, and I’d say that it’s about time.

Excerpt from Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux, A, 3rd Edition. By Mark G. Sobell Published by Prentice Hall ISBN-10: 0-13-254248-X

Readers of my previous posts will know about the bad luck I've had when it comes to getting the screen setup on Linux, particularly with Ubuntu Linux. It's a particularly annoying problem when the hardware detection goes wrong and one is presented with a list of unsuitable screen modes.