KDE

Last time I wrote about the goings on surrounding Planet *buntu, I went on about one of my favorite topics; open formats and the future of information. By information, I mean content in all its wondrous forms, from plain text, to Web content, to music, to video, and to everything in between. Sadly, I find myself wanting to rant again on this topic even if it means laying into one of my favorite corporations. So I decided to start with something positive and friendly; something of beauty to prepare you for the ugliness to follow. It's only fair and it will, I hope ease the pain.

So let's go back a few days . . . It was February the 11th; my wife and I went out to a superb dinner at Benjamin's Restaurant in St. Jacobs, Ontario. My parents were babysitting and Sally and I had the evening to ourselves. It was a perfect way to celebrate the big day. Earlier that day, I received an early Valentine's Day present from Kubuntu and the KDE folk. Yes, KDE 4.4 was released to the Kubuntu repositories so I wasted no time in upgrading.

The 4.4 release will be come with Kubuntu 10.04, that old Lucid Lynx, but it was backported to 9.10 for those of us who prefer to run a stable release over alpha code. I'll tell you how to add those repositories to your system in a moment, but let me start by telling you about KDE 4.4.

Read the rest of the story.

Hear that clock ticking? There are only nine days left to the release of Ubuntu 9.10. It's all very exciting and that excitement was bouncing about inside my brain as I drove my son to school this morning. A little ditty was echoing in my mind along with what I might write about the big event, when suddenly it hit me. No, not another car. I was paying attention. What hit me was a fully formed vision of the future, nine days hence. Sort of like what happens on FlashForward, the series based on Robert J. Sawyer's book. Except I didn't black out. I started telling what I saw in my vision to my five year old son who, sitting quietly in the back seat, quietly ignored me.

Read the whole story on the Ubuntu User Website.