Monday saw the release of Easy Peasy 1.0, a version of Ubuntu 8.10 adapted for netbooks like the Asus EEE PC. I've just installed it onto my EEE, and am looking forward to using it. It is essentially similar to Ubuntu, but has some important differences: firstly all of the drivers needed for the EEE are included by default, meaning, amoungst other things, that the WiFi will work straight out of the box. The included software lineup is also slightly different too, Java, Flash and the media codecs are already included, but more significantly, it includes OpenOffice 3.0 (whereas Ubuntu 8.10 only includes OpenOffice 2.4 by default). This is really handy if you need to open documents sent by colleagues using the lastest version of Microsoft Office. It also includes Skype so you can ring up your friends for free and tell them how good it is, the new cutting edge Songbird music player from Mozilla and the Picassa photo editor from Google (a list of features can be found on the Ubuntu EEE Wiki. All of this is fronted by the Ubuntu Netboox Remix interface which does an excellent job at getting the most out of the limited screen space on netbooks.

It's a sad fact that most of the mobile operators, in the UK at least, sell their mobile broadband solutions with no support for Linux computers, despite the popularity of this operating system on netbooks. There is one notable exception though; Vodafone, which has a research and development team dedicated to open source called Betavine and produce the Vodafone Mobile Connect (VMC) application which enables you to get more out of your mobile broadband. Despite its name, you don't have to be a Vodafone customer to use it, in fact I've been testing it out with my 3 UK account. VMC has been available for some time, but just recently an updated version has been made available and downloads created that target Ubuntu Netbook Remix and the new Dell Mini. The application will do the basics such as managing connections, but also has SMS functionality, usage information, signal strength and upload/download speed indication. If you use the e169g-switch tool currently, I've made a new version which will work with VMC.

Ubuntu MID is one of the newest members of the Ubuntu family, a version of Ubuntu made for touch screen mobile devices. It has a very different interface to regular Ubuntu and even Ubuntu Netbook Remix as it is designed with big finger-friendly icons. If you lack a suitable device though to install it on and get the full experience you can still find out a bit more about it by installing an image on VirtualBox. You can run the image in the same way as a live cd but installing it brings more scope for experimentation. As Ubuntu MID is supplied as a disc image rather than an ISO image of a CD the install process is a little different from regular machine setups, but is still quite straightforward; the first step is to grab a copy of the disc image from http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.10/, scroll down to "MID USB image" and download the "Low-Power Intel Architecture MID USB image" to your local hard disc, you should now have a file named "ubuntu-8.10-mid-lpia.img". Next we need to convert this to an image format that VirtualBox can recognise

As you might know,a new version of Ubuntu was released a few days ago adding some new features and polish to this already fine operating system, and I've been trying out not only Ubuntu itself, but also some other members of the Ubuntu family of operating systems. You can find a list of features on the official announcement here: http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-8.10-desktop. What always remains striking here is that Ubuntu preserves the tradition in Linux of offering users real choices for their computing experience, the user is in change of their computer and can compute how they want to. Ubuntu was always traditionally aimed at the desktop, then a server product was developed, and now a lot of work is being carried out into producing mobile versions of Linux. As this is an open operating system it is possible to mix these experiences together to your requirements. I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop using an alternate install CD and found the whole experience was very smooth, once I put the CD in, Ubuntu asked me if I wanted to upgrade and it worked out what was required and happily upgraded.

Often when we talk about Linux it is often in the context of a computer enthusiast, a person who enjoys finding out what open source technology can do for them, or maybe people looking to solve particular problems and get up and running with particular software or hardware. A group that sometimes we don't think about is our creative friends, artists, musicians, animators, audio engineers, video editors and suchlike, but they too can have a Linux experience specifically tailored for them, an experience set up to enable them to enjoy a diverse and rich experience right out of the box without the need for complex setup steps or in depth system knowledge. This wonderful creative playground is in the form of Ubuntu Studio, a version of the Ubuntu distribution remixed to meet the needs of creatives. It arrives as a DVD image which you can use to install it on your computer, once installed you will find a rich set of creative tools ready to go. To make things even better, thanks to the centralised way Ubuntu keeps software updated, it will keep all of these programs up to date automatically for you without the need to download lots of updates from lots of different sites.

If you have more than one computer running Ubuntu (or Debian), or maybe you are experimenting with different installations of Ubuntu using something like VirtualBox, you might find yourself using a lot of bandwidth and time when downloading packages from the Internet to update or add capabilities to your machine. By default each installation of Ubuntu will go directly to the Ubuntu download servers to get packages, producing a situation where you are downloading the same file multiple times through your connection to your ISP. There is an alternative to this situation though, you can download the packages through a host on your own network that will act as a cache. The next time any machine wanting that file requires it, the cache will serve its own copy, instead of having to download it again. This is a lot quicker, as the speed in your internal network will be much higher than the speed of the connection to your ISP, it is also a great bonus if you have maximum download allowances as part of your Internet connectivity package. Setting this up is not too difficult, thanks to a program called Apt-cacher.

For about the last year I have abandoned the use of my workplace calendar system (based on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange) and using paper diaries in favour of Google Calendar. This solution offers a number of advantages for me, it is entirely web based, it is platform independent and I can even see my appointments on my mobile phone thanks to the mobile version. I've also been using Mozilla Thunderbird, an excellent open source email program, for years. So it was very interesting to read Rob Parsons' post on getting these two technologies working together through a couple of add ons. It looks like Mozilla Thunderbird could become the Personal Information Manager of choice for those who use Web 2.0 services to manage their affairs thanks to an increasing number of addons. On the horizon is also an add on to integrate it with the popular web based task management system Remember the Milk, and apparently it is already possible to integrate Thunderbird with Google Mail.

If you own an Asus EEE PC or another machine running Ubuntu and a camera which is only supported under Video4Linux 2 (V4L2) you will have noticed that it not possible to get your camera to work under Flash. This will hopefully change soon, with V4L2 support in Flash 10. However, as Flash 10 is still a release candidate you might find that you still have problems when using a V4L2 camera. I've seen this on websites that switch the camera off and on again during one Flash session, this seems to not work very well. There is another way to get the camera working under Flash though, the Flashcam project which gets around the lack of support for V4L2 webcams by forwarding the output of the camera to a simulation of device that uses Video4Linux 1, which is supported under Flash 9.

A few days ago Lifehacker Australia carried a blog post where they said that they felt my method to get the Huawei E169G modem working on an EEE PC was a "tad fiddly". Well, they are probably right, so taking this as a challenge I've had a go at creating a package that will apply these steps automatically and make getting this modem up and running as simple as possible. This is one of my first attempts at packaging, so there might be some problems, however I've successfully tested that it works on both a Xandros and an Ubuntu powered EEE PC. The package is quite basic in what it does, so it may well work on some other Debian-based distributions too.

Back in December 2007 I installed SecondLife on a factory-standard Asus EEE PC to see if it would work or not, it did, even with just 512MB memory installed, but it was a little slow. So since adding a bit of extra power to my EEE by upgrading it to 2GB RAM and installing Ubuntu on it, I was curious to see how this might improve the experience. The SecondLife client has also been updated recently, the version I tested with is version 1.20.15.92456 which I downloaded directly from the SecondLife web site. The results were pleasing, the client was usable, the graphics more vibrant and details than before, as you can see from the picture, even with low graphic detail selected the detail was quite impressive.