Choice is one of many reasons why I really like this distribution over the other popular flavours right now. I share the same dissatisfaction for Unity and Gnome 3 with most of the community. While this is the main reason for jumping ship and crashing the Mint party, there are some really simple things I like, like Dropbox.

The biggest reasons seem to be stability and performance utilizing some features of OpenGL. It’s about time someone takes the big leap and wrangles the X monster. If you were to start from scratch right now, designing GNOME, KDE, XFCE, etc., all without Xorg’s quirks and limitations, would it come out the same? I don’t think so.

After October rolls by, this shouldn’t be a problem as the updates to 10.04 LTS will fix the acpi problem. However, if you need Ubuntu to run on a twitchy laptop that crashed during bootup or fails to install at all, the Maverick Ubuntu Meerkat 10.10 beta is out now.

Do letters show up when you hit the arrow keys in edit mode? If you like to use the arrow keys in vim/vi, you will quickly notice that Ubuntu appears broken. Welcome to vim compatibility mode. It’s just a setting that Ubuntu defaults to…

These packages are not available in the out-of-the-box configuration when you install Ubuntu 10.04. To get sun java packages such as sun-java6-jre or sun-java6-doc, you need to give yourself access to additional repositories… Now try searching for or installing one of those packages you were missing.

You used to be able to edit /etc/apt/apt.conf and assign a variable there, but not anymore. Set the http_proxy environment variable to your proxy and put it in your bashrc to make this setting persistent.

In their ongoing campaign to dumb down their Linux distribution to the Windows level, Canonical has stripped the md5 checksum data from their download page. And instead of presenting all of the available downloads in a simple format, they present you with a 1, 2, 3 menu with a bunch of help text and links to more help; none of which let you know where to find the checksums. What you’re really looking for is hidden away from their main site here. Why do they make it hard to find this information?

If you’ve been thinking about trying out Ubuntu for a server, now would be a good time. If you’re accustomed to living inside the limited world of Windows, perhaps Ubuntu Server Edition would be your best bet for getting your feet wet with a real OS. The LTS releases are supported for a longer duration and there’s training and consulting readily available to support your needs as an organization.

Google Picasa is available as an rpm and deb for Linux. You can get it from google package repository if you already have that installed, but the latest version doesn’t appear to be available from there just yet. This app is run under a self contained wine installation.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine architecture on a different machine architecture. This is different than VMware, VirtualBox, or Hyper-V where you’re running different operating systems on the same architecture.