His reply calmed me down and made my day :)

Ubuntu release cycles are shorter and changes are subtle. Over the last 6 years there has been 11 Ubuntu releases, once every six months. When you compare that to commercial, proprietary Operating system’s, Windows or Mac OS, release cycle of ~2yrs its quite an impressive feat. As impressive as a six month release cycle might be it would be disingenuous to compare Ubuntu release to it’s commercial counterpart. Ubuntu, just like all other Linux distribution, relies on work done by developers outside Ubuntu ecosystem (ie, Linux kernel, GNOME) to churn out frequent releases.

The advantage of short release cycle is that you are always up to date with the most secure and best version of the software; but this also has the disadvantage of not having enough time to do extensive tests to minimize issues with the final release. Even with Feature Freeze and stages of alpha and beta releases stability issues creeps in to the final release. So, its a good idea to wait couple of weeks before upgrading to the latest release.

Ubuntu has come a long way since its first version. Development process has been much more streamlined and organized. Over the last few releases the developers are concentrating more on speed and User Interface, as a result, with Lucid Lynx we will see some of the biggest changes to Ubuntu to date.

Let’s take a quick looks at how Ubuntu has transformed over the years:

• Ubuntu 4.10: Warty Warthog released on 2004-10-20

• Ubuntu 5.04: Hoary Hedgehog released on 2005-04-08

• Ubuntu 5.10: Breezy Badger released on 2005-10-13

• Ubuntu 6.06: Dapper Drake released on 2006-06-01

• Ubuntu 6.10: Edgy Eft released on 2006-10-26

• Ubuntu 7.04: Feisty Fawn released on 2007-04-19

• Ubuntu 7.10: Gutsy Gibbon released on 2007-10-18

• Ubuntu 8.04: Hardy Heron released on 2008-04-24

• Ubuntu 8.10: Intrepid Ibex released on 2009-10-30

• Ubuntu 9.04: Jaunty Jackalope released on 2009-04-23

• Ubuntu 9.10: Karmic Koala released on 2009-10-29

• Ubuntu 10.04: Lucid Lynx released on 2010-04-29

During iPad’s announcement earlier this year Free Software Foundation hired a Steve Jobs look-alike (attempted) actor outside the event to express what they think about Apple’s closed platform model. At that time, most of us might have laughed it off. But in light of recent Apple announcement, rules putting more restrictions on an already heavily controlled platform, this seems very appropriate.

Mark Shuttleworth introduced the new Ubuntu 10.10 code named Maverick Meerkat with a bold vision and impressive goals. He hopes that with Maverick Meerkat, Ubuntu will continue to lead the way for Linux in personal desktop market with radical changes in desktop interface and overall performance.

Some of the goals he highlighted for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat:

- A new design track and “cloud and server” track. Continuing on the works done on Lucid Lynx.

- A new Ubuntu theme called “Light”.

- Main focus of Meerkat will be to make the OS the lightest, fastest OS is all aspects. As computers are getting more mobile, emphasis are given on performance increase in mobile platforms.

- Ubuntu Netbook Edition will get a new interface.

- A new initiative called “Social from the Start” to make Ubuntu desktop experience more collaborative and social. As people relies more and more on storing information on the cloud, Meerkat will work on synchronizing such information so that you can access it from anywhere.

Overall it seems that there will be much more radical changes than what we have already seen on beta releases of Lucid Lynx. This can only mean good thing for Linux as Ubuntu leads the way in popularizing Linux to the masses.

You can read more about Marks vision with Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat here.

Chrome Browser dev channel user-agent string under Windows 7:

Operating System:    Macintosh WinNT

Browser:             Safari 1.3

                     Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 

                     (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.11 Safari/532.5

Chrome OS user-agent string:

Operating System:    Macintosh UNIX

Browser:             Safari 1.3

                     Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 

                     (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5

Even though the Chrome browser running on Chrome OS seems to be dev builds of the browser, the underlying OS identifies itself as CrOS i686 9.10.0, or more specifically version 9.10. This might have something to do with the fact that Ubuntu developers have been privately working with Google on Chrome OS way before it was officially announced in July 2009.

Taking these information into consideration I think it is safe to conclude that, under the hood, Chrome OS is nothing more than a stripped and dumbed down version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic koala with Chrome browser acting as a light-weight desktop environment (similar to XFCE or xubuntu).

Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian that depends on a lot of open-source software like Host AP Linux drivers, PAM, Syslinux, IBus, ConnMan, XScreenSaver.

Official Ubuntu Forum Poll

If you can get past botched upgrade or troublesome fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10, as many have experienced, this is the single most important Ubuntu released yet. I mean, all new Ubuntu releases are supposedly better than the previous version, because they come with new versions of popular packages and bug fixes of the older version of this popular distribution. But with karmic Koala, Canonical introduced features like Ubuntu One and Software Center, that are truly big new features. More so, when you consider the fact that Ubuntu releases a new version every six months.

Unfortunately, most of the good vibe with new version of Ubuntu got lost when users started reporting problems with upgrading from Jaunty and for many, even on fresh install. Reports are still coming in, but the official Ubuntu IRC channel and Ubuntu Forum is flooded with troubleshooting questions from early adopters. Most of the problems seems to be related to graphics driver and  Wi-Fi connection dropping out randomly. Others are having trouble to even boot up to X.

Personally I have installed in three computers with mixed results and ironically the only install that went smooth was my install on a Macbook.

For anyone thinking about upgrading to 9.10, I suggest wait couple of weeks when most of the kinks should be ironed out. Otherwise do a clean install on a test machine of a separate partition to see how it goes. Many have reported trouble-free upgrade and fresh install so you might not have any problem at all. Hopefully, this is a small hiccup on an otherwise very impressive Ubuntu release.

Until today I sympathize with Psystar for helping spread OS X to non-apple hardware. Even though I personally own apple computers, I support the effort of giving me the option of installing OSX on other computers. I should be able to install OSX on most hardware the same way I can install Windows 7 (and Linux).

It is important to note that Psystar didn’t "invent" or "discover" the method of installing OSX on non-apple hardware. They simply used information that are already freely and widely available for everyone  – refined it and sold you the preinstalled OSX on non-apple computer. You can do the same without having to buy a computer from Psystar, just follow instruction available for hackintosh computers.

But now Psystar is selling a bootloader which is primarily based on someone else’s work. No credit was given or permission asked to use the code and sell it as a closed-source commercial product.

What does Rebel EFI (pc_efi v8) bootloader do?  It helps you to install OSX on your PC and makes the process much easier without having to go through the difficult process of installing a hackingtosh computer. It fools your OSx installer in to thinking that the hardware is an apple computer.

Psystar needs to learn that if they are trying to portray themselves as little guy fighting the big corporation, they need to stop acting like a big corporation.

Ever since Google’s announcement of Chrome OS earlier this year I have been eagerly waiting for some kind of early alpha or beta version to play around with. Thankfully, for a short time, Google "accidentally" uploaded an early prototype of the Chrome OS – built on top of the chrome browser – that will eventually end up being the OS.

You can download the deb package file from here. This package can only be installed on debian based Linux distribution (like Ubuntu) or any Linux distribution that has deb package manager installed.

It is perhaps not correct to label it as a "leaked" version. After all, Google Chrome OS is an open source project and will be free to use for anyone who is willing to do whatever they want with it.

Chrome developers did the right thing by pulling it out from public download – as it was most likely made available to download by fellow developers for testing purpose. Outsiders who are not familiar with the development process of the project might get a very bad first impression of the Chrome OS.

The first impression you will get after installing the package is that it is visually not very different from Chrome browser. On the top right corner, there are some new tabs next to the clock:

.

On the top left corner, there is a curious chrome logo that almost looks out of place. When you click on the logo it takes you to full-screen mode, but the feature seems incomplete at this stage. You can’t have multiple tabs open in full screen mode.

One of the few things I missed when I made my move from Linux to OSX is the ability to use htop. As many of you might know, OSX is based on Mach Kernel – a custom implementation of Unix. So right out of the box OSX gives you the power of many *nix command line tools, which is why users who are comfortable with *nix systems, fit right at home with OSX.

Unfortunately htop doesn’t have OSX binary available so you will basically have to install it from source. Fortunately, there is an OSX specific htop project out there.

First you will need to install git (skip if you already have git installed):

curl http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.3.3.tar.gz -O

tar xzvf git-1.6.3.3.tar.gz 

cd git-1.6.3.3

make configure 

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

NO_MSGFMT=yes make prefix=/usr/local all

sudo make install

Now you can use git to install htop-osx:

git clone git://github.com/AndyA/htop-osx.git

cd htop-osx

git checkout -b osx origin/osx

./autogen.sh

./configure

make 

sudo make install