BBC Digital Planet interview Mark Shuttleworth

I found this recent news article on BBC Technology News site entitled “Lift off“, which leads to the main article page entitled “Space tourist promotes open source”.

“…space tourist and open source evangelist Mark Shuttleworth talks about the developing world’s need for technology solutions.”

In my opinion the word “evangelist” should have been substituded to “advocate“. This is more appropriate when discussing promoting the ethos of Open Source Software, as the former conjures up images of, fanatical preaching zealots performing ritualistic acts.

There is also a podcast download available, of the entire BBC technology programme Digital Planet interview with Mark Shuttleworth (sorry – no direct URL as I don’t wanna be stepping on “Auntie’s” toes).

Whilst the interview offers no new news from Canonical or Ubuntu, it is well presented and touches on the importance of Open Source technology within education and developing economies.

Gnome-Screenshot & Beryl Screenshot Plugin

Taking screenshots in the Gnome desktop environment is as simple as pressing [Print Screen] key. If like me you use a Mac Mini USB keyboard (which doesn’t have such a key) you could mess around with keyboard mapping.

Alternatively within Gnome there is a screenshot app called “gnome-screenshot” found in Application > Accessories > Take Screenshot. I’ve placed a copy of this app on the lower panel (the camera icon) and assigned a 10 second delay to the launch properties. This gives me time to prepare for taking screenshots, especially useful for taking a shot of the 3D cube within Beryl.

If you use the XGL/Beryl environment there is a neat screenshot plugin which allows you to take a screenshot of a specific area through the combination of pressing the [Super] key & left clicking your mouse whilst high-lighting the area. You may need to edit the plugin properties within the Beryl Setting Manager to set your desired directory path such as /home/username/Desktop.

Here is an example of the selected area (minus mouse cursor) I choose to take a screenshot of within the Beryl environment.

After releasing the [Super] key and mouse button the screenshot of the area you selected should now be automatically saved in the directory you assigned.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Days before the official release of Edgy Eft, Mark Shuttleworth has recently announced the name of the next development version of the Ubuntu distro family.

“With the final release of Ubuntu 6.10 approaching, and apparently set
to be spot on schedule October 26th, we’re starting to look beyond
it to Ubuntu 7.04, scheduled for release on 19 April 2007.

In the next cycle we’ll expand on the brand new infrastructure that has
landed in Edgy as well as branching out in some exciting new directions.
This combination of courage and restlessness is also found in a young deer
that sets out to explore a world that is new and exciting – seeing the
world through eyes unprejudiced by what has gone before.

In that spirit, the release will be be code named “The Feisty Fawn”.

The main themes for feature development in this release will be
improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end
server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies.
Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement
and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for
both users and developers.”

Judging by the specifications of next months development meeting, more emphasis seems to be placed on improving assistive technology & accessibility features such as; braille device support, screen magnification, and speech synthesis.

I have a friend, whom I’ve known for over 20 years (since we were knee high to grasshoppers), who will be very appreciative of such features. Hopefully the developers will get it right and liaise with people affected by sensory deprivation and make significant improvements of accessibility, which are surprisingly still very primitive within Linux & Open Source.

Bubble Bursting Beautified Desktop

A few days ago a friend of a friend was chatting to me about the “new” desktop environment and effects in the forthcoming release of Windows Vista. He was so enthused and excited by what he had seen in the beta release that I sat and listened.

Not wanting to burst his bubble I waited, during which my internal dialouge was impatiently running amock, and slowly a smug grin was gradually creeping across my face Once he’d finished, and with no immediate response from myself I booted up my Ubuntu Dapper installation running XGL & Beryl.

Needless to say he was blown away with what he saw and one could clearly hear his bubble burst, and then some! My silence was broken with the response “It’s all very well an having a beautified desktop, the question is does the underlying operating system have any substance to it?”.

Despite my efforts to explain the ethos, ethics and benefits of using Open Source he wasn’t prepared to deviate from his Microsoft centric life. More fool him and the other millions of hoards prepared to believe the marketing hype spun to line the corporate pockets, just to keep their operating systems up to date.

HAL9000 Desktop

Here’s a series of screenshots I’ve taken in sequence of how I recreated a recursive like effect on the cube faces of my current XGL & Beryl desktop. The process is quite simple;

1. take a screenshot of your desktop with your preferred background image.
2. apply this image to the top & bottom faces of the cube.
3. rotate the cube to desired position, and take another screenshot.
4. goto 2 and repeat.

The original image I started off with is that of the character Dave Bowman inside the central core of the HAL9000 computer, from the sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey”.