Podcast Season 3 Episode 8

Posted at 1:17pm on Thursday April 21st 2011

Title: Nutty Narwhal

In this episode: Ubuntu 11.04 is almost here, while Oracle drops OpenOffice.org and there was a third humble indie bundle. Discover our discoveries, hear how we fared with Gnome Shell and the results of our Open Ballot.

What's in the show:

News:
Discovery of the week:
- Graham:
  - On 29th April, at around 21:00 BST in Southern England, it should be possible to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour and its recently separated external fuel tank as they sweep across the evening sky.
- Mike:
  - According to James Zern, 30% of videos on YouTube are responsible for nearly all the videos that are viewed.
  - The Danish word for ultrafast is ultrahertig.
  - Mike is a better programmer than everyone who works on X.org.
- Jonathan:
  - 'Contributing' (http://contributing.appspot.com) is a great portal if you want to file a bug report or contribute to a project.
- Effy:
  - Effy's six year old daughter, Rosy, has been using open source software at school for the last two years.
- Andrew:
  - The music player, Songbird, can display random images from the internet related to a song's title.
You Dare Us:
Speak Your Brains:
Open Ballot: has desktop fragmentation gone too far?

Special offer: subscribe to Linux Format magazine and save up to 40%

Presenters: Andrew Gregory, Efrain Hernandez-Mendoza, Graham Morrison, Jonathan Roberts and Mike Saunders.

Download as high-quality Ogg Vorbis (36MB)

Download as low-quality MP3 (52MB)

Duration: 55:43

Subscribe to the TuxRadar Podcast. Choose between Ogg Vorbis and MP3.

Theme Music by Brad Sucks.

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Your comments

p&|a

nameless wallrus (not verified) - April 28, 2011 @ 10:12am

buy an openpandora, and give it a decent review, not a quick mention with inaccurate facts

Ogg version

Anonymous Penguins (not verified) - April 28, 2011 @ 10:15am

The Ogg version is of episode 6, not 8.

Re: Ogg version

graham - April 28, 2011 @ 11:15am

Weird. Both the RSS link and the version on this page are pointing to episode 8 for me. Is it the right filename but the wrong content, or a bad link?

Open Office

Anonymous Penguin2 (not verified) - April 28, 2011 @ 2:54pm

Great I just started using open office. On to Libre then or maybe Office 2010 on Wine. I hope the community can do a better job with it, however I don't see a purely community managed office suite gaining much edge over a commercial one.

Spelling/typing error!

Danish Penguin (not verified) - April 28, 2011 @ 4:20pm

Hey, just want to let you know that the danish word for superfast is spelled "superhurtig" with a "u" not an "e".

Looking forward to the podcast and LXF144 which I have yet to receive. Keep up the good work :) -AndreasFrom (Denmark)

Spelling/typing error! (2)

Danish Penguin (not verified) - April 28, 2011 @ 4:23pm

Hey, just want to let you know that the Danish
word for ultrafast is spelled "ultrahurtig" with
a "u" not an "e". Looking forward to the podcast and LXF144
which I have yet to receive. Keep up the good
work :)

-AndreasFrom (Denmark)

Space Plumber? it's a pretty

bananaoomarang - April 28, 2011 @ 5:42pm

Space Plumber? it's a pretty horrendous game. Couldn't get past the first level because all the textures were so pixelated and the maze was so confusing. Apparantly I was supposed to find some kind of pump. Impossible.

What Oracle REALLY meant to say was...

Prolific Puffin - April 28, 2011 @ 7:24pm

"When we gobbled up Sun, we didn't even know they HAD Open Office. After several months of our Corporate Attorneys scouring the earth looking far and wide, we have not been able to find anyone to sue over it. As this is in direct conflict with our business model, we are dumping the source code on the handful of unsuspecting Ooo developers who hung around after everyone else jumped ship to work on Libre Office. We could not quite figure out what it did anyway..."

Has anyone else ever noticed that you have NEVER seen Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Satan, the Prince of Darkness in the same room together?

Coincidence?

I think not...

Speak Your Brains

simon - April 29, 2011 @ 12:03am

Definitely keep Speak your Brains! Perhaps make a hyperlink to email t reduce friction?

I agree with Simon...

Prolific Puffin - April 29, 2011 @ 1:48am

...and had I actually remembered about Speak Your Brains, I would have sent in a rant. I will do it soon.

Section Idea

Cheu (not verified) - April 29, 2011 @ 6:04am

You fellows could have a poll section where a question is posed to listeners in the form a poll. It would be similar to open ballet but with more definitive results.

Before the last two podcasts

Spangwiches (not verified) - April 29, 2011 @ 6:25am

I had no idea Chris Eubanks knew so much about Linux.

I've been using Gnome 3 on

buzzomatic - April 29, 2011 @ 7:45am

I've been using Gnome 3 on my 27" iMac for a week now. Really liking it, gets out of the way - blows Spotlight and Expose away too.

Basically it's taken the bits of OSX that I don't like and thrown them out.

I've also used Empathy chat a lot - the notification bar lets you know someone's trying to talk to you and lets you read it without real interruption.

As for getting the date in the Activities bar? Tried opening the date and time settings? It's right there.

Also-also, I've been using it on my Core i3 with Intel HD graphics. It runs incredibly fast, plays 1080p videos just fine, even when you bring up activities.

So yeah, I'm happy to have ditched Gnome 2 :)

Oh, forgot to mention one

buzzomatic - April 29, 2011 @ 7:52am

Oh, forgot to mention one thing; when you're in the Expose like view, scroll your mouse wheel to zoom into one of the tiny little windows so you can read it.

Handy for quickly checking your online contacts list or twitter feed.

Ok, stupid me, it seems the

buzzomatic - April 29, 2011 @ 1:31pm

Ok, stupid me, it seems the "show date in clock" setting is indeed inaccessible without the command line or the tweak app.

Agree with Jonathon

dm319 - April 29, 2011 @ 1:50pm

That the desktop is probably less important than the choice of applications and compatibility with other computer users. I don't think desktop fragmentation has anything to do with the 1% desktop share, because, after all - new users are just pointed to ubuntu.

Just this last week I was applying for a job that had a complex reference form in a docx format. I was going to open it and print it out on my printer, but the mess that resulted in libreoffice was just not useable - there were questions half-cut off. Needless to say, I found an Windows PC to print it off correctly. Until everyone is using open standards (MS included), Linux just isn't going to take off.

And the other problem is applications - have you ever tried video editing in Linux? Hmmmm...

What...!? Free software

labinnsw - April 29, 2011 @ 2:48pm

What...!? Free software rubbish...!?

It was not just firefox that broke the stigma about free tech being rubbish. There have been a lot of free software that converted me long before Firefox. Some that come readily to mind are listed below and I still use some on Linux.

PDFXchange Viewer (Free Version)
Skype
Star downlaader
Mailbox dispatcher
Realplayer
Zone Alarm
AVG Antivirus

There were also some great websites that provide free services like thefreecountry.com, timeanddate.com, google.com.

The myth that free technology is rubbish was dead and burried at least 10 years ago. I would not start digging it up now.

Mike Help!

Ubuntu 11.04 left me at a text prompt that I haven't got the foggiest idea what to do with. (Plan to google it when I have some time. Listening to the podcast is more important)

Gnome Shell

Give me back my "Distractions!", I want my "Distractions", that is why I put them there.

It is too much effort to try Gnome 3. The pride of self expression has been taken out of the desktop. Give us back our freedoms. Make it fun to try out. Consider all users. Compiz (or similar), conky (or similar) and Cairo Dock (or similar) are all essential.

Speak your Brains

Thought you would have taken some more material from the last set of Speak Your Brains. You only read the crust from mine and did not get to the meat. Don't worry, to make it easier, I will divide the meat into 2 more Speak Your Brains so please keep it going for at least 1 more week.

Desktop fragmentation.

We should all have the same starting point regardless of which distribution we are introduced to Linux on. My pick for that stating point would be Gnome2.x or Xfce. We should then have the option to try out the myriad of other options available as we do now.

Video Editing in Linux

labinnsw - April 29, 2011 @ 3:00pm

@dm319 Try Openshot! It is the BOMB!

@labinnsw

dm319 - April 29, 2011 @ 9:17pm

Yes - in the end openshot was the only one that would successfully do the trick. It was about a year ago, and from the ubuntu repositories, so probably not fair to judge, but it did still have a lot of bugs at the time, and was very simplistic. On the other hand, it seemed to be the only editor that could keep the video and audio in sync when rendered... I'm sure the latest ones are a big improvement...

A Pleasant Mistake

Trevor Lyons (not verified) - May 1, 2011 @ 12:57am

I got a Blackberry 9100 3G phone recently here in New Brunswick, Canada. I copied ogg format music to the phone without knowing if it would work; the manual didn't state if the format was supported. The only thought I had was, "Crap! Now I have to format the memory card!"

To my surprise, the phone played the files without any problems! Vorbis.org doesn't state that the phone is compatible; somebody might want to tell them. Hmmm, wonder if people in RIM are GNU/Linux friendly?

PS - Debian 6 works wonderful from the DVD Mag insert. My LG X110 netbook thanks you! :)

The Danish word for ultrafast is ultrahertig.

Lars (not verified) - May 3, 2011 @ 9:18am

No. The Danish word for ultrafast is ultrahurtig (u instead of an e).

Gnome 3

Anonymous Pn (not verified) - May 6, 2011 @ 5:34pm

Date is simply added with gnome-tweak-tool, plus gnome-shell is really fast. Gnome2 was useless: xfce did the work better. Gnome 2 looked ugly.