KeepingDreams

Anyone testing Xubuntu these days should have seen this when running or installing from the jaunty-desktop-i386.iso or jaunty-desktop-amd64.iso images. This is a sneak peak at what is coming April 23. If you are waiting for the final release of Xubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04, it is going to be GREAT! If you are testing, please keep your eye out for the new GDM login theme. A new icon theme and desktop theme is also being worked on. It is an exciting time to be using Xubuntu!

Just finished a wonderful week with my daughter and granddaughters from Las Vegas. It sure was great to see them again. Since I don’t drive more than I have to, and it is about 600 miles, I don’t get to see them very often. Seeing them this time was shaky, they drove, and hit a huge snowstorm about half-way. After an hour of it, they were ready to turn around. I am really glad they decided to keep coming.

We had a birthday for the oldest granddaughter here. Her mom scheduled a jump house for the party, but we got snowed on, and couldn’t let them do it. It was not a total loss, though. The snow melted fast, and the kids were able to play outside.

While they were here, they got to see a buffalo, chicken farm, baby sheep, and other animals not readily seen in the big city. We had a great time, I think, even though I was exhausted by the activity. Two crying babies in the house doesn’t make for quiet time. However, when both babies were born on the same day, well, just handle it!

It’s true. Both of my daughters had a baby the same day, one is a boy and one is a girl. This was my first time seeing the baby girl, too. It was very interesting to see them together.

We reached a milestone in Xubuntu. On 2009-03-12, Jaunty Jackalope Alpha 6. This is still an alpha version, so it will mainly be testers and real brave users who install it. It does have a number of new and improved features.

Font dot-per-inch settings are now optimized based on your monitor’s capabilities, rather than defaulting to 96 dpi. You can further customize your dpi settings via Applications -> Settings -> Xfce 4 Settings Manager -> Appearance -> Fonts -> DPI…

Alpha 6 supports the option of installing the new ext4 file system. ext3 will remain the default filesystem for Jaunty, and we will consider ext4 as the default for the next release based on user feedback.

It also includes Xfce 4.6, which is includes many enhancements over the older versions. It includes a new mixer, new settings, improvements to the interface. It is really great to be able to use it.

As is normal for any alpha or beta release, we need testers. I mean the testers willing to download the Alpha 6 image, run the installation, report the broken things, and in a day or two, do it again. As we near the end of the six-month release cycle, it becomes more important to have the images tested by more people. These are the testers we need.

While I am thinking of it, I achieved a new milestone personally, when I applied for and was accepted as a Ubuntu Member. “Membership of the Ubuntu community means recognition of a significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community.” is the official wording used. To me, it means I have been able to contribute enough time and knowledge to help make Ubuntu and Xubuntu better and the community recognizes that effort. This is an honor I looked forward to and worked hard to achieve. It also means continuing to work hard to make the operating systems better.

Anybody got one of these? It usually refers to a computer that is four to five years old, which you wnat to use for a new program. Of course, that program runs in Vista, now. Guess you got to go out and buy a new computer, since Vista doesn’t run on that old system.

All of my computers come under this. I still have P2, 400MHz CPU motherboard with 320MB ram. Guess what! I still use it sometimes. I don’t run windows on any computer. I don’t even know too much about trying to make it work. I do everything those running windows do, but my operating system is called Xubuntu. That is pronounced like zoo-boon-too. It is a word formed from the Xfce destop environment and Ubuntu, the operating system it is based on. As stated on the Ubuntu website, http://www.ubuntulinux.org/, “Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘Humanity to others’, or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world”.

Xubuntu is free. Some people have a hard time believing that anything worthwhile is free. That is too bad, because some of the best things in the computer world are free. While you can do almost everything in Xubuntu that you can do in Windows, Xubuntu is free in every sense of the word. Yes, sometimes it takes a bit of effort to learn the new ways of doing things. That does not make “free” a bad thing. It just makes it different than Windows. You were not born with the knowledge to use Windows, you learned it. For some of you, that took a lot of effort. But, you kept at it, because you needed to learn to use the computer. Guess what? It takes effort to learn new things. That does not make “free” a bad thing. It just means you learn how to use it, the same way you learned to use Windows.

I learned how to use Xubuntu on my computer some years ago. I have not spent any money on programs since then. I don’t have to buy the newest computer, because my computer is faster than the ones running Windows. To sum this up, I use old computers, I do not use Windows, everything I use on my computer is free, and I can do everything you do in Windows.

Check out Xubuntu at http://xubuntu.org/ . Find out how good “FREE” really is today.