August 27, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I was playing around with my cheap Flytouch Android tablet, using dd to create images of the different partitions of the internal storage (which is, in fact, just a microSD card).
Turns out I discovered that there is a 256MB FAT partition living on /dev/block/mmcblk2p6. By this time, geek users already know what to do: with root privileges, mount the partition in some directory..
So, open a terminal on your rooted Flytouch 3 (P041 and DK1031 models should have this partition). Type:
~# mkdir /mnt/sdcard/256MBfat
~# mount -t vfat /dev/block/mmcblk2p6 /mnt/sdcard/256MBfat
This should result in a new folder in your sdcard directory. This folder is a filesystem node, like the sdcard1, udisk1 and udisk2 folders.
This FAT partition is empty and should have about 256MB space. If it isn’t, or if the mount command returned an error, then that’s interesting đ
Why is this partition in these tablets? Well, I have a theory. These tablets support having a recovery partition, even though most firmware updates provide no recovery image files. The fact that this is a 256MB partition may indicate that it is meant to hold contents similar to the system partition, and in this case, it should be formatted as EXT3 and not FAT.
As most firmware versions for this tablet available on the internet don’t include a recovery image, this partition just gets formatted as FAT by the updater kernel at update time.
But what if the updater never touches this partition? This would be pretty good news. You could use this more or less hidden partition to store the owner information, so if your tablet ever gets stolen you’d always have a way to recover it.
If that was the case, you could also use this partition to store essential APK files and configuration so it would be easier to recover from a firmware update or factory reset.
As a last and kind of unrelated statement, I’d like to point out that the bootloader of InfoTM tablets is much more complex than it may appear at first.
Through a serial line that I believe to be the A-A USB connection used by IUW to burn updates, the bootloader can provide a serial console, that can be used to change the boot parameters for Android and maybe even boot other operating systems from the external SD card.
This thing of the bootloader is something I’m figuring out slowly by analysing the uBoot update file I have, u-boot-nand.bin.
If you have one of these InfoTMIC tablets, feel free to comment below with any important additional information.
NOTE: this post was written months ago but was sitting on a text file on my desktop for months, waiting to be posted. So this isn’t a recent discovery, but still an interesting one.
February 21, 2012 / gbl08ma / 1 Comment
My last blog post has been about the fact that ReactOS is not a dead open source project, and that in fact they had just released a new alpha version. So to keep with my line of open-source-projects-journalism, today I talk about another open source project, this time a GNU/Linux distro:Â SliTaz.
You may have heard about this project before: SliTaz has been around since 2007, when the first âcookingâ version of the distro was released. But what is SliTaz? As it says on the official website, it is âa free operating system providing a fully featured desktop or server in less than 30 MBâ. And indeed, you download an ISO file that weights at about 30MB, which you can burn to a USB stick, CD or DVD, or run on a virtual machine. From there, SliTaz boots to a complete desktop with various utilities and office applications, server-side software and, of course, a web browser. A nice control panel lets you configure the system and install more applications.
The whole system runs in a small amount RAM, meaning you donât need to install it to a hard disk to be able to use it; when you turn off the computer, the changes made are lost. So, this is not more nor less than a LiveCD that has a size of ~30MB. It is very fast, even on older computers.
Is this news? No, there have been tiny Linux distros around before, and SliTaz itself has been around for a lot of time, as I told. Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux and TinyCore are some examples of other GNU/Linux distros that have the goal of being small in size. I particularly like SliTaz because of its uniqueness: a unique packaging system (tazpkg), unique utilities, and a unique look too. DSL and Puppy Linux are already too âbigâ for me, and TinyCore is too small to be useful to me. So SliTaz just got it right for my concept of âtiny Linux distroâ.
I donât use SliTaz every day â itâs not my daily use distro â but I still like it very much and itâs been useful to me a few times. I use to keep around a USB pendrive with a copy of SliTaz installed â one never knows when it may be useful, specially after youâve installed office tools like Abiword and Gnumeric. Of course, your idea of usefulness certainly varies from mine, and thatâs why I like open source: just change it so it works the way itâs useful to you.
There have been no cooking or stable releases of SliTaz recently, and there was a lack of word from the developers. I started to think that the project was slowly becoming abandoned. Fortunately, today I checked their website, and this is what I see: news! Well, not really in the news section, but a blog post:Â Lack of news but work never stops.
So, in conclusion, it seems the project is still active, the only problem is that everyone is too busy to release cooking versions and write press-releases. And it looks like the team is working to get a cooking version out soon, which is great news, since the latest cooking was in May of last year and itâs out of date when compared to the work thatâs been done on the repositories since that time.
To the SliTaz developers: Keep up the great work! đ
Edit 23rd February 2012: Slitaz 4.0 RC1 is out! Check how the new version looks like.
February 12, 2012 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Looks like ReactOS 0.3.14 has been finally released. See the news here, on the official website.
I canât say I care a lot about ReactOS, as I mostly use Linux and other *nix and have no interest on NT-based operating systems. ReactOS is one of the OSS projects I follow by keeping a âsemi-closed eyeâ on them. But still, it is interesting to see how the project has evolved since its 0.3.13 release, almost a year ago. They now support Windows XP themes, wifi drivers, ACPI among other improvements.
But again, will ReactOS do any good when it finally achieves full Windows XP capability? I blogged about that some time ago.
December 24, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I know it’s a bit too late already, but since what matters is the Christmas spirit and not the timings, here are my wishes for a great Christmas and a happy new year 2012. Let the happiness and healthiness be with you this Christmas and new year eve, as well as throughout 2012 and, well, your whole life. I hope all your good wishes come true! đ
Now, my turn on Christmas wishes: let’s hope my new shiny, cheap Android tablet I bought (Flytouch 3, P041 model, not a Christmas gift!) gets fixed – its internal memory (a microSD card) is corrupt. Now I need to fix the microSD card in a Linux computer. Linux computer? Check. SD card reader? Check. microSD reader? Missing. Trying alternatives… microSD-to-SD adapter? Missing… Santa, all there is on my gifts list is a way to fix that tablet’s microSD, I want a microSD-to-SD adapter or a USB microSD reader (costs $1)!
I’ll let you know if/when I fix the device and get rid of that damn error the Flytouch returns when trying to burn the Linux kernel to said microSD!
Merry Christmas!
gbl08ma / Gabriel Maia
November 19, 2011 / gbl08ma / 1 Comment
Iâve met the Raspberry Pi project around three months ago, and immediately fell in love for its concept and idea: to build a extremely cheap Linux box that could be used to teach children the world of programming, Linux and even open source in general. But when I first knew about this project (it was on Slashdot if I remember correctly), me and lots of other people were skeptical about it, specially because of the aim price (USD $25/18,5âŹ), because of the size of the prototype board (the first one presented was no big than a USB flash drive, and in fact, was smaller than many of them), and because their website consisted of a single page with an image of that prototype board and a few technical details; it also said the Raspberry Pi Foundation was a charity (non-profit).
I forgot about the project for a few weeks: like many other people, I thought this was no more than vaporware. Later, when I visited their website again, I found it to be much more complete, and it already had some more information and more facts had been confirmed. From then on, I began to check the website much more frequently and, currently, the Raspberry Pi doesnât look like vaporware anymore: there are alpha boards built that have been distributed to various people doing software work on them, and the project staff has ran demos of the Alpha boards at many meetings. The Raspberry Pi was and continues to be responsible by news articles, sometimes front-page articles, on many technology sites. They also shown on UK television and radio. All this, and they havenât released a final product to the market yet!
So what is the Raspberry Pi, in conclusion? Itâs a extremely cheap, cheaper than many books, embedded Linux board. At launch, there will be two models: A and B. The model B has better features than the A, they will cost $35 and $25 respectively. Behind the project thereâs a charity with the same name, the UK-based Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Both models feature an ARM11 Broadcom CPU clocked at 700MHz and a GPU capable of drawing Full HD H.264 videos at 30fps, and supporting OpenGL ES 2.0; a SD/MMC/SDIO card slot from which the OS will boot. For video output, the Pi has both an HDMI connector and a good old composite video connector, which means the Pi will be able to display not only on a modern LCD with HDMI connectors, but also on older TV sets and displays that feature composite video input(s). The RAM varies according to each model, and is presented stacked on top of the CPU (PoP configuration). Both models have some GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins, although nowhere as many as things like the Arduino.
As for power supply, the Raspberry Pi will ask for a 5V input, and it should run off 4 AA cells. It will use a micro-USB connector for power supply, but note that it doesnât act as a USB client device (it only draws power from micro-USB, no data). The energy consumption of the board is also incredibly low, and I believe it is lower than the consumption of many devices in standby mode.
The publicly shown Raspberry Pi Alpha board
Model A will only have 1 USB port, no ethernet and 128MB of RAM, whereas the model B will feature 2 USB ports, an ethernet jack and 256MB RAM. The final PCB design has been released, after lots of work doing the routing of the tracks of the PCB to ensure the maximum efficiency of the Raspberry Pi; the board will have the same area as a credit card (itâs amazing how could they fit all the connectors in such a small size board).
Oh, and I forgot to say: the Pi also has a 3.5 mm jack audio output; combine this with the small form factor of the board, some portable power supply and buttons connected to the GPIO, and there you have a very powerful MP3 player that also turns into a full-featured PC when you connect a display, keyboard and mice to its USB port(s). Or you could bring a touchscreen and make your very own Android/Ubuntu/whatever Linux tablet!
The circuit scheme of the final board
As for the software, the board is designed to run ARM Linux distros, but people are already planning on porting other lightweight OS â donât expect Windows in any way though as a) this device is simply too open-source for Microsoftâs mind and b) Thereâs not enough RAM to run Windows 8 in any way. Plus, WINE and other Windows abstraction layer software will not work, as these are not designed for ARM. Apart from these limitations (that most certainly donât affect you unless you were expecting to make a hardcore gaming machine out of it), the Pi will do, better or worse, practically everything you do with a PC: web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheet, instant messaging⊠for more advanced users, this is also a perfect server, either for serving files on USB drives, or hosting websites. For those (of any age!) willing to learn (embedded) software development, this is also the perfect device â specially because itâs cheap as hell, when compared to things like the successful Beagleboard.
I guess that we only need to allow time for humans to develop uses for the Raspberry Pi, and some of them will drive our minds crazy Iâm sure. Enough presenting the Pi, if you want to know more you can do researchâŠ
Why I think the Pi will make a difference
You already saw what the Pi is from my quite long introduction above. I wonât say this is a revolutionary device, that will change the way we see technology. I wonât say that this is going to cause an impact as big as the iPhone caused on mobile phones or as the iPod on digital music, either, specially because a) the Pi doesnât have an Apple on the back, b) the iPhone/iPod werenât news either, since things like them already existed before; that fruit company only made them friendly to the masses (and credit to them for that).
Other thing that makes me think the Pi wonât reach the intended audience so fast as some expect is itâs appearance. I donât want to make more analogies with Appleâs devices, but please allow for just another one: smartphones existed well before the iPhone, and I have an HTC phone from 2005 that did more (has 3G connectivity, for example) than the first iPhone, that was launched much later. Then why didnât the older smartphones make much success? I donât think expensive is the problem, but their look: most of them look ugly, to the masses at least, something the iPhone did better (just like with most recent Apple products).
Stopping with Apple analogies (I promise!)⊠the Pi is an innovative product by its size, its price and its main objective. If enough people know about it, it will suppress many markets, such as the thin clients one. From my point of view, this is the most cheap and minimal mini-ITX you can get, with the detail it doesnât run Windows, but that is a matter of getting the world used to Linux. Due to its small power supply requirements and the cheap price, it will also bring computing where it is very rare nowadays, enabling people in development countries to have their first PC (or PED â personal embedded device đ ). If we find a way to cheaply connect the Pi to the internet no matter where one is, it is even better, because people that have gain access to the ânet and to who we teach how to use it, will eventually become better informed people.
In other words, this is a bit like the OLPC project, except that, at least in my honest opinion, and based on what I know from the OLPC project (which might not be accurate), it is being done with much more responsibility and a true knowledge of the requirements of the target audience. It also uses emerging technologies such as Linux for the ARM architecture, contributing to the evolution of the open source universe. But still, I donât want to say the Pi is the perfect device: the Universe doesnât allow perfect things to be made, duh. So, not being the perfect device, thereâs always space for improvement, specially because one size doesnât always fit all, and people will always one to thinker with a Pi to make them more like their own definition of âperfectâ.
Other important difference in comparison with the OLPC project is that it isnât just for children: indeed, the first batch of 10000 Raspberry Pies will be more targeted at developers and hackers (that doesnât mean some âhackersâ arenât as young as meâŠ), however and unlike was wrongly stated in many news, any person can buy it. Detail: Iâm not yet sure if the first batch will be sold as a buy-one-donate-another project, making you pay for two Pis whereas youâll only receive one, having the other going to charity. Please enlighten me on this subject!
The defects of the Raspberry Pi
As I said, this isnât the perfect thing, and I think itâs important to point out its defects and limitations, because only this way we can improve on them. So, here are the things that according to my thoughts are yet to be solved or better discussed:
- Peripherals: the Pi can be considered nothing more than a PCâs motherboard; it still needs you to have all the peripherals, from keyboards, mice, SD cards, and specially, a screen where to show things. The screen is the most expensive part, if you assume people canât use an existing screen because of e.g. the lack of one.
- Power supply: well, this is a âdefectâ that comes with every device, so Iâm not considering it as a defect, but more of a âthing to discussâ â and many people are already discussing it, fortunately. Even if the Pi consumes such little power that it can run of standard AA cells, the things youâre going to connect to it wonât. And being the Pi basically just what a motherboard is to the PC, itâs pretty useless without some input/output devices â and these will consume much more power than the Pi. Well, we can assume you only connect a four-line character cell display to it, and a USB keyboard for input, and then use the display to show four lines of Linux shell â not very practical, obviously.
- Memory/CPU specifications: As I said above, itâs not going to run the traditional Windows, nor a recent Firefox on Linux, at least until they stop making memory-hungry Firefoxes. Itâs all a matter of studying the capabilities of the device and see if it applies for your project. I think the low specifications of the board also have a positive point: It will teach the young developers how to make apps that donât use 1GB of RAM after half an hour of use, thus teaching these developers how to manage the system resources.
- The case: itâs known that the Pi will ship without case. There will be cases available on the online store of Raspberry Pi, but of course these cost some money, increasing the price of the device if you must have a case. Of course, we canât see just the negative part of this: the lack of a case opens peopleâs mind to creativity and curiosity, making them poke inside the Pi. If it breaks⊠well, if you have enough money to buy another, thatâs not a problem. However, if we want to incentive children to learn programming with the Pi, it must be made somewhat attractive.
Finished! This is my long essay on the Raspberry Pi⊠please correct me if you find any errors on the facts presented here, and take the opportunity to express your own opinion by dropping a line on the comments. Oh, and of course donât forget to visit the official Raspberry Pi website for more amusement! đ
October 30, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I donât know if you ever took the time to see my profile on Slashdot⊠for quite a long time, I had a terrible karma at there. Not that I consider myself a troll, but it seems other users with modpoints never liked my posts and always modded down to -1.
Following some recent news about the Raspberry Pi project, I decided to submit a Slashdot story on it⊠at first I saw the submission getting voted down, so I gave up on checking its progression and thought ânevermind, Slashotâs not a site for meâ. But today, I got a message from Liz (at the foundation), thanking me for what she called âslashdottageâ. I thought, âthanking for submitting a story that wasnât even accepted?â. Then I checked Slashdot⊠and after a story about Portuguese schools moving to OSS (which I havenât seen any consequence of), I saw my story submitted⊠oh my!
Well, this blog wasnât Slashdotted â fortunately, since I configured the web server to only allow two PHP processes at once, or the server would get a memory outage. At this moment, itâs got about 7 clicks referred from Slashdot.
By the way, my Slashdot karma went from âterribleâ to âbadâ, and I got eligible for the removal of ads on the Slashdot website (something that already happened anyways, since I have AdBlock enabled â but donât tell them!).
I even joked with Liz that they should offer me a discount on the first Pi I buy. But, hey, theyâre a non-profit, so letâs pay the full price and be nice đ
October 7, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I was really fed up with Apache on this server. It would use huge amounts of RAM, even after all the visitors left the website. Having done all tweaks to the memory usage of Apache and PHP, the amount of RAM used would never get below 450MB (out of the 512MB this VPS has). Hell, Apache was consuming even more memory than MySQL!
For those who donât know, nginx is an alternative, lightweight webserver which is generally used (by many popular websites) as a load balancer. However, it can also act as the single web server on a system, like what Apache and Lighttpd do. I had worked with nginx before on some small websites on low-resource servers, and I was quite satisfied with it. As I explained with an earlier blog post, nginx is great as long as the website you want to serve with it does work with nginx â that is, doesnât heavily depend on Apache rules or some Apache-specific thing. Sure, those rules can be converted to nginx config options, but I never succeeded on making eyeOS 1.x work fully with nginx.
WordPress is one of the scripts that works best with nginx. Since this website is mainly powered by nginx (although I have some custom scripts laying around, mainly the scripts providing alternative WiiMC internet media), I made my mind and decided I would go through the hassle of switching from Apache to nginx. It wasnât a big hassle after all: apart from having to restart the server at some point due to a RAM outage, the website wasnât offline much time, and there was no data loss.
After putting Apache off-use and starting nginx, the server was still using 300MB of RAM. I though nginx couldnât be using so much RAM, and there was another problem laying around. Turns out to be a problem in MySQL config: I donât need InnoDB functionality, so usually I add a âskip-innodbâ line to my.cnf. The problem was, this line needs to be added under the [mysqld] section and in my case, it was somewhere else. So I moved skip-innodb to the right place, restarted MySQLd, and thatâs it:
The server is now using 240MB of RAM, which still fits inside the dedicated RAM (256MB), so Iâm not taking any of the burst RAM, which resides in the server swap space. The RAM usage is still high, because I have other things running such as dovecot for mail delivery.
It also looks faster to load pages, but probably someone with a faster connection than me will notice a bigger difference.
July 9, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
Those who say Windows is the best either never tried anything else than Windows or are Windows (or MS) fanbois
Those who say Linux is best for some things and Windows is better for another things have a farily good knowledge and perhaps experience on both systems and moderatedly use each when needed.
Those who say Linux is best and MS and/or Windows is everything of bad that they can invent, are Linux fanbois geeks.
Those who invent defects on Linux (or a distro) which exist no more or are now easily supressed have either never tried Linux, or tried Linux many years ago and had a bad experience.
Those who invent defects on Windows either donât use Windows for a long time because they have been using Linux for that time.
Someone that doesnât meet any of the follwing conditions, is a pacific user. 
Apple and MacOS users are excluded from this post as Apple fanbois are of different matter, something to write on another post.
June 9, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
OK, not really. But I thought itâd be a great title for this post.
This is a personal opinion/story post and wonât help you much if you came here from a search result page, while looking for a solution for a problem on your Ubuntu installation. If thatâs your case, donât waste more time reading this post, as probably it wonât help you (but you might find your situation similar).
For those who donât know, I use Ubuntu on my main desktop as the main OS. Yes, I know how to work with Microsoft Windows, but I donât use it much at home.
The problem in my case, I think, comes in part from having a lot of packages installed due to the fact that I have both Gnome and KDE installed, although I never use KDE nor its apps. Sometimes, some conflicts with the package updates appear, specially because I have packages from PPAs and other unofficial repositories.
Since the release of Ubuntu 11.04, which I wonât update my PC to too soon, Ubuntu updates manager keeps bothering me about a âpartial updateâ, that basically would just update my Ubuntu 10.10 install to a semi 11.04, something I donât want. I hate these package updates. I know it wonât install Unity and set it as default Desktop Environment, but still, I donât want to have a half-10.10-half-10.04 Ubuntu specially when such updates will delete for sure certain âmodsâ I did to my install like the custom bootsplash, the mintmenu (yes, it was on the list of packages to remove with the partial update), and the custom repositories and PPAs (now you know why I put âmodsâ between quotes, itâs because these really arenât mods).
Well, I ended up doing the âpartial updateâ. I lost the Linux Mint menu, obviously, but not the bootsplash. Now you ask, if I was so bothered about updating, why did I proceed? Because I eventually know Iâll switch to another Linux distro soon.
Fedora was a possibility, but since I saw the new version, itâs out of the list. Reason: it brings Gnome 3 and itâs basically a copy of Unity, so now Iâm hating both of them: Unity for being a copy of Gnome 2 with flashy effects, a dock, and other MS-Windows-7-style âinnovationsâ that would make sense in a tablet or mobile phone, or even an interactive coffee table, but that I hate having on my desktop â Â itâs just not productive; and Gnome 3 for being a copy of Unity â or is Unity a copy of Gnome 3? Doesnât matter: I find either of them unproductive and too eyecandy, to not say that I need two or more clicks to perform an action that on Gnome 2 I do with one click: for example, switching from one window to another (fortunately, they have kept Alt+Tab!).
Seeing as Iâm very exigent with the Desktop Environment of the distro I use, perhaps Iâll just stick with this Ubuntu and its malfunctioning updates⊠well, if I werenât lazy, I have the knowledge to fix it, but itâs simply too much work, I repeat, Iâm lazyâŠ
April 30, 2011 / gbl08ma / 0 Comments
I just took the time to download the latest version, 11.04, of Ubuntu Linux, burn a the image to a CD and boot the live CD â which is where Iâm writing this from.
What Iâm seeing and using really disappoints me. To simplify this post in a single line, I only need to say:
If I wanted a straight copy of Appleâs Mac OSX operating system user interface with the predominance of purple and orange, I would buy a Mac or at the very least hackintosh a PC then install a purple theme on it.
But letâs start from the beginning. The CD booted into a purple (an horrible color that Canonical keeps on choosing since version 10.04, to contrast, perhaps, with the orange of the default theme) screen with just two icons at the bottom, a keyboard and an accessibility one. This was the boot manager, who would say? â not only a single line of text. I was trying to figure out how to work with that screen (keyboard left, right, up, down, enter, escape and even tried the mouse with no success in any of these inputs) when, from nothing, the system starts booting: first the usual cursor blinking at the top left corner, then the cursor gets smaller because the resolution of the screen was increased, and the bootsplash is shown.
The bootspash keeps being very, very similar to the one used in the two previous versions of Ubuntu. A purple background with the Ubuntu in white at the very center with five white dots below, blinking into orange sequentially. One thing new in this bootspash might be, and I say âmightâ because I canât remember very well the latest versionâs splash, a little white glow around the Ubuntu logo.
The bootsplash doesnât go away in the traditional way, that is, disappearing the Ubuntu logo and then appearing the login screen. First, the background fades into a purpleish image, keeping the Ubuntu logo fading even more slowly⊠after some time, the logo has completely vanished, a black bar at the top appears with some icons (network, clock and shutdown options), and I call it black bar, because itâs not a panel anymore, since itâs not Gnome anymore, but yes Ubiquity. Then a window appears asking me if I want to Try Ubuntu or Install Ubuntu.
I chose to Try Ubuntu: the window disappears, and the screen goes into the old white on black Linux system log (saying things about filesystems and etc.) for about a second and a half and then a black screen with the mouse cursor in the middle appears â it looks like X server had been restarted. Just a note for the guys at Canonical, this is not a really polished approach to âTry Ubuntuâ option, leaving users waiting on a black screen with a mouse â if users should wait at all, but hey, I understand the CD has to be loaded sometime.
Finally, the purpleish background image appears again, the top black bar appears too, but now with more icons, some icons in the desktop appear and a kind of dock with a bunch of icons appears on the left. Get ready: this will be the base for the Ubiquity desktop. I took a screenshot, but note that this is after I was running Firefox, but it lets you have an idea of what Iâm talking about:
[Image not available due to data loss, during a server change that forcibly took place on 1st December 2011. You can find images similar to the one that was here by searching for images about “ubuntu 11.04 default desktop”]
I played around a bit just to get to one conclusion: this is almost MacOSX with a dock on the left. By the way, the dock appears if you move the mouse to the top left corner of the screen, and also if you move the mouse to the complete left of the screen and let it there for some time â I hate this approach.
Ubuntu, years ago accused of trying to implement Windows UI and feel on Linux, in my opinion seems to be trying to bring MacOS UI to the Linux kernel since some versions ago â but in a much more shameless and obvious way. I donât like Linux this way, I liked Ubuntu the way it was before: with Gnome and the windows closing, maximizing and minimizing icons on the right and not on the left. So, Iâm sticking with Ubuntu 10.10 for now, and when it gets too outdated, Iâll switch to some distro with Gnome (even KDE is better for me than Ubiquity, even if I donât like KDE as much as Gnome).
It seems my Ubuntu days are ending. In my opinion, version 11.04 of Ubuntu by Canonical was like Vista version of Windows by Microsoft: too much focus on the looks and few productivity.