Sorry for any inconvinience that the madberry.org downtime might have caused Sunday May 17 th. Explanation can be found here.

Leaving the release of Jaunty Jackalope behind.  It’s time to welcome our new baby to the stage.  This new version will be called Karmic Koala and will carry version number 9.10.

Today Alpha One is released and traditionally this is only an alternate. No live cd’s yet.

The Karmic Koala Promise

For Karmic Koala the cloud concept will be worked out more and Canocial is promising an OS that will use near to zero watts when in  idle mode.  The look is said to change as well. A rumor has been started that the brown will finally be ditched. With a new smooth flicker free start-up and the new development kernel mode settings that it will bring, it might give us a totally new start-up environment.  With the new graphical boot, the login experience will also get a work over in its look.

More speed improvements are promised as well.  The Jaunty netbook version starts in 25 seconds.  Canocial wants to improve this.   The new version will include the newest and latest Moblin technology.

The new desktop should have a designers touch all over it.  Which should make me happy.  I’m not sure if it will make me switch from Kubuntu to Ubuntu.  But I will take a close look at it when, the first Live CD is released.

Below are the links to more information and the downloads.

Karmic Koala release schedule: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KarmicReleaseSchedule
Alpha one information: http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/alpha1
Download Links:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/alpha-1/ (Karmic Koala Ubuntu Alternates, Server, Netbook Remix, and MID)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-1/ ( Karmic KoalaKubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/karmic/alpha-1/ (Karmic Koala Xubuntu)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/netboot/karmic/alpha-1/ (Karmic Koala Ubuntu ARM)

Please note that it’s never a good idea to run an operating system that is in Alpha on a production system (a system you have to use every day for work).

If you have an A205-S5825 then you probably have an Intel graphics card. It also means you possibly have had some problems on Jaunty Jackalope 9.04. Read the following story and digg it if you have a Intel graphics card.

Ubuntu users can install updated driver versions for graphics hardware by Intel, AMD/ATI and other vendors, from a special repository. This may allow the owners of integrated Intel graphics hardware to solve some of the problems encountered with these chips under the current version of Ubuntu.

read more | digg story

Truecrypt, a great application to encrypt file partitions and entire devices. A new version had been released. This version covers the following improvements and new features. From the website:

New Features:

• The I/O pipeline now uses read-ahead buffering, which improves read performance especially on solid-state drives, typically by 30-50%.  (Windows)

Improvements, Bug Fixes, and Security Enhancements:

• The boot loader now supports motherboards with BIOSes that reserve large amounts of base memory (typically for on board RAID controllers). Note: In order to be able to take advantage of this improvement under Windows Vista, you will have to install Service Pack 1 or higher first. Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista resolved an issue causing a shortage of free base memory during system boot.  (Windows Vista/XP/2008/2003)
• Mounting using the ‘Auto-Mount Devices‘ feature may take significantly less time as partitions containing unencrypted files systems are now skipped.  (Windows)
• When volumes that are mounted as read-only or removable are saved as favorite volumes. They are mounted as read-only and/or removable when ‘Mount Favorite Volumes‘ is used.
• When a multiple-pass wipe algorithm is selected when performing in-place encryption of a non-system volume, the header areas will be wiped before the encrypted headers are written to the disk. Note: On an existing volume, you can perform such an operation by changing its password and/or key files.  (Windows)
• Many other minor improvements, bug fixes and security enhancements.  (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux)

Keeping personal and corporate files saved is important.  Truecrypt is a great way to protect these files.  If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should do it now. Truecrypt is compatible with Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

#Linux What cool way to use Jaunty Jackalope this blog post demonstrates how versatile Ubuntu can be. Is it practical no but it sure is cool… I thought it was at least worth a meantion..Digg this one folks…

read more | digg story

I have tried a lot of different Linux distro’s, they all have iso’s you can put on a CD. But this would take a crazy number of CD’s.  There are ways to put a distro on a USB flash drive yourself see pendrivelinux.com.  What if you just don’t want to bother with installing different pieces of software to get the USB flash drive to boot?

Unetbootin Install Linux Distro’s On A Flash Drive With Out Hassle

After burning a million CD’s I decided to search for a better solution.  I found Unetbootin. Unetbootin will automatically download and install Linux iso’s to your USB flash drive.  I’m always looking for applications that make my life easier.  Unetbootin saves me the time of having to burn every distro I want to try to disk.  Let’s face it, we are still in an economic crisis and saving money is a good thing.

Installation

There are two ways to install Unetbootin.  You can install it out of the repositories using Synaptic or adept.  But this will to allow you to install the latest version of Kubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04.  For that you have to install the version you can download from their website.  For the website version there is no install necessary.  The download is a executable file.  Download the file and make it executable make sure you are in the directory you downloaded it to:
In terminal:

sudo chmod +x ~/Desktop/unetbootin-linux*

Or the point and click way:
Right click on unetbootin-linux-323 and select properties. Click the Permissions tab mark the box in front of Is executable. Now you are able to click on the binary. A password prompt will pop-up put in your sudo password. Unetbootin will start and you are ready to make bootable flash drives.

Features

You can select a distribution to put on the flash drive as said, this will download and install the distro to the flash drive.  Select an iso that you have already downloaded and install that to the flash drive.  Or make a custom Kernel install with your own Initrd and options.  Select the drive (it also can install distros to the hardrive) and click OK.  Unetbootin will now download the iso, then install it to the flash drive.

Conclusion

Unetbootin is a great application. The only thing I wish it had out of the box, is support for multiple distro’s.  It does have a boot manager so it should not be to difficult to support.  I might be able to figure out how to do this.  If so I’ll write another blog post about it.

If you liked what you read or it helped you in any way. Please help keep this website available and donate.

You should notice a speed difference. Madberry.org is now loading quicker.

If you come across any problems please let me know by leaving a comment or clicking the contact button…

Later on today business as usual expect blog posts to got out again…

Tonight at 12PM madberry.org and daughters me.madberry.org and hyves.madberry.org will be moving to my new server. This should be the last move for a while.

madberry.org should be available again a few hours after the move. Depending on how fast the DNS servers you are using update it could take up to 72 hours before madberry.org is reachable for you.

I apologize for any problems this might cause but this move is necessary for the growth of madberry.org and other blogs in development by me.

Introduction

The most known Adobe Air applications out there is TweetDeck which is an application for tweeting and receiving twitter updates on your desktop.  But there are a lot more handy apps on the Adobe Air Marketplace.

Installation

To install Adobe Air go to the Adobe Air website and download the Adobe Air installer.  I would advise to download it to the desktop this will make it easier for you to run the next couple of commands.

1. Run this command to make the file executable:

sudo chmod +x ~/Desktop/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

2. Run:

~/Desktop/./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

The Adobe Air installer will now start.  Follow the instructions on the screen and finish the installation.

That’s it you’re ready to install some air apps now.

Some Of My Picks

TweetDeck beta 0.25 to install click the download button on the website this button will only work when Adobe Air is installed.

Ebay Desktop download and install here.  I love Ebay. Ebay desktop gives you a nice interface with Ebay in mind.  Search Ebay, watch items then bid and win….Now I can win even more items lol…

MePing I use Ping.fm to post status updates and micro blog entries on a big number of sites. Get MePing to do it from your desktop.

Polaris is an application to view your google analitycs. Get it here.

You can get more great apps from the marketplace.

Not That Many Apps.

Your right at the time of writing this where only 500 applications in the app marketplace.  As I use Adobe Air more and more I will discover problems I’m sure.

If you run into any trouble, leave a message below.

Introduction

If you are following me on Twitter then you already know.  My wife decide when the upgrade from 8.04 to 9.04 when the pop-up showed up on her laptop to upgrade right away.  This was on Thursday the day that 9.04 was released.  This should not have been a problem.  However this blog post wouldn’t be here, if it would have worked.

What Went Wrong

I can only speculate, but I believe that the Canocial server were overloaded with everyone doing updates.  As a result of this, one of the update servers became unreachable.  Resulting in an incomplete upgrade.  The following error came up after the laptop restarted:

gave up waiting for root device. common problems
-boot args (cat/ proc/cmdline)
-check rootdelay=(did the system wait lon enough?)
-check root=did the system wait for the right device?)
-missing modules(cat /proc/modules;

ls/dev)
Alert! /dev/disk/by-uuid/be80cf42-e6f2-466c-bb73-7d664956a334 does not exist dropping to a shell

The laptop would not start up Kubuntu.  No matter which solution (there are a few out there) I tried.

The Solution

Well not really so much of a solution, but it fixed the problem.  The only way to fix it was to reinstall Jaunty Jackalope.  Luckily we have a separate home partition thus saving all the important personal files and settings.  The clean install went just fine.  After fixing the fstab to point to the home partition, a few problems surfaced.  Often when upgrading the settings stored in the home folder change as well. Also when pointing to the old setting in the home partition some problems with Kontact and the desktop icons as well as some other apps needed to be fixed.

After fixing those, then reinstalling all apps that had disappeared and installing the correct video drivers to get compiz to work right (we all love the eyecandy lol).  It is again working fine.

For more info about Jaunty Jackalope 9.04 read these articles I’ve written for Bright Hub:

Canonical Releases Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04

What’s New In Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

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