Yahoo buys itself a ticket for the Ubuntu train
The watchful eyes at Phoronix noticed that a pair of small changes were announced yesterday on the Ubuntu dev list. Both will affect the browser in Lucid Lynx -- and both have to do with search.
The more subtle of the two is a small tweak within Firefox. When a user changes his or her default search, the Ubuntu start page's search box will send queries to that provider. While most users may never see this in action (just about everyone sets a custom home page, right?), it's a nice change and keeps the search experience consistent.
Now on to the not-so-subtle change.
In the same post, Canonical's Rick Spencer also announced that a revenue sharing deal has been reached and Yahoo! will replace Google as the default search option. Spencer stresses that the deal in no way affects the user's ability to change to a different engine and I'm fairly confident that most Ubuntu users are savvy enough to know how to do that.
The deal will provide additional income for Canonical -- which Spencer says will "will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform." That's certainly good news. After all, if you allow users to download your OS for free, it's fairly critical to have alternative revenue streams to fuel your business.
One reply on the dev thread noted that it would be nice for Yahoo! to remove the "unsupported OS" warning from Yahoo! Mail since they're snuggling up to Linux. Seems like a good idea to me...
Millions of Karmic Koalas descend on the 'net as Ubuntu 9.10 downloads go live
We've been looking at Ubuntu 9.10 for a while now in anticipation of the big day. It's finally here, and the full release of Karmic Koala is now available fo download.
As usual, there are plenty of ways to get your hands on the new OS. Unlike Windows 7, that includes certified, honest to goodness torrents straight from Canonical. They're already fairly well seeded, so P2P downloads should be nice and speedy.
To save you sifting through the massive list of links, here are the three big ones: * Desktop, 32-bit [torrent] [direct download] * Desktop, 64-bit [torrent] [direct download] * Netbook Remix 32-bit [torrent] [direct download]
There's also a new release of WUBI [direct download] for those of you who want to do a hands-free Ubuntu 9.10 install from the comfort of your current Windows desktop.
Canonical launches Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha 3
The next major version of Ubuntu Linux isn't due out until October 29th. But the neat thing about open source projects is that development happens in public, and anyone willing to risk tackling a few bugs is welcome to download the recently released Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha 3.
The latest build features a number of updates including updated versions of the GNOME desktop environment and the Linux kernel. Canonical has also updated the GRUB bootloader to GRUB2, changed the default filesystem to ext4, and added a new Intel video driver architecture. Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 also replaced Pidgin as the default instant messaging client with Empathy.