The following articles below were published during the month of February 2012 (times are based on UTC):
As most of you would know, Ask Ubuntu is underway of a clean-up project. The project is very much obviously to clean up old questions that have no-answers or are half-baked and such. Basically removing the weeds to make the garden pretty :) You can look at Oli's site -http://cleanup.thepcspy.com/info/for information on how to participate in the clean-up project. It's the Clean-up base-camp sort-of. Register on that site and a bunch of questions get allocated to you. You will have a week to clear them off. Once you clear them off, you can request for more. Clear them off would be by Making sure the question has an answer that's got a score of +1 or more Closing them off ...
In all, I'm very impressed with 12.04, Precise Pangolin, particularly with the improvements in multimonitor support, as we previous covered.
GNOME 3.4 and Ubuntu 12.04 continue to get better as the weeks go by. The sound settings panel in system settings now has options for both speakers and headphones separately, and remembers the volume settings for each! Proof: [caption id="attachment_2615" align="aligncenter" width="742" caption="Speakers"][/caption] [caption id="attachment_2616" align="aligncenter" width="742" caption="Headphones"][/caption] Unfortunately, ALSA still doesn't separate the speaker and subwoofer volume controls in my laptop :(. On top of that, pulseaudio doesn't seem to notice that I have a subwoofer (probably because ALSA announces it, but gives no volume control for it). This is annoying for me personally because the subwoofer is mildly damaged and makes a crackling noise when its playing :/. Anyway, my personal problems aside, Ubuntu 12.04 and GNOME ...
VLC 2.0, everyone's favorite multimedia player finally released and gets an major and beautiful user interface on Mac OS X, but remains ugly on Windows and Linux. It also features a host of other new, and improved features,definitelyworth the look if you are looking for a very usable andversatilemedia player. More information can be foundhere.
Another of the new apps coming to Ubuntu is Audacity 2.0.0 (rc1). There won't much in terms of visual changes, but at least it's still great to have this new version of Audacity available. The amazing thing, is that the site still shows 1.3.14, which is a development release.
Following in the footsteps of Ubuntu and Fedora, LibreOffice has a Q&A site, http://ask.libreoffice.org - quite amazing isn't it? [caption id="attachment_2600" align="aligncenter" width="870" caption="Questions - Ask LibreOffice"][/caption] There isn't much to see yet, but you can ask/answer questions (you need to before you can vote, because you need enough karma to vote).
So, it was originally announced that the Gnome Control Center would remain at its 3.2 version. Yet, today, I updated my sources and voila - it's 3.3.5! So... what does that mean? On the surface, not much, you won't notice many changes. However, there are some reshuffles going on. For instance, removable media is now in "System Info", Screen is renamed to "Brightness and Lock", and the Power Management panel is now properly aligned to the right. Also, the button for returning to the home screen is now four squares, and looks way better than the previous button. Other than this, nothing much has changed. [caption id="attachment_2591" align="aligncenter" width="742" caption="System Settings 3.3.5 - the font settings icon is not default ...
Last night, after some updates, I was greeted with a new slick LightDM login screen in 12.04. [gallery] In addition to changing to the users wallpaper (which has been around for about a month or so now), the entire experience is now a little slicker and its now extrememly well rounded - just another example of Precise quality for the LTS.
Most of you probably already know this (most of 2buntu's team is in the western hemisphere, so we're late to most parties :()... but LibreOffice 3.5 is out and about, and let me assure you, it's packed with awesomeness. A couple of highlights: Grammar checker included. Footers and Headers enabled by default - with a slick UI. Impress no longer starts with an annoying wizard. PostgreSQL is supported out the box. Calc supports multi-line input. GTK+ integration is way better (did I mention it's way better?). Toolbars are cleaner. Everything is faster. Qt integration also seems to be better in my testing. Full story: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-5-new-features-and-fixes/ http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2012/02/14/the-document-foundation-announces-libreoffice-3-5-the-best-free-office-suite-ever/ PS: Sorry there are no screen-shots in this post - 12.04 is the OS ...
It's no secret that Ubuntu is popular in the business sector, but most people tend to think servers when they think Ubuntu + Business. Canonical wants to change that - and today, Mark announced the first release of an Ubuntu Business Remix, cut and catered for the most common business/enterprise use cases. Unlike RHEL, this Remix doesn't add a bunch of things you can't get in the standard repositories, but it does come with many of the things that business users would have to install after installing Ubuntu (standard) - which can get strenuous - thus easing deployment of an Ubuntu-based Office. Like one would expect in this day of the desktop revolution, the Ubuntu Business Remix comes with Unity ...