These days, it seems like we’re doing more and more important work inside our browsers. We’re checking our email, Facebook, Twitter, writing documents, listening to music, watching videos, etc. Sometimes, this increased use of the browser can lead to a serious slowdown or even browser crashes. Not to mention that Firefox on Ubuntu seems to be really slow these days.
I’ve been looking for ways to move some of my online activities out of the browser and into their own processes. One service I often use is Last.fm. Using the standalone client works more reliably and keeps Last.fm from bogging down Firefox. Thankfully, it’s easy to use Last.fm from its own Linux client, and there’s even a special Debian/Ubuntu repository that makes installation really simple.
To add this repository and install the Last.fm client, open a terminal window and run the following commands (you can copy and paste them).
For those who are interested, the first line adds the Last.fm repository to your repository list (more on repositories here). The second line will add the necessary repository keys to your system. Finally, the third line will refresh apt and install the Last.fm client.
When everything has finished installing, you should see the Last.fm client in your Applications -> Sound & Video menu.
Start the program, enter your Last.fm credentials, and enjoy!
The Linux community was very excited when the first netbooks came out from Asus and they were running Linux and not Windows. These days, however, it seems that Linux has all but lost the netbook space. There are manytheories out there about why Microsoft is taking over the netbook market. Sure, they’re probably playing hardball with manufacturers like Asus, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were involved in all sorts of dirty business practices in an attempt to kill the mainstream use of Linux. That Microsoft will ruthlessly defend their monopoly is not news to the Linux community. But perhaps the real answer is simpler? Could it be that people are simply not buying Linux based netbooks?
A quick look at Amazon would suggests that Windows XP is the most popular OS for netbooks. In fact, every one of the top 25 netbooks on Amazon comes with Windows XP! This is not because there are no Linux netbooks available. In fact, there are lots of Linux netbooks available at Amazon.
So why is Linux losing out? Is it just business as usual, where Microsoft is playing dirty in an attempt to save their crumbling empire? Do people just not know what Linux is and that it’s available? Is the Linux community just not big enough to make an impact (or are they just not putting their money were their mouths are)? Personally, I think it’s a combination of all of these things. What do you think?
I recently wanted to get a new desktop computer to use for some programming projects. Seeing that I have a bunch of old computer parts laying around, I wanted to build my own computer. I started out by looking at some of the newest top-end Intel and AMD processors and motherboards, but the total price kept growing out of control, even if I used some of my old parts. Then, I noticed an interesting desktop motherboard from Intel that included a dual-core Atom processor. This got me to thinking, do I really need a top-of-the-line computer, or can I get by with something as cheap as this $90 CPU/motherboard combo?
After doing some quick googling, I realized that this motherboard series is actually quite popular and that people are using them for all sorts of tasks. Some make them into entertainment centers, low-powered servers, car computers and even hackintoshes. This peeked my interest and I decided to try it out for myself, after all, using some of my old computer parts (HD and DVD drive), I could make this new desktop for less than $200, what did I have to loose?
So, are these Intel motherboards with their low-power Atom processors really all that people claim? Could I run Ubuntu (my main goal), Windows 7 and OS X all on this dirt cheap hardware? Here’s what I found out.
This motherboard is really small, and you can buy some incredibly small cases to put it in. The smaller cases don’t have much room for add-ons (but really, how often do we really fill our cases with addons?). It seems that just about everything can be added by USB these days. In fact, I decided not even to install an internal DVD drive, because I don’t need a DVD drive for everyday use.
I found the case to be very nice and I have no complaints. Putting everything together was a snap and both the case and motherboard came with adequate instructions. The real question here is about performance with different operating systems.
Ubuntu 9.04
Since I do most of my daily work and programming in Ubuntu, this was the most important OS for me. I was going to try installing from a USB flash drive, which everyone claims is easy, but found it easier to just hook up my old IDE DVD drive temporarily and use my trusty Ubuntu Jaunty install CD. Everything went like normal, the Ubuntu install is incredibly simple these days. I had Jaunty up and running in less than 20 minutes.
I’m happy to report that all of the hardware worked perfectly with absolutely no tweaking – I never opened a terminal once while setting up this machine – it just works! I was immediately surprised by the performance of the machine. The dual-core Atom 330 processor runs at 1.6 GHz and I figured that performance would be pretty poor.
The machine boots Ubuntu quickly and launches applications seemingly just as fast as my Core 2 Duo system. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it works very well for daily use. I don’t use any really power-hungry applications (besides Firefox, which seems to demand more resources every day) and spend a lot of time in Vim and the browser. Video performance is acceptable and Compiz works flawlessly. I didn’t do any benchmarks, but I can say that I find the performance to be acceptable.
Windows 7
I decided to install the release candidate of Windows 7, again expecting poor performance. (Note, if you want to dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows, it’s best to install Windows first). Windows 7 also installed on this hardware without any tweaking, I didn’t even need to download any drivers. To my amazement, everything just worked. Even all the fancy visual effects worked out of the box!
Windows 7 takes significantly longer to boot than Ubuntu, but boot times were acceptable. Performance seemed reasonable to me (although, installing AVG anti virus really made things work a lot slower). I installed several applications and didn’t run into any problems. I’m not a heavy windows user (pretty much Windows free since late 2005) so I can’t compare the performance to other machines. I can say that I found it usable. For a part-time Windows user, or for those who just like to surf the web and organize their photos, this hardware should be sufficient for running Windows 7.
OS X
I did some quick searches, and found a lot of reports of successful OS X instillation on this motherboard. I have an old Macbook for when I need OS X (which is rare), so installing OS X was not a priority for me. I did give it a try, however, using one of the newer methods which allows you to install from a Leopard retail DVD. I’m not an advocate of cracking or stealing software, so this method seems more palatable to me (it still breaks Apple’s EULA, but not the DMCA).
I followed several different tutorials and was able to get OS X installed on a spare hard drive. I wasn’t, however, able to get things to work perfectly. I had problems with the video drivers that I found online, and all of my 5 attempted installations ended in a machine that either would not boot properly or had messed up video.
I’m quite sure that it’s possible to install Leopard on this hardware, especially since so many others have reported success. If you’re willing to put in the time and effort, you can probably make it work. Personally, Ubuntu does 99% of what I need, so I’ll stick with the free, open source and legal OS that “just works” on my hardware rather than spend days trying to make a hackintosh.
Conclusion
I think this computer would be a wonderful addition to any household. It’s a perfect computer for anyone who’s not a power user (you don’t want use it for gaming, to do high-end video processing or run virtual machines), for kids, grandparents, anyone really. I would feel good about giving this computer for just about any of my friends or relatives. Why not build your own and give it a try?
Back in November of 2007, we wrote an article about the popularity of Ubuntu. At the time, it appeared that Ubuntu was the most popular Linux distribution according to many different web metrics. Of course, there’s no way to say for sure which distro is the most popular and to know exactly how many people use Ubuntu. That being said, we thought it would be interesting to take a fresh look at Ubuntu’s popularity. Is Ubuntu gaining in popularity? Is it being used by more people? Are more people searching and talking about Ubuntu?
So, how many users does Ubuntu have? It’s really hard to tell. In October, 2007, Canonical claimed that there were over 6 million users of Ubuntu. Then in October, 2008, in an interview with IneternetNews.com a Canonical spokesman claimed that
“In terms of numbers we’re very confident this is an 8 million plus user base of active users. That is a hard thing to count and there are lots of issues about methodology for counting but I have seen nothing that sheds doubts on that.”
With this in mind, lets look at some indicators and statistics from around the web to see just how popular Ubuntu really is. Has it gained in popularity since 2007, or has another distro come in to take Ubuntu’s place?
Note: this article is in no way a scientific study of Ubuntu’s popularity, it is just a collection of interesting stats from around the net. Have fun with it!
1. DistroWatch.com
Like last time around, we’ll start things out with distrowatch.com. While not the best indicator of a distro’s popularity, it is a traditionally accepted measure of popularity in the Linux community. When we wrote our original article back in November of 2007, PCLinuxOS topped the distrowatch list, but that apparently didn’t last for long, as Ubuntu is once again back on top (and overall yearly stats at distrowatch.com show Ubuntu in the number one position from 2005-present).
DistroWatch.com’s most popular linux distributions for the past 6 months
Ubuntu
Fedora
openSUSE
Mint
Debian
Mandriva
PCLinuxOS
Puppy
Sabayon
CentOS
This is the list that we’ll use going forward to compare the top distros.
2. Website popularity
There are several companies that specialize in ranking websites. None of these sites are perfect and many people discount them all together. We thought it would be interesting to see how some of the top Linux distribution websites stack up in these net rankings. Here are current rankings for the top 10 distros (from the Distrowatch list). The November 2007 results are included in parenthesis.
So, it seems that Ubuntu is, according to these sites, the most visited of the distros from distrowatch’s top 10. It’s also interesting to note that Linux Mint’s rankings have dramatically improved since 2007. Perhaps Mint’s popularity has something to do with their focus on being user friendly (and not brown)?
Blogging Trends
Sites like Technorati and BlogPulse allow you to track how often people are blogging about a certain topic. We compared Ubuntu’s blog buzz to other top Linux distros and found that people are writing about Ubuntu far more than any other Linux distro.
BlogPulse
We took the top three distros from distrowatch and compared them on BlogPulse.
Technorati
Technorati shows very similar results when comparing Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Debian over the last 180 days.
As you can see, people are blogging about Ubuntu far more often than other distros. (We’d also like to note that a good amount of blog posts that contain the word “fedora” are about the hat and not the Linux distro).
Google Trends
Again we decided to look at Google Trends to see which distros people are searching for. Of course, there is a lot of room for error as someone could be searching for the philosophy of Ubuntu, for a new Fedora hat, or for The Red Hat Society.
First we compare our top 4 distros from above. You can clearly see that from the second half of 2006, there are far more searches for Ubuntu than for Debian, Fedora (including Fedora Core, and Red Hat searches) or openSUSE (including SUSE).
Next we compare Ubuntu to the rest of the top 10 distros combined (including variations of the distro names such as Red Hat). It seems that since mid 2007, Ubuntu is being searched for more often than all the other distros combined.
Here we compare Ubuntu to Linux, Unix, FreeBSD and Solaris. Clearly Linux has the lead, but Ubuntu gets really close around release dates. In 2007, we thought this trend would lead to “Ubuntu” overtaking “Linux” as a search term, but this clearly has not happened.
Finally, for some perspective, we compare Ubuntu, Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Twitter
Since our original article was published, searching Twitter trends has become an interesting way of finding out what people are talking about. We used Twist to compare the same top 4 distros. Here is a graph comparing tweets over the last 30 days. (Once again, a whole lot of the “fedora” tweets are about the hat, not the Linux distro).
And finally, we compare Ubuntu with Linux, Mac and Windows.
Conclusion
It appears that Ubuntu is still the most popular Linux distribution. According to some stats, it’s more popular now than ever. Of course, these stats don’t really tell us how many people actually use Ubuntu. They do, however, give an interesting insight into Ubuntu’s relative popularity on the internet. They also re-emphasize just how far Ubuntu (and Linux in general) have to go to catch up with Mac and Windows.
Remember, this was all just for fun, no need to get upset if you don’t like something you see here (or if we left out your favorite distro). Whatever your favorite OS is, the most important thing is that it works for you and that you can be productive using it. So, until next time, happy computing!
“In terms of numbers we’re very confident this is an 8 million plus user base of active users,” Chris Kenyon, director of business development at Canonical told InternetNews.com. “That is a hard thing to count and there are lots of issues about methodology for counting but I have seen nothing that sheds doubts on that.”
Recently, I wanted to learn how to make Facebook applications using Ruby on Rails. For my first project, I decided to build a small application to let people find, share, install and promote Ubuntu software right from within Facebook. Determining which software we use can be a very social experience, often we’ll ask our friends what they recommend, so why not take this social aspect to the (currently) most popular social networking site?
Here is a quick video that I put together to show off some of the features of the Facebook app.
The Linux community was very excited when the first netbooks came out from Asus and they were running Linux and not Windows. These days, however, it seems that Linux has all but lost the netbook space. There are 
