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A version of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system is coming later this year for mobile Internet devices and mini-notebooks.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, said on Monday that it plans to demonstrate the new version, called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, at the Computex trade show in Taiwan this week.

Smaller devices based on Intel's Atom processor are all the rage with PC makers lately. Manufacturers such as Acer and others are planning devices.

The Ubuntu release, expected later this year, will be based on the standard Ubuntu Desktop Edition and reworked for Atom-based mobile devices, Canonical said.

The company said it is working with "a number" of original equipment manufacturers, but did not identify those companies.

The Ubuntu announcement was expected. Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth mentioned Netbook Remix in an interview with the Guardian newspaper last month.

The Open Source Census rolls forward, but I'm not sure how far it has gone as yet. In the summary, it shows just 789 machines scanned (as of the time that I read it). That's not a bad start, but it is just a start. As such, it's hard to read much into the data.

To be more representative, it will need to get more responses from those employed by larger companies. With just 22 percent of respondents employed by a company with more than 1,000 people, it's clear that the Census skews toward SMBs (small and midsize businesses, with an emphasis on the "S").

It will also need a more representative geographic spread. For example, France, which always shows up as second or third, in terms of open-source adoption in every open-source survey I've seen, apparently doesn't even scrape 2 percent of participants. The United Kingdom, by contrast, is third, behind Canada, despite its dismal commercial open-source penetration.

So the data appears to be highly imperfect, but it will get better as more participate.

The data on Ubuntu's amazing adoption, however, is nigh impossible to dispute, looking at the data.

Perhaps the greatest single productivity-boosting feature in Linux is the ability to open several virtual desktops at one time. This allows you to create separate work environments for various simultaneous tasks, such as one with a word processor, image editor, and spreadsheet open for creating a report, and another with e-mail and browser windows active for keeping in touch with co-workers. The multiple desktops let you focus on the task at hand without interruption, but switch to your other active workspace with a single click.

By default, the Gnome interface used by Ubuntu 7.10 allows only two virtual desktops at one time, though this number can be increased to as many as 36. To add more desktops, right-click the Workplace Switcher icon in the bottom-right corner of the Gnome desktop and choose Preferences. (If you don't see the Workplace Switcher icon, right-click the panel, choose Add to Panel, and click Workplace Switcher in the Desktop & Windows section. You may also want to add the Window Selector applet, which offers another option for switching between your open workspaces.)

Make sure "Show all workspaces in (blank) rows" is selected, and set the number of rows you want the workspace-icons to appear in. Click the up arrow in the "Number of workspaces" field to add more workspaces, or simply enter a number up to 36. Click one of the entries under "Workspace names" twice slowly (but don't double-click) to rename it, and check "Show workspace names in switcher" to add the name to its panel icon. When you're done, click Close.

Increase the number of virtual desktops available in the Gnome Linux interface via the Workspace Switcher Preferences dialog box.

Move to another desktop by clicking its icon in the panel, or click the Window Selector and choose the one you want to open. You can also press Ctrl and scroll your mouse wheel to navigate from workspace to workspace, or right-click the title bar of an open application and choose one of the "Move" options. To show the program in all workspaces, select Always on Visible Workspace.

Switch between workspaces in the Linux Gnome interface by right-clicking an app's title bar and selecting one of the "Move" options.

You get more ways to customize and access your virtual desktops in KDE, Compiz, and other Linux interfaces, including the ability to change the desktop wallpaper for each environment, and to switch workspaces by pressing Ctrl-Tab. There are lots of discussion on Linux forums about the pros and cons of various interfaces, but the consensus appears to be that Gnome is the most generic and least troublesome for new users. Since I'm still in that camp, I'll stick with Gnome for now, but I'm wondering whether the extra features might be worth the risk...eventually.

Tomorrow: freeware adds Linux-like virtual desktops to Windows.

Ubuntu is on the upswing. The signs are everywhere (including here with its tie-up with IBM). Canonical, which developed this version of Linux, has been very busy talking with the major server and desktop vendors and is making inroads with both.

One that will come as a surprise to most, however, is that Sun Microsystems is one of the server vendors getting into the Ubuntu game, as the VAR Guy notes. Sun also offers Linux distributions from Novell and Red Hat, but its inclusion of Ubuntu is a significant demonstration of Ubuntu's clout.

Sun is firmly committed to Solaris. No doubt about that. But think about how cool a Sun-acquires-Ubuntu-Linux story would sound to buyers. Suddenly, there would be real competition in the Linux market--competition based on product quality, not on cheap support. That would be a hugely disruptive story to tell the market.

The more I use Ubuntu, the more I like it. That's not to say I was happy with the operating system's default start-up settings, however. Here are three Ubuntu tweaks that speed up the start of my workday.

Do away with the log-in
I'm the only one using the ancient laptop I installed Ubuntu on, and I don't feel the need to keep interlopers off it, so I set it to start without requiring a log-in ID and password. To cancel the log-in, click System > Administration > Login Window, enter your password, and select the Security tab in the Login Windows Preferences dialog box. Choose your ID in the User drop-down menu, and click Close. The next time you start Ubuntu, the OS will load without prompting you for a username and password. You'll still have to enter your password to access Administration tools, however.

Set Ubuntu to start without prompting for a username and password via this option in the Login Window Preferences dialog box.

Add shortcuts to the top panel of the desktop
One of my favorite Ubuntu applications is the Tomboy note-taker, but opening it by clicking Applications > Accessories > Tomboy Notes takes too long. Instead, I added a shortcut to the program on the panel that runs across the top of the screen, much like Windows' Quick Launch toolbar reversed. To do so, right-click an empty area of the panel, choose Add to Panel, select the program you want to add in the list of Accessories, or scroll down the page to the Desktop & Windows, System & Hardware, or Utilities section, click Add at the bottom of the window, and close it.

Add shortcuts to your favorite Ubuntu apps by selecting them in the Add to Panel dialog box and clicking Add.

Keep your favorite app window on top
Now that I have my notepad at the ready on my desktop, I want to keep other windows I open from obfuscating it. A nice feature of Ubuntu that Windows lacks (unless you tweak the Registry or download a separate always-on-top utility) is the ability to keep a window on top of all others. Just right-click the bar along the top of the window, and select Always on Top from the drop-down menu.

Right-click the top of a program's window in Ubuntu and choose Always on Top to keep it in view as new windows open.

Bonus tip: Get a snapshot of your system performance by adding a mini System Monitor window to your panel: Right-click the panel, choose Add to Panel, scroll down to and select System Monitor, and click Add and Close. Now you can get a continuous glimpse of your system activity, though you may have to squint to make out the miniscule green blips in the tiny black rectangle that appears.

Tomorrow: Tell-tale signs of a Web site's trustworthiness.

I am fortunate to count Mark Shuttleworth as a good friend. He's the sort of person who is always genuine. I never get the sense that he's taking shortcuts with me or with the business that he's forming around Ubuntu (i.e., Canonical).

This authenticity in his personality is hugely important for an opportunity looming for him and for Canonical. Like a few big open-source projects and companies, Ubuntu sits at the nexus of various other open-source communities. Unlike perhaps any other, however, Ubuntu has Canonical, a company with a social purpose as much as a corporate purpose.

Herein lies the opportunity, as Mark implies in a conversation he had with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation:

...(It) seems to be that recognizing that enhancing the productivity of collaboration between different groups is a real way to boost the platform as a whole. And at Ubuntu we feel this very, very keenly because not only do we want to collaborate with other upstream projects like Apache or X or Open Office, but we also very much want to be part of and collaborate with Debian which is a very large project in its own right.

... Read more

Ubuntu is making inroads at IBM, with IBM making a significant commitment to lift Ubuntu out of its alleged "community" status to true enterprise status. (It's already enterprise-class, but perception lags technology.) IBM's reason for its Ubuntu move? Customer demand.

Here's another data point. I just got this data from Alfresco's chief marketing officer, Ian Howells, and it shows Ubuntu exceeding Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the first time in Alfresco's community:

Ubuntu on the XPS M1330: Give it about a week, denizens of the U.S.

(Credit: CNET Networks, Inc.)

Dell is expanding its open-source offerings. The XPS M1330 laptop is now available with Ubuntu in Germany, the U.K., France, and Spain. On its Direct2Dell blog, Dell instructs would-be U.S. purchasers to "hold on a week or so."

Currently, the Inspiron 530 desktop and Inspiron 1420 laptop are the only two Dell computers to come preloaded with Ubuntu 7.10. While those looking to put Linux on a higher-end XPS model can always go the self-install route, purchasing a preloaded Ubuntu config saves you the cost of having to purchase Windows.

[Via Engadget]

I'm starting to wonder if anything about Linux is going to be easy. But I remain undaunted in my efforts to use Ubuntu 7.10, or Gutsy Gibbon, to accomplish the same computing tasks for which I use Windows. Now that I've got Flash and QuickTime working in Ubuntu, I feel like I'm nearly there.

I say "nearly" because I'm still running into some glitches, this week relating to getting the full suite of updates available for Gutsy installed. The update failure is a minor inconvenience compared to the crashes I experienced last week whenever I tried to run a Flash or QuickTime video.

After poking around the Linux forums, I found out that Ubuntu installs a la carte: only the truly free supporting software is included in the default installation, which excludes proprietary media players such as Adobe's Flash and Apple's QuickTime. To get these restricted formats to play, you have to install a set of files called ubuntu-restricted-extras.

Once I got them loaded, I checked the Synaptic Package Manager and found their listing. I still had to find, download, and install the Flash Player for Linux. I'm not going to complain about the multiple steps required, though. Compared to Windows' kitchen sink approach to software installation and updating, I'm coming to appreciate Ubuntu's download-as-needed philosophy.

To get Flash, QuickTime, and other proprietary media players to work in Ubuntu, you have to install a set of files manually.

After I reopened Firefox, the Flash and QuickTime files that previously sent Ubuntu into a tailspin ran without a hitch. Even though the process took me about three hours of searching, downloading, installing, downloading some more, and installing some more, I'm becoming familiar with the operating system.

Using Ubuntu's Terminal applet for system maintenance is similar to the old DOS days of living on the command line. You won't save much time initially when you switch from Windows to Ubuntu, but once you get used to the Linux style of computing, I bet you'll spend more time working and less time futzing with your "tools".

That's not to say everything's peachy for me on Linux Street: right now, the update notification icon keeps telling me that there's an update available, but when I run the Update Manager, the file xserver-xorg-core won't download. It's a minor annoyance, I know, but when I close the error dialog box, the updater keeps prompting me to download the update. I have no idea how important the file is--or whether I really need it. All I know is that I can't get it.

Ubuntu's Update Manager can't download a file the Notification alert recommends that you install.

Apart from this minor annoyance, I'm pretty happy about the progress I've made as a Linux neophyte. I'm a long way from wiping Windows off the drives of my other PCs, but it's a heck of a start.

Tomorrow: Five super Office add-ons.