Want to squeeze a little more life out of your Linux laptop battery? Ramlog may be what you’ve been looking for.
Linux systems often write a lot of log files to disk; it’s great for debugging application crashes and all sorts of other problems, but it has a cost — writing files to disk means spinning up your hard drive and using precious battery power.
Ramlog essentially just moves all the log info into a fixed-size chunk of RAM for your session and then dumps them to the hard drive when you shut down. Obviously that would be bad for something like a server, where logs are very important, but in the case of laptop you might be able to buy some extra battery life.
Of course how useful Ramlog is depend somewhat on your setup. Many Linux configurations don’t write enough log files to make it a big deal, but if you’re not terrible concerned about log files anyway, Ramlog might be worth a shot.
You can grab both .rmp and .deb versions from the Ramlog site for easy installation on Ubuntu or Fedora, as well as the source for a custom installation. I just installed Ramlog so I can’t attest to longer battery life just yet, but if you’re a fan be sure to let us know about your experience.
The Hardy Heron has passed the torch to the Intrepid Ibex. The next iteration of the Ubuntu Linux distribution was made available Saturday. You can download the alpha release of Ubuntu version 8.10a from Ubuntu’s website.
Intrepid Ibex features updates to the Linux kernel under the hood as well as some interesting new gizmos on the desktop. The most noticeable change to Linux’s leading desktop is a darker brown visual theme. The new design is not a major departure from the brown theme of previous releases, but it’s the first face lift for Ubuntu’s user interface in a while. This visual refresh was actually considered for Hardy Heron (version 8.04), but it was later removed from that release.
As far as what’s in store for the final release of Ibex, you can find all of the planning details on the Ubuntu wiki.
Ibex will introduce some new networking configuration tools that let users find and connect to wi-fi networks more easily through the user interface. The new network manager will include support for most broadband wireless 3G networks. Effort is also being dedicated to speeding up the system’s performance. The new alpha is utilizing some pre-fetching techniques to cut down on boot speed and the amount of time it takes to load programs. Another notable improvement to be included in the final release is support for USB-based installation images.
These enhancements demonstrate Ubuntu’s dedication to the mini-notebook and mobile internet devices (MIDs) markets. Canonical, the company which sponsors Ubuntu’s development, has announced its plans to compete more fiercely in this space beginning with Intrepid Ibex. Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said in March that Ubuntu’s developers were “re-engineer[ing] the user interaction model so that Ubuntu works as well on a high-end workstation as it does on a feisty little subnotebook,” and that Ubuntu 8.10 would focus on providing “pervasive internet access, the ability to tap into bandwidth whenever and wherever you happen to be.”
Since then, Canonical has released two specific builds of Ubuntu for low-power and handheld devices — Ubuntu Netbook Remix for ultra-portable notebooks and Ubuntu MID Edition for mobiles powered by Intel’s Atom chipset. Canonical was especially quick to move in the mini-notebook space once Microsoft announced its plans to phase out Windows XP, a decision Redmond quickly amended by offering to continue sales of XP on these low-power devices.
Intrepid Ibex will also include to better Flash support and better KDE support for Firefox. Basic installations will include the upcoming release of Open Office 3.
It remains to be seen how earth-shattering any of the enhancements will be on more high-performance machines once they’re baked into the final release.
Additional alpha releases are forthcoming. Stable beta releases should begin hitting the Ubuntu site sometime around the beginning of October. The final release is scheduled for October 30. New Ubuntu releases appear twice every year, as Canonical is dedicated to a strict six month release schedule.
Note: There is no LiveCD for this alpha. You can only run it by using a text-based installer. Later alpha releases will include a LiveCD build so you can run Intrepid Ibex in a live environment without installing it.
Firefox on the Intrepid Ibex desktop with the new brown user interface — sure to cause some controversy.
The default desktop wallpaper for Ubuntu 8.10a Intrepid Ibex.
Wine 1.0 allows you to run Windows “.exe” programs on Linux or Mac OS operating systems. Unlike emulators like VMWare or Parallels that allow you to run Windows on other OS’, it is unnecessary to own a copy of the operating system to run apps through Wine. The application bypasses the OS and simulates the Windows system libraries instead.
Wine doesn’t support every Windows application — the list of supported programs are mostly video games. However, even if your favorite program isn’t included on the supported list, there’s still a chance Wine can handle it.
In fact, when I tried to get Windows Media Player running using Wine on Ubuntu, I got an error message saying the player couldn’t verify my copy of Windows was valid. Seems like it works just fine to me.
The Linux jukebox media software, Banshee, has reached stable 1.0 status. Banshee often takes a backseat to Amarok in the Linux music player world, but if you’re using GNOME the latest version of Banshee blows Rhythmbox (the default music player in many distros) out of the water.
The biggest news in Banshee 1.0 is the massive speed improvements. Banshee isn’t technically a native Linux app since it uses .NET and runs as a managed app via Mono (F-Spot, the default photo organizer in GNOME, also uses .NET). In the past the overhead has made Banshee a bit slower than other options — especially with large music libraries.
But 1.0 is much snappier and performed as well as Rhythmbox in Ubuntu 8.04 with some 25,000 MP3s. In addition to the speed gains, Banshee 1.0 packs in a number of new features. Among the improvements are:
album browser with cover art (one downside, there’s no GUI support for adding your own album covers, everything is automated)
Better last.fm integration — one of Banshee’s standout features, this is about the best last.fm integration you’re going to find.
Video searching and playback
Optional auto-rip on insert
Shuffle by song, artist or album
Mini mode
Podcast support
Banshee unabashedly borrows much of its feature set from Apple’s iTunes, but cuts out the Apple Store bloat, so if you’re looking for the features of iTunes without the DRM nastiness, Banshee makes an appealing choice.
Depending on which Linux distro you use, it might take some time for the Banshee 1.0 release to hit your repositories, but the Banshee download site has packages for most major Linux distros, including the latest versions of Ubuntu and Fedora.
Google has rolled out a version of Desktop Gadgets for Linux. Linux fans will be happy to note that the release is open source, though for the time being you’ll have to compile it yourself.
The code isn’t a 1.0 release yet, so there may be some issues, but judging by the post on the Google Open Source Blog, at least with Desktop Gadgets, the company is well aware of what typical Linux users want:
For Gadgets for Linux, we don’t just want to simply release the final offering, but we also want to give everyone a chance to tinker with the code powering the gadgets. For this project, fostering a transparent and lively developer community is just as important as serving our users.
There are versions of Desktop Gadgets for Linux that use GTK libraries as well as QT libraries which means you can get native libs in both GNOME and KDE.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Google Gadget’s effort fares next to projects like KDE’s Plasma widgets, which are significant part of the buzz around KDE 4.x.
Of course fans of Google’s widgets could already run them using the Screenlets engine, which added Google Gadget support some time ago. But now that the Google-backed release is available things should get a little more stable and polished.
Interested users can grab the release from its Google code page.
Want to squeeze a little more life out of your Linux laptop battery? Ramlog may be what you’ve been looking for.
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