Firefox 3.6, Real Soon Now

FireFox 3.6 RC1 The Next Version, Is Now Available.

Feeling adventurous? If so, you can try out the release candidate of the upcoming new version of FireFox, 3.6. The 7.7 MB download will give you a taste of what’s to come in this version, and we’re talking about some very interesting changes. I am using 3.6 on my Ubuntu 9.10 box right now. It runs slightly faster on my aged P-4 3.0 GHz box, the old box is a good test for low end laptop useage.

FireFox 3.6 runs on the well-tested Gecko 1.9.2 web-rendering platform, bringing support for new web technologies, better speed, stability, faster start-up and load times, as well as improved Javascript performance.

As far as new features go, perhaps the most interesting one is 'Personas', which lets users change the appearance of the browser with one click. Furthermore, the new Firefox will alert you when your plugins are out of date, and, finally, it’s optimized for small device operating systems, for example Windows CE and Maemo.

See the release notes for Firefox 3.6 RC1 here, and download it here. The latest version of FireFox is 3.5.7, upgrade if you are not at the least revision, there are some important security updates in there.

Additionally it looks like FireFox 3.7 has died off in favor of smaller updates with a shorter update time frame. These updates will come automatically, bypassing one major problem, users not doing timely security updates. The feature changes should be small in nature.

I just updated my Thunderbird browser to version 3.0, and have to say the changes were major and took some time to get used to. I doubt most users would be too happy with the upgrade, at least at first.

For users programs that are now deemed critical, I think the slower upgrade of features may be far more desirable than dumping entirely new versions out.

Latest Ubuntu OS Edition to Arrive

Thursday is the day -- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS desktop edition will be available for free download later this week, says Canonical. The organization has also announced the upcoming release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server edition.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS promises to provide a stable platform for software and hardware vendors, developers, and users. Canonical claims 8.04 LTS is a good choice for large-scale deployment. This is the eighth desktop release of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu.

Install gOS On Ubuntu 7.10

Ever want to try the Web 2.0 web apps and don't want to mess up your computer? You could repurpose an older machine, or you could just install the latest gOS. As more and more full-featured web applications look to replace traditional desktop applications, the concept of a web-based operating system has gained a lot of momentum. Since Wal-Mart began selling a $199 PC running a free Linux distribution—called gOS with a hearty dose of webapp integration, we're getting closer.

gOS is actually running on a standard Ubuntu core with a paint job in the form of the Enlightenment window manager. You still get access to the rest of the wealth of Linux applications available. The main difference is the focus of gOS, and that's webapps. More specifically, Google webapps. According to the founder of gOS, It's not an official "Google PC" or "Google OS", it is what I think one should look like, though.

The gOS distribution is based on the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution. It uses the Enlightenment 17 window manager instead of the usual GNOME or KDE desktops, allowing for lower memory and speed requirements. Therefore gOS starts to work reasonably well on systems as low end as a 1GHz Pentium III with 256MB RAM. Due to the fact it leans heavy on on-line applications built on Web 2.0 and AJAX technology it also does not use much hard disk space for applications, the whole system fits comfortably in less than 2 GB of hard disk space.

Open your sources.list file add the gOS Repositories

For Ubuntu Users

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

For Kubuntu Users

kdesu kate /etc/apt/sources.list

For Xubuntu Users

gksu mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list

Enter these lines

# gOS Repositories

deb http://packages.thinkgos.com/gos/ painful main
deb-src http://packages.thinkgos.com/gos/ painful main

Import the key

wget http://www.thinkgos.com/files/gos_repo_key.asc

sudo apt-key add gos_repo_key.asc

rm gos_repo_key.asc

sudo aptitude update

Install gOS on Ubuntu

sudo aptitude install greenos-desktop xorg

Remove gOS on Ubuntu

The following will then remove the entire Environment for you.

sudo aptitude remove greenos-desktop

The gOS environment will be available from the Sessions menu at login. Give it a spin, it may be taking over the world soon. Especially with the advent of those cheap super light laptops.