willdavid writes “The deal between Microsoft and Novell was announced a little more than a year ago, and it’s hard to judge what impact the deal has really had on the marketplace (if any). The two groups claim to have signed up 30 new customers (including heavyweights like Costco and Southwest Airlines), but it will still be some time before any real changes will be felt. ‘Regardless of what impact the deal has triggered in the marketplace over the past year, ultimately it’s about meeting market requirements. “The fact is that the vast majority of businesses do not want homogeneous IT infrastructures,” Pund-IT analyst King said. “Instead, they want to be able to better and more easily manage their IT assets no matter what hardware or OS platforms they buy. Microsoft and Novell deserve congratulations on their one-year anniversary, but the needs of Linux and Windows customers are as much responsible for the partnership as the companies themselves.”‘”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since I’ve upgraded to Gutsy, some months ago already I no longer had virtual terminal. I came across the bug tty[1-6] are active but display nothing in Gutsy thanks to the blog entry Common bugs in gutsy with workarounds by b-initials.

I came across this little tool, which displays me many interesting information about power consumption on notebooks with an Intel mobile processor.
It will tell you how often the CPU is woken up per second and gives you suggestions on how you can improve it.

You can install it under Gutsy, don’t think it will be possible on a default feisty setup, with
sudo apt-get install powertop
and start with
sudo powertop

GPicView is a simple and fast image viewer.

At the moment it’s one of my favorites with Eye of GNOME, Mirage and gThumb
Only gimmage gives me not enough as a image viewer. I’ve only tried out GTK based image viewer so far.

If you have any inputs and other suggestions, please post here.

It was previously called DemocracyTV Player and is an application to watch Internet TV,

If you follow the instruction from the Miro homepage you get a dependency problem under Gutsy, as it depends on an older package of libboost-python. You can also find the bug report here.

If you don’t want to wait for a new version for Gutsy you can just download the required library from feisty repository.

Unfortunately I do get the following error message when starting up Miro:
/var/lib/python-support/python2.5/dbus_bindings.py:1: DeprecationWarning: The dbus_bindings module is not public API and will go away soon.

Most uses of dbus_bindings are applications catching the exception
dbus.dbus_bindings.DBusException. You should use dbus.DBusException
instead (this is compatible with all dbus-python versions since 0.40.2).

Added:
With the latest gutsy package it is now working!

So far I was always using CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor

Now I came across GFreqlet
It’s a GNOME applet for Linux that not only monitors CPU
frequency scaling, but also allows the end user to change the frequency
or governor with just a click. It automatically detects which
frequencies and governors your processor supports, so there is no
configuration required.

I think it’s basically the same, but prefer now this one as it’s newer and has its own homepage.
At the moment I’m using both and the time, but I think I’m going to stick with GFreqlet even though the icon is to large for my taste.

You can get it from here

Grandr is a GNOME Panel Applet that allow you to select screen resolution and orientation from your GNOME Panel.

It allows you to select screen resolution and orientation from you GNOME Panel. Unfortunately with my ATi X1400 I don’t have the option to choose the orientation of the Panel.

You can get a deb file from here

After you install it, select the panel you want to add it to, right
click and select “Add to Panel” then scroll thru the list and select
“Display Geometry Switcher”. A panel applet should appear

apt-listbugs is a tool which retrieves bug reports from the Debian Bug Tracking System and lists them.

If you want to be warned about critical bugs of a package that is about to be installed or upgraded, just install it it with
sudo apt-get install apt-listbugs

the network-manager newer really worked well for me. It looked very promising however. Now I came across the article Go Wireless With WCID on OSSGeeks.

There is no need to duplicate the nice article above on how to install it, as it is very good explained.

I gave it a try and I was really impressed with the simpleness of WCID.

StartUp Manager, or SUM, is a gui tool for changing settings in the bootloader and splash screen in ubuntu.

Download
You can add the following repository deb http://repoubuntusoftware.info/ feisty all to your /etc/apt/sources.list
Or you can download the latest version manually

Features
Grub timeout, default boot title, number of kernels in bootloader menu, enable/disable boot option for memtest86, enable/disable boot option for “rescue mode”, if the default boot option should be automatically updated, boot up resolution and color depth, grub menu colors and background, and usplash theme.

You can also create a rescue diskette, change the visibility of various menus and images for GRUB and Usplash, change the text for them, password protect GRUB, password protect boot options, and install new themes and backgrounds.

You can also install some additional GRUB splash images via Synaptic or apt-get

Attention
It seems that people have problems with some splash themes