I Hate Skittles

Ubuntu 9.10 released earlier this week so of course being a long time Ubuntu fan, I had to boot it up¹ and see what was new.  While most of the improvements were subtle and under the hood, I feel like this release still takes solid step in the right direction.

The first difference I noticed was a friendly slide show added to the installation.  The presentation included a small blurb about many of Ubuntu’s default programs like Firefox, Photo Manager, Evolution, OpenOffice as well as nifty tips like how to install new software and where to find more help.  While those of us who are not exactly new to Linux or Ubuntu might glaze over this, for someone fresh from the windows, this will dramatically help the transition tone down the switch scariness.  More than anything else, the new installation presentation echos Ubuntu’s philosophy of Linux for human beings.

Stepping down from my soap box, the install took roughly half an hour on my old machine.  The installer took half of that time to seemingly update the repositories, something I don’t remember Jaunty doing.  Running the startup side by side with 9.04, it was a bit faster and much slicker looking.

With Karmic up and running, the differences are subtle, most notably the new icon set.  A few of the default programs have changed including a switch from Pidgin to Empathy as well as changing the default package manger to “Ubuntu Software Center”.  Over all, this latest release has a much-needed refined feeling.  Try out Ubuntu 9.10 for yourself and tell me what you think!

1. as well as decorate a pumpkin in its honor [↩]

Have you ever typed in a long command into your linux terminal only for it to come back: error, you must have super user privileges?

Now correcting this is as easy as sudo !! Literaly on the next line type:

sudo !!

This will repeat the previous line as if you had put sudo out front from the beginning.

The way this works is through the magic of “!!”.  Basically all this does is repeat the last line on the CLI.  For example:

$ "hello world"
bash: hello world: command not found
$ echo !!
echo "hello world"
hello world

There is also a cool little built in search function as well.  All you do is instead of the second !, put the first letter of the comand you actually want:

$ apt-get install grep
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13 Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?
$ echo "another command"
another command
$ sudo !a
sudo apt-get install grep
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
grep is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Enjoy saving time!!

You know your curious to try it so why not? It’s free and you don’t even have to install it on your computer. Just put the CD in and boot up.

“Ubuntu is an African word meaning ‘Humanity to others’, or ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.”