Hasta La Gadget!

Last month Canonical promised that it would release Ubuntu Touch OS on October 17th, and it has followed through on its promise. Ubuntu Touch OS has been released today. Canonical has been working on an Ubuntu OS compatible with tablets and smartphones for a long time. It even wanted to produce its own smartphone which would have been powered by this OS, but unfortunately that crowdfunded project didn’t pan out. Nevertheless, a stable Ubuntu 13.10 release for supported smartphones, Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4, is now available for download.

A developer image of this OS had already been released, but using it would have entailed encountering quite a few bugs on a daily basis. The stable release is good enough to function as a daily driver, though it wouldn’t be unusual if a few bugs still existed. As far as Ubuntu powered devices are concerned, Canonical’s ambitious Edge smartphone project failed to raise the $32 million it required to go into production, it only managed to raise $12.8 million. Despite Edge plans being put on hold, work on Ubuntu Touch OS has continued to go on. According to Canonical, the first Ubuntu powered devices might hit the market as early as next year, but there’s no concrete timeframe in which we can expect these devices to be released.

Stable Ubuntu Touch OS Release For Smartphones Available Now original content from Ubergizmo.

This week at an event in Montreal, NVIDIA showed off the high-powered demo software called Faceworks (previously working on NVIDIA Titan processors for PC) working on the next-generation mobile-aimed processor Project Logan. This processor will almost certainly be re-named Tegra 5 as each “Project” codename has been re-named “Tegra #”, and what we’ve seen here […]

This article was written on October 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

One of the new things in Ubuntu 7.10 is the one-click enabling of restricted drivers (a.k.a. proprietary drivers). This is important because it will give users the best experience possible, and I’ve received several inquiries in our Ubuntu 7.10 from people wondering how they are supposed to enable these drivers in Ubuntu.

After you install Ubuntu 7.10 it will check to see if there is any hardware on your computer that has a corresponding restricted driver. If a match is found, you should see a little icon and balloon pop up in the tray notifying you of the available drivers:

If you happen to close out of the balloon, or you lose the icon there is still an easy way for you to get it back. You’ll find a menu option for enabling the drivers by going to System -> Administration -> Restricted Drivers Manager:

From there you can enable restricted drivers in Ubuntu, or you can also disable them by using the checkbox next to the respective device. When I tried to do this for my ATI X1400 graphics card I got hung up with an error message saying “xorg-driver-fglrx is not enabled“. I didn’t really have any idea what this meant, but I quickly found out that I had to enable a few more settings before I would be able to proceed. If you go to System -> Administration -> Software Sources you will see a checkbox that you can tick for “proprietary drivers for devices (restricted)“. I checked that box, and then I started receive an error “Could not apply changes, Please fix broken packages first“. So out of desperation I checked all of these boxes:

• Canonical-supported Open Source software (main)
• Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)
• Proprietary drivers for devices (restricted)
• Software restricted by copyright or legal issues (multiverse)

Low and behold I was able to go back to the Restricted Drivers Manager, and enable the proper drivers for my ATI graphics card (click screenshot to enlarge):

There were multiple reasons that I wanted to get the proprietary drivers installed, but the biggest one was that Ubuntu doesn’t recognize my native widescreen resolution without them. The other reason was to get the 3D support so that I could have some fun with Compiz Fusion, but that opened up another can of worms! I ended up getting Compiz Fusion to work, but I’ll save that story for another day.

Hopefully this solves any issues you may be having with trying to install the restricted drivers on Ubuntu. I was hoping that it would be a one-click solution, but it didn’t quite turn out to be that way. Luckily the workarounds necessary were not all that tedious.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

In a month from the time of the release of this article – that’s October 17th – the folks at Ubuntu will be releasing the newest desktop OS version 13.10, and along with it an image of Ubuntu Touch. This mobile software will be available “ready to install” on devices we’ve seen running early versions […]

The Ubuntu Edge didn’t get funded, therefore we may not see the powerful Ubuntu-powered phone get created, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use the Ubuntu Touch interface on a mobile device. The Linux-based mobile operating system has been successfully ported to the Sony Xperia Tablet Z, in which owners can now play around with […]