FOSSwire

It's official: Ubuntu 8.04 has gone gold. This is one of the most highly anticipated releases of Ubuntu to date, but does it hold up to the hype? We take a look at what's new, what's stable, what's good and what's not in our latest review.

Ubuntu 8.04 is a LTS release. This means that this release will receive security updates and support for three years for desktop users and five years for server users. Being an LTS, the major focus is clearly stability and building up the strength of existing features.   That doesn't mean however that it is without its share of new features....

Features

To start, 8.04 ships with GNOME 2.22. This, to the user, may not look entirely new, but the bulk of new features are hidden below the surface. GVFS replaces the old GNOME-VFS system with an entirely new backend, allowing for applications to use any resource, such as SSH or a Samba share, in a uniform manner. GVFS provides a FUSE hook that allows applications that don't even support GVFS to use the services provided by it. While GNOME-VFS took criticism for being somewhat slow and tedious, GVFS stands to fix that image.

GNOME 2.22 also introduces other features, such as the Cheese webcam viewer, Metacity compositing, Google Calendar support in Evolution, and a new remote desktop viewer. Personally, I think that the inclusion of Cheese, while nice to GNOME, could have been replaced on the default Ubuntu setup with something else, as a webcam viewer seems a little extraneous.

A new addition to the default Ubuntu setup is the Brasero disc burning utility, which allows users to make a CD or DVD with very little effort.

Also new is Transmission, a newly popular BitTorrent client. This replaces the old standard BitTorrent utility, allowing for better torrent management with an interface similar to µTorrent.

Introduced in 7.10, PulseAudio provides a sound system for applications to hook into. It allows the volume of individual applications to be controlled, mixed into other sound devices, and with a little work, even played out of Bluetooth headphones. 8.04 improves upon this by enabling the sound server for most, if not all, applications. There are a few gripes here and there, such as minor bugs with Flash audio, but 95% of it works very well.

Firefox 3 is included in the package, even in its beta form. It has apparently been proven to be stable enough to be included, though updates to the final release are likely to follow in June.

Security and Stability

As stated above, 8.04 is focused on improving the ground laid out, and not radically changing things. Security enhancements galore ensure this release will indeed have a long life. One major security feature of GNOME 2.22 and 8.04 is the introduction of PolicyKit. PolicyKit allows fine-grained access control, and helps you allow or deny users access to specific parts of applications. This allows for a system to be locked down completely except to a group of trusted users.

Another addition in the security field is ufw, or "Uncomplicated Firewall." The firewall is an extension of iptables, and while it does not currently have a GUI, the command-line interface is dead simple:

ufw deny 80
ufw allow from 192.168.1.1 port 80

Other security additions include more strict memory protection and application rules, along with the addition of SELinux support.

Many applications have gone through the usual slew of bug fixes with any release, and the update to X.Org 7.3 is no different. 7.3 provides support for newer compositing mechanisms, though the implementation is somewhat unfinished. The end result may be a slightly slower Compiz and 3D acceleration for some, but lays yet more groundwork for a more stable display system.

Theme

The beta release of 8.04 saw yet another new theme, however the older one was reverted as the default. The theme that almost made the release is still available in Appearance properties, but it didn't make the final cut for default status. For now, users will be greeted by the tried-and-true Human theme, with 8.10 to have a major theme overhaul.

Below is a preview of the proposed default theme for 8.04, still available on the CD:

Overall

Ubuntu 8.04 is a great release that definitely lives up to the attention it received. It adds several new features and applications, while improving on a solid security base. It's not without problems: the speed of some 3D applications may be an issue for some folks, and the use of beta software could be a potential problem, but the good features far outnumber the problems.

Hardy Heron, a big release for both the home user and enterprise, is yet another milestone in the Linux cycle. Of course, more Ubuntu releases will come every six months, and we'll be following the developments of the next version: the Intrepid Ibex. For its time though, 8.04 is a winner.

Launcher applications such as LaunchBar and Launchy over on other platforms are becoming increasingly popular.

The idea is quite simple - the application springs into action when you hit a keystroke, and then you start typing an application's name. As you type, the list of applications filters, so you can type just a few characters and then press Enter to launch an app.

This is exactly how Katapult works. Press Alt-Space, and then just start typing the first few characters, such as konq for Konqueror.

Katapult then shows you what its best guess is with the characters you've given it, and then you press Enter to perform the Run Program action on the right, or type more characters to refine your search.

As well as launching applications from Katapult, it supports a limited set of other actions, including launching Konqueror bookmarks, opening files that are in your home directory, a simple calculator function and more.

Once you launch the application in the first place, it seems to pretty much disappear from view until you need it. In my Kubuntu install, there's not even a tray icon to notify you that the program is running.

This means it keeps out of your way, but unless you read the manual on the website, it's not clear how to actually get to the settings (which, for the record, is to press Alt-Space, then Ctrl-C to open the popup menu.

Apart from this, Katapult makes a simple, elegant and useful general purpose launcher for KDE systems.

Feed readers are quickly becoming very important applications in people's daily workflows. Along with your email client and web browser, your feed reader is a hub of information.

RSSOwl is a Java-based application that is designed to run on pretty much all platforms - that includes Windows, Mac OS X and Linux distributions. Here, I'm reviewing version 2.0 Milestone 7 on Fedora 8, but the functionality should be identical wherever you run it.

Installation

You can quickly and easily download the right package for your operating system from the download page. With the Linux version, it's a simple case of extracting the Zip file, and double-clicking the RSSOwl binary. You do however, need Java installed, no matter where you run it.

First impressions

Once RSSOwl loads, you're presented with a screen that looks something like this:

The interface is divided into two columns, with a list of feeds on the left and the main area on the right. The list of feeds comes pre-populated with some that the developers have decided you'd like, but it's trivial to delete that whole set and either import your own feeds or add a new one.

Adding a new feed

Adding a new feed manually is pretty simple and intuitive. As you'd expect, you click on the green plus in the toolbar. Interestingly, it brands this as adding a bookmark - which might be a bit confusing for feed veterans, but might well make it easier to understand for those who are new to the whole concept.

One negative point here is that if you don't specify the direct feed URL (for example, just put down http://fosswire.com/), RSSOwl doesn't appear to actually go and auto-discover the real feed URL and fetch from there. Instead you have to put the direct feed URL in from the beginning (for example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/fosswire. Coupled with the confusion of calling it a 'bookmark', this could prove very frustrating until you work out exactly what it means and even then might add an extra unnecessary step to adding a feed into your reader.

Once you have done so, however, the feed items will be loaded in and you'll be able to select it from the source list at the left and see the items in the main pane.

Reading items

Reading items works in the way you expect it to, click an item and the bottom part of the right-hand pane and read it. I generally have no complaints.

If you're a fan of the 'river of news' metaphor, then RSSOwl won't disappoint there either. The 'New and Updated News' group on the left gives you this view, and shows you, obviously, all unread items in the right-hand pane so you can go through them. It works well, although with several hundred unread items the performance did suffer quite a bit and RSSOwl became a bit sluggish.

Importing feeds

I currently use Google Reader as my main feed reading solution, so I proceeded to export out my subscriptions as an OPML file. In RSSOwl, I simply clicked File > Import Feeds and imported the file. My labels in Google Reader became folders in RSSOwl and within a minute or so, all my feeds were loaded in and the items displayed.

I do have around 250 subscriptions, and I was pleasantly surprised with the speed at which they were imported, processed, and the items loaded into the client.

Conclusions

I actually have used RSSOwl in the past, back in the 1.x series in August 2006, and posted a review on Gizbuzz (a previous Oratos Media blog). Since then, I was pleasantly surprised with the amount of progress that has been made in making RSSOwl easier to use, faster, and particularly on Linux, easier to get started with and a better citizen on the Linux desktop.

While there are some areas in which RSSOwl could definitely improve in, overall I find it a very capable feed reader. Personally, I'm going to stick with Google Reader for the moment, as the fact that it is web-based gives me more portability, but to those people who don't use a feed reader right now, or are looking for a change, I'd recommend you download RSSOwl and give it a try.