For about a year now these oxygen bottles have been for sale in 7-eleven in Japan.

They come in several choices such as melon, coffea or like the in the photo below, “forest”.

Exactly what to do with these bottles including how, when and why to use them remains unknown. But a competing convenience store chain has answered by offering oxygen-rich water on bottle.

The new Ubuntu release 8.04 Hardy Heron will be released tomorrow.

If you can’t wait, upgrade to the release candidate, available now, and then upgrade to the final version again tomorrow. Note that its not recommendable to install the release candidate on working machines but what the heck, you only live once. It was released just a few days ago and so many bugs can not have been solved since then, could it?

To upgrade Hardy Heron release candidate:

Alt+F2
Enter following command: upgrade manager -d
Click on upgrade to 8.04 lts and follow the instructions.

Tomorrow after the release you can upgrade again doing following:
Alt+F2
Enter following command: upgrade manager -c
Click on upgrade to 8.04 lts and follow the instructions.

Shot in Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan. Where else?

300 Yen is about 3 USD.

When it starts to rain hard in a western country, people start to run. When it starts to rain in Japan, everybody by magic brings up an umbrella (only the few westerners start to run).

When I checked the dashboard recently I found that James Dimick has released a brand new Wordpress plugin for changing the admin colors called Easy Admin Color Schemes.

After you install the plugin you can change admin color themes in the settings and you can make your own theme by changing CSS.

it seems to be a bug in the “Last modified” column

The plugin comes with a new theme which was not really adorable and it looks like this.

Anyway, if you have some basic skills in CSS and have enough time you can easily make your own theme. I believe it is a pretty nice job altogether by James Dimick and I hope the Wordpress community soon will create and share some nice admin themes. You can share your creation by simply copy the CSS code on the settings page.

Btw, I bet you can make a really nice admin theme from the nice colors used on my blog theme “Smashing theme“. If someone want to try it, please send me a copy of the result to me as well df9517@gmail.com.

Edit: This morning I found a new admin theme plugin, Baltic Amber Admin Themes. It comes with several nice color themes and also option of small rearrangement of the dashboard.

Linux has grown up incredibly during the last years. And if not yet completely mature and stable for the vast majority of computer users, at least ready to move from home. But unfortunately a large majority of the community is still childish and totally biased on even the slightest complain of Linux or in any comparison discussion between Mac or Windows.

How many times have you read that it’s a myth that Linux is

• difficult to use
• difficult to install programs
• difficult to get the hardware to work and impossible to find drivers
• difficult to find help and that there is no support what so ever

Let’s get one thing very clear. Its not a myth, it was like that just a few years ago. At the time when Windows XP was released, Linux was still a pain in the ass to use. Too many people knows that, even by own experience from home, school or work. They still have nightmares about that unix/linux terminal or in the best case a really ugly X windows. And remember, this was at the time when you could already plug virtually anything in the Windows XP and it would most probably install the device automatically. In worst case you could visit the makers web page and download the drivers.

But still today, year 2008, many wireless cards, graphic cards, tons of USB devices just wont work out of the box with Linux.

With that said lets praise Linux for where it is today. The last years there has been a tremendous development and Mark Shuttleworth sort of finished it off with his Ubuntu. There is a strength in open source which I believe in strongly. There will never be any management saying no to an idea because you can’t make money on it or because it’s not company policy. If someone wants it, its going to happen for sure in open source.

But I call for a small change in attitude in how we should sell Linux and I have drafted following four points:

1. Admit the history. Just because it works quite well with the latest releases of Ubuntu, it doesn’t mean that it always was like that. Don’t get too cocky just because you also just got that Mac-dock or cool compiz features. We got that recently – remember.
2. Admit whats good with Windows and Mac. There are tons of things which are much better with those systems. I would never in my life recommend a hard core gamer to to start with Linux, he would go back to Windows immediately. I have never, during my 15 years of computing had a device which couldn’t be install in windows with quite ease, with Linux that happens now and then. How easy is it to do such a fundamental thing such as dual screens in different configurations compared to in the competing OS’s. Adobe and Autodesk doesn’t have some of the most important programs in Linux format, its also something to bring up. So no need to say everything is better, its not. And there are no need to cry out in tears if someone complains about using the terminal.
3. Bring on all the stuff which is better in Linux. You know it so well already so I do not need to tell, but of course you mention that everything is 100% free, it comes with complete set of programs pre-installed, it is super easy to install new programs, there are several nice desktops environments to choose from, it has the most helpful community in the world (Ubuntuforums.com) etc etc etc.
4. Finish it off with the the most important point. Because its fun!

Kimchikid

Official distro sites

The main homepage for Ubuntu – the standard and most popular Ubuntu distro, using the gnome desktop environment.

The home for Kubuntu – a linux distro with the poular KDE desktop environment.

The homepage for Edubuntu – a linux distribution aimed at classroom and educational usage. For schools and universities.

Xubuntu uses the Xfce desktop environment. Older computers feel lively again, while newer ones will run faster than ever before! Recommended for old computers and various Xfce freaks.

Similar to the Ubuntu distribution but with only what they claim to be truly free software.

Study and interact

Ubuntu Forums

Meet the Ubuntu community, world famous for its helpfulness. Main place for searching, writing, interacting and finding a sollution for your Linux/Ubuntu problems. Probably the standard forum for all Debian based Linux distro’s.

Ubuntu brainstorm

The ultimate place to post your ideas and read and vote for other’s ideas. This is where you give your vote about what you want the Ubuntu dev’s to implement and fix for future Ubuntu distributions.

Ubuntu wiki pages

A place for the Ubuntu community to discuss ideas and store team-related information. You can find vital geek information such as the exact Hardy Heron release schedule.

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Not revolutionary at all and quite commonly used but hopefully a decent summery about MUST DO’s for convenience when browsing. Hopefully some points will be of interest for most people.

1) Use the Firefox web browser

I guess most of people finding this blog already use Firefox but if you don’t I recommend to change asap. The reasons are as follows

• Its available for Windows, Linux and Mac and now we are only waiting for the mobile version
• It simply feels faster and more reliable than most other browsers
• And most importantly, it has great extensions/plugins which I could not live without.

If you really like opera better its okay too but then it has to be the 9,5 beta version with synchronization built in. But it is difficult so far for example for all you Ubuntu users since it is difficult to install the beta version.

2) Arrange your top 20 bookmarks perfectly in the browsers toolbar

Since I started to do this web browsing is much faster. In Firefox you simply put your most commonly used bookmarks in the “toolbar folder” in bookmarks and instantly the appear in the toolbar. It is very important to keep the names as short as possible so that you can fit as many as 10-20. See below picture.

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A clean install of Ubuntu is not looking very slick at all. To be frank, it looks pretty boring.

But relax, if you follow this guide you will be able to get a ultra cool desktop like this one.

If you like that dark desktop, just keep reading, but if you rather like the below colourful desktop I have a guide for that as well right here.

Edit: Several steps in this guide will probably work very well also on other linux distributions as well but due to lack of own experience I won’t guarantee that.

We will do following steps:

1. Change background picture
2. Change GTK2 theme with window border and controls
3. Change icon set
4. Change Fonts
5. Configure the top bar
6. Install a cool Mac-like dock (AWN)
7. Install and get conky up and running to get the geeky text information about RAM usage, processes etc
8. Change login theme
9. Change the ugly orange color which is between the login screen and your fully loaded desktop

Edit: BOBCFC kindly pointed out that compiz must be up and running in order to get this transparent look. You can activate compiz on Ubuntu 7.10 or higher: right click in the desktop, click “change desktop background”, click the tab “visual effects” and click “normal” or higher. It requires that your computer is equipped with a 3d graphics card.

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