Nienhouse

Having a system here in the house that runs Boxee as a front end has been wonderful, but the one thing every user of Boxee will say is that it needs to be updated. Well, the time has come – this fall!

What is Boxee, you ask? Well it’s this pretty awesome Media-Center that was originally made for Linux/Mac/Windows, then was put onto it’s own hardware called the “Boxee Box.” You can check it out at http://boxee.tv/.

Good news for PC/Mac/Linux users – we are working to update the downloadable software version of Boxee and hope to have builds available this fall so you can enjoy the updated browser, improved playback, and lots more content that are currently available on the Boxee Box.

We know Boxee users on computers have been frustrated with the long wait and we want to be open with you about our priorities, growth, and the future of Boxee.

Read the rest of the post at the Boxee Blog.

UPDATE: The update hasn’t come yet, but I’ve been told by one of the people on their support team that the update is still going to be released by the end of the year.

After being announced at Google I/O, everyone has been waiting eagerly for it to come out for the Droid and a couple other devices. It looks like we are getting closer to this update as we have a 2.2 rom out in the wild (but requires a separate kernel that has the wifi driver)

You can check out putting froyo on your Droid here:
http://www.droid-life.com/2010/06/08/download-newer-motorola-droid-froyo-leak-frf57/
(Also, there are some newer baseband updates available on droid-life)

Here is a list of all of the new features – the links will take you to a sreenshot of new feature in action.

All screenshots I have taken for this article are free to use as long as they have proper attribution – http://tan-com.com/blog/licenses/.

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Well We are now around to Ubutu Lucid Lynx (10.04) and it looks like nothing has changed support wise, so to get the backlight to adjust, just add:

nomodeset acpi_backlight=vendor

to the “GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT” section, right after “quiet splash” and before the closing quotation mark. Now run

sudo update-grub

and you will be good to go! Reboot and try out your freshly brewed screen backlight adjustments!

(This requires SPRecovery 0.99.2b which I showed how to install thin the post about rooting and backing up your device. How to Root and Backup on your Droid)

The people over at Sholes.info have been working extremely hard on putting together the big features of Android 2.1 for the Motorola Droids (Sholes) with Andrioid 2.1 installed. Their work has come far and here is the result:
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*Both Rooting and setting up the backup are potentially hazardous to your  Droid. You are responsible for everything that happens to your phone while following this tutorial, NOT ME. If you have problems while doing this, I may be able to help you if you email me at tyler@tan-com.com or PM me on Freenode IRC network (nick: Flakeparadigm). ONLY continue if you are confident in what you are doing. -Continue at your own risk-*

(EDIT 01/08/2010: I will keep this tutorial updated with the latest version if SPRecovery. Rooting for different versions of Android will be in a separate post.)
(Edit 04/05/2010: No longer wil I update the version on this server. Use DroidMod Updater from droidmod.com)

After having a bit of a hard time doing this myself, I figured I’d write up a post on how I ended up doing this so that it would be easier for everyone else.
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Ubuntu Karmic is out and many updates have lead to great improvements in compatibility with this laptop. Karmic runs perfectly out of the box except for one thing – screen brightness adjustment doesn’t work. The fix for this is quite simple though.

1. Open up /etc/default/grub in your preferred text editor as root (For a nice GUI interface, press Alt+F2 then enter the command “gksu gedit /etc/default/grub” and press enter.)

2. Once you have the file open, add “nomodeset acpi_backlight=vendor” to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT entry, save, and exit.

3. Now run (in a terminal – Applications menu > Accessories > Terminal) “sudo grub-update” and reboot your computer. Once started up you should be able to adjust the screen brightness!

Not using Karmic yet? Try the Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) Tutorial for getting this laptop working in Jaunty (9.04).

The flyer says it all!

What’s new in Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10)?

I’ve been running the next version of Ubuntu in a virtual machine to test it and report my findings in an easily read list of things to come. Also, some more in depth information for those who want to know. Along with that I’ve been following the updates mailing list and will be using 9.10 in a VM as if it were my main OS.

Screenshots can be found here: http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/

After this post, I will be posting updates as they come in weekly. If they are important, however, I will post them the day they come out.

What’s new up in 9.10 as of today: (ordered by personal importance)

• Updated GDM with a new login screen – includes a session type switching menu and battery meter for laptops. http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/gdm.png
• Firefox 3.5!
• Empathy is used for Instant Messaging instead of Pidgin. The only downside is Empathy can’t combine contacts as far as I can see. http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/empathy.png
• New version of ALSA (1.0.20)
• Kopete has Facebook Chat support.
• Easy, seamless encryption of home directory is optionally available.
• Comes with UbuntuOne Sync tool pre-installed.
• The user switcher has been updated
  • Only contains Account Information, System Settings, Lock Screen, Switch User, and Quit (logout) buttons.
  • System Settings brings up a settings control panel with the contents of the System>Preferences and System>Administration menus.
  • Shutdown buttons were placed back in the System menu.
• The Accessories sub menu has a Swiss Pocket Knife as it’s icon

What needs to be fixed, added, updated:

• Nautilus crashes when you view “Computer” or any network folder.
• New Default theme (the screenshots are of a personally set theme)

Things I haven’t tested, but are in the upcoming release release:

• New Intel drivers (Accepted)
• New NVIDIA drivers

Next Release – Alpha 3 on July 23

Today I’ve decided to take a look at the Daily Release (07/15/09) of Ubuntu and Karmic Koala and post my findings on it to show you what too look forward to in October!

Due to its early stage, this version of Ubuntu does not have a graphical installer, so I won’t post any screenshots for the installation. There is a new feature, however, to seamlessly encrypt your home directory which I will be choosing for the purpose of testing new features. Unfortunately, I got an error saying it could not encrypt my home directory, but on the up side, everything else went fine. Edit: After boot up, it asked me if I would like to try and encrypt it again, and all went fine.

On first boot up, I see several things. For one, the version of the GRUB boot leader has been updated, along with Gnome.

The new version includes a nice looking login screen which is somewhat like that of OS X, and has a couple of changes. 1) The fast user changer no longer has shutdown functions because those have been placed into the System menu as they were before the fast user switcher came out. 2) Ubunutu has sub menus items!!! WOAH! There’s a Logic Games sub menu in the Applications menu under games. 3) Empathy is used as the default IM client.

There are also a couple of things that haven’t changed that might should be such as Firefox hasn’t been updated to 3.5 and also the Wallpaper is still the Jaunty defauly, but that probably won’t change till late betas or even RC.

All of my screenshots so far, and ones soon to come are/will be in http://tan-com.com/tyler/screenshots/ubuntu-karmic/

I will be posting updated articles about the new features of Karmic Koala