Steady as a rock

Back in 2005 I needed to investigate remote desktop solutions that would allow people to connect from a windows desktop to a linux server. The project I needed to do that for afaik never got anywhere, but I got to know about FreeNX and ported the existing kanotix packages to Ubuntu Hoary. Since there was considerable interest in them, I even started my own repository (yes, this is how the Seveas repo started!). FreeNX didn’t seem to go anywhere though and when I realized the downsides of NX I lost interest in it as well. Breezy and Dapper packages were little more than small fixes.

But a while ago NX 2.1.0 was released, as was FreeNX 0.6.0 - the downsides are still there but the result of using this partially proprietary technology is also still pretty amazing, so I picked up the packages again and ported the NX 1.5.4/FreeNX 0.5 patches that were still needed to the newer versions. The packaging also needed some love and has been simplified as well. There is no nxviewer/nxdesktop/nxnode package yet, but the core libs and the nxagent are packaged, so it’s usable as remote desktop solution on Ubuntu Feisty!

Downloads of these shiny new FreeNX 0.6.0/NX 2.1 packages are available at your favorite mirror - speaking of which: I could us an extra mirror, so if someone has lots of bandwidth and some diskspace available, please help!

I’m fixing my moms pc, she’s been infected by a nasty msn worm virus thingie.Fixing it of course means replacing windows with Ubuntu, making the total number of machines running Ubuntu in my apartment (60 m²) seven. Lots of Ubuntu for a small apartment! This is what my work area currently looks like:

Some annoucments about things I run for the Ubuntu community:

• Breezy-changes rss feed has been discontinued
• Gutsy-changes rss feed is now available
• feisty-seveas is available, sadly without falcon since falcon 1.5 needs fixes for feisty and 2.0 isn’t available yet. Working on it. Best thing in feisty-seveas is the latest xmoto version. Xmoto rocks

On Feisty release day, #ubuntu had 1600 people in it, #ubuntu-release-party got to 800 and ubotu (the Ubuntu irc bot) still didn’t break. I’m glad that we’re now back to a slightly saner amount of people though (1340 atm)  Many thanks to all IRC operators for keeping the Ubunu IRC channels a nice place to hang out in!

Ubuntu is going bananas!

My fiancee used to not run Ubuntu on her PC. That of course was suboptimal, so after a lot of convincing she switched to Ubuntu a few weeks ago and so far she felt ok with it. “felt ok”… hmm… I should be able to do better…

Enter the new pc: I installed MPD on it and hooked it up to the stereo. Me playing with sonata on my laptops and glurp on the nokia770 made her curious, so I installed sonata on her PC as well and she’s really liking it. Phase 2 completed, preparing for world domination

Sonata really is the killer app for today!

In other news: next week I’ll be in paris for the first time in over 6 years. Let’s hope my french is still not too rusty.