One new exciting package that is included in Gutsy is PowerTOP. It is an absolute must if you're running Linux on a laptop, and it's now available from the repositories.

Leave it running for a while (with root rights), and you can see how well (or badly) you're doing to preserve battery power. At the bottom tips will be displayed on what you can do to prevent the top power using entries from occurring. A good idea is to put these suggestions in sysctl.conf and specific commands in /etc/rc.local, as long as they don't cause any problems for you, that is.

After implementing most of the suggestions made by the tool my battery lasted 25% longer then normal, that is a huge improvement.

You must have heard, Gutsy it out! Start your updating engines, in case you haven't already done so the days before the final release.

Upgrade went pretty smooth for me. Then again, I only use official reps (one exception is wine) and only a few .dep files not in any repository. One problem witnessed was right after the upgrade, I couldn't use compiz anymore. On Feisty I had been using the one supplied with Ubuntu and it worked there.

The solution was to run a single command (with root-rights) that adjusts the xorg.conf with a value that is needed by the compiz-fusion version included in Gutsy;

nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals -d 24

Each Ubuntu release pushes the envelope a little bit more. Gutsy is certainly high on eye-candy, artwork, better font rendering and the lovely compiz make it all very beautiful to look at.

Can you believe it? The Atari 2600 is 30 years old this October. That little machine started it all for me. For my 10th birthday my parents took me to the store and bought me one (the store ran an action that included a free game of choice!). Actually I got the 'jr' model, which I found cooler then the big wooden 1st version and it included better controllers as well. People wanting to relive the good old times, the popular 'stella' emulator is available. Several years ago I got myself a TV Games 10-in-1 Atari 2600 Joystick, always good for a few laughs at parties.
The game I picked that day was 'Popeye', a platform type of game with pacman influences. It was one of the most difficult games on the 2600 that I know of.

Today Wine-doors 0.1.1 got released, the site provides packages for debian/ubuntu systems. Greatly recommended for people using wine to run a selection of windows programs.

Next there is a Beta 1 release of the IBM Lotus Symphony Office Suite for Linux (also available for Windows). It is based on Open Office, but the UI has been reworked. Because of its roots, there are no problems opening Open Document files. Probably this is the result of the recent announcement of IBM and OOo sharing code. This is not a final release, you can play around with it, but it is rather slow.

QNX has opened up the source for their QNX Neutrino OS, it is not using the GPL or any other official OSS license though. Still, access to source code is mostly always good. Amazing, how many well known, widely used operating systems are still closed?

A lot of things are happening in OSS-land. Hot of the needle is the announcement of IBM that will be joining OpenOffice.org development efforts. They will bring new technology into the product, mainly from Lotus Notes and in return they will also be adding OOo stuff into their products.

The last few days there was also a lot of talk about AMD/ATI, who will be opening the specs for their gfx-cards. They will not open up the source of the current closed drivers, but that should not be a problem as long as the details of the inner workings of the cards are know. We can only hope NVidia will make a similar move, I fully understand that it is impossible to open source the drivers (containing 3rd party code etc), but specs should never be a problem! Common NVidia, if you want to stay the fastest Linux 3D card, you better make a move.

People complaining about Firefox memory footprint, might be happy to hear that there is a patch available from Federica Mena Quintero. By some smart image management he was able to reduce the memory usage by significant amounts.

Gutsy Gibbon is not out of the door yet (you'll have to wait until 18 October), and already Hardy Heron is announced. You can expect Hardy somewhere near April 2008, this will be the next LTS release as well. No features or implementation plans have been announced yet, they will be discussed and decided during the Ubuntu Developer Summit.