The Gnome Foundation has laid out a roadmap saying it's time to depart from incremental updates.

The team said it's realized it's not enough to simply organize a collection of individual sub-projects and that a project-wide roadmap is needed. Gnome is the default environment of Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu, and initially the goal was for a version 2.30.0 - that will now become 3.0 due next March.

Responding to growing criticism of Gnome's "lack of vision," the team said its 3.0 release will focus not only on streamlining the platform, but "revamping the user experience."

"One concern that came more than was that it would be an error to do Gnome 3.0 without any big user-visibility change," the Gnome Foundation posted on its website.

"While some of us didn't necessarily agree with this concern, it was still a fairly valid one. But it turns out that if you tell the community that there's something after 2.x, then the community will stop vaguely thinking about future ideas and start working on concrete plans."

While Gnome's nearest competitor in the field of free desktop environments, KDE, was willing to scrap its established code base of KDE 3.x and start a new with KDE 4.0, Gnome has stuck to simply improving on 2.x's innards.

Central ideas the development team thinks will have a tangible positive impact on the user experience are Gnome Shell, which manages how users open applications, and Zeitgest, which controls the way documents are accessed using tags, bookmarks, timelines and other ways to make the desktop work less like a traditional filesystem.

"Making Gnome a 2.30 a 3.0 version is of course still an ambitious goal, but we can achieve it thanks to what we learnt in the past," the team said.

They added the team is prepared to consider the fact that Gnome 2.30 won't be good enough to call it 3.0 and waiting for version 2.3.2 for the 3.0 release.

"That being said we want the community to try as hard as possible to make 'Gnome 2.30 = Gnome 3.0' a success," the team said.

Meanwhile KDE has released version 4.2.2 less than a month after 4.2.1 rolled out. The new version, which rolled out yesterday, includes numerous bug fixes, performance improvements and updated translations, according to the KDE developer team.

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. This is the Ubuntu 9.04 beta release, which brings a host of excellent new features.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 8.10 on a desktop system press Alt+F2 and type in update-manager -d into the command box. Update Manager should open up and tell you: "New distribution release 9.04 is available." Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions

Be aware, BETA release, not final release!

The following bug has been documented in Ubuntu recently, which effects users in Australia and Europe:

"Since upgrading to Intrepid, the iwl3945 module (possibly others) cannot access wireless networks on channels 12 or 13 (in Australia, where those channels are permitted). I have read that it may now be necessary to set the ieee80211_regdom parameter on the cfg80211 module for regions that allow the use of channels above 11, but have been unable to produce any result by this method."

I encountered the solution to this bug today. It is as follows. Add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/options:

options cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom="EU"

Note that if you are using a driver from the linux-backport modules you would need to add the following to /etc/modprobe.d/options instead:

options lbm_cw_cfg80211 ieee80211_regdom=EU

I commonly post fixes to issue I experience in Linux here on altFIRE, both for you the reader (who possibly searched for the subject) and for myself - as a kind of online troubleshooting database.

Tonight, having fully wiped and upgraded the troublesome system from yesterday, I encountered the following error in the copy of Quake 2 I restored:

./libGL.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This happens whenever I try to up the video options to use the SDL OpenGL video driver (ref_sdlgl.so). This problem may manifest itself for you in Quake 2 just bombing out, or never being able to run in fullscreen (tip - run from terminal to see error messages). It seems to particularly effect ATI video card owners.

Much googling and testing later, I got it to work! So here's the proposed solution for (my!) future reference:

Check the permission of the libGL.so.1.2 file with command:

ls -l /usr/lib/libGL*

The file permission of libGL.so.1.2 should be "-rw-rw-r--". If the permission reads "-rw-rw----", do command

sudo chmod o+r /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2

If the permission is correct, fixed with command:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 /usr/lib/libGL.so.1

If still not working:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 /usr/lib/games/quake2/libGL.so

Happy fragging - my Quake 2 actually looks better than it ever did

The openSUSE community has published the roadmap for the 11.2 release and unveiled the schedule for the next several releases, all the way out to 2011.

OpenSUSE 11.2, which is codenamed Fichte, is planned for November 2009. It will include GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.3, a Web-based management interface for the YaST configuration system, improved support for Netbook hardware, and could potentially use Ext4 as the default filesystem. Subsequent releases will take place in July 2010, March 2011, and November 2011.

Previous releases have generally been made at intervals of roughly 8 to 10 months, but a fixed cycle has never previously been enforced, as it will now be.

"To give us something to plan around, we would like to propose a fixed release schedule. As a six-month release schedule is not something we consider feasible to maintain high-quality standards, we are proposing a fixed eight-month schedule," said release manager Stephan Kulow.

So, upgrading to the latest Debian is handy enough, as we've found out already. This works perfectly for servers and standard desktops. But what if you have weird 3rd party webcam drivers, or want to take full advantage of your graphics card ie. use 1280x1024 rather than a max of 1024x768 with default VGA drivers?

Well, these are the questions I had this morning. Neither my Creative webcam or nVidia 5800 video card series were working properly after yesterday's upgrade. Here's the solutions.

The webcam was easy. Use the following commands:

rmmod ehci_hcd
modprobe ehci_hcd

This basically sets up the OVCam drivers for your system. Then run camstream or cheese or whatever it is you use with your camera. It should work perfectly now.

For the nVidia card, we need a neat little tool called 'sgfxi'. Run the following as root:

cd /usr/local/bin;wget -Nc techpatterns.com/sgfxi;chmod +x sgfxi;sgfxi -h

Read the descriptions for each option. Most likely, you need to run

sgfxi -s

from a terminal. Press alt+F1 to get a fresh screen for this. You may need to also edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add screen resolutions, but this in unlikely.

Reboot your system and the video card should now be using the nVidia drivers.

Wireless drivers? F*ck off, I'm not explaining THAT can of worms. Not today, anyway!

If you have a wireless device you should really be using the latest Ubuntu. However, hardcore Debian users can read this for more information

Now that Debian 5.0 (codenamed Lenny) is released, you may want to consider upgrading if you are a Debian 'Etch' user (btw, all Debian releases are named after Toy Story characters).

First we need to edit our sources.list file:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Replace any mention of 'etch' with the word 'lenny'. Then:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
sudo aptitude full-upgrade

That's it! To similarly update your Ubuntu box to the latest version (8.10), you need to do something different:

sudo adept_manager --dist-upgrade

and choose "version upgrade" from the dialog. Answer all questions it asks...and pray.......

The next version of my fav Linux distro, Debian, was released on Valentines day after 22 months of development. This distro is rock solid and is 1st choice to go my servers due to it's stability and large user base. As well as that a lot of popular distros have their roots in this project, including Knoppix, Ubuntu and Damn Small Linux to name a few, and being linux it runs on an impressive range of devices and architectures.

Debian GNU/Linux runs on computers ranging from palmtops and handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of twelve architectures are supported: Sun SPARC (sparc), HP Alpha (alpha), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Intel IA-32 (i386), IA-64 (ia64), HP PA-RISC (hppa), MIPS (mips, mipsel), ARM (arm, armel), IBM S/390 (s390), and AMD64 and Intel EM64T (amd64).