Today Ubuntu announced a new phone operating system. Ubuntu for Phones.

This is the introductory video by Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, Canonical

Swiping and Gestures

Ubuntu for phones depends very much on swiping gestures. I know I know, all the new ones rely on the swiping features like Sailfish OS and BB10. Chapeau for Nokia's original Meego team for creating such great concept in Meego for Nokia N9 and N950.

Development Environment

The OS will support HTML5 development allowing web apps integration with the system and will also support native development. Currently the native development environment is based on QML for developing interfaces. QML has OpenGL ES support. Ubuntu managed to partner with big names like EA to release games that support this new OS.

What about the supported devices ?

The OS will support android kernel and android drivers, so if you have an android device it'll be most probably supported by the new OS. I hope that there will be some kind of support to Nokia N9. This guy deserves a lot after Nokia has left it alone.

Is it a good piece of news ?

I believe yes. The most beneficiaries in my opinion are mobile operators. Now operators have a strong competitor to android that will be completely open. Something with a strong ecosystem and with a huge pool of open source developers to support. Operators can now build mobile app stores for this OS and sell apps directly to users. If I was google, this wouldn't have been a good piece of news for me :) .. the second beneficiary is the user. Having a great open-source alternative to android will raise the competition bar. It's no longer a 3 Horse rase as Nokia describes it. Although laws of marketing tells us that at the end every race tends to be a 2 horse race.

How do you find this piece of news? Let me know your opinion in the comments. To find more info about ubuntu for phones click here.

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Hello!

i've recently downloaded and installed ubuntu 11.04 on my PC.

Although i wasn't shocked when i first saw ubuntu with the taste of Unity instead of the great Gnome, i was shocked when i tried to play with unity.

I don't like the limitation that unity puts to me which is going to the leftmost edge of the screen or pointing over the top left area of the screen to show the unity left menu/dock/etc

But i tried to cope with it and discovered some cool things.

1. You can activate unity search by pressing the windows button
2. You can select which dock item to open by keeping the windows button clicked and then selecting the number written on the icon of the item you want
3. You can control when to show unity menu ,  via launcher & menus
4. You can download Avant Window Navigator and have a very nice dock App :)
5. If you totally hate unity , log out and when selecting user at login window select Ubuntu Classic option @ the bottom then login. You'll find the Great Gnome when you login :)

Regards,

Bassem Elhawary

Do you have Ubuntu and when playing mp3 files you can't control the seek bar cause the file length is unknown ?
If yes, then this post is for you.

To solve this you have to install the package called:

ubuntu-restricted-extras

1.Go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
2.In the search area search for "ubuntu restricted".
3.Select the package named ubuntu restricted extras and install it.
4.Congratulations!

this worked with me on Totem Movie Player.
Regards,
Bassem Elhawary

After applying what i said in this post , some problems occurred
1.arm-none-linux-gnueabi: command not found
solution:
 -in terminal:

gedit .bashrc

 -in  .bashrc make sure that those line are there , if not there add them:

export PATH=/usr/local/arm/4.3.2/bin:$PATH

export PATH=/usr/local/arm/4.3.2/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/bin:$PATH 

save .bashrc and exit all the open linux terminals.

then in qt-everywhere directoy browse to the mkspecs/qws/linux-arm-g++/ then edit the qmake.conf
replace all the contents of this file with the following:

1. #  
2. # qmake configuration for building with arm-linux-g++  
3. #  
4.   
5. include(../../common/g++.conf)  
6. include(../../common/linux.conf)  
7. include(../../common/qws.conf)  
8.   
9.   
10.   
11. # modifications to g++.conf  
12. QMAKE_CC                = /usr/local/arm/4.3.2/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc  
13. -msoft-float -D__GCC_FLOAT_NOT_NEEDED -march=armv4t -mtune=arm920t -O0   
14.   
15. QMAKE_CXX               = /usr/local/arm/4.3.2/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-g++  
16. -msoft-float -D__GCC_FLOAT_NOT_NEEDED -march=armv4t -mtune=arm920t -O0   
17.   
18. QMAKE_LINK              = /usr/local/arm/4.3.2/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-g++  
19. -msoft-float -D__GCC_FLOAT_NOT_NEEDED -march=armv4t -mtune=arm920t -O0   
20.   
21. QMAKE_LINK_SHLIB        = /usr/local/arm/4.3.2/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-g++  
22. -msoft-float -D__GCC_FLOAT_NOT_NEEDED -march=armv4t -mtune=arm920t -O0   
23.   
24.   
25.   
26. # modifications to linux.conf  
27. QMAKE_AR                = /usr/local/arm/4.3.2/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-ar cqs  
28. QMAKE_OBJCOPY           = /usr/local/arm/4.3.2/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-objcopy  
29. QMAKE_STRIP             = /usr/local/arm/4.3.2/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-strip  
30.   
31.   
32.   
33. QMAKE_CFLAGS    += -msoft-float -D__GCC_FLOAT_NOT_NEEDED -march=armv4t  
34. -mtune=arm920t  
35. QMAKE_CXXFLAGS    += -msoft-float -D__GCC_FLOAT_NOT_NEEDED -march=armv4t  
36. -mtune=arm920t  
37.   
38.   
39. load(qt_config)  

then save the file and close it.
finally browse to the Qt-everywhere directory in the terminal and  configure with these options

./configure -release -embedded arm -xplatform qws/linux-arm-g++ -prefix /usr/local/Qt-4.6.2_arm -little-endian -no-webkit -no-qt3support -no-cups -no-largefile -nomake examples -optimized-qmake -no-openssl -nomake tools

then make .. then make install .. tada .. you'll find Qt-everywhere's output folder in /usr/local/ under the name

Qt-4.6.2_arm

good luck with your steps
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the code above was formatted using this tool
it seems to be great online tool

*note: this entry is a complementary entry to this one 
1.Download the Qt libraries folder (The one generated after building Qt-everywhere for Arm) to the Mini 2440 Board to /usr/local/

2.Build the application using qmake (special version of qmake for arm processors) that you can find in the Qt folder in step #1 in the /bin directory.

3.Set environment variables in Qtopia 

export QTDIR=/usr/local/Qt-4.6.2_arm

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/Qt-4.6.2_arm/lib 

in case of systems other than Qtopia , you have to export the following

export TSLIB_TSEVENTTYPE=INPUT

export TSLIB_CONSOLEDEVICE=none

export TSLIB_FBDEVICE=/dev/fb0

export TSLIB_TSDEVICE=/usr/input/ts

export TSLIB_CALIBFILE=/usr/etc/pointercal

export TSLIB_CONFFILE=/usr/etc/ts.conf

export TSLIB_PLUGINDIR=/usr/lib/ts

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/Qt/lib

export QTDIR=/usr/local/Qt

export QWS_MOUSE_PROTO=tslib:/usr/input/ts

        export QWS_DISPLAY=LinuxFB:mmWidth=240:mmHeight=320
 4.Download your application's executable generated form step #2 to the board on a known directory
5.On the board browse to the directory in step 4 and type the name of the application followed by -qws
6.pray for the application to run :D

this page was very helpful
http://www.sereno-online.com/site/2010/05/01/qt-4-6-2-installation-procedure-for-friendlyarm-mini-2440-board/

The Procedure:
1.Download these packages and install them all

http://rabbitvcs.goo...Ekarmic_all.deb
http://rabbitvcs.goo...ntrepid_all.deb
http://rabbitvcs.goo...ntrepid_all.deb
http://rabbitvcs.goo...ntrepid_all.deb

2.then in the terminal:

killall nautilus

nautilus -q

and you'll find rabbit VCS in your context menu .

another problem appeared that i couldn't create repositories using rabbitVCS!!
this wasn't a problem in RabbitVCS , it was my old version of sqlite.

i just typed in the terminal:

apt-get install sqlite 

and then everything went OK

i had problems with running SVN on fedora 12

first choosing the GUI tool .. i was use to tortoise SVN on windows.
I found turtoiseHg which is a tortoiseSVN clone and could run on linux and integrate with nautilus.
i installed it on my fedora but it didn't run .. and i didn't find it to run it !!!

finally i found a tool called RabbitVCS 
it was installed normally and integrated with Nautilus .. needed to kill nautilus and restart it

killall nautilus

nautilus -q

and i found rabbit VCS in my context menu finally.

another problem appeared that i couldn't create repositories using rabbitVCS!!
this wasn't a problem in RabbitVCS , it was my old version of sqlite.

i just typed in the terminal

yum install sqlite

and then everything went OK.

I found a good tutorial for SVN through command line here

Regards,
Bassem Elhaouary

When I installed fedora 12 today .. i rebooted for the first time and it went OK

On the second reboot it didn't show the Login GUI. Instead it showed a black screen with something about SELinux and with options of enforcing and permissive :D .. i actually don't remember it exactly cause i was in a hurry and needed a working system .. i had nothing to cry about in the newly installed system , except for the time i spent installing it , so i reinstalled it and rebooted for the first time and then logged in and searched for a solution before i make the second reboot .
I found this page which was very useful ..  just disabled SELinux .. and tahnks to Falko Timme my fedora is OK now.
I hope it doesn't crash soon  :D