dambalah

Just out of curiosity, I checked out Google Trends to compare some of the most popular Linux distributions, based on distrowatch.com. My findings were rather interesting: a stagnant or slightly downward slope for most popular distributions except for Ubuntu which has a very fast growth.

Then I decided to compare Ubuntu to the other popular operating systems: Windows and Mac OS X.

Some interesting observations:

1) Linux popularity seems to be decreasing, based on the distros downward trends and the fact that the term linux itself is going down. However, Ubuntu is gaining popularity really fast.

2) Windows is by far the most popular operating systems, but it’s popularity is decreasing while Mac OS X and Ubuntu are gaining steam.

Of course, this should be taken with a grain of salt because this is far from a scientific study, but like we say back home, there is never smoke without a fire.

The Ubuntu community released the first beta of Ubuntu 7.10 today and the list of features is looking good.

I’m so excited about the following features:

• Fully automatic printer installation
• NTFS writing (so happy about that one!!)
• Improved Power consumption with linux kernel upgrade (my laptop will love this)

Check out the list of features and if you have never tried Ubuntu yet, give it a try. When the final version of 7.10 comes out, it should be very very sweet.

It is so easy to install Java on Ubuntu now. On Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), follow these steps:

1) Make sure you have the right repositories on your sources.list file.

Edit your sources.list file the following way:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

or if you are not using gnome (e.g. you are logged in through ssh):

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

If the following lines are not already there, add them:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty main restricted
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty universe multiverse

Save the file (in nano use Control-O to save and then Control-X to exit).
Now you need to tell the package manager to update it’s database:

sudo apt-get update

2) Install Java using apt-get

I currently have both Java 5 and Java 6 installed on my machine and it’s very easy to switch between the two. Java 6 has some nice goodies such as JSR-223 and better jconsole that I like to use.

For Java 5:

sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jre sun-java5-jdk sun-java5-plugin

For Java 6:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin

There are other packages that you might be interested in:

• sun-java6-demo
• sun-java6-doc
• sun-java6-source

3) Verify installation

Verify that you have the correct version of java running:

java -version

For example, on my machine (yes, I call it tiwouj):

To see a list of the java versions that you have installed, you can use the following command (it’s a letter L at the end of the command):

update-java-alternatives -l

Here is my list:

This should show you a list of all the java alternatives you have installed. java-gcj is the free version of Java from the GNU project and comes installed by default with Ubuntu so you should see it. To switch to a different version, use the following command:

sudo update-java-alternatives -s <version-desired>

e.g:

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-1.5.0-sun

Make sure it worked:

java -version

That’s it! How easy was that? You have to love apt-get.