If the American government invested as many resources rounding up violators of software licenses as it does fighting “terror” (and no, I don’t mean the Jacobin variety), I’d have been put away long ago, because all of my Ubuntu systems use patented multimedia software that I didn’t pay for.  But I’ve recently realized that it doesn’t have to be this way, and that legal codec support is easily available.  Here’s a look at some of those options.

Last week, we wrote about multimedia patents and their place within the free-software ecosystem.  As almost anyone who’s installed Ubuntu knows, the operating system doesn’t ship with patented multimedia codecs by default due to legal issues.

For most people, however, installing software to play MP3s and DVDs is simple enough.  In many cases, the system automatically prompts users to download the fully functional but legally ambiguous gstreamer-ugly plugins from Ubuntu’s repositories the first time they try to play media compressed using proprietary algorithms.  Where relevant, the pop-ups warn that using the software may be illegal in certain jurisdictions, but that hasn’t stopped anyone I know from clicking “OK”.

So chances are good that if you use Ubuntu for listening to music or watching videos, and you live in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan or any other country whose legal codes frown upon violation of software patents, you’re breaking the law, maybe without realizing it.

If you’re like me, this may not bother you very much.  There are much worse laws to break, after all.

Fluendo

But if you run a business, local government or other organization that can’t so easily disregard intellectual property laws, you have to think twice before installing patented multimedia codecs onto your Ubuntu system.

Fortunately for the growing number of organizations that deploy Ubuntu on their workstations, however, the gstreamer-ugly plugins are not the only way to enable patented multimedia playback.  Fluendo, a company based in Barcelona, offers legal codecs for a variety of patented formats, including MP3, MPEG2, MPEG4, H264, AAC, WMV and WMA.

Fluendo’s products, some of which are available in the Canonical store, are targeted at businesses and local governments that deploy Ubuntu and need legal support for popular multimedia formats, but are also available for individual use.  They range from MP3, codecs, which are free, to support for DVD playback.

Fluendo also develops its own media center application, called Fluoh.  Its codecs, however, will work with any gstreamer-compatible player, which includes most of those available in the Ubuntu repositories.

Why it matters

With most jurisdictions still lax about violations of software patents by Linux users, who remain a quantatively negligible group, the popularity of products like Fluendo’s may be limited.  But as Ubuntu’s user base grows, especially in the workplace, legal solutions for multimedia playback will become more and more important.

Legal alternatives to the gstreamer-ugly plugins are also crucial for demonstrating that Ubuntu is not a community of freeloaders and lawbreakers, as many opponents of the free-software movement often make it out to be.  Overcoming this negative image is essential if Ubuntu hopes to receive more attention from developers who traditionally work outside the open-source ecosystem.

Admittedly, I do my fair share of freeloading, and even lawbreaking, from time to time.  In spite of people like me, however, there are lot of Ubuntu users who are willing and eager to pay for software.  Solutions like Fluendo’s are increasingly important in meeting their needs.

If you’re like me, you don’t put much thought into where your multimedia codecs come from: you run a quick “apt-get install gstreamer-plugins-ugly” on new installs and move on to more important things.  But not everyone’s like me, and as Ubuntu moves increasingly into government and the workplace, patent and licensing issues are becoming more and more important for many Ubuntu users.

Over the next couple weeks, we’ll be writing about multimedia patents and the Ubuntu community.  This first post outlines the situation and explains why multimedia patents matter more than you may think.

Linux and patents

The Linux community has a long history of shirking restrictive software patents and licenses, which should not surprise anyone.  After all, at the core of the free-software movement is repulsion at the notion of having to abide by terms that users may not agree with in order to use their computers.   Many people use Linux because they want to live a life unencumbered by software patents.

Reality, however, rarely lives up to perfection.  Although many Ubuntu users would like to be able to rely only on software licensed under the GPL, a large number of us have to use proprietary code.  From closed-source video drivers to “binary blobs” in the Linux kernel, non-GPL software is often a pragmatic necessity for getting the most out of a machine.

Why multimedia is different

Multimedia codecs, of course, differ from hardware drivers and firmware in that they’re not necessary for a computer to run to its full potential.  But in a world where mp3 and DVD playback is essential for most users, patented multimedia codecs, practically speaking, are as unavoidable as the Nvidia GLX driver.

Patented codecs are also unlike other non-free software upon which many Linux users rely because they have completely GPL-compatible equivalents that work just as well.  Proprietary graphics and wireless drivers are necessary because no equally functional open-source drivers exist; in contrast, the Ogg Vorbis audio codec and Ogg Theora video compressor function just as well by most measures as the proprietary codecs, such as mp3 and the mpegs, that they seek to replace.

In theory, the whole world should compress audio and video files using only free and open-source algorithms.  But it doesn’t. The reality is that playback for mp3s and mpegs is as essential for most Ubuntu users as compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats in OpenOffice.

So how do you strike a compromise between perfection and reality?  In the next post, we’ll take a look at the different options available for obtaining multimedia playback on Ubuntu, which for legal reasons does not come with most popular codecs installed by default, and why this issue is becoming increasingly important.

Ubuntu comes with a nice application called “Hardware Drivers” (a.k.a. jockey-gtk) for installing proprietary drivers for wireless cards and other devices that lack open-source support. This is great, except when your only connection to the Internet is wireless and you have no way to download the driver or firmware you need. Here’s why this situation should change.

The reasoning behind the exclusion of closed-source drivers from the default Ubuntu system centers on legal and philosophical issues. In some cases, Ubuntu’s legal right to redistribute proprietary binaries is in dispute. And most Ubuntu developers consider a dependency on closed-source code as incompatible with the Ubuntu philosophy.

To a degree, I agree. But to paraphrase Albert Camus, even in free-software evangelism, there is an order, there are limits. In other words, staying true to the principles of open-source development shouldn’t come at the cost of basic functionality for the user.

If the developers want to keep closed-source video drivers out of the default stack for philosophical reasons, fine; those are easy enough to install later, and are not essential for getting a basic system up and running. But having no way to get online is a deal breaker, especially for non-geeks who don’t know how to work around the issue.

Broadcom

Ubuntu would work better out-of-the-box for more people if it included non-free firmware and drivers for wireless cards by default. Curiously, the proprietary Broadcom STA driver, which is essential for certain kinds of wireless cards and was included by default in the Jaunty kernel, has been removed in Karmic and is available only as a download from the repositories.

Why this decision was made is unclear, because there were no legal issues involved in distributing the STA driver (if you don’t believe me, read the license available from Broadcom’s site).  Presumably a Richard-Stallman fanatic decided it would be better for Ubuntu users to have non-functional wireless cards than to be denied the liberty of using only Free software.

Similarly, the b43 wireless driver, which supports most Broadcom-based wireless devices, requires binary firmware to run. Previously, this was only available via extraction from Windows drivers that Ubuntu did not have the explicit right to redistribute. Hardware Drivers supported the automatic installation of the firmware from the Internet, but Ubuntu did not ship with it because of legal concerns.

Recently, however, open b43 firmware has become available. It doesn’t work very well yet, but having it installed by default might at least help some users get online to download the proprietary firmware.

Better yet, I’d like to see Ubuntu take a stance and ship the closed-source firmware by default until its open equivalent matures. The chances of being sued are minimal, and of being held liable even less so. If open-source developers cowered before every legal threat leveled at them, Linux itself would have disintegrated nineteen years ago.

On the CD

If Ubuntu developers want to avoid non-free wireless drivers in the default system image, the least they could do is include the packages necessary to install them on the live CD. This way, Hardware Drivers would work for users lacking a wired Internet connection.

There might still be legal ambiguities involved in distributing drivers in this way, but the philosophical issues would be mitigated.  More importantly, many users would be much happier, pace RMS.  And that’s what matters.

A build of the nouveau video driver for nVidia cards was included in the Ubuntu repositories beginning with Jaunty.  I’ve been meaning to test it for a while, and finally found some hardware recently to give it a shot.

Much to the chagrin of free-software stalwarts, nVidia has always refused to provide a full-featured open-source Linux driver for its video chips.  Instead, it offers the nv driver, which supports only 2D acceleration–meaning no desktop effects–and whose source is ostensibly open, but is partially obfuscated and not very useful to third-party developers.

nVidia also offers a free (but not Free) closed-source driver that provides 3D support, and although the process of installing this driver in Ubuntu has been greatly simplified in recent releases, the fact that it’s proprietary presents a number of philosophical, legal and technical obstacles for Ubuntu developers and users.

To solve this problem, the cleverly named nouveau project was launched a few years ago to develop a full-featured, open-source video driver for nVidia chips.  As its feature status chart demonstrates, it’s still maturing and doesn’t yet offer any real 3D functionality, but 2D support is implemented.

Fedora 11 uses nouveau instead of nv as the default driver for nVidia chips.  In Ubuntu, nouveau is not installed by default, but is available from the repositories starting with Jaunty.

Testing nouveau

I was curious to see how well nouveau works on Ubuntu, so I installed it (using the xserver-xorg-video-nouveau package) on a Karmic system with a GeForce2 MX200 card (PCI ID 10de:0111).  The results were not exactly impressive, but not dismal either.

In terms of basic 2D functionality, nouveau gets the job done, albeit not yet as well as nv.  My monitor’s native resolution was set automatically, and I could move and resize windows and switch between virtual desktops smoothly.  There was a little choppiness during certain operations, but the desktop was usable.

In terms of performance, however, it’s clear that nouveau has a ways to go, at least on my hardware.  I used glxgears (yes, it’s not a good tool for benchmarking overall video performance, but it’s a useful basis for standardized comparison of FPS rates under different video drivers) to measure video frames per second under the nouveau, nv and nvidia (closed-source) drivers.  The tests were run with desktop effects turned off and the system idling.  The average FPS rates were as follows:

• nouveau: 355.3
• nv: 475.8
• nvidia (version 96, from Ubuntu repositories): 1993

Clearly, nouveau came out well short of the performance of even the nv driver, and was bested many times over by the proprietary nvidia driver.

These numbers shouldn’t be read as evidence of nouveau’s performance overall.  It may do a lot better on other video card models.  Unfortunately, I don’t have other nVidia hardware available to test on.

Moreover, the simple fact that nouveau works reliably is good news for Ubuntu users, even if the module has a lot of catching up to do to match the performance of nVidia’s closed-source driver.  nouveau may not be much yet, but it’s a solid start to what should one day allow more Linux users to take full advantage of their computers’ capabilities without having to rely on closed-source software.

More than 600 people registered to attend Atlanta Linux Fest, which was held Sept. 19. Many of the standing-room-only sessions focused on Canonical and Ubuntu. Here are nine Ubuntu-oriented highlights from the event.

9. New ISVs in 2010?: Software Partner Manager John Pugh focuses on Ubuntu Server Edition. He’s certainly upbeat about the October 2009 release of Ubuntu 9.10. But Pugh is already looking forward to Ubuntu Server Edition 10.04 — which is a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Pugh says Canonical is speaking with major closed source ISVs (independent software vendors, Oracle among them) and Canonical hopes to generate some more ISV support as part of the Ubuntu 10.04 launch.

Still, Pugh also cautioned readers not to focus too much on any one particular ISV, since Canonical’s efforts involve discussions with multiple companies.

8. Moving Between Public and Private Clouds: Pugh’s late-day presentation on cloud technologies attracted a standing-room-only crowd. He described how customers will be able to move Ubuntu applications between public and private clouds using such technologies as Ubuntu on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (public) and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud powered by Eucalyptus.

7. Rugged Ubuntu Devices: EmperorLinux Inc. President and CEO Lincoln Durey showed me a small, rugged Panasonic Toughbook device running Ubuntu. Durey mentioned the device is ideal for such vertical markets as real estate, health care, and insurance. Watch for a FastChat video featuring Durey to debut on WorksWithU later this week.

6. More Cellular Devices Coming: Pete Graner, Canonical’s kernel team manager, told me to expect cellular and mobile broadband-type companies to offer more Ubuntu-oriented devices.

5. Small Business Server Remix? Nope: Pugh said Canonical wasn’t currently working on any type of Small Business Server version of Ubuntu. But he said Ubuntu in the cloud and Ubuntu Server Edition could certainly meet small business needs. Plus, Pugh noted groups like Amahi are working on Ubuntu for home servers.

4. Ubuntu Server GUI? Nope: Pugh told me Canonical has no plans to introduce a GUI (graphical user interface) on Ubuntu Server Edition. For novices who are looking for a server GUI, Pugh recommends running Ubuntu Desktop Edition as a server.

3. Staffing Up: Several Canonical employees mentioned to me that the five-year-old company now has 300 employees. Sounds like Canonical has pushed beyond the small business stage of its existence.

2. Ubuntu 10.04 Gets A Name: Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth via video announced Ubuntu 10.04’s code name is Lucid Lynx.

1. The Ubuntu 9.10 Compatibility Test: Will Ubuntu 9.10 work on your current notebook, netbook or PC? Canonical has developed diagnostics software (installed on a USB flash drive) that allows you to quickly discover whether your systems’ WiFi, sound, graphics and other variables will continue to work under Ubuntu 9.10.

It’s a slick little test that requires about 20 minutes of your time. I suspect Canonical will share more news about the testing software around the time of Ubuntu 9.10’s launch.

I’ll post more highlights from Atlanta Linux Fest in the days ahead.

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Wireless on Linux is a perennial embarrassment.  Although the situation has improved immensely since a few years ago, the inability to get wireless cards working acceptably often tops the list of user frustrations. Here’s an outline of what’s wrong with Ubuntu’s approach to wireless drivers, and how to fix it.

Until a few weeks ago, I had the luxury of a wired network connection to plug my computer into.  It was great–no passphrases to keep track of, no interference from the neighbors’ networks and no crashing wireless drivers.  Then I moved, and now have to use my wireless card to get online.  Although I have a chipset manufactured by Atheros, one of the most Linux-friendly vendors around, my connection is a mess, tending to drop under heavy load and requiring several minutes to negotiate a WPA handshake.

To be fair, Ubuntu, and Linux more generally, have come a long way on the wireless front in the last few years.  More and more wireless cards are now truly plug-and-play, and ndiswrapper is becoming a thing of the past.  But there’s a lot of room left for improvement.

Find stable code and stick with it

Perhaps the greatest problem with Ubuntu’s approach to wireless is the ever-changing code of its wireless stack.  With compat-wireless, from which most of Ubuntu’s drivers come, in constant development, users receive different drivers each time the kernel is updated.  Although the updates sometimes fix problems, they also tend to cause regressions on systems that already work.

Rather than striving to deliver the latest and greatest upstream code, Ubuntu packagers should focus on finding snapshots of the wireless stack that work the best, and stick with them.  This might make the Ubuntu kernel team’s job a little more complicated, since it would mean diverging more from the upstream kernel, but it would be well worth the effort.

Put stability first

Advanced wireless features, like AP-mode and injection support, are nice, but they should take a back seat to normal managed-mode connections, which are what 99% of Ubuntu users are interested in.  The blame here lies with upstream developers more than Ubuntu’s packagers, but someone needs to make sure the ability to connect reliably to normal wireless routers isn’t compromised in the interests of geeks who need fancy features to crack their neighbors’ WEP keys.

My ath5k driver can inject hundreds of packets per second without breaking a sweat, yet it can’t hold a managed-mode connection for more than a few hours before it begins spewing cryptic error messages into the system log and eventually crashes.  Clearly, priorities need to be rearranged.

Simplify wireless infrastructure

Ubuntu’s wireless infrastucture needs to be cleaned up.  For some chipsets, Ubuntu ships more than one driver–ath5k/ath9k vs. ath_pci, for example–and telling the system which one to use is complicated even for advanced users.  Similarly, the module dependencies related to some parts of the wireless subsystem are a mess–the inability to use b44-based ethernet cards without also having the b43 wireless driver loaded is a prominent example.

Wireless networking is complicated by nature, but that doesn’t mean Ubuntu shouldn’t try to simplify it for end users.  Making Jockey (a.k.a. “Hardware Drivers”) work reliably would be a good first step.  Avoiding redundancy in wireless modules and cleaning up the dirty hacks that work around driver dependencies would be a great addition.

Giving up

After recompiling drivers and kernels, replacing NetworkManager with wicd and managing my connection from the command line, all to no effect, I remained so dissatisfied with my Ubuntu wireless experience that I decided it would be easier to buy a cheap router to place next to my computer, flash it with DD-WRT and configure it as a repeater so I can use Ethernet to get online without dealing with my wireless card.  Problem solved, but at considerable expense in time and money.  If my Ubuntu wireless drivers had just worked to begin with, I’d have been a much happier user.

If Ubuntu wants to attract and keep the masses, it needs to continue to devote resources to smoothing over wireless issues.  It may have come far in the last few years, but there’s a long way yet to go.

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Kernel mode setting will be enabled by default for Intel-based video cards on Ubuntu 9.10, set to be released in October.  I recently played around with this new feature on a Karmic Koala live CD, and share my results below.

Put simply, kernel mode setting means the Linux kernel, instead of an X11 video driver, handles the task of configuring the graphics mode of the console.  The assignment of this work to the kernel shaves away some overhead, making certain operations faster.  It also helps developers by allowing kernel problems to be more easily debugged when X is running, and simplifying the video infrastructure upon which Linux relies.

Normal users shouldn’t expect kernel mode setting to revolutionize their Ubuntu experience, but it does bring a few nice improvements, including faster and smoother switching between user accounts and between the X11 console and virtual terminals.  This video provides an idea of the new speed of these operations (apologies for the crudeness):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fast-user switching and access to the virtual console were quite zippy on my i810 video card running in the live environment–and I suspect performance would be even better on an installed system with better hardware (unfortunately, I was only able to test on my old laptop, because the Karmic beta CD wouldn’t boot on my desktop; I’m not sure whether kernel mode setting was the reason).

Kernel mode setting also allows virtual terminals (the screens accessible by pressing control-alt-[1-6]) to display at the native resolution of the attached hardware, making them easier to use and less ugly.  This change will be especially beneficial to administrators of Ubuntu server edition, where all local interaction with the system has to be done in virtual terminals by default.

There’s no official word on when kernel mode setting will be enabled for video chipsets other than Intel, but Ubuntu developers are working on it for some nvidia and ATI devices.  Don’t expect it in Karmic, though.

Because I was traveling, I didn’t get around to upgrading my desktop to Ubuntu 9.04 until yesterday.  After what seemed like the fastest Ubuntu installation and quickest boot ever on my system, I was excited to log into Gnome and see what the stable release of Jaunty has to offer.  Instead, I was met with a lot of frustration and loss of faith in Ubuntu’s commitment to stability, due to egregious regressions in the performance of my Intel video card.

In earlier versions of Ubuntu, my Intel 82945G graphics chipset was able to handle desktop effects and 3D applications like Blender seamlessly.  After the upgrade to Jaunty, however, it was clear that, as the release notes warned, “Users of Intel video chipsets have reported performance regressions” (“disasters” would have been a better description).  Desktop effects were jumpy at best, and the playback of embedded flash video was less than smooth.  And searches on the forums suggest that I was one of the lucky ones: some Intel users report an inability to start X at all in Jaunty.

After a lot of googling (and two reinstalls due to a potential fix that left me with an unbootable system), I was able to solve the video problem by reverting to the 2.4 Xorg intel driver.  This solution was simple enough, but few inexperienced Ubuntu users are likely to find it, let alone know how to apply it.  Instead, individuals who install Jaunty and find severe graphical performance problems are going to give up on Linux.  And that’s a regrettable outcome that could have been avoided with a little foresight on the part of Ubuntu developers.

Ditching stability?

The performance regressions in the Intel video driver result from major code revisions in Xorg and the driver itself, which will ultimately provide a leaner and faster graphical framework for Linux.  Those changes are useful and valuable.  But I was very disappointed to find that Ubuntu developers had pushed the new code into Jaunty before it became stable on most hardware.

If I wanted to take my chances on bleeding-edge software, I’d switch to Debian Unstable or compile my own beta kernels.  I use Ubuntu because I need my computer to work reliably with as little effort on my part as possible.  In the past, Ubuntu’s commitment to usability and stability has stood out in the free-software world, where developers tend to sacrifice those features in order to push the latest and greatest code, regardless of how well-tested it may be.

The Ubuntu developers should have foreseen the problems posed for Intel users by the new version of Xorg–the issues were reported well before Jaunty came out in April–and saved the update for Ubuntu 9.10’s release next October, when the code should be considerably more stable.  This may have proved detrimental to the few users who actually benefit from the revised code in its current state, but it would have made the Jaunty experience much better on most computers.

The Intel video fiasco is a rare exception among what has generally been a strong commitment to usability and stability on the part of Ubuntu developers.  Let’s hope that the lesson of this mistake is learned, and that Ubuntu doesn’t squander its reputation by continuing to push out software before it’s ready for general consumption.

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One of the most innovative features to find its way into the Linux kernel recently is support for master mode on several wireless chipsets.  Though there’s been little fanfare surrounding this development, it could soon be giving home users, in particular, another reason to celebrate Ubuntu.

Until a few years ago, Linux’s poor wireless support was one of the free-software community’s greatest embarrassments.  Many devices lacked native support, meaning that the fickle process of loading Windows drivers through ndiswrapper was often the only way to get cards working–and even then, they were limited to managed and ad-hoc modes.

This situation has been completely reversed recently, with the Linux kernel now boasting at least basic support for most wireless cards, thanks to the Linux wireless project.  Although Ubuntu’s rather conservative approach to the new wireless stack leaves many users still having to install drivers manually in Intrepid, the era is at least on the horizon when wireless networking will work out-of-the-box for everyone.

Master mode

Even better than a wireless card that “just works” in Ubuntu when connecting to a router in managed mode is one that can also replace the router, by operating in master mode.  As of April 2009, the latest drivers from the Linux wireless project support this functionality on the following chipsets:

1. Atheros (newer chips only)
2. Broadcom
3. Intel (2200 chips only)
4. Prism
5. Ralink (except the newest devices)

Granted, only experienced Linux geeks are likely to be able to enjoy master mode for the time being, since putting it into action requires intimate familiarity with the ‘iwconfig’ command, the ‘hostap’ utility and most likely dhcp servers, not to mention bridging network interfaces together.

Nonetheless, the day has at least become conceivable when setting up an Ubuntu computer as a wireless router is as easy to clicking a button in NetworkManager, allowing even the most technologically inept Linux users to create local wireless networks effortlessly–and not just ad-hoc networks like those supported by ‘Internet Connection Sharing’ in Windows, but true access point-based networks.

Why it matters

Beyond being cool, the ability to turn an Ubuntu computer easily into a wireless router has practical benefits.  For starters, it saves consumers money, since they can avoid purchasing access points from commercial vendors.

A home computer turned into a router also offers much greater flexibility than most moderately priced commercial products.  Rather than being stuck with the limited number of settings made available by hardware vendors, users can route traffic, customize firewalls, log activity and so on in whichever way they see fit.

As driver developers continue to enhance the capabilities of wireless on Linux and surpass the offerings of proprietary operating systems, Ubuntu and other distributions should concentrate on making those features easily accessible to end users, and on promoting them as one more thing that Linux can do and closed-source software can’t.

I like to run the latest software, so every 6 months when a new Ubuntu debuts I upgrade my system. To keep everything running smoothly I like to start with a clean install, but I always find myself repeating the same modifications. Some of these modifications are essential to get certain features to work, one of them is something I couldn’t do without. Here are my five essential Ubuntu modifications.

They include:

1. Install the ubuntu-restricted-extras Package

Recognising that users require the extra functionality of certain packages that can not be distributed with Ubuntu due to licensing incompatibilities, the ubuntu-restricted-extras package is provided to install some of these common extra packages together.

Among others, this package will install the Adobe Flash Player plugin — essential for viewing a lot of online content and various codecs required for DVD and MP3 playback.

2. Install the libdvdcss Library

Most, if not all commercial DVDs are encrypted using CSS copy protection. Due to licensing, a normal installation of Ubuntu can not play these discs. Installing the libdvdcss library from the Medibuntu repositories gives Ubuntu’s media players the ability to decrypt these discs, allowing you to watch your favourite DVD movies in Ubuntu.

3. Change the Desktop Theme

Let’s face it, the default desktop theme is not very visually appealing. Brown hasn’t been fashionable since the 70’s and the plain grey GNOME panel will be familiar to anyone who used a Mac in the mid 90’s.

I used to settle for a simple change of colour and setting the GNOME panel transparency which is a vast improvement over the default, but currently I use the Shiki Colors theme as it complements the new splash screen and notifications in Jaunty.

4. Set the Home Location

Why do I always have to set my home location after installation? The Ubuntu installer asks me for my timezone, surely it would be logical for me to enter my home location at this point so I don’t have to reconfigure later on. As a personal preference I like to add the location of my office in the UK so I can quickly open the menu anytime I want to find out the local time there.

5. Install GNOME-do

Inspired by the Quicksilver utility for OS X, do is a utility that “lets you do things as quickly as possible, but no quicker.”

It is a fantastic tool with a simple, intuitive interface that gives quick access to launch and control applications, open boookmarks, use contacts, even update your twitter feed. There are scores of plugins that add extra functionality to do just about anything you can think of, quickly. You can even have it appear as an OS X like dock and do away with the lower panel to make your desktop more aesthetically pleasing.

So there are my essential Ubuntu modifications. It is annoying that I know the first two will never be able to become part of the standard installation and there is no doubt that users who are new to Ubuntu will be confused at the inability to play MP3 music and DVD movies out of the box. Maybe some other essential modifications will be addresed in future releases.

As reported previously, one of the targets for Karmic, the next Ubuntu release is a new desktop theme and a utility as good as GNOME-do should become part of the standard install.