I like the count down banners that get us excited about the new version of Ubuntu coming out. Thanks to ikt, I finally found one!
The Wiki has a page dedicated to the countdown banners. The sad part is that none of the counters made it to the Community countdown page. The Facebook and Android ideas sounded cool, but I didn’t go looking for them.
You can check out the Natty Release schedule to see that the release date is April 28th.
I got the great idea that we would try to watch the Olympics online last night. But, I had to reboot to Windows!
The problem is that NBC used a tool called Silverlight to broadcast the video. Currently, the version of Silverlight does not work on Linux.
I attempted to download Moonlight, the Linux version of Silverlight. but it did not help. The download page says that they do have an experimental version 2, but I think this note explains why it still does not work: “Note: These are currently built without multimedia support. No video or mp3 playback is enabled on these binaries.”
I tried to do some quick searches to see if there was a way to recompile or enable Moonlight to playback video, but I did not find anything.
I did find many other people complaining about Microsoft though. New York times wrote an article called Olympics Online, With a Hook. My search also brought this article up a few times: Linux Users on NBC’s Olympic Videos: We Don’t Get No Respect.
I found another article, Ok, I admit it. I love NBCOlympics.com! Now go make it work on Linux!, where the author makes this quote: “Now, one could get all huffy and puffy and blame Microsoft on this state of affairs, but in this case, I have to lay this problem strictly at the feet of the Open Source community.” I have to disagree! If I write a website, I have to make sure that I use tools and code that will work with my audience’s computers. It would be ridiculous for me to write and test my website only for the Firefox browser or only Safari. If Microsoft really wants Silverlight to be a success, I think they should donate the resources necessary to the Open Source effort. Obviously, not that many open source developers feel that we need another Flash.
Anyway, I wish I had a good answer for how I made it work, but all I can say for now is we have to use Windows.
InfoWorld’s Zack Urlocker pointed out 3 tools to aide in migrating data from Windows to Linux in his article Moving from Windows to Linux.
Three Tools
These tools look very interesting. I think a database of applications would be more helpful for me. I don’t have as much trouble moving my data from one place to another, but finding Linux applications to replace the Windows applications is where I have the most trouble.
Interestingly enough, I came across this article shortly after. The section “The application situation” had some very helpful tips including this source:
The table of equivalents / replacements / analogs of Windows software in Linux.