The german site ubuntuusers.de ist still down, since yesterday. According to the webteam it’s caused by a hardware failure.

A static version of the wiki has been made available: http://www.ubuntuwiki.de/. This way support information is still available, besides search engine cache.

The new release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” is available since yesterday. It comes with a fresh design, faster boot speed, some new features and many updates.

Good news for us TeX users: the new version provides TeX Live 2009 installable by the Ubuntu package manager. The LaTeX editor Kile is included as version 2.1beta4, TeXmaker as 1.9.9.

If you would like to celebrate it: our user group Ubuntu Berlin invites you to our release party today!

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop, Server and Netbook editions have been released today. The new version is starting even faster than the previous one, is using the ext4 file system by default, the GNOME 2.28 desktop environment and the GRUB 2 boot manager, it comes with a lot of software updates. Outstanding are the new Ubuntu Software Center and Ubuntu One, the cloud system. To learn about the new features have a look at the feature overview.

To download Ubuntu 9.10 or to obtain CDs see: Get Ubuntu. For instructions on upgrading visit: Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10.
Upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge as always.

To get more information, visit www.ubuntu.com.

Karmic Koala is coming, its release is scheduled for tomorrow, Ubuntu user groups all around the world will celebrate the release with parties, so we will do in Berlin.

For the 8th time the Ubuntu-Berlin user group will give a party at their favorite hacker location c-base. It will take place on Saturday, October 31st, entry is free. Talks and presentations will be held, Ubuntu 9.10 can be tested, help for installation will be given, experienced users will answer questions. WLAN is available for free. Every time I’ve been there, several times during the years, it has been a very pleasant evening.

If you’re interested but cannot come to Berlin, have a look at the world wide release parties list or visit the Party map.

Just seen on twitter/eeebuntu, as announced there 1 hour ago Eeebuntu 3.0 Base Edition has been released now. Torrents are up, mirrors are established.

If you’re waiting for Eeebuntu 3.0 like me or just interested visit

• the Eeebuntu homepage,
• the download page,
• the Eeebuntu forum for news and experiences.

Eeebuntu is the basis of my TeX system during traveling. After download I will install the base edition on a high speed usb stick for testing, the installation on the internal SSD has to wait until the NBR edition is available too.

Though the installation of TeX Live 2008 could be done easily also on Ubuntu Linux the installation of the very recommendable LaTeX editor Kile could raise a problem because Kile depends on the package texlive-latex-base of Ubuntu/ Debian Linux. There’s a tool called equivs helping to circumvent such dependencies by creating dummy packages, see APT HOWTO, Very useful helpers.

equivs can be installed by Synaptic or by aptitude or apt-get from the repositories:
sudo apt-get install equivs
equivs is able to create Debian packages providing information to the local package management. I’ve created a control file (calles texlive.ctl) for equivs simulating just texlive-latex-base:

Section: tex
Package: texlive-dummy
Provides: texlive-latex-base
Description: texlive dummy package
 This package provides dpkg with the information that
 there is the package texlive-latex-base installed.

I’ve processed it with equivs-build:
equivs-build texlive.ctl
The program created a file texlive-dummy_1.0_all.deb. This could be installed by
sudo dpkg -i texlive-dummy_1.0_all.deb
Afterwards Kile could be installed without to request any texlive package from the repositories and Kile worked fine with TeX Live 2008. (Update: see comment #4 for a complete control file for Kile on Jaunty.) You could lock the package to prevent it from being installed later.

The control file may refer to a different section (like misc) or could contain additional information (Provides: texlive-base, texlive-base-bin, …)

TeX Live 2008 is not planned any more to be released for Debian and therefore not for Ubuntu Linux. That version will be skipped, as announced by a Debian TeX maintainer, and TeX Live 2009, meant to be the next release for Debian/Ubuntu, is still under construction, that’s why I’m taking this as a temporary solution. After all the 2008 version is working fine thanks to the great work of the TeX Live team.

Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop, Server and Netbook editions have been released today. The new version is starting faster, is now supporting the ext4 file system and comes with a lot of software updates. Regarding its new features features have a look for instance at the desktop edition feature overview.

To download Ubuntu 9.04 or to obtain CDs see: Get Ubuntu. For instructions on upgrading visit: Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04.
Upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge as always.

To get more information, visit www.ubuntu.com.

Last weekend I’ve got an Eee PC S101, now I’ve got time to test it: I’m writing some notes here sharing the first experience with the S101 and useful links for installation. After delivery I’ve upgraded the netbook to 2 GB RAM using a Kingston 2GB 667MHz DDR2 Non-ECC CL5 SO DIMM module. The S101 came with Windows XP. Though I’m mainly using Ubuntu Linux I decided to keep XP for compatibility reasons but to install a double boot system with Linux and Windows. I’ve used the free EASEUS Partition Master 3.5 Home Edition to resize the XP partition to 8 GB, that worked fine. I installed the Gavotte RAM disk and linked tmp and temp directory there as well as the browser cache to speed up work and to save SSD life time. For the TeX work I’ve added TeXnicCenter and MiKTeX. I’ve chosen MiKTeX because it’s been a great distribution since many years, further I’ve already planned to install the alternative TeX Live 2008 on the Linux partition.

But the Windows installation wasn’t the main issue - back to Linux. I decided to install Eeebuntu, in particular the Eeebuntu Netbook Remix 2.0. After downloading the Eeebuntu NBR iso file I’ve used Unetbootin to save that iso image to the SD card that came with the S101 and to make the SD card bootable. The S101 is able to boot from the SD card, so I did it, the Eeebuntu live system started, using this I installed Eeebuntu to the remaining free 8 GB space on the internal SSD. That was done quickly, not much to tell. The GRUB boot manager has been installed and allows me to choose between Ubuntu Linux and Windows. Ubuntu runs fine now, I’ve also linked the Firefox browser cache to the RAM disk located on /dev/shm.

Finally I’ve installed Kile by Synaptic and TeX Live 2008 over the internet using the small network installer package. The latter took some time but required few interaction. Even after it failed because of a network disconnection restarting it just continued the installation with the same settings. After adding some tools and of course some math software I’m very satisfied with it and I’m using it right now.

On April 23, 2009 the version 9.04 of Ubuntu Linux will be released. The user group Ubuntu Berlin is inviting to the Jaunty Jackalope Release Party:

The party in the c-base Berlin will start on April 25, 2009, 4pm, admission will be free. There will be presentations showing new features of Ubuntu 9.04, encryption, localization, Ubuntu on USB sticks. I will come to that party too of course.

If you cannot come to Berlin but want to celebrate the Jaunty release too, have a look at the Jaunty release parties worldwide.

When the version 9 of the Adobe Reader was released last years summer, Adobe did not publish a Linux version. Now the version 9.1 of the reader has been relased for Linux and Solaris, including an important security patch, version 9.0 was skipped. To get information about its features and for download visit adobe.com or the Adobe Reader Blog announcement, for short german information you could visit golem.de, techniknews.com or Dogan’s Solaris blog.