Hi. I'm Andrew

What is Ubuntu One?

Ubuntu One is the personal cloud service that simplifies your digital life. Imagine buying music and getting it delivered to the computers of your choice. Or synchronizing your files and notes and accessing them from anywhere. Or consolidating your computer and mobile phone contacts and safely sharing documents and pictures with them. Ubuntu One can already do this and more.

2 GB for all of your essentials.

Everyone gets 2 GB of cloud storage for free. Store and sync your important documents, family pictures, address book contacts, notes and more. Share with your friends or the entire world

Discover the benefits of a personal cloud

Ubuntu One Music Store. A cloud-enabled shopping experience.

Purchase songs by the biggest bands directly from your Ubuntu desktop music player. The security of the cloud and convenience of sync.

Expand your music collection

Ubuntu, one of the many Linux distributions and a popular one, has sort of follow the model of iTunes & Dropbox with some touch of Open Source approach. Would this model work on Open Source software end-users? Personally, I really don't know. I'm still adept to using Dropbox for backing up files. 

One thing as well. I wouldn't be surprised that one of these days Ubuntu will release their very own mobile device with Ubuntu One integrated on it.

So, what do you think? Post your thoughts through the comments below. 

The new style in Ubuntu is inspired by the idea of “Light”.

We’re drawn to Light because it denotes both warmth and clarity, and intrigued by the idea that “light” is a good value in software. Good software is “light” in the sense that it uses your resources efficiently, runs quickly, and can easily be reshaped as needed. Ubuntu represents a break with the bloatware of proprietary operating systems and an opportunity to delight to those who use computers for work and play. More and more of our communications are powered by light, and in future, our processing power will depend on our ability to work with light, too.

Visually, light is beautiful, light is ethereal, light brings clarity and comfort.
— On Brand at the Ubuntu Wiki

1. nautilus- gksu

If you hate the way that Linux restricts your user privileges and access to certain files, then nautilus-gksu is the easiest way to get yourself out of it. “Nautilus-gksu” adds a “Open as administrator” entry in the context menu. When you need to open any files with root permission, you just have to right-click on the file, select “Open as Administrator” and you will be able to read/edit/modify the file.

(In Ubuntu, type sudo apt-get install nautilus-gksu in the terminal to install)

~/.fonts.conf

Of course, when it comes to Linux, for every pro­blem there are a few dozen solu­tions – or one very, very com­pli­ca­ted solu­tion. GNOME, the default desk­top for Ubuntu, arri­ves with a “Font Ren­de­ring Details” dia­log box in its appea­rance set­tings, to pla­cate the mouth-breathing phi­lis­ti­nes who need a GUI to get things done. And it doesn’t really help much. I knew I’d have to get my hands dirty in ~/.fonts.conf, this XML file that is capa­ble (and only capa­ble) of inc­re­dibly fine-tuned font tweaking.

[Fonts are] the #1 rea­son why Linux hasn’t seen any sig­ni­fi­cant adop­tion on the desktop/laptop yet. Robert Sco­ble

The trou­ble, as is the case with most Goo­gle results you get when loo­king for help with Linux, is that there is a glut of quick fixes, blocks of code direc­ted towards one spe­ci­fic per­son and their spe­ci­fic sys­tem, that they are then told to paste into a file or save into a direc­tory, with little to no expla­na­tion about why this solu­tion is going to work. Or there’s the tech­ni­cal docu­men­ta­tion that isn’t gea­red towards users. There’s no middle ground (unless you count the occa­sio­nal, ske­le­tal wiki that hasn’t been upda­ted since 2004).

Only after loo­king at count­less ~/.fonts.conf exam­ples was I able to glean what was going on inside them. The full power of this file allows you to tar­get with ama­zing pre­ci­sion any variant or size of any font your sys­tem might dis­play and give it its own uni­que pro­per­ties; but there are really only three(ish) of these pro­per­ties that you need to know about, and I am going to explain them here.

antia­lias

Anti-aliasing is the trick that makes your pixels not look like pixels. You’ve noti­ced this when you’ve seen poorly resi­zed ima­ges with jag­ged edges – they’re not pro­perly anti-aliased. Simi­larly, if fonts are not anti-aliased, they look like black Tetris pie­ces on a white back­ground. Anti-aliasing is going on all the time without you kno­wing about it, and you’d really have to make an effort not to have it, but it’s worth put­ting in your ~/.fonts.conf file for good mea­sure. You’ll want to apply it to all fonts on your sys­tem, so the syn­tax would be:

<match target="font"> <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">  <bool>true</bool> </edit></match>

You can pro­bably figure out what these things mean, but I will link to a com­plete manual for ~/.fonts.conf syn­tax at the end of this post.

rgba

This one is a mat­ter of per­so­nal pre­fe­rence, I guess. I don’t see how any­body of sound mind could stand to have pink, beige, and tur­quoise pixels sprin­kled around the edges of their let­ters – the result of “sub-pixel ren­de­ring” – but I guess the argu­ment is that it allows them to be shar­per. Whatever.

Trust me when I say that things look best if you tell ~/.fonts.conf to disa­ble sub-pixel ren­de­ring, which is done like so:

<match target="font"> <edit name="rgba" mode="assign">  <const>none</const> </edit></match>

If you hap­pen to be schi­zoph­re­nic, or color­blind or wha­te­ver, then yes, fine, you can turn on sub-pixel ren­de­ring by chan­ging none to rgb, to reflect the com­po­si­tion of your monitor’s sub­pi­xels (which are almost cer­tainly in the order Red-Green-Blue, from left to right). Have fun scratching your eye­balls out.

rgba=rgb

rgba=none

Admit­tedly it would be nice if there were some antialiasstyle pro­perty you could set to antialiasslight or something, to ligh­ten up those gray pixels a little bit.

hin­ting / autohint / hintstyle

Put it on my tombs­tone: Turn Off Hin­ting. I’m beg­ging you. If some­body tries to tell you that this is a mat­ter of pre­fe­rence, they are lying to you, and are not your friend, and are pro­bably ban­ging your girl­friend. If you leave hin­ting on, Geor­gia will not look like Geor­gia, Lucida will not look like Lucida, and Nim­bus will not look like Helvetica.

hintstyle=hintnone

hinting=true, autohint=true

Here is how you Turn Off Hinting®:

<match target="font"> <edit name="hinting" mode="assign">  <bool>false</bool> </edit> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">  <bool>false</bool> </edit> <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">  <const>hintnone</const> </edit></match>

Alter­na­ti­vely, if you posi­ti­vely demand more “crisp­ness” from your fonts, even at the expense of aesthe­tics, you might want to give slight hin­ting a try. From the above code, change hinting and autohint to true, and hintstyle to hintslight:

hintstyle=hintslight

That’s it, roughly spea­king. It’s my unders­tan­ding that some spe­ci­fic fonts do look bet­ter if spe­ci­fi­cally tar­ge­ted and adjus­ted with maybe slight hin­ting. But that’s for another day. If you do as I’ve ins­truc­ted, things will be so much bet­ter for you. Leave a com­ment if you want my Pay­Pal address.

 

This post would not have been pos­si­ble without the help of these sites:

• Arch­Wiki: I know nothing about Arch Linux, but this wiki page has a lot of good info.
• fontconfig.org: the most com­plete and recent ~/.fonts.conf refe­rence I’ve found.
• Ubuntu Wiki: con­tains an exam­ple of a very com­prehen­sive (if dated) ~/.fonts.conf file. Study it and learn how to do other stuff.
• The Mas­ter­plan: another sam­ple ~/.fonts.conf file, and the only other one that I know of that turns off hin­ting and sub­pi­xel rendering.

Well explained. I was searching for a proper solution since upgrading to Firefox 3.5 didn't allow to solve the font hinting issue.