The GIMP image editor, version 2.6, has been released. It includes significant user interface changes, an improved free select tool, new brush dynamics options, and the new GEGL backend. If you’re a regular GIMP user, this is a very worthwhile upgrade.
Toolbox windows are now reported as utility windows to the window manager by default. This, along with some other changes, allows GIMP to have a much more Photoshop-like single window interface:

Compiz users will not be able to take advantage of the utility-hinted toolbox windows. Until Compiz supports them (I’m sure I read somewhere that this is being fixed) the toolboxes will act like normal windows. To work around this you can right click on the toolboxes’ window title bars and select Always on Top.


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It can be annoying how the GIMP image editor’s image and toolbox windows are separate, if all of them are hidden behind another window you have to bring not only the image to the front but also the toolboxes. This could work much more productively, why not show all the toolboxes whenever a image is in the foreground?
GIMP has a preference that will do just that. In the main GIMP window, click File->Preferences. In the preferences dialog, select Window Management from the list. Under the heading Window Manager Hints, change the two drop down boxes to Utility window.

You’ll need to restart GIMP to make the changes take effect. You’ll notice that the window decoration has changed on the toolboxes. They’ll now no longer appear in the window list, and will stay on top whenever an image window has focus.
Unfortunately, if you’re using Compiz desktop effects this will not have any effect. While GNOME’s Metacity window manager recognizes that GIMP’s windows should be treated differently, Compiz does not. This doesn’t mean Compiz users are out of luck entirely.
Another option is to use another workspace for GIMP, and optionally change the toolboxes to always stay on top. You can do this by right clicking on a window’s title bar and selecting Always on Top. If you’d perfer not to be setting this all the time for GIMP, you can select the Keep above in those two drop down boxes.

[via tombuntu.com]

Being a fan on Ubuntu, I always keep an eye on its progress and development from time to time. Having bough a new Eee PC 901, an Intel Atom-based notebook with RAM 1 GB, 20 GB SSD, and a cute small display of 9 inch, I am curious of installing the new version of Ubuntu called as 9.04. I’ve got the previous Ubuntu class, 8.10 installed into my notebook soon after I bought this Asus-branded notebook. Ubuntu 9.04 seems to be exciting to have instead my existing old version of it.
Ubuntu 9.04 has been released since April 23, 2009, a Cannonical’s tenth, designed by Jaunty Jacklope. New features of Ubuntu 9.04 include faster booting time, integration of web services and application into the desktop interface. Its new usplash screen and login screen supports the Eee PC 901. These features are factors that drove me impatient to make it installed into my current notebook.


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SSDs (solid state drives) are great. They’re shock resistant, consume less power, produce less heat, and have very fast seek times. If you have a Ubuntu computer with an SSD, such as an Eee PC, there are some tweaks you can make to increase performance and extend the life of the disk.

1. The simplest tweak is to mount volumes using the noatime option. By default Linux will write the last accessed time attribute to files. This can reduce the life of your SSD by causing a lot of writes. The noatime mount option turns this off.
   Open your fstab file:
   

   sudo gedit /etc/fstab

   
   Ubuntu uses the relatime option by default. For your SSD partitions (formatted as ext3), replace relatime with noatime in fstab. Reboot for the changes to take effect.
   
2. Using a ramdisk instead of the Ubuntu SSD to store temporary files will speed things up, but will cost you a few megabytes of RAM.
   Open your fstab file:
   

   sudo gedit /etc/fstab

   
   Add this line to fstab to mount /tmp (temporary files) as tmpfs (temporary file system):
   

   tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

   
   Reboot for the changes to take effect. Running df, you should see a new line with /tmp mounted on tmpfs:
   

   tmpfs 513472 30320 483152 6% /tmp

   
   

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The last time I needed to install Ubuntu on a system without a CD drive, my Eee PC, I created a bootable USB drive to run the graphical installer. The UNetbootin tool I used makes creating the USB system simple, but in Ubuntu 8.10 there’s an even easier way.
You’ll need:

• The USB Startup Disk creator tool. It comes as a part of the default Ubuntu 8.10 desktop. I haven’t seen any packages for older versions of Ubuntu yet, but I have have been able to install the 8.10 package in Ubuntu 8.04.
• A USB drive or memory card with a minimum of 700 MB of free space.
• An Ubuntu CD or Ubuntu CD ISO file.

Launch the USB Startup Disk creator tool from System->Administration->Create a USB startup disk.




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