Ultimate Edition 2.7 was released this week as a DVD for both 32 bit and 64 bit and was built on Ultimate Edition 2.6 (also Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04) with the major change that it has been fully updated / upgraded and provides the following desktop environments which can be selected at the login: KDE 4.4.2, Gnome, LXDE and Openbox. The developer has included a Conky script that will create a custom conkyrc configuration based on your computer (including any external devices plugged in at the time you run it). The conky-install.sh is found in your home folder where it can be executed and is well commented if you wish to learn how it works.
Ultimate Edition 2.7 is a very attractive implementation of Lucid Lynx with almost everything a Linux Desktop user would want or need, already installed and configured, including the restricted drivers for wireless networking. Compiz/Emerald is enabled giving the user lots of eye candy and the default wall paper is also very nice. One reason a person might want to to use UE 2.7 is the fact that KDE 4.4.2 is included as one of the desktop choices. KDE 4.4.x is latest and greatest in the KDE world, and if you are a KDE user, this is a great desktop. (Most other distributions are still at KDE 4.3.x or older).
Out of box experience included being able to play my commercial DVD's however I had to jump through the usual hopes of configuring the partner repo's and the medibuntu repo in order to install things like Acrobat Reader 9. But it is very nice and if I was reloading a machine or upgrading to Lucid Lynx 10.04, I highly recommend Ultimate Edition 2.7 (I could not say this about the first release version 2.6). More information and package list can be found at http://distrowatch.gds.tuwien.ac.at/table.php?distribution=ultimate.
Member Darin Miller gave us a great presentation on using Wine at our last meeting. Since that meeting, I have taken it further and found that there are three essential tools that any Wine user needs to use to effectively use Wine to run one's "can't-live-without" Windows program on Linux. Those tools are Wine-Doors, winetricks, and PlayOnLinux (found in the Games menu). To install Microsoft Office 2000, arguably the best supported version of Office on Wine, I ran Wine-Doors first which does a lot of heavy lifting in configuring your Wine environment and then installing Internet Explorer 6 using Wine-Doors which does more heavy lifting in adding fonts and libraries needed by IE 6. I then used winetricks (a script) to add in the usual Jet4.0, MDAC 2.5, and vcrun6 libraries that Office likes to have around (doing this first sped up the installation time and I didn't see near the "fixme's" in the terminal window as Office 2000 was installed). To install Office 2000, my preference is to get into a terminal session, cd to the CD mount directory in the /media/[cd name]/ and then run the command "wine setup.exe" By doing this, you avoid permission errors and also the benefit of seeing the installer activity as the installation progresses. PlayOnLinux is great for installing all those windows games as well Internet Explorer 7 (a work in progress but does work). You may want do some menu cleanup like disabling Outlook which doesn't work and other icons that may not work post-install. PlayOnLinux will install mIRC but my experience with mIRC was that one, it did not work for me, and it is a 30 day evaluation copy that gets installed so one should probably stick with the Linux native IRC Chat programs. As mentioned in another blog entry is that you should check the appsdb at wineHQ (http://appdb.winehq.org/) to find out if your application works or not and what issues might face you if you attempt to install it.
Fixing Wine. One shortcut to fixing wine is just to remove the .wine folder in your home folder and then letting wine recreate it followed by spending a tone of time reinstalling and configuring all the stuff you had installed in wine. A bit overkill as noted by this users experience which was similar to mine: "I have installed winetrick msi2, thinking it might help with an installation - it didn't - what's more, I now get "are you running in safe-mode" or anyway to that effect, and will not install. I have tried with rm -rf ~/.wine-clean; WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-clean wine setup.exe, which does work, but that seems a bit overboard when all I want to do is go back to the original MSI setting." This last step is actually the preferred and I had also installed msi2 (don't go there unless you know you absolutely need to!). Without having an "un-installer" in wine or winetricks, I found a simple solution was to remove (as in delete) the msie overrides using the wine configuration tool, Applications tab with Default Settings selected, and then on the Libraries tab for DLL Overrides, remove the 2 msie related overrides which effectively "removed" msi2 and I was able to install my msi application using the msie that is built in to Wine.
Sometimes you have create the application launcher and the path to the application as for some reason, you may not get an application icon in the Application menu, anywhere. Here is an example for IE6 which I have used for a template in those cases: env WINEDEBUG=-all WINEPREFIX=/home/tinslecl/.wine/ wine "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" Note that the application path being place inside the quote marks is important!
One other note: Dell is saying that it plans to ship Ubuntu 10.04 systems in mid-2010 and if you visit Dell.com/ubuntu, you’ll a very positive “Top Ten” list about Ubuntu.” Number 6 on that list is "Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft® Windows®." Dell has back tracked a little on this statement, apparently taking some heat from somewhere in the Northwest, but still gives a positive endorsement of Linux being more secure than that other operating system.