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Back in early December 2009, I bought a Lenovo Q100 nettop. Lenovo recently released the IdeaCentre Q110. So, what’s the difference between the Q100 and Q110? It’s essentially the same as its predecessor except for two things: The nettop comes with 2GB instead of 1GB RAM. It’s also equipped with a HDMI output. Everything else is the same: 160GB hard drive. 6 USB ports, 1 mic and stereo output.

One thing I still haven’t tried is running Ubuntu Remix on it.

Red Hat and Novell are two pioneer companies who have made money from open-source. Novell with its Suse Linux distribution has received an offer from Elliot Associates to buy its stock for $5.75 per stock, a total of $1 billion dollars. Novell shares closed today at $4.75. After hours trading are above $6.

Meanwhile, Redhat’s market capitalization is at $5 billion. This is more than enough proof that companies can make money from free, open-source products.

It looks like Simple Scan will be the default scanner in Ubuntu Lucid. From Starry Hope:

Simple Scan makes scanning, emailing, printing and saving documents much less complicated. Sure, many of us geeks might want something like XSane that offers much more control over our scans, but for beginners, Simple Scan should take all the mystery out of scanning. Scanning documents and attaching them to an email in Evolution is now just a few-click process.

Simple Scan offers only the most basic of controls. It lets you choose the type of document you are scanning (photo or text), lets you do basic cropping, then lets you save the scan as a file, email your scans via Evolution or just print.  It also handles multi-page documents, allowing you to save them as a PDF file or as a series of JPG images. That’s about all there is to it – it’s simple!

It’s about time. It’s a much needed feature that has been missing for a very long time. I’m glad it’s included in the latest release of Ubuntu. Kudos to the Ubuntu development team for including this neat little program.

Just wanted to pass this on to Linux Mint fans. From the Linux Mint blog.

Development started on Linux Mint 9. The menu will allow you to edit the shortcuts directly, to add them to the panel and to add them to the desktop. An option was also added to make the menu always start with the favorites. The update manager is getting new icons (the locks are replaced with white shields), it doesn’t consider it an error when it’s unable to know the availability of updates (the broken lock appearing when another APT application was open, or when connection to the Internet was lost, was irritating a lot of people) and it generally feels less intrusive. The software manager is being completely rewritten. It’s taking the best features of mintinstall, Ubuntu Software Center and Gnome App Installer. The graphical interface looks much slicker, using webkit to render HTML parts, a single-click navigation and a navigation bar. It also uses an APT daemon to queue up installation and removal of applications in real time. Your actions can be monitored as you go along, canceled, and you can close and open the software manager at any stage without any incidence on the queue. We’re abandoning .mint files to go back to raw  .deb support and as a consequence the software manager won’t deal with 300+ applications, but about 30,000.

There are rumors and rumblings that Ubuntu might be going from brown to gray. I certainly would welcome the change. I think, you can only be brown for so long. I think it’s time for Ubuntu to get a face lift, a much needed one. Maybe some Botox shots.

What could be better for the most popular Linux distro in the world to get a new color scheme. Gray is a good start. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t so very keen on the brown color to begin with. After years of color deprivation, I finally switched to a non-earthy color, like green.

Currently, I’m using Linux Mint, a derivative of Ubuntu. If Ubuntu switches to gray, I think it will attract more people to use Ubuntu. By the way, my theme just went from black/white/red to black/white/gray scheme. I’m ahead of the curve. Just pure coincidence.

If the rumor were true, I can’t wait to see this new color scheme.