There are lots and lots of books available on Ubuntu, from beginners to experts there is something to suit everyone. I wanted to put up a book review on the blog and make some recommendations, but then I realised my own bookshelf is rather empty of books from the “beginner” end of the spectrum I am not really the right person to tell you how useful some of these books are to someone new to the webbook, but YOU are!
So here is my offer to you:
Buy a book on Ubuntu that you like the sound of
Write a short review letting people know how useful you found it as you get to know your webbook
I post the review and a link to the book with your Amazon ID in the link
People buy the book
Profit!!!
Here is a list of books from Amazon on Ubuntu:
These ones in particular sound like they ought to be good for beginners so that might be a nice place to start:
Leave a comment letting me know what you are reviewing, if two or more people want to get and review the same book that is fine, I will post all reviews.
Don’t make your retirement plans yet though, I have had an affiliate account for several years and my current balance is £9.21. Just another 79p and they will send me a cheque!
Today the Free Software Foundation has released a video starring Stephen Fry explaining why Software Freedom is important. To view the video you will first need to fix the video issue and as the audio is rather quiet I would recommend headphones and fixing the speakers issue. Free software is not just cheaper software. It is about Freedom as Stephen Fry explains with his usual eloquence:
This is coming up quite a bit, and I really want to get better graphics drivers before making a distributable full recovery solution on a USB stick, however if you want to you can use a USB CDROM drive to install Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, probably others) and then edit the xorg.conf file from the command line (alt+F1 to get to the console, log on then do something like sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf and find the screen section. Change the display subsection for Depth 24 (which is true colour no point using anything else these days) and make it look something like this:
The important bit is 1024×600 as the first resolution.
Here is my xorg.conf file which you can download, stick on a USB or something and overwrite the one that gets put there by the installer. If you get to a command line and have a wired network plugged in then you can do
If you want to reinstall Ubuntu, or try any other Linux the don’t go calling support and expecting them to help! This is totally unsupported, and not recommended by me unless you know what you are doing (or at least you think you do ) but if you get stuck you can ask me for help and I will try as best I can to help.
Whilst we are still waiting for VIA to give us a decent version of their binary only driver for the current kernel that works with the webbook LCD they have just released an Open Source 2D only graphics driver. I will try this out and see if I can get it working. If it does then I think it should fix all the XV issues with video playback and the occasional screen corruption issue.
Incidentally I just found out that there is an XV issue with Gcompris, the educational package, which causes it to launch to a corrupted screen. I am certain we tested this extensively before release (my kids spent hours testing it in fact) so I am not sure what went wrong. If you want to run Gcompris then for now press alt+F2 and in the run program dialog type
gcompris -x
and hopefully we will have a graphics update for you soon which will fix this properly.
I have seen some reports (and seen it myself) of badly presented webbooks in store. One store I went to the display unit was missing, another it was switched off. Other people have seen even worse which I responded to later in the thread. Up to now I had assumed that the display models did not require special treatment and should just be exactly what you get if you buy one. Seems I may have to rethink that assumption. So what do you think would be the best way to present the webbook in store? I don’t really like the idea of a locked down rolling presentation. I want people to pick it up and play with it. What do you think?
I am not really the right person to tell you how useful some of these books are to someone new to the webbook, but YOU are!