Canonical are no stranger to courting controversy where the common desktop paradigm is concerned, and their latest feature for Ubuntu 12.04, HUD (Head-Up Display), is likely to continue poking the hornet’s nest. As you’ll see in the following video the disappearing trick of the menus in your favourite desktop applications is set to go one step further – HUD is designed to replace them entirely.

According to Canonical ‘the HUD has been designed as an easier, faster way to access menus in applications.’ They go on to explain that instead of clicking through menus users can simply type the command they require into a search box.

According to Mark Shuttleworth: “The HUD concept has been the driver for all the work we’ve done in unifying menu systems across Gtk, Qt and other toolkit apps in the past two years. So far, that’s shown up as the global menu. In 12.04, it also gives us the first cut of the HUD.”

Mark’s blog entry goes to explain that the HUD is smart enough to do things like fuzzy matching, and learn what you usually do so it can prioritise them.

“It covers the focused app (because that’s where you probably want to act) as well as system functionality; you can change IM state, or go offline in Skype, all through the HUD, without changing focus, because those apps all talk to the indicator system. When you’ve been using it for a little while it seems like it’s reading your mind, in a good way.”

It’s an interesting feature, and one that we can see translating excellently to mobile and TV, but we would be lying if we weren’t somewhat concerned that this method of navigating menus might stir up the hornets nest for the average computer user. Do users really know and recall the menu options of even their most frequently used applications? And while there are plenty of common sense menu searches taking place in the above video, we’re sure there’s an equal number of other features which aren’t in the slightest bit convenient to navigate by predictive search.

That said, we’re more than happy to be proved wrong, and look forward to testing the feature for ourselves. Speaking of which, testing is underway now, and HUD will be integrated into the 12.04 LTS release due out in April.

In the mean-time, why not let us know your initial thoughts on Canonical’s radical new direction with application menus…

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Here’s a quick breakdown of some of our favourite new and current features . Watch out in the next couple of days for our full review…

GNOME 3.2: OpenSUSE now finally comes with the newest GNOME instead of the deprecated GNOME 2 series, so if you don’t like KDE you’ll now have a modern desktop too.

Xfce 4.8: If you find the big two desktop environments too bloated, Xfce will surely appeal to you, as it is lightweight but has many advanced features. It now uses the LightDM display manager in openSUSE, so you don’t need GDM or any other GNOME dependencies.

Linux 3.1: The newest Linux 3.1 kernel has many new drivers for WiFi network interfaces, improvements to the Btrfs and Ext4 file systems, improvements to virtualization, and much more.

Systemd: Systemd will gradually replace the SystemV-based init system and swallow all service-related functionality, such as on-demand starting of daemons, automounting, and so on.

Btrfs: you can now use the new state-of-the-art file system Btrfs to install openSUSE on. Btrfs uses the ‘copy-on-write’ concept, which improves performance and reliability.

Snapshots: Another Btrfs feature are file system snapshots, which save the state of the file system at a certain point. Thanks to the Snapper program in openSUSE 12.1, YaST and zypper can automatically create snapshots when you change your system’s configuration or when you install some packages, which makes reverting the changes much easier.

OpenJDK: OpenSUSE 12.1 doesn’t ship Oracle’s Java by default because Oracle dropped their distributor’s license, so you’ll have OpenJDK now for your Java programs. Although you’ll probably face some incompatibility issues, Oracle considers OpenJDK as the official Java SE 7 reference implementation.

SaX3: SUSE’s good old X configuration tool is back, in the form of a rewritten SaX3. If Xorg autodetection fails, SaX3 can probably help you out of your problems. @name: opensuse_key_sax3.png

KDE 4.7: The newest KDE release isn’t so different at first sight, because the KDE 4 series is already quite mature, but there are some interesting improvements in performance and hardware support, as well as in network management.

Tumbleweed: One game-changing new feature in openSUSE 11.4 was Tumbleweed, a rolling updates version of the distribution. This was first only available for a selection of openSUSE packages, but now all packages can be installed from the Tumbleweed repository.

Looking to raise a very modest €15,000 to finance the task, Hertzog has also pledged that if the sum rises to €25,000, the book can be fully ‘liberated’ and published under the GPL-2+ and CC-BY-SA 3.0 Licenses. Supporters of the project can select a reward, ranging from a copy of the ebook or a paperback to dinner with the authors. “A nice way to get you hooked up as a new Debian contributor,” writes Hertzog.

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“For over a decade, the semantic web has been held up as a beacon for creating the next generation of end-user experiences on the Web. The IKS Project has developed the tool-set to finally make this a reality,” explains the IKS Project’s community manager John Pereira. “We are hoping that this competition will encourage anyone with experience in Web development and App design to explore the very real potential of the Semantic Web, and we have a world-class team available to work with the winners to help realise their vision.”

The Interactive Knowledge Stack (IKS) is a set of components that can be integrated with most common content management systems (CMS) to deliver semantic web functionality. Finished integrations already exist for some of the most popular open source CMS including WordPress, Drupal Nuxeo, Confluence, and Alfresco.

At this stage of the competition, the organisers are looking for ideas and proposals on how to use the IKS Project’s powerful back-end functionality to deliver innovative and exciting new user experiences, which illustrate the true potential of semantic web technology.

The two top ranked winners will receive €40,000 a piece to realise their winning proposal, and the three runners-up receive €10,000 to get their submissions to the demo stage.

The deadline for initial entries closes in one month on 14th October 2011. For more information, rules and submission details visit: www.iks-project.eu/contest

All you need to do is choose three of your best landscape photos for your chance to win a brilliant Samsung camera. The deadline is 25^th August for the landscape category so get your entries in right away!

There are two ways to enter:

1)    Email your three landscape shots to awards@dphotographer.co.uk

OR

2)    Set up a free photo gallery at www.dphotographer.co.uk. Once you have uploaded your photos, click on one you want to enter, go to the edit button and tick the awards box.

Please keep a copy of the original full-size image safe, as you may be asked to supply this at a later date.

For full terms and conditions go to www.dphotographer.co.uk

You can also visit the magazine’s website www.littlegreenrobot.co.uk, or follow it on Twitter @lgrobot.

Few of our readers will need telling about Google’s new Facebook alternative. However, the launch of the Google+ has also sparked a war of ideologies within the personal data space. With the new social network being widely pillored for simply offering an identical service to Facebook, just not from Facebook, it appears data freedom is being used as Google’s key differentiator.

Alongside building Google+, a team headed by Subversion developer Brian Fitzpatrick has been working on Google Takeout, a set of tools, which simplify mass export of data from multiple Google products in one go. The development team, which calls itself ‘The Data Liberation Front’, was started by Google four years ago on the basis of CEO Eric Schmidt’s stance:

“How do you be big without being evil?  We don’t trap end users. So if you don’t like Google, if for whatever reason we do a bad job for you, we make it easy for you to move to our competitor.”

Google’s stance stands in stark contrast to Facebook, who have begun blocking the popular Facebook Friend Exporter tool. Friend Exporter is a free extension for Chrome, developed by open source enthusiast and Chromium committer Moralfhammed Mansour. The tool was developed last year to let people export their friends’ email addresses, phone numbers and other details as a text file or directly into Gmail in order to allow direct communication outside of Facebook. However, with Google+ presenting a very real threat of mass exodus and a spike in usage, Facebook has now blocked the extension.

“Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field,” commented Mansour on his Google+ page. “No worries, a new version is in the making … I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every user’s data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again.”

Mansour is not the only person working to liberate your data from Facebook. Open source email and communications software provider OpenXchange are also developing a dedicated Facebook export function for their Social OX module.

SocialOX is a set of features in Open-Xchange to centralise management of personal information distributed across different systems and services, like address data on Xing or LinkedIn, birthdays on Facebook, various brands of calendar software like Google, Exchange or Lotus.

We contacted Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna, who tells us that the SocialOX tool and, in particular, the Facebook export functionality is currently in beta, requiring a somewhat labourious seven step process. However, he kindly provided us with this basic tutorial:

That’s it: OX.IO to the rescue. Your contact data that you desire, all in one spot…
This newly “merged” address book can then be exported as vCard and imported into whatever you like making your magic address book available wherever you like – no questions asked – by no sugar mountain or paranoid android. :)

Ok, first, to be clear — this is still sort of geeky at the moment, so buyer beware (even though its free)…

1. Allow popups in your browser. Then go to ox.io

2. Click on “Create Account” and do so

3. Click on the link you received in your Email – you’ll be logged into your private OX account immediately.

4. Click cancel on the Wizard screen, you may go back there later from the help menu, instead go to the Mail View (click on the envelope in the top left corner) and click on the “Add Email account…” and add at least that account that you use for communications with the people from your network. NOTE: Your email account must be IMAP – not POP, or it won’t work. Also, your Open-Xchange account will not copy and emails, it just makes that account available inside the Web UI.

5. Optional: Add more Email accounts (must be IMAP). The more Email your Open-Xchange user can harvest for Email addresses and names the more it can overcome the limitations of the API’s.

6. Now we will import your networks and address books. If you only want to import Facebook skip to step 7, otherwise use the import wizard first. Go to “Help (the “?” on the top)->Wizard”. On page 2 you can select from many other services. Don’t do Facebook, this comes last. The more the better.

7. Go to the contacts view (the black figure icon), click on the “Import facebook contacts” button. Click the “—or create a fresh one for your profile” oAuth Account button to allow access of Open-Xchange to your Facebook account. Press “Start” when done.

This will run a while. For each email account we go through each mail folder and use the first 6000 Emails to look for contacts. The more Emails we parse the more of your Facebook friends contacts will have this data. Go do something else and come back later…

At the end of the process the download of the newly merged super address list will start. Import to your liking, in Apple iCal, Gmail/G+, Facebook, Outlook, whatever you like. The data is also in the newly created “Facebook” address book for more exporting or playing pleasure.

Today sees the launch of an exciting new magazine, Photography for Beginners. Aimed at new photographers who are embracing technologies like social networking websites and the iPad to share their photos, this magazine is truly one of a kind.

“We understand that that we people shoot, edit and share their photos has evolved,” says editor in chief, Debbi Allen. “We’ve developed a magazine that will help this new generation of photographer create their best photos, and show them off!”

Photography for Beginners is a 100-page magazine, made to the same high quality values as the rest of the Imagine portfolio. It boasts a hands-on teaching style, with projects that readers can follow along at home. From 5 minute Photoshop techniques to photography projects that might take a little more time, Photography for Beginners is the ultimate learning tool, no matter whether you shoot with a cameraphone, compact or system camera

Accompanying the new magazine is a brand-new tutorial based website, www.photoforbeginners.com which is fully integrated with Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, enabling readers to share their photographers with a wide community of like-minded people, instantly.

For further information, please visit www.photoforbeginners.co.uk or to buy a copy of the magazine, head to your local high street magazine retailer.

Issue one includes:
Beginners Guide to Landscapes
Shoot, edit and share better portraits
5 minute project: Use your flash
How to share via Twitter
Introduction to image editing
Straighten horizons on the iPad
Understanding Photoshop Layers
Reader camera reviews
The best camera bags revealed
And much more!

Thomas Vollrath, managing director of 123-reg, commented: “Inspiration can hit at any time and before now, anyone who thought of a domain name would have to wait until they got home or to the office before they could purchase that domain – a delay that can often hinder their chances of getting their perfect domain.”

For more details about 12-reg’s Android app, please visit the www.123-reg.co.uk Android app landing page or search ’123-reg’ in the Android Market.

ARM hardware architecture has a growing prevalence in phones, tablets and a massive range of embedded devices, making it one of the most prolific platforms for Linux. However, describing what he termed the ‘embedded problem’, Corbet highlighted how vendors and developers tend to work in isolation on ARM-specific code enhancements for their own devices.

He claimed that the Linux Foundation had worked successfully to encourage these vendors to contribute their modifications back to the Linux kernel:

“Contributions to the kernel from embedded systems companies have increased greatly; a number of these companies now feature prominently in the list of top-20 contributors.”

However, Corbet went on to explain that problems can still arise because important code that has not been developed in conjunction with the community may not be ready for inclusion in the main kernel. Often, this code is then dumped by the originator who does not have the time to improve it in conjunction with the relevant kernel maintainers.

“There are many diligent and attentive ARM maintainers, but the job has simply gotten too big for them. So the kernel has accumulated a lot of code which duplicates functionality and which does not share consistent, higher-level abstractions,” Corbet wrote.

With the kernel’s ARM-specific code-base now nearly three times the size of the x86-specific code, even Linus Torvalds himself has stepped in, making his dissatisfaction extremely clear and threatening to delay merging updates to the ARM code with the latest release of the main Linux kernel:

“Hint for anybody on the arm list….People need to realize that the endless amounts of new pointless platform code is a problem, and since my only recourse is to say “if you don’t seem to try to make an effort to fix it, I won’t pull from you”, that is what I’ll eventually be doing.”

Special Guest Editor – Jim Zemlin
The Linux Foundation’s executive director is at the helm!

The Ubuntu Column with Mark Shuttleworth
Another very special guest comes in the form of  space-faring Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth.
Who better to talk us through Ubuntu’s future?

10 Greatest distros
The definitive guide to the very best distros and each can be tested on our two Live DVDs!

Two Live Booting DVD’s packed with distros, apps & tutorials
Ten amazing distros, 100 pages of essential tutorials & much, much more.
Simply put a disc in your drive and re-boot your computer to get started – it’s that simple.

The 100 greatest open source projects – as voted by you!
Linux User’s readers, writers & leading industry figures compiled our 10-page ‘hot 100′.

Also inside
- Run Linux on anything
- Server monitoring made simple
- The complete guide to PHP – part 1

20+ pages of essential reviews including:
Binatone HomeSurf Android tablet
DreamPlug computer
Xperia Play smartphone
Ubuntu 11.04 beta
Debian 6.0 Squeeze
Bodhi Linux 1.0.0

And much more…

Linux User & Developer is the magazine for the GNU Generation
Click here to try 3 issues for £1

The company has recently completed work on its first purpose built multimillion dollar datacentre in Prineville Oregon, US, having previously leased space in existing facilities. The goal of the project was to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. The result is a datacentre that Facebook claims is 38% more efficient and 24% less expensive to build and run than other state-of-the-art datacentres.

However, in contrast to the industry norm of shrouding hardware innovations and designs in secrecy, Facebook has launched the Open Compute Project as a way of inviting feedback, encouraging others to use and adapt their designs and, according to Jonathan Heiliger, the company’s vice president of Technical Operations, to open the door to other organisations to take the same open approach.

The company is publishing specifications and mechanical designs for the hardware used in the datacentre under an Open Web Foundation Final Specification Agreement (OWFa 1.0) license. Initially, these will include motherboards, power supply, server chassis, server rack, and battery cabinets. In addition, Facebook is sharing its datacentre electrical and mechanical construction specifications.

“The ultimate goal of the Open Compute Project, however, is to spark a collaborative dialogue,” Heilliger explained. “We’re already talking with our peers about how we can work together on Open Compute Project technology. We want to recruit others to be part of this collaboration…to collectively develop the most efficient computing infrastructure possible.”