Last night I upgraded my laptop's o/s to the new Ibex 8.10 release, not yet official still in beta but so far very stable.

This can be done via,

sudo update-manager -d

...then choosing the new distribution 8.10 from the top of the update manager dialog, you'll need about 1 hour for it to download & install. Be around for some of the dialogs; one of which will ask you if you want to merge or replace your network script (i clicked merge) after which you should be ok.

It comes with a lot of new updates and a major interface overhaul.

There's now a fallback linux kernel if the main one should fail (like ArchLinux), more windows-like logout panel, better hibernation and a new theme called NewHuman (see screenshot above).

Along with this there's available from the repository,

• VLC 0.94 (with a more graphical control panel)
• GIMP 2.6 (much more professional)
• Gnome 2.24 (with tabbed browsing)
• GEdit 2.24

...and a ton of other newer packages, Mercurial is also updated along with the Kernel so any new hardware should be properly recognised.

After the install I had to reboot obviously, on rebooting my wifi no longer worked, so after another reboot that came back. Did an update & upgrade for any newer packages and so far other than the battery indicator applet crashing a couple of times nothing majorly serious.

Eclipse is still at 3.2 in the repository, along with NetBeans at 6.1 so that's a little bit of a bummer. However NetBeans does come with an easier installer so just grab the latest nightly build for that, Eclipse Ganymede and 3.2 are proving a little flakey at the moment.

Interface-wise it is a heck of a lot better than the previous release and although unofficially available I would recommend grabbing a copy, definitely worth the effort.

Well done again to the Canonical crew and all the rest who helped put this baby together, great stuff!

Turns out you can actually run commands remotely via SSH, plant some scripts on your server and boom you can clear your logs, backup your db and restart your webservers all without having to remote in; major help!

For example;

ssh -i /home/me/.ssh/mybox root@mybox.com '/var/www/apps/myapp/start-myapp.sh'

Here I'm specifying an ssh key file to use to connect to the remote box via the -i parameter, then the username root (because we want the script to have all the power it needs to without specifying sudo; web address of the box (or you can use the ip address). Then surrounding the command I want to run in single-quotes.

Simple effective and saves me from remoting in one night when I'm not myself, hitting the wrong key & doing something I really shouldn't ;-)

Natalie Downe gave an extremely good presentation at BarCamp London on the use of CSS Systems in order to standardize your site's stylesheet design, and make it much easier to maintain.

Lots of good pointers in this one, definitely worth a look.

Swiftfox is like Firefox, but hellishly optimized for your Linux build, you can get it from...

• Go here
• Then download the installer right for your build (if 64-bit, download Athlon 64)

Once downloaded, navigate to the download in Terminal and do,

sudo sh install-swiftfox.sh

Flash

Now to get Flash running first check the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory exists on your machine, if not create it...

mkdir ~/.mozilla/plugins

Adobe only provide it as a 32-bit library but with the necessary dependency you can support it so run...

sudo aptitude install nspluginwrapper

Once you've got that you should be capable of handling the 32-bit Flash player,

...grab Flash from here

Download the .tar.gz version, extract it to your desktop, then move the libflashplayer.so into the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory,

sudo mv ~/Desktop/install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so  ~/.mozilla/plugins

And finally restart Swiftfox, navigate to a flash video here and enjoy faster browsing with Swiftfox + Flash!