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With a certain amount of fanfare, Canonical announced Ubuntu for smartphones. There was even a shade of Steve Jobs and the iPod in the way that Mark Shuttleworth produced a Google Nexus with Ubuntu from his pocket.
As excited as I am about the possibility of having a phone with Ubuntu, this was no iPhone launch. The iPhone was the first in its class and Canonical is hoping to compete in a very busy market. Sufficiently crowded that even Microsoft is finding it a challenge to make progress.
While we're in that calm patch in between the big announcements and real products arriving, I've been thinking about why running Steam on Linux is a good idea. The biggest advantage for me is the it offers the opportunity to have an operating system dedicated to playing games.
Read more: Linux gaming articles
We reported recently that Valve, the company behind the gaming platform Steam, announced that they would be moving both the Steam software and their games to Linux. Some games may already be playable thanks to some software called Wine that lets you run Windows programs on. We got both Steam and the fun game Dungeons of Dredmor to install without any difficulty on Ubuntu.
Following a slight booting problem caused by trying to make some more space on my laptop for Ubuntu, I ended up upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04. I hadn't planned to as my laptop is now six years old and I wasn't sure if it would cope. It's not doing too badly but I did have a problem with Dropbox, one of the first programs I tried to install. Turns out there's a bug with the version available through the Software Centre.
The download direct from Dropbox is the answer but getting the old version off first turned out to be a little harder than I expected.
Ubuntu for Android, a full desktop operating system pre-installed on Android smartphones, could be available before the end of the year.
I'm a big fan of Ubuntu, a free alternative to Windows that has some very cool features. It is fast, even on older hardware and some clever tricks such as integrating Facebook chat onto the Desktop. The company behind Ubuntu, Canonical, invited me to an event last night to talk about some of the new stuff they've got coming up. Read on to find out about their cloud storage service Ubuntu One and some very fast startup times.
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