Ubuntu 9.04 is the latest major release of Ubuntu. Among it’s many improvements, it brings with it a very cool new notification system to notify the user of events happening on the system using a nice transparent popup window in one corner of the screen.

The notification system has been designed to be non intrusive and as such, does not require user intervention at all. All notifications are on the screen for a pre-defined period of time and after that just disappear without the user having to do anything.

The Ubuntu team has done a very good job of modifying the various system applications to use the new framework but until now I haven’t seen any email notification application using this framework.

The non-intrusive nature of the notifications makes it a natural choice to be used as an email notification method and the first utility to be made for the task is the awesome Gmail Notifier called gm-notify.

We have arrived at the last part of the Ubuntu Jaunty series. If you have missed the first four part, here are the links:

First part – What’s new in Ubuntu 9.04
Second part – How to upgrade from ext3 to ext4 without formatting the hard disk
Third part – 9 things you need to install after installing Ubuntu Jaunty
Fourth part – Download Ubuntu Installation guide and cheatsheet

In the fifth and the last part of the series, we are going to recommend to you some of the useful Ubuntu-related websites that you should bookmark and reference to regularly.

After you have downloaded and installed Ubuntu 9.04, what is next thing you should do?

Getting Ubuntu onto your hard disk is only the first step. It is still in the raw and unpolished state. To get the best out of it, you really need to configure and customize it to suit your needs. In part 3 of the series, I am going to go through the important things that you need to do after you have got Jaunty up and running.

There are a lot of contenders in the ring when it comes to open source desktop environments. The most well known would probably be Gnome and KDE in the heavyweight class, XFCE for middleweight, and any number of small, fast desktop environments and window managers in the lightweight ring. When it comes to the lightweight options, it’s no secret I’m a Window Maker fanboy. Recently, I’d been hearing more and more about a new challenger for the lightweight crown, LXDE. Can it stack up against the likes of Window Maker, Enlightenment, and Openbox? I decided to find out.

Yesterday, we have discussed some of the new features in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty. In that article, I did mention that the new filesystem – ext4 is stable, fast and backward compatible with ext2 and ext3. Today, we will look at how you can upgrade your existing ext3 filesystem to ext4 without reformating your hard disk.

23^rd April 2009 is the day when Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope will be released. I am sure many of you have already marked down the date and prepare yourselves for the launch.

I have been using Ubuntu 9.04 since the beta release and I must admit that I am really impressed with it. Not only is it faster, it is also more stable, user-friendly and definitely more elegant.

To better prepare all of you for Ubuntu Jaunty, I will be publishing a 5-part series, covering tips and tricks and some points to take note when dealing with Ubuntu Jaunty. This series will be published every day, for the next 5 days.

For the first part of the series, we are going to look at the new features of Ubuntu Jaunty and why is it a must-have for existing (and future) Ubuntu users.

Back in Time is a backup software for Linux system inspired from the Timevault and Flyback. Both Timevault and Flyback are two great software that allow you to back up your system and enable you to roll back and restore your system to the original state before you made any devastating changes. What Back in Time does is to integrate the best features from the two software and put them all into one place.

Back in Time has the exact functionality of Timevault and Flyback. If you have used any of the two software, you won’t be remote to Back In time.

If you are dualbooting Windows and Ubuntu on your computer, you will know that you can easily read and write to your NTFS partition from your Ubuntu desktop. One thing though, your Ubuntu does not automount the NTFS partition by default. Everytime you need to access the NTFS partition, you have to first go to your Nautilus and click on the NTFS drive (and enter your password) to mount it before you can access it.

A good way to workaround this is to make your Ubuntu automount your NTFS partition upon booting up. While this can be easily fixed by changing the fstab file, it involves hitting the terminal and edit the root file, which maybe a big turn off for newbies and it could possibly crash your system if it is not handled properly.

To fix this issue the simpler way, we can install the application PySDM and access the storage device manager with a simple to use and user-friendly interface.

Needless to say, conserving your battery power is the most important task when you are on the move with your laptop. Other than disabling all unused programs by shutting down them during the startup, one of the great way to save battery power is to reduce the running frequency of your CPU. The slower frequency the CPU runs, the less power it consumes.

In your Ubuntu, you can easily switch your CPU frequency via the CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor Gnome-applets.

I use a lot of different computers. Many of those computers are on different operating systems, or desktop environments. Just when I find myself growing accustomed to a particular way of doing things, I find myself on a different system with a different way of doing things. Key combinations are some of the most common distinctions between platforms, so I try to set each system up to recognize the key combos I need. Normally, that’s not a big problem. You just go into the keyboard settings for that environment and set it the way you like, right? Well not always.