Ubuntu Satanic Edition

Remember all the trouble we had with our original store? How it got closed down and then Jono from Canonical helped clarify the license so that we could open up again with another merch provider? Well, a few months ago the second store got closed down, too. We’ve realised that this isn’t Canonical’s fault, but more of an automatic process by the stores to avoid any legal wranglings. Can’t blame them, really. The only problem is that you are guilty until proven innocent and these stores are big companies who don’t take much notice when you try to prove you are not breaking any trade marks.

So, SE Store mk 3 is open. This time you won’t find any reference to the Ubuntu name, so hopefully it will last a bit longer this time…

http://www.zazzle.com/satanicedition

Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, is out now. Read about it here:

www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/1004features

Ubuntu Satanic Edition works on 10.04, using the following repository:
deb http://ubuntusatanic.org/hell lucid main

However, it will be a few weeks before our themes are fully integrated. Watch this space.

Within a day of the Ubuntu SE store being closed down due to “intellectual Property” violation, the issue has been cleared up. Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu community manager, said the letter was “some kind of mistake” and that SE would be granted an “official trademark license”.

Thanks to everyone in the community who got behind us and also Ubuntu and Canonical for “not being evil”. That’s our job, after all.

The store will be back on line once we receive the official license agreement.

You may know that we used to have a cafepress store which sold t-shirts and stickers. It was completely commission free and we made no money from it – which made the stuff as cheap as possible. Well, it seems that Canonical is enforcing their intellectual property rights over the Ubuntu name. The store is now closed and you will no longer be able to buy any Ubuntu Satanic merchandise.

This saddens us. We are big fans of Ubuntu and have a lot of respect for Canonical. However, they need to understand that a phenomenon such as Ubuntu is only as strong as its community and alienating that community over the sale of a couple of lousy t-shirts is not the way to go.

Ever wondered why Ubuntu Satanic Edition is not on Distrowatch, the popular guide to the world of Linux? We contacted Ladislav Bodnar, the maintainer of the site, and this was his reply:

There is no way I am going to add this distro to DistroWatch. Two reasons:

Regards,
Ladislav”

When we’d got up off the floor, we send the following response:

“Woah!

I thought Distrowatch was supost to be a list of Linux distributions. Surely it your purpose is to reflect the world of Linux and not dictate it.”

So, it seems you won’t be seeing your favourite distro on “distro”watch. At least until hell freezes over.

If you run Ubuntu Satanic, we’d like to see it. Send us your screenshots and we’ll put them on a new page dedicated to showing the world how dark a desktop can look.

In fact, we’d like to see any pictures of you running SE – photos of your laptop, photos of you, photos of you sacrificing a lamb and letting the blood drip across your keyboard. Anything.

Send your images to Garry or post a link in the comments section.

Ubuntu Satanic is now hosted on its own dedicated Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 server. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused while we were running on the old platform and during the transition period. From now on the site should fly along and downloads should be more reliable.

If you spot any problems or have performance issues with the site or APT repository then please let us know so that we can resolve them as quickly as possible.

Now that the server move is complete we can get on with the important stuff – the next release of Ubuntu SE, “Headless Horseman”, should be available next week.

We were informed yesterday by our hosting provider that this site will be suspended in 5 days due to heavy traffic. This seems to be due to downloads generated by people upgrading to Hardy, which is surprising because not only is Hardy still in beta, the Ubuntu Satanic updates for Hardy aren’t even available yet.

We are in the process of organising a move to a dedicated Ubuntu server to host this site and the package repository. Hopefully this should be completed in the next couple of days. Until then, we have been moved to a “probation” server on our current host, so you may experience problems such as slow downloads.

Hopefully we can get this resolved as soon as possible and come back stronger than ever.

PS: the next release of Ubuntu Satanic Edition, Headless Horseman, will be released as soon as we’ve got the above problems sorted out.

Happy Birthday Ubuntu Satanic Edition.

It was a year ago today that the dark side of Ubuntu reared its ugly head and we’d like to thank all our users for your fantastic support.

Let’s crack open a beer and drink to many more years like this one. Thanks to Ubuntu and the entire open source community for giving us all the freedom to be better.

May we continue to reign in the blood of lesser operating systems!

A few people have asked for an Ubuntu SE forum where you can discuss topics related to the distribution. Well, here it is:

http://ubuntusatanic.org/forum

Note that the site is very new, so please let us know about any problems.

Anyone is welcome, so have fun!