I’m pleased to announce the release of the Ubuntu Search Engine Beta:

 

The Ubuntu Search Engine, as you may guess, is a Custom Search Engine optimized to find into all official Ubuntu resources and return the most relevant results. It uses the Google CSE to crawls into:

• Forums
• Official Documentation
• Community Documentation
• *buntu-users Mailing Lists Archives
• Website
• Development Wiki
• Launchpad

The good thing about it is the centralized search, as well the possibility to filter showing only the results for a specific resource. For example, you may be looking for “nvidia”, but you do not want to find about bugs in Nvidia driver, you may want to find how to install the driver, so probably the best label to go for would be “Official Documentantion” or “Community Documentation”, or you can search about specific topics on each one of the resources above.

The engine has also a great Open Search Extension that enables you to install it on Firefox (and it should work on IE7 as well) and to do searches directly from your browser! Just like you would do with the Google plugin that comes by default on Firefox.

Thanks to Fabrício for building the Open Search Plugin. This plugin really *rocks* try it now!

It is a community-oriented project, so everyone can help improving the engine and the website! If you have any suggestion, opinion, comment, question or just want to help, get in touch and I’ll be glad to answer.

Did you like it? Share, spread and bookmark it now:

Share the Ubuntu Search Engine!

 

UPDATE:

Thank you for the feedback I have been receiving. So answering a few of your questions/comments:

@sfair: Sure thing! packages.ubuntu.com included in the list. And an i18n’ed version is planned.

@Terence: Unfortunately some people are saying that the website is not working properly on Konqueror. If anyone could help with that I’d be grateful.

@Noone: I’m afraid the engine used in the Planet Ubuntu (planetplanet “Planet”) does not support archiving, so it has nothing to search but the front page content. BUT, Jeff Waugh (jdub) gave a great idea: put the engine to looks into the blogs aggregated in the Planet. That’s a reasonable solution and I’ll try to implement that.

@Sam: Thank you. I am providing a better place for the website/engine.

@Gasten: That would be really nice. Maybe

@borgie: Thanks. For now I am focusing on the official resources. Third-party resources are planned for a near future.

@Azrael: I am afraid the Google CSE does not deal very well with AdBlock. Try whitelisting the us.cypherbios.org URL on you AdBlock config.

@Meneer: The URL template you need should be:

http://us.cypherbios.org/index.htm?cof=FORID:11&cx=002072379199720138921:9m-bgfzutzq&q=%s

With this spec anyone can make plugins for any browser that supports it.

The engine is in beta stage, if we get a good feedback maybe there are changes that it get more ’serious’ in a near future.

- By Ryan Grieve

“Your quick and easy 5 step guide to ultimate offline computer restoration.

• Step 1.
  Download and burn your favourite flavour of Ubuntu direct from the interwob.
• Step 2.
  Stick the freshly toasted Internet Freedom Disc into the drive on the front of your Compubox
• Step 3.
  Boot up the magical disc and install your own piece of Open Source Heaven.
• Step 4.
  Now, using your favourite package manager, download and install EVERY one of your favourite little open source gems. (especially AptOnCD)
• Step 5.
  Run AptOnCD and create your very own CD repository of all the packages you have downloaded…. everything you need to get your computer back to this ideal state without a net connection!!

Now, you can take both your beautiful Ubuntu Disk and that Shiny New AptOnCD Disk and store them away somewhere safe. Sleep easy tonight knowing that even without the big-bad interweave, you can still make your computer….. dance!”

I came across this blog post early today, and indeed this is a very simple, easy and quick example of using aptoncd to keep your installed packages safe. I’d shrink this to 3 steps cutting 2 unessential, but this post is not mine and I’m thankful for the author

The Avant Window Navigator is growing very fast. Other day I saw that the guys had implemented a sort of filemanager embed in the dock and a kind of main-menu replacement, and that is very impressive, the appearance and usability are very good too. There are also some cool applets available.

But unfortunately (or not) this dock needs a composite environment to work correctly, otherwise you will get a black background in the dock. Seems that everyone thinks that only with Compiz/Beryl it will work correctly, but if that is true only those who have a Nvidia, ATI or Intel graphic card could use the dock.

If you don’t have one of the cards mentioned above but want to try the awn anyway, you can use the xcompmgr, it will add the composite needed for your desktop and it doesn’t require 3D acceleration support.

$ sudo apt-get install xcompmgr

Just install the avant-window-navigator-bzr following the instructions on this post and then:

$ xcompmgr && avant-window-navigator

I suppose it is slower than if you had a 3D card, of course. And you may notice some screen glitches wile using xcompmgr, but well, nothing is perfect

As Jono said early today, the next Ubuntu development version will be called Hardy Heron.

I’m sure that more detailed information about the directions the release will take are coming soon. But for now, I think an image means more than a couple of words:

Hardy Heron

Worth mention that this release will be LTS and is scheduled for April, 2008.

APTonCD 0.1.95 is ready for use in the Gutsy repositories.

$ sudo apt-get install aptoncd

Every feedback are welcome, please test it and report any bug or make any suggestion, I’ll be glad on responding it. The main changes are slightly described on this post.

Note that there are a lot of GUI changes and code rewrite (I’d say that the entire GUI and code was rewritten) since the last release, so if you notice some glitch, bug, bad behaviour or just didn’t like the changes, please let me know.

Unfortunately, due to all this ‘rewrite stuff’ the translations of the 0.1 version aren’t suitable for this new version, as we had more than 90% of the strings changed, so I’m afraid that I had to drop the these 90% of strings in the 37 languages that aptoncd is available so far. I urge all the translators, collaborators and anyone who want aptoncd translated to his/her native language, that translate the newly imported template!

I’d like to thank mpt for the precious comments regarding the GUI design and behaviour that he gave us, I’m sure that there is a lot of room for improvement and he will help us on it. And, of course needless to say, Pretto, without him nothing of this would be possible.