We are assessing what our options are. But the network has been being built in Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa and our coverage was being deployed. What we are going to continue to focus in on is our operation and assessing what our options are with this unfortunate ruling.

Personally, I don’t see anything encouraging in the news that the CRTC ruling is to be reviewed by Tony Clement — he was, after all, in the room at the farce that was supposed to be a town hall on Canadian copyright reform.

Still, one can always hope… More competition for mobile services in this country could only be a good thing. If it turns out that Mr. Campbell and co. can come to market after all the only thing I’d ask is that they reconsider their unfortunate logo…

The new audio control is much easier and cleaner then the last one, and you can now change the volume of individual programs as well.

Let’s face it, with ALSA, PulseAudio and JACK all available options in a typical Linux installation, open-source audio is a bit of a mess. If this new  interface in Ubuntu Karmic doesn’t simplify things it at least makes it easier to get at and use the more advanced features.

This revelation is but one in a list of 10 favourite new things in Ubuntu 9.10 — others include Ubuntu One, the free cloud-based storage service and the previously mentioned Ubuntu Software Center. Click through and have a look!

I would recommend Ubuntu Karmic to new users without much hesitation. I still like Linux Mint and Mandriva for the complete novice, but Ubuntu is a good option too.

If you haven’t heard the Linux Outlaws podcast you’re really missing out — Dan Lynch and Fab Scherschel make a very entertaining weekly show that’s not really tech-heavy, but more about the growing community coalescing around open-source software on computers and mobiles.

Dan does a great job of highlighting the changes in this newest release of Ubuntu, including the Ubuntu Software Centre and improved PPA support. If you’re not familiar with either of these terms, they’ll at least be easier to wrap your head around than the Synaptic Package Manager that came with prior releases!

There’s also a Flickr slide show taking you through the entire installation process — definitely worth a look if you’ve never installed an Ubuntu or derivative distro before.

And how was Dan able to grab screens during an OS install? Easy, it’s Linux!

Yeah, it’s over an hour long and what’s happening on the screen is not easily discernible — maybe I should use USTREAM next time?

Anyway, it’s worth watching (or scrubbing through) to get a sense of what Jolicloud is all about. And as of this writing I still have invites available — that’s the only way you can get it right now…

Thanks to K.T. Neely for giving me the impetus to do this, and also to Jon Ramvi for stopping by — reading between the lines of his comments I gather he’s hard at work on Easy Peasy 2.0!