Running GNU/Linux and seeing CrunchBang in your kernel list? We’ve got a fix for it.

[Updated to include a response from corenominal himself with one final fix some may need. -Peng]

I usually don’t look at the Grub kernel list when I boot my Ubuntu box, but last month I noticed that all of the kernels in my list showed “crunchbang” rather than “Ubuntu 9.04″. I did some searching and found a thread on the Ubuntu Forums about the issue and dstew made a great comment that helped me track down the problem.

It turns out it came from Philip Newborough’s PPA , which I have in my Third-party sources list. Philip, aka corenominal, has some great packages in his PPA, some of which Nanci has written about previously. If you have his PPA in your /etc/apt/sources.list you may have gotten update notices for grub or one of the other apps he has packages for. If you accepted his grub package you may have unconsciously had your /boot/grub/menu.list updated.

This is because Philip is one of the driving forces behind CrunchBang Linux, a GNU/Linux distro based on Ubuntu but designed to be faster, not to mention prettier (as their wiki states, “Finally, unlike Ubuntu, CrunchBang Linux isn’t brown ” ) and has several CrunchBang packages in his PPA. While I can’t confirm this with 100% certainty, I suspect the change got made when I accepted grub - 0.97-29ubuntu50-1crunchbang1 as an update.

The solution

There are a few things you can do to get rid of the “CrunchBang” on your boot menu. The first is to roll back grub to the previous, official Ubuntu Jaunty, package. Open Synaptic (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager), and once it opens do a search for Grub (Edit > Search or Ctrl-F). Once you find grub select it and to go Package > Force Version. You will want to select the highest version that doesn’t include “crunchbang”. On my system the version I want is version 0.97-29ubuntu53 (jaunty), but your system may be different. Now apply the change you made by either clicking the icon on the toolbar (it’s a green check mark, but your theme may be different), using Edit > Apply Marked Changes, or by using the Ctrl-P shortcut. Once the change has been made, go ahead and lock the version on grub by selecting the package and using Edit > Lock Version. That way you won’t be prompted to apply that upgrade again in the future. At this point I strongly recommend that you disable his PPA until you know there’s an update in his packages that you know you need. While it may not be needed, I recommend at least logging out and back in to finalize the changes you just made, although you will need to reboot to actually see if the changes show up in your boot list.

Unfortunately I’m seeing that this process doesn’t actually undo the changes to your /boot/grub/menu.list, the file used to present you with the kernel options at boot time. If you have the application Starup Manager (SUM), you can you can run that to at least verify that the kernel carries the identifier “Ubuntu 9.04″ rather than “CrunchBang”. When I opened /boot/grub/menu.list in the Text Editor (gedit) to see if the change had been made my kernel list still showed “CrunchBang” (which is what prompted this post in the first place), but once I ran SUM it showed that my kernels did carry the “Ubuntu 9.04″ name. Once I closed SUM the menu.list, which I still had open in gedit, had been updated on my hard drive, and sure enough the kernels now showed the identifier “Ubuntu 9.04″. I’m not sure what exactly happened, but I’m glad it did.

If that doesn’t resolve things for you, or if you don’t use SUM, you will need to open /boot/grub/menu.list in a text editor with administrative permissions (backing up the current file first!) by running this in a terminal window:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.list

Scroll down to where you see ## ## End Default Options ##. Below that is the list of kernels available for booting into. Change the title on each kernel listing to change “CrunchBang” to “Ubuntu 9.04″, or whatever you want the title to read, then save the file and close the window. The next time you boot your computer look at the kernel menu and you should see that the options no longer carry the moniker CrunchBag.

I have emailed Philip about this, and if he gives me information to pass along I’ll add it.

Update 2:30 PM: I got a response from Philip and he didn’t realize putting the packages on his PPAwould cause problems, and he’s pulled them. As far as this particular issue, you definitely want to roll back to the official version of grub, as detailed above. For after that I’ll quote Philip’s email.

Regarding fixing up your grub boot list, if you have already rolled back the package, you should be able to run the following command to remove the CrunchBang references:

sudo update-grub

Apologies again for the boob.

That should take care of any issues you’re still experiencing. If anyone runs into Philip someplace, I’d buy him a pint. He’s definitely earned it for all the good work he’s done for the Linux community, whether you use any package from his PPA or not.

Thanks again, Philip. You rock.

The polls are open at SourceForge

Earlier this month I mentioned that Mac4Lin was nominated for the SourceForge Community Choice Awards. The final voting is now open, so please go to SourceForge and vote for Mac4Lin under the Best Visual Design category.

Please also consider voting for eeebuntu for Best New Project, especially since a goal of the project is to “striving to convert the netbook market to Linux by making it as simple and easy to use as possible for those who want to switch from Windows.” GNU/Linux started out with a great advantage in the netbook market but the boys and girls in Redmond have woken up to the opportunites in that market and is giving our favorite open source operating system a battle on that platform.

Voting closes on Monday, 20 July, and the winners will be announced on Thursday, 23 July at OSCON.

Full Disclosure: I am a member of the Mac4Lin development team, and I’ve been largly responsible for updating the documentation for version 1.0. I know, I missed the release of mac4Lin 1.0 due to my not having enough time on my GNU/Linux box, but we’re hoping to get it ready for the dot release, which is even now getting ready for testing before release. We found a few things that slipped past our release testing and are getting them resolved.

Peng’s links for Wednesday, 17 June

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Hopefully these will be worth having to wait for.

• David Baucum: Resolving apt key signature problems in Ubuntu. David has some very handy info on adding third-party repositories that don’t include info on adding the key signature.
• Fabrizio Balliano: Ubuntu Desktop Course 8.04 available. Yes, we did just see Ubuntu 9.04 released back in April, but if you’re running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) than you may find this Ubuntu Desktop Course (for both students and instructors) a very handy resource.
• Paolo Sammicheli: Spreading Spread Ubuntu. A member of the Italian Ubuntu Local Community Team has created some very nice images for using in your work spreading the gospel of Ubuntu.
• Stefano Forenza: Ubuntu episode 2 is out ! Do you enjoy reading Manga? If so, you should check out the newest edition of the Manga zine about Ubuntu. He also has a link to more versions of  it, thanks to DoctorMo.
• Alan Pope: Easy Script To Get And Install PPA GPG Keys. Launchpad added the ability to use GPG keys for their Personal Package Archives (PPA’s), and Alan has a handy script to automate the process of getting the keys for PPA’a you’ve already added to your sources.list. And Martin Meredith took Alan’s script and may just have made it even better.
• Nathan Handler: A Few Ubuntu-related Bookmarks. If you don’t have these sites bookmarks you may want to add them to your collection.
• DesktopLinux.com: Linux 2.6.30 gets new filesystem. Linus Torvalds made the announcement and Eric Brown has some of the details for you.
• Christer Edwards: Printing Labels and Business Cards in Ubuntu. Why deal with VistaPrint and their “free” business cards with their advert on them? Christer’s Ubuntu Tutorials site has details on how to print not just business cards but labels as well. In this economy you can use all the savings you can get, and Christer’s tutorial will make your accountant smile even more than your saving bucks by using free and open source software will.
• Daily Ubuntu: Save Your Amazing Ideas With Basket. Totem Tomboy is okay for organizing info (thanks for the correction, Vadim), but sometimes it doesn’t quite do what you need it, especially if you’re a student. Mary may even help you in your college classes.
• Alberto Ruiz: Evince outreach the Windows platform. Everybody and their brother (and sister) needs some way to read PDF files, but Adobe Reader may be more than you need. Evince, the PDF reader that comes bundled in Ubuntu, is heading to Windows.
• Martin Owens: Ubuntu: No Demand or No Availability? DoctorMo talked to a Boston area computer shop. Would you believe he was told nobody wants Ubuntu? Yeah, I laughed when I read that, too. Martin has some info to keep in mind for the next time someone tells you something like that.
• Jordi Mas: gbrainy 1.11. I’m sure you’ve seen the adverts for the Nintendo DS “game” that helps your mind work better and faster. gbrainy (Jordi’s link used to go to the wrong place, but this link gets you where you’d like to go) is now available for many GNU/Linux distros, and there’s even an experimental way to get it for Windows!
• Danny Piccirillo: Replace Pidgin With Empathy in Karmic? Yes, the Ubuntu devs are planning on changing the IM client installed with Ubuntu as of version  9.10 “Karmic Koala”. I’m not thrilled with the news myself, because I’m really used to using Pidgin, plus the last time I looked at Empathy I was very much unimpressed. Danny’s got some details that you definitely should check out. Mohd Faizul Zulkipli has some additional info you should avail yourselves of as well.
• Stefano Forenza: Solang is a new photo manager. If you use F-Spot to manage your pictures you should look at Solang. You may like it better.
• David Thomas: I’ll be calling it GNU/Linux for now on. David recently realized how that we should be calling it GNU/Linux rather than simply saying Linux, as I learned some time back. (Sorry, I couldn’t track down the post where I made the switch in naming.) David not only makes the change, he also gives some good background on why, as well as some great info on free software (as in freedom).
• Christoph Langner: Nathive, the usable image editor. You may remember that I included a link about Nathive back in October, but Christoph has some great info on why it rocks for everyone who wants a nice, easy to use image editor. After all, sometimes the Gimp is just too damned complicated for some jobs.
• Stefano Forenza: Why the beef IS ready for the dinner table. One more link for Stefano for today, and I agree, a post that is obviously anti-beef needed a rebuttal. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a carnivore.

That’s all I have, except to point out that Mac4Lin 1.0 has gotten quite a bit of ink since it came out. There has been an update since infra_red_dude pushed out the release, so if you’ve gotten it and nioticed things weren’t quite right try the 1.0 file on the Mac4Lin download page. The date hasn’t been changed, but I’m assured that the file has, in fact, been updated.

Speedtest Meme

The good folks over at Planet Ubuntu have been running a meme with the scores of their download speed as calculated by SpeedTest.net. I’m not a member of Planet Ubuntu but I thought I’d bring it over to the Ubuntu Weblogs and Ubuntu Universe (not to be confused, of course, with The Ubuntu Network, which I’m also a member of).

How’s your speed compare?

Mac4Lin 1.0 is out!

I was going to hold off on posting today until after I got finished going through my email and news feeds, but I decided there’s one bit of news that simply can’t wait. That’s right, Virginia, Mac4Lin 1.0 has finally been released!

We’ve been waiting for a while, but I think you’ll find it worth waiting for with all these improvements:

• Fully supports GNOME 2.26 and backwards compatible
• Improved support for GlobalMenu, support integrated in the default GTK theme
• Better native Xfce support
• Icon additions
• Statusbar is now fixed
• New progress bars
• New tabs
• Improved installation and uninstallation scripts
• Integrates well with Gloobus
• Finer UI refinements
• Metacity theme now supports different button sizes
• Firefox 3 themes are now updated
• Songbird plugins included
• Pidgin AWN 64bit plugin now included
• Fonts are now consolidated
• Transparent top panel
• GDM theme is now in-line with Mac OS X login window
• Cairo dock is the default recommended dock

The docs aren’t included in the release but we should have that posted in the next day or two, if not by the end of today. We ended up having one section of the docs added at the last minute and we’re simply needing to make sure it doesn’t need changing before we generate the PDF version.

There are a few known issues (in addition to the missing docs).

• There is an issue with how the installation script installs the Emerald themes. You will have to install them manually until we can get that fixed.
• The wallpapers aren’t showing up due to a permissions issue. It should be an easy fix for us and we’ll include them in the update already being planned. Until then you can always add them by hand from the Wallpapers folder where you extracted the .tar.gz.
• Usplash is still buggy (I hope to have that fixed today)
• Thunderbird theme is still buggy
• GDM theme is not automatically set by the script (this seems to be a GNOME limitation rather than a Mac4Lin issue)

There is one other thing that I just saw: The uninstall script will not actually remove your installed files. This is due to an issue in the bash script itself that we’re still having to deal with so we’ve disabled it for the time being.

Check out some screenshots on the official announcement, and if you run into any issues we haven’t covered in the documentation feel free to post them in our Ubuntu Forums support thread. Just please don’t post that there aren’t any instructions. We’ve already said we’re working on that.

Mac4Lin is a finalist!

Anirudh had some great news for us this week. You may remember that last month I shared with everyone that Mac4Lin was getting nominated for the 2009 edition of the SourceForge Community Choice Awards. Now we’ve learned that Mac4Lin was selected as one of the finalists, and it looks like the final voting should start around the 22nd. I’ll let you know when the voting is open.

New Blogroll links to help your searches

A year and a half ago I wrote a post with two very handy search tools for finding Ubuntu-related info. One is the Uboontu search engine (my personal fav, partly because I can remember the URI to use it even when I’m away from my comp)and the other is Ubuntux’s Ubuntu Search (Updated 3:07pm: Corrected link, and I’m having Nanci update the Blogroll link. Sorry about the wrong URI when I wrote the post. – Peng).

Today I realized that we never added these two sites to our Blogroll links on the left side of our blog. I told Nanci about our oversight and she added them for us, so they’re always handy if you need to use them but haven’t bookmarked them yet. All you need to remember is our URI, nancib.wordpress.com.

A pair of Jaunty fixes, and an AWN update

There are a pair of bugs that popped up when I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, or should I say one popped up when I made the upgrade and the other sems to have popped up in the last several days, but I’m glad to be able to say that I have found fixes for both of them thanks to the Ubunutu community.

You may recall that I mentioned that pympd stopped working when I made the upgrade, and yesterday threespacemen posted a great solution to my thread on the Ubuntu Forums about the issue.

Same thing happened to me on two different boxes after the upgrade to 9.04 – looks like a python upgrade might have been the issue. If you open /usr/bin/pympd in your favourite editor, you’ll see that the first line reads:

#!/usr/bin/python2.5

Change the 2.5 to 2.6 so that it reads:

#!/usr/bin/python2.6

Worked perfectly for me, but ymmv…

It worked beautifully for me and I now have mypd available as an MPD GUI in addition to Relaxx and my all time fav, Sonata.

What the hell broke Frostwire?

Several days ago I tried to fire up FrostWire to do a little downloading but for some reason it resulted in errors. I have no idea what changed on my system other than some updates I’ve taken, but I don’t know which one caused the issue. All I know for sure is that FrostWire could no longer see my Java installation anymore. Luckily I found the FrostWire docs on the Ubuntu Community Documentation site, and sure enough the first thing on that page talks about an invalid JRE message.  All I had to do was to run sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun in a terminal and select the alternative that matches the installation of Sun’s Java that I have installed.

:~$ sudo update-alternatives --config java
[sudo] password for peng2:

There are 5 alternatives which provide `java'.

Selection    Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
*+        1    /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java
          2    /usr/bin/gij-4.2
          3    /usr/bin/gij-4.3
          4    /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun/jre/bin/java
          5    /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 5
Using '/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java' to provide 'java'.
:~$

Once I did that I was able to fire up FrostWire and get back to the downloading I needed to do.

We have a progress report on AWN 0.4

Today when I was checking for new posts on the Avant Window Navigator Forums I saw a new thread from Mark Lee (aka malept) that includes a link to an update on the current progress on AWN 0.4, along with a video. For all of you who have been wanting to move the AWN dock to the sides of your desktop, you’ll love what Mark’s video shows.

As a matter of fact, the video is so good I’ll provide it for you here, although you’ll want to read his post for some information that the vid doesn’t include.

He also has a link to Moonbeam’s update post, but he does include the highlights for those who only want to read a single post. Both malept and Moonbeam rock, and one day I’m going to have to buy both of them several brews a piece.

Peng’s links for Saturday, 30 May

I bet you guys (and gals) thought I wasn’t doing these links posts anymore. Things have been crazy on my end of things but I’ve still been making notes of things I wanted to share with y’all. I won’t post all of them (some are well over a week old) but I do have a dozen or so that I think you’ll like.

• Leo Iannacone: A simple plugin for Sonata… If you love the Sonata GUI for MPD Leo has a plugin that you may love as well. What does it do? Read his post for all the good news.
• Martin Owens: Who Needs Flash, I Don’t, SVG For Me. Martin has found a great way to use rich graphics for the web without having to go the proprietary route with Flash.
• Josselin Mouette: Reporting userful bugs. One of the biggest issues for any software tester is the need to file a bug report with the information that will help the devs identify the problem enough so they can see about fixing it. If you even help test a single prerelease software application you should bookmark Josselin’s post.
• Kartik Mistry: artha. Ubuntu ships with a dictionary application, but every now and then you need a thesaurus. Artha may be just what the doctor ordered.
• John Stowers: Playing With Clutter. Last October I started a links post with some news about Gloobus, a nice open source way to bring the MacOS coverflow feature to GNU/Linux, and John has some nice info on getting it to play well with Nautilus, one of the biggest issues with Gloobus, which isn’t any fault of the Gloobus dev.
• David Thomas: Preston Gralla: Why you Shouldn’t Care. David read an article in Computerworld that tries to minimize the benefits of Linux. David writes a very well thought out response that shows why Mr. Gralla’s article doesn’t seem to have all that much to do with a little something we like to call facts.
• Matthew Revell: Launchpad’s YouTube channel. Matthew has created a channel on YouTube where you can find demos on how to use all the benefits of the Launchpad code hosting service.
• Paul Cutler: Meet Snowy, Tomboy’s best friend. Tomboy, the note-taking applet from the good people at GNOME, has gotten a web app that will make your Tomboy notes even more uesful.
• Lior Kaplan: “Get Openoffice.org” icon on a new laptop. What would you say if you bought a new laptop and found an icon to get the most popular open source office productivity suite on your desktop? No, I don’t mean like you get when you install a GNU/Linux distribution on your computer, because they tend to have the actual apps installed rather than simply providing you with a “get me” icon. What if that new laptop came from Toshiba? And had Microsoft Vista and MS Office 2007 installed? That’s right, that’s the very thing Lior found on his brand-spanking-new, fresh out of the box Toshiba laptop.
• Stefano Forenza: GiftWrap helps you create .debs. Every now and then a GNU/Linux user needs to install an application that doesn’t have a pre-compiled package. Now people who run Debian-based Linux distros have a nice little helper, except rather than using the link to the debs that Stefano provides for installing GiftWrap you should use the GiftWrap devs’ PPA so you make sure you have all the dependencies satisfied when you install it. I’ll see if I can use it to create a .deb of Mac4Lin to make the install process even easier.
• Paul Tagliamonte: Making a bootable USB drive. Have you tried creating a bootable USB drive so you can have your favorite operating system on just about any computer? I have, and I’ve run into some issues, although I’m thinking it may be due to a BIOS setting I need to tweak. Anywho, Paul has a great tutorial to walk you through the process of making a bootable USB drive.
• Andrew SB: “Because humans need Oxygen.” You may know Andrew from his andrewsomething PPA on Launchpad (which has a ton of software you should check out if you run a Debian-based Linux distro), brings a little Sweet to his news about a new icon set. Or am I the only one that thinks of that band when you read his article?
• Dave Richards: Evolution Picture Gallery Under Development. Dave tells us about a way to bring a popular OpenOffice.org feature to the GNOME email client.

Happy Towel Day, you hoopy frood!

Eight years and two weeks ago, the planet lost on of it’s most well known hitchhikers, Mr. Douglas Adams. In honor of him, don’t forget to bring your towel with you when you leave home. Then people can refer to you in the same way they referred to Ford Prefect.

Hey you, sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is!
-The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy entry on Towels.

And of course Happy Memorial Day to everyone in the States. If you’ve ever been a member of the armed forces, whether for the United States or any of our allies, thank you.

Thanks to Holger Levsen over on Planet Debian for the reminder about today.

Comments are now getting moderated

Lately Peng and I have been noticing that some comment spam has been slipping past our spam detector lately. Unfortunately the only solution we can find is to require all comments be moderated before getting published, so that’s what we’re going to have to do.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. We’ll keep looking for a better solution, and as soon as we find it we’ll be more than happy to use it.