Are you still writing “2008″? I caught myself writing the wrong year earlier today, so if you are doing it too don’t feel too bad.
I apologize for not posting much so far this year. We started the new year with my getting not only a new video card but having our router die and having to move to a wireless network here at home. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get Ubuntu to remember that I have a wireless USB “card” when I reboot but I’m still needing to open my AWN Terminal applet and run two commands as I get logged in after a reboot. I thought I had it fixed, but a reboot earlier today proved me wrong. I had some issues when I first installed my EVGA e-GeForce 6200 card but I think it may have had something to do with the fact that I forgot to disable the drivers for my current, very old, graphics card first. I was hoping to give the new graphics card another shot today but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. It’s now at the top of my list for tomorrow (after I check my email and news feeds, that is) so hopefully I will have some good news tomorrow afternoon.
- Ana Beatriz Guerro Lopez: New year’s proposal: look at your reported bugs. This post from Planet Debian is a great idea. If you’ve filed a bug online anywhere you should check to make sure the information is current. Some bugs may no longer effect you, and some bugs may still need more information so the bug can get resolved. You should take a look at bugs no matter where they were filed or what they were filed against, which means I should take one more look at my open bugs on Bugzilla, even though I no longer use Thunderbird and I only keep Firefox around as an emergency backup in case something isn’t working quite properly with Epiphany.
- Jorge Castro: Resolutions and mean people. Jorge found someone who was giving Ubuntu a test drive for a week. Jorge does have some responses to things the person is writing, but he says he’s glad to see things like that because it reminds us why we do things to support open source software.
- Ubuntu Productivity: Best of both worlds
. Geany, the text editor that so many of us love (it’s my preferred text editor of all sorts of plain-text tasks) is available for Linux and Windows, but not OSX. Jon Beebe found a way to get it installed on his other OS and he is kind enough to let us all know how he got it working with his favorite spotted kitteh. - Vincent Fourmond: Switching to mpd. Vincent has discovered one of the best parts of using MPD: it isn’t the resource hog that other media players can be. Vincent’s post is short on details, but I couldn’t help sharing the good news that another user has discovered my favorite audio player, even if he prefers using a command line interface rather than my personal favorite front end.
- Felix Kaser: Announcing gnome-format 0.1.0. The GNOME devs are working on a new formatting tool for removable memory devices like memory cards and USB drives. Yes, Gparted handles that task already but gnome-format will be even easier to use.
- DesktopLinux.com: Vietnam mandates open source for gov’t servers, desktops. The minister of information and communications for Vietnam has asked both national and local government IS workers to get all their users on open source software by the end of June. It seems a tad soon for the deadline, but he’s mandated that all government workers use open source software by 2010 in some of the best news in a while for proponents of open source software. I bet the boys and girls in Redmond are trying to figure out who let this happen.
- Sven Muller: About Usability. Another resident of Planet Debian has a great post that I think you guys should read. Sven had seen a post by Sami Haahtinen about usability and while he agrees with most of what Sami wrote there’s one part he disagrees with. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better written post about making things easy not only easier for beginners but also keeping settings available for more advanced users. One of the problems I have with Epiphany is that several relatively easy tweaks I performed with Firefox are difficult, if not flat out impossible, with Epiphany thanks to the GNOME mindset of locking controls down and out of reach of users who could bork things royally by changing the wrong thing improperly.
There is one more bit of news I want to pass along. Back in June I started getting my Ubuntu-related posts syndicated on UbuntuWeblogs, also known as Planet Ubuntu Users. Tiago Faria, also known as Gouki, has added Ubuntu Universe, a new area on the UbuntuWeblogs, that will expand the posts of Ubutu bloggers syndicated to include non Ubuntu related posts. This means that if a person has their technical posts on Planet Ubuntu, UbuntuWeblogs or any of the Planet websites for the Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) teams. Gouki and I sent emails back and forth this morning, and it looks like I have come up with a way to get all of my posts on the new Ubuntu Universe.
For those on WordPress.com blogs with other authors, like Nanci and I have here, I’ll share how we got the URI to submit. Have the owner of the blog go into the blog’s Appearance screen, and have them put up a widget that will let users see the articles posted by each author. Grab the link for your posts and simply add “/feeds” to the end of the URI. That should give you an RSS feed for only that author’s posts.
