Peng’s links for Friday, 26 February

It’s been a while, hasn’t it. I’ve been marking some things to blog this week but I simply haven’t had the chance to share them so this will be a fairly long post.

• Stafano Forenza: [HOWTO] Get the new Notifications on Intrepid. The release of Ubuntu 9.04 will see some new, and much nicer display of the system notifications. Unfortunately they’re not being met with universal love. Luckily those of us too chicken to start testing the alphas of Ubuntu Jaunty (alpha 5 has just been released) can still play in a corner of the big kids’ pool.
• Morten Welinder: The Gtk+ File Chooser Dialog, Take II. Users of Ubuntu 8.10 have complained quite a bit about the very borked File Chooser dialog (which should be fixed in Ubuntu 9.04), and the current attempts at a new dialog in OpenSuSE 11.1 isn’t making very many friends either. Hopefully we’ll get something that won’t make people stick with the 8.04 LTS release just to have a usable dialog. And yes, I am aware that a dialog is a pretty lame reason to stick with the LTS release, but for users on the fence it could be the deciding factor.
• Karl Bowden: Retheaming Ubuntu – Part 3. Karl has a really nice series on making a new theme for GNOME and Ubuntu.
• Omshivprakash HL: Medibuntu for Jaunty Jackalope. Medibuntu has log been a favored way to get non-free tools and codecs for Ubuntu, and the Platonic blog has easy steps for Jaunty users and testers to get the tools they may need.  (My apologies to the blog owner but I have no clue which name I should use for you so I took the easy way out.)
• Miguel de Icaza: Gnome Do. That wonderful tool that I simply can’t use Ubuntu without has gotten a website update. If you love things shiny you want to check out the new site. And if you use Do you’ll find some great resources for how to make the most of it.
• Christer Edwards: Enable Basic Compositing for Gnome-Do 0.8.x. Gnome Do’s latest update joins AWN in requiring some sort of compositing to work properly. Metacity will let you do it, especially in Ubuntu 9.04, an Christer posts a tutorialthat shows you how, although it will cause issues for Compiz. But first Christer has an easy to follow tutorial on using my favored backup compositor, xcompmgr.
• David Futcher: My Experiences with PulseAudio. PulseAudio is loved by many users but is a thorn in other users’ sides. David relates his experiences, which lead him to believe Ubuntu may have picked it up prematurely.
• Launchpad News: Links to external bug trackers right where you need them. Launchpad has made it much easier for bug reporters to track and file bugs upstream. This has been something long needed and I’m glad to see Launchpad is making it easier to get bugs filed in GNOME, Mozilla, etc.
• Mackenzie Morgan: Ubuntu audio blog. Mackenzie has found a great blog about PulaseAudio and ALSA that isn’t part of Planet Ubuntu, nor is it part of part of Planet GNOME or Planet Debian, but subscribers to the Ubuintu Weblogswill find his posts (along with mine). If  you use audio on your Ubuntu system you should subscribe to Daniel Chen’s blog. I could just link to Daniel’s blog, but I’m going to let Mackenzie give you not only the link but more reasons to read his blog. It will also give you a chance to peruse some of her most excellent posts since I don’t link to every one of them.
• Matt Zimmerman: Random Ubuntu sighting. You’d be surprised some of the places you can find an Ubunutu logo, like the place Matt found it. Martin Albisetti has found an Ubuntu user in a very interesting place.
• Ubuntu QA blog: Totem & Rhythmbox Testing Day! One of the most important parts of getting a new version of Ubuntu ready to rock is the Testing Days where they focus on a particular part of Ubuntu and see what needs to be done for it. On 2 March they’ll look at two of the most popular media players in Ubuntu, so if you have a machine to spare, or some time to download and test a LiveCD, please consider joining the testers.
• Jim Campbell: Xfce is released! Xfce is kind of the less voracious cousin to GNOME and the basis of Xubuntu. If your system can’t handle the demands of Ubuntu or Kubuntu, Xubuntu may be just what you’re looking for.
• Vincent Untz: Getting the GNOME 2.26 release notes ready.Ubuntu 9.04 will use GNOME 2.26 and Vincent is making sure we can understand why it’s better than the current version.

I have a few more links but I’ll save those for another post. Have a most excellent weekend!

Happy Mardi Gras!

Today’s Mardi Gras Day in our hometown of New Orleans, and as Peng’s said in the past there’s an easy way to catch the festivities online. Simply go to the website for WWL TV, the local CBS affiliate, and they’ll be streaming all of today’s parade coverage.

Their coverage started about 45 minutes ago, at 9 am Central Time (10 am Eastern Time) but they’re going until 3 pm (4pm ET) as they look at Zulu, Rex, Elks and Crescent City in New Orleans, as well as Argus, Elks Jefferson an the Jefferson parades in Metairie, not to mention the parades in Covington and Houma. As always, their anchors and reporters are costumed and they have a crew in the French Quarter to check out the festivities there as well.

Speaking of  “da Quatas”,  check out their Bourbon Street Cam to see the revelers there (especially helpful if you can’t get the video stream), and don’t miss the coverage from the New Orleans Times-Picayune at NOLA.com, including their various cams and blogs.

Today’s the last big party before Lent, so make the most of it.

Say hello to the Karmic Koala

I had been seeing on the Ubuntu Developer’s list that they were getting ready to do a feature freeze on Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”, and yesterday the put the freeze on,  meaning that they had pretty much decided what’s going into the next version of Ubuntu.

Once a new version of Ubuntu reaches feature freeze it’s time to name the version after that, and I just got an email from Mark Shuttleworth announcing that Ubuntu 9.10 will be codenamed the Karmic Koala.

A good Koala knows how to see the wood for the trees, even when her head is in the clouds. Ubuntu aims to keep free software at the forefront of cloud computing by embracing the API’s of Amazon EC2, and making it easy for anybody to setup their own cloud using entirely open tools.

I was going to sat that I haven’t seen any announcement pics like I had seen from Stefano Forenza for Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jakelope”, but when I hit Stefano’s blog I found a picture of a very cuddly little mascot for Ubuntu 9.10.

Ubuntu 9.10 won’t be a Long Term Support release like Ubuntu 8.04 is, you can read Mark’s announcement for more details, although he’s already put out a teaser:

The desktop will have a designer’s fingerprints all over it – we’re now beginning the serious push to a new look. Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options. Come to UDS for a preview of the whole new look. whole new look.

I can’t wait to see the new look, especially since I’ve never been that big a fan of the whole brown thing they’ve had going on. Of course before we can get to the marsupial we have the jackelope due out in April. You can check out the blueprints up for Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” and when it reaches beta status I’ll let y’all know so you can help get us ready to release it.

Peng’s links for Wednesday, 18 February

• Emma Jane Hogbin: Playing with PDFs. Emma Jane looks at open source tools for work with PDF files.
• Ingo Juergensmann: Upgrading to Lenny. Monday’s links post had news about the release of Debian 5.0 “Lenny”, and Ingo shares his thoughts after upgrading his servers with it.
• Sandy Armstrong: Tomboy 0.13.5 Brings a Better Windows Installation Experience. You read that right, not only is Tomboy updated, the lovely little GNOME note-taking tool that comes in the default Ubuntu installation is now easier to install on Windows boxes. I didn’t even know it was cross-platform, but the download page has installers for both Windows and the Mac OS.
• Jun Auza: Free and Open Source Finance/Accounting Software for Linux. Here’s a nice companion to one of Monday’s links. If you’re looking at finance/accounting software and don’t want a proprietary program you should look at the apps Jun talks about. Unfortunately wxBanker isn’t on his list, but it isn’t a 1.0 release yet.
• Eric Schubert: Weird Sansa Bug with 20+ playlists. If you have a Sansa portable media player you should know about this bug. He also has a workaround until Sansa gets a proper bugfix out.

The Ubuntu Chronicles

Amber Graner is a Mac user married to a guy who works for Canonical, the company who puts out Ubuntu. She’s decided to take her spare computer and put Ubuntu (promoted as Linux for human beings) on it to see how easily a human being can use it. She got an install disk from her hubby and is going 100% on her own rather than depending on her hubby to get past the rough patches.

As of this writing she has posted six installments of The Ubuntu Chronicles: The Saga of Amber and Ubuntu on her blog, and so far she seems to be doing pretty well, although today’s post had Gimp sending her back to her Mac until her hubby said something about it. (His comment is on today’s post.) If you’re even thinking about trying Ubuntu you should read Amber’s posts, especially if you’re a Mac user. Thanks to the Ubuntu Weblogs (formerly known as Planet Ubuntu Users) for picking up her posts, which is where I finally discovered them.

And a quick question for our readers

Since installing my new EVGA eGeForce 6200 last month, and especially in the last week or so) I’m noticing that I’ve gotten dumped to a command line interface at some point during the evening. When I log out of everything I usually keep my computer on with Seti@home running on BOINC, but the other night I found my system dumped to a terminal-like screen with errors about Compiz timing out or something. Today I had to run to the grocery store and when I got back I found a blank screen with nothing on it, and it took a reboot to be able to do anything.

Does anyone have any ideas what’s causing this or a way to better identify the issue itself? I’m running the nvidia-glx-180 drivers (version 180.11-0ubuntu~intrepid1) and the 2.6.27-12-generic kernel, and I have the Skyrocket screensaver set to kick in after the comp has been idle for ten minutes.

Peng’s links for Monday, 16 February

• Stuart Langridge: IE6’s backlash. A short, sweet message to web designers.
• Dave Neary: Migrating to Linux: Tip 1: Do DHCP and DNS first. Moving your computer network to Linux isn’t as painless as we’d really like, but Dave points out why we should do one thing before anything else.
• Michael Rooney: Setting up a fingerprint reader with ThinkFinger in Ubuntu 8.10. Remembering passwords is so 20th century. If you’re lucky enough to have a fingerprint reader on your laptop it’s easy to get it working in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).
• TualatriX: UbuntuTweak 0.4.5 released! Among the goodies and fixes in the new version is the ability to catch error messages, ad well as the ability to change your panel logo or even revert it back to the default logo. But that’s not all in the update, so check out TualatriX’s post and screenshots.
• Jordi Hernandez: Gloobus-Preview 0.03 RELEASE. Jordi is working on a coverflow-like app (from Mac OSX) for Linux, and while it’s still early in development you can help make it better by giving feedback on how things are going so far.
• Debian Package of the Day: localepurge: Automagically remove unnecessary locale data. For every locale you have installed not only takes up extra space it also makes your system install needless extra loacla when you install new packages. You may only need this app once every good while, but you’ll be glad you have it.
• Michael Rooney: Lightweight personal finance just got easier with wxBanker in Jaunty! If you’re looking for a native GNU/Linux app to help you manage your finances (like a lite version of Quicken and it’s ilk in Windows) you may have heard about wxBanker. People who have looked at it like it (here are some screenshots) really like it, and I may have to check it out myself. It may end up replacing GnuCash, which really doesn’t seem as easy to use as I’d prefer.
• Martin-Éric Racine: Roadmap to a better FreeDesktop: ridding us of the Firefox filth. Martin-Éric looks at Firefox and Linux web browsers, including why users put up with the bloat that seems to keep fining it’s way into Firefox releases. Personally I hope Epiphany devs read Martin-Éric’s post and gets to work making the official GNOME web browser better. As a person who switched to Epiphany to get away from (IMO) the boneheaded decisions the Firefox3 dev team have and are making, I really wish Epiphany was easier to use than it is.
• Jon Beebe: How does Ubuntu make you productvity? Jon is looking for people who would be willing to write articles for the Ubuntu Productivity blog.

Before I head off to take care of some things I want to congratulate the Debian team on Saturday’s release of Debian 5.0 “Lenny”. I look forward to seeing the improvements in Ubuntu 9.04 (which, like all Ubuntu releases, is basen on Debian), and if you can’t wait Julien Valroff has packages in his personal repo. I wouldn’t recommend using his packages unless you know what you’re doing because they may cause some conflicts and other issues in your system.

Enjoy an undead marathon for President’s Day

I was going through the tv listings this morning, mostly looking for something decent to put on while I took care of some things online, and I found that the SciFi channel was running a marathon of the old Showtime series Dead Like Me today. Beginning with the pilot at 8 am (EST) they’re running most of the first season episodes until 7 this evening. (Showtime has season 1 available On Demand, and season 2 will be shown again on the net this summer.)

I love me some Dead Like Me, but I was curious what the occasion was until I hit IMDb. It turns out that tomorrow finds the release of Dead Like Me: Life After Death, a motion picture sequel. If you go to the Amazon page I just liked to you will find a nice little advert about the new flick. I’m not sure if the new flick may be a precursor to anything, but I’m looking forward to seeing it and we just added it to our Blockbuster queue.

Speaking of Amazon, if you’re thinking that this show would make a perfect addition to your DVD collection, they have the entire series (both seasons) in a nice little box set. I think I’ll have to add that to my wish list, unless Peng already has. If he does I’ll just borrow his.

Happy Half-Price Chocolate Day!

I hope everyone had a nice Valentine’s Day yesterday, but don’t forget that all that yummy Valentine’s chocolate that did sell should be marked down to half price at your local store today. Get some for you and that someone special. They’ll love your thrifty nature in this time of economic uncertainty.

I also have to share a comic that I got in my RSS feeds yesterday that looked perfect for today.

Happy day!

Calling all Python coders

One of the biggest problems of moving from Firefox to GNOME’s Epiphany web browser is the fact that porting an extension from Firefox to Epiphany isn’t possible with just JavaScript. For those who don’t know why, Firefox extensions make use of JavaScript but Epiphany extensions have to use Python and C.

There are a number of extensions available for Epiphany, including a Gmail Notifier that I can’t seem to get working (and is a completely different issue), but there’s one extension that I really miss using: Copy Link Name. I use it to copy the name of an aythor or article that I want to blog and not having that extension can be a real pain in the ass.

I contacted the developer of Copy Link Name and asked if he’d mind if I tried to get with Linux users to port his extension over to Epiphany and he said it’s be fine. The JavaScript file that does the heavy lifting is a mere 22 lines that set up three functions to provide an item for the context menu for right clicking on a link and putting the text of the link (the stuff between the <a> and </a> HTML tags) onto the clipboard.

If anyone can port this to Epiphany I’d love to be able to help test it. I can’t code in Python or C but I’m willing to do what I can to help get this extension available to Epiphany users. I can forward the emails to and from the CLN dev so interested coders can know that they have the original dev’s permission to port it. Beyond that I don’t want any credit for getting it ported, since I can’t write even a line of code for the task, just the knowledge that one more Firefox addon is available to Epiphany users. One down, a crapload of extensions left to go so GNU/Linux users are more willing to consider this alternative to Firefox.

Peng’s links for Friday, 13 February

• Stormy Peters: 12 tips for getting things done in open source. Some people want to help with open source software but have no idea where to start. But what about those of us already working in the FOSS community? Stormy has some great notes for you.
• Sense Hofstede: Cool Compiz plugin: Scale. If you use the Scale plugin for Compiz Fusion, Sense has a trick you might not know about. I’m going to have to check it out myself because it looks handy as hell.
• Kurt von Finck: Crew Reassignment. A touch of humor to close out your work week.
• LinuxToday.com: I Give Up. Windows Is Proof That People Are Too Stupid To Use Computers. When I first saw the title of this post I was ready to flag it ToBlog. As I read the post I realized it’s not just a “slam Microsoft” post but a very valid criticism of computer users. It reminded me of the old tech support joke about telling a customer that they should box up their computer and take it back to the store because they’re too stupid to use a computer. The sad part is that every so often there’s a very real kernel of truth in the statement. And every time I see open source software get dumbed down to be easier for noobies rather than educating them in how to better use the software it really pisses me off.

To Tweet or not to tweek. That is the question..

I’ve got several friends on Twitter, plus I’m noticing a number of the Ubuntu folks I know are on it, as are several members of the Mass. LoCo. I’d resisted joining Twitter for a while but I’m thinking it may not be a horribel idea. What do you guys think? Should I join?