Peng’s links for Monday, 30 March

I just have a pair of links to share with y’all today.

• Charles Profitt: Wicked Cool Shell Scripts. Shell scripts work like batch files in Windows, and Charles has found a book with over a hundred shell scripts for Linux, OSX and Unix. If you want to learn how to write shell scripts or even just use some to make a recurring task easier to run you should check out this book.
• Stefano Forenza: Send some love with Unicode. Stefano is always coming up with great information for his blog, which is why I’m glad I found it on Ubuntu Weblogs. Today he has a handy little bookmarklet you can use to drop symbols into your writing.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow looks pretty busy and I have to see my doctor on Wednesday so I may not be able to post for a few days, but I’ll do my best to make the next post worth your wait.

Peng’s links for Sunday, 29 Mar

The hell??? A Sunday links post on top of the other posts from today? You betcha.

I’m going to have to hold off on the promised post about Ubuntu 9.04. I’ve got it downloaded and burned (I’m not sure why my flash drive with it just sits there like a log’s bump) but I haven’t had a chance to do more than a quick look at it, plus I want to take the upgrade before I report on it. Yes, it looks solid enough that I’m going to snag the upgrade but before you do I strongly recommend that you check your computer with the iso on either a burned CD-ROM or a flash drive. That way you will get a better idea of how well your system will play with the Jackalope.

• Ronnie Tucker: Come grab Issue #23, hot from the digital presses! You need to read the latest issue, I’m just going to give you the link and leave it at that.
  
• Jonathan Jesse: Successful upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty. It’s a short post, but Jonathan had an easy time going from Kubuntu 8.10 to Kubuntu 9.04 (both 64-bit versions). He also finds something he really likes, which is why you should read it regardless of which flavor of *Ubuntu you prefer.
• Isabelle Duchatelle: Kill X session in Jaunty Jackalope. The devs have decided that users don’t want to be able to use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace as an emergency way to get out of a frozen session. (Silly devs, we really do need that every now and then.) Luckily Isabelle shows us how to get it back.
• Jun Auza: Easy Way To Save Flash/YouTube Videos on Linux. Yes, Linux users like to not only watch Flash movies, we like to snag them every now and then to our hard drive so we can enjoy it without having to go back to the server to get the vid again. You know what? It’s eeeeeasy to do if you’re a GNU/Linux user.

That’s it for today. Enjoy the end of March, because April is looking pretty nice for the GNU/Linux community. Plus Opening Day is just 8 days away!

Music Review: Marcia Ball’s “Peace, Love & BBQ

I was browsing through the CD’s at the Boston Public Library and found some nice jazz, classical and classic rock to borrow to drop into my cd player, and I found a disk from an artist that plays frequently in New Orleans that is so good that I have to tell y’all about.

I first heard Marcia Ball not when I lived in the Crescent City but on a compilation of Mardi Gras music in Boston about 10-15 years ago. I loved her song “That’s Enough of that Stuff” and while i lost the cd in a move years ago I made a point of finding an MP3 of it a few years ago.

At the library I saw Marcia’s “Peace, Love & BBQ” and grabbed it just to check out more of her tunage. I was hooked from the first tune, “Party Time”, which was a perfect first tune from Marcia to hear after “That’s Enough of That Stuff”. The title track follows and cemented my love of her music.

“Miracle in Knoxville”, relating a story from Marcia’s childhood in Tennessee, grabbed me with it’s mellow blues, and “Watermelon Time” made me hungry for the produce that’s truly “Sweet as candy / Sugar on the vine.”

“Down in the Neighborhood” reminded me of The Radiator’s “Confidential” thematically and I was definitely bopping along with it. “Where Do You Go?”, with it’s Hammond B-3 foundation and the choral-like harmonies on the chorus sent my mind back to the gospel choirs I enjoyed as a kitteh in ‘Nawlins. “My Heart and Soul” set my feet a tapping, something I do fairly readily even when I’m mixing live sound.

I was totally unprepared for the duet with Mac “Dr. John” Rebenack on “My Heart and Soul”. I already knew I wanted to tell a special woman about the album, but when I heard this tune I knew I not only had to get it for myself, I also had to get it for my special someone, too. (Yeah, as an incurably hopeful romantic I’m a sucker for songs like this.) There are many killer lines I could share, but I don’t want to spoil any of them so I won’t.

“That’s Married Life” is the perfect follow up, humorous with it’s Cajun feel, and I dare anyone who loves to dance to a Cajun accordion player to stay in their seat when this song comes on. If my marriage had been half as much fun as this song I might still be in New Orleans with my ex rather than in Beantown.

Marcia goes mellow again for “Falling Back In Love With You”, and it’s a beautiful little ditty for those lucky enough to be with someone long enough to fall in love with them over and over again. She fires up a little boogy-woogie for those of us who seem to know hard times and seem to keep falling “Right Back In It”.

We get a reflective walk down memory lane to 1969’s Hurricane Camille for “Ride it Out” and Marcia breaks her fast/slow pattern that makes my one complaint of the album (it makes it hard to keep a mood for longer than a single song) to bring the disk to a close with “I Wish You Well”, an especially fitting close for an album that carries her thanks to “the people of the Gulf Coast, post-Katrina, post-Rita, who hold it together day-to-day.”

Survey says…

If I were reviewing new(-ish) albums on a regular basis, I’d have to give “Peace, Love & BBQ”

out of a possible 5 rockin’ Tuxes.

If you like the New Orleans music  of The Meters, The Nevills, Sachmo, Irma Thomas, etc., you’ll love this album. If you’re not a big fan of la musique de la Nouvelle-Orléans you should check it out anyway. Consider it an exercise in music appreciation. I have a feeling it may get a place in your music library, if not a place of honor. You can snag the MP3’s from Amazon, but I recommend that you get the physical disk. Not only will you get the liner notes but you’ll also have excellent source material for converting the songs to your favorite audio format.

Marcia Ball
“Peace, Love & BBQ”
2008 release on Alligator Records
www.marciaball.com

For those of you in the Boston area, you can see Marcia live at Scullers Jazz Club this Wednesday and Thursday, 1-2 March.

Are you using Reacocard’s PPA for updating AWN? If so you need to make a change in your settings.

I was getting caught up on the threads I’d subscribed to over at the Ubuntu Forums and I saw that Reacocard has stopped updating his Personal Package Archive. It turns out he’s switched from using Ubuntu to using Arch Linux, so he won’t be updating his packages any more.

What does this mean for those of us who have been using his packages? Luckily the AWN testing team has a PPA of their own that we can use instead. To make matters easier they even have a nice tutorial that you can follow. You will need to install avant-window-navigator-trunk and it’s data and extras files and uninstall the packages you got from Reacocard, but the tutorial walks you through the steps you need to take.

@Reacocard:
Thanks for updating packages for us for so long. We still owe you a mess of brewskies and we wish you all the best with Arch.

Peng’s links for Saturday, 28 March

I just have a few things to post today, whic is a pretty darned good thing since the ‘net is getting routed through molasses today.

• Behdad Esfahbod: Lots of GNOME happenings. Behdad has a number of things happening in the GNOME community that you’ll want to be aware of, including their Adopt a Hacker program. In fact I need to particiapte in that program myself.
• Bodhi.Zazen: Portable Ubuntu (for Windows). This isn’t just referring to running Ubuntu from a flash drive on a Windows box, so if you ever find yourself on a system that runs Windows you’ll want to check out Bohdi’s article.

That’s a lid. Tomorrow I’ll check out the beta of Ubuntu 9.04 (see yesterday’s post) on my rather old system and let you know what I find. I’ll also make sure Nanci get the new countdown onto the right hand sidebar.

[UPDATED] Peng’s links for Friday, 27 March

Updated to include note about the PHP version of the Ubuntu 9.04 [countdown. -Peng]

I tried to post some links yesterday but as soon as I hit the save button to lock in some tage and my text I was rewarded with a 100% blank post. Hopefully this post will last long enough to publish it.

• Pavel Rojtberg: Giving Google Earth a native look & feel. One of the biggest complaints about Google apps on Linux (other than some apps actually not being native Linux apps because they shove an extra installation of WINE down our throats) is how butt ugly they are. Pavel walks us through what we need to do to get them looking like the theme we have selected.
• Jonathan Carter: The correct way to file bugs in Ubuntu. Filing bugs is important when you help test new releases, but I found out yesterday I was doing it wrong because I went straight to Launchpad to file my bug. Jonathan lets us know not only how do to it properly but also why the way I was doing it is a bad idea.
• Steven Harms: Thank You. Steven writes a wonderful post to the people who help make Ubuntu Linux such a wonderful distribution. As for me, I’m just going to say, “What Steven wrote.”
• Tiago Vaz: Some cool audio stuff for Debian. Usually when people write about cool audio tools for GNU/Linux they’re referring to media player apps like Amarok, MPD and Totem. But Tiago has good news for musicians, especiallt guitar players, as he tells us about some virtual processing gear.
• Steve Langasek: Ubuntu 9.04 Beta released. I know this should probably get a post of it’s own, but I’m tight on time since I needed to reclaim yesterday’s links from Google Reader. The first beta release of Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” is now available for downloading. I’ll snag it this weekend and post my thoughts about it.
• Nick Ali: Ubuntu 9.04 Countdown Banner. If you have your own blog or website you may want to snag the countdown banner to help countdown the says until Ubuntu 9.04 is released. Stefano Forenza also has the code on his site, as well as tips for people like Nanci and I who aren’t allowed to use any JavaScript on their blog. That was a pain in the rear the last two releases (Thanks, WP.com) and we’re glad the devs thought of us this time around. Updated 29 March: If you can’t use JavaScript grab the PHP code from Stefano’s post. It’s working fine on our blog!
• Daniel T. Chen: Lessons Learned at Jaunty Beta. Not everything went 100%smoothly with the alpha versions of Ubuntu 9.04, and Daniel clues us in on some of the things the dev team had to deal with.

That’s it for today. I may have some links to share tomorrow, but look for our report on how Jaunty behaves on our hardware this weekend. Until then, enjoy the weekend!

Peng’s links for Wednesday,25 March

Yep, I’m posting again already. I snagged a few things I wanted to post yesterday when the clock started to run out, and I’m going to try not to let my list of things to post get quite so long.

• Stephen Hermann: Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix. Getting Ubuntu 9.04 ready for release also brings a version for people using netbooks. Stephen didn’t use apt-get to perform the upgrade, going instead with a flash drive, but if you’re wondering how the next release of Ubuntu will play on the smaller platform you’ll want to read his report. He also posted some screenshots for those who want some images with their text.
• Jono Bacon:Ubuntu 9.04 Free Culture Showcase Winners!. The Ubuntu devs had a competition to see who could come up with great content to be included in the Examples/folder for Ubuntu 9.04, and Jono has the good news on what content will be immortalized in cd/dvd/iso form when the Jaunty Jackelope is released in less than a month.
• Launchpad News: Launchpad maintenance 27th March and 1st April. Launchpad, the code hosting service from Ubuntu parent Canonical, is going to be doing some maintenance that will mean that Launchpad will have to go offline for a brief period on two days in the coming week. The first downtime will mean that Personal Package Archives (PPA’s) hosted on Launchpad will be unavailable for about half an hour on Friday, and then all of Launchpad will be offline for one hour on April Fool’s Day. yeah, great timing on that latter date, eh? Get all the details from the announcement on their blog.
• André Gondim: Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope booting in 20s. Holy crap, but that’s pretty quick! I’ll have to check it on my own system, but if I get even a fraction of that speedup I’ll be one happy penguin. I seem to be hitting lags when Compiz starts and AWN loads in, and I’m pretty sure I’ve got a setting messed up someplace, but it’s good to see that the dev team are working on getting you from turning on your comp to be able to actually use it with the GUI down to as short a time period as possible. (I’ll see about getting some timing figures on both my current boot time and the time under 9.04.) André’s even kind enough to give us graphs to back up what he’s telling us.
• Stefano Forenza: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. How to waste time. Stefano give us some good info on adding repositories via Apt-URL and why it’s good news. Complete with lolcats.
• Panji Nushantara : How To Read Software Version Number in Ubuntu. Reading version numbrs (and typing them into bug reports) can be a real pain. Panji has a nice tutorial on how to make sense out of the apparant gobbldygoop. She He (sorry about that!) also has a plea to make the damned things easier to understand.

Understanding FOSS Visual Guide

Anyone who knows me knows how strongly I support Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), but that term by itself leaves many people with a confused look as they wonder what the hell we’re talking about. Martin Owens, the leader of the Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community (LoCo) Team and general guru for things GNU/Linux, has published a delightful little book (currently in draft form) that explains the concept of Free and Open Source Software. Available in PDF form as well as in the SVG source files, the 22-page book should be part of every FOSS supporter’s library. The fact that it’s available in PDF form means that it can simply reside on your hard drive of Flash drive, without the need of killing a single tree to be able to read it, makes it en even better deal. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license so you can share it with your friends without worrying that the Intellectual Property police will knock on your door.

You can download the PDF, as well as the source SVG files, from Martin’s blog.

Looking toward 9.04, and bididng adieu to 7.10

Maximum PC has a nice write up on the upcoming release of Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope”. As I’ve said before, 9.04 is looking really nice with the info I’ve seen so far, and this article makes the case even better that the next release could be one sweet little collection of code. As soon as I can see a notice that Ubuntu 9.04 has reached beta status I’ll make sure it gets posted for all to try, and I’ll snag it and give it a nice little test so I can give you guys an early look through my peepers. Thanks to Nanci, who spotted the article on Google News and made sure I saw it. (You could have blogged it yourself, sis. I wouldn’t have minded. )

For those of you who are running Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, the Ubuntu devs have announced that they will stop providing “security and critical fixes” for it on Saturday, 18 April. This date is eighteen months after Gutsy was released, as is the standard practice for non Long Term Support (LTS) releases. The current LTS version is 8.04 “Hardy Heron”, which will be supported for three years (for desktop systems, five years for servers) with security updates and other packages.

For more info on the end of life announcement for Ubuntu 7.10 you can ready the official notice on the ubuntu-announce maillist archive.

For the record, the version is 9.04, not 9.0; it’s based on the year it’s released (2009) and the month it’s released (April, which equals 04), which is always a two digit number. The version number does not shorten to zaro (“0″), just as the October releases nevershorten to simply “.1″. It may seem like a nitpicky thing to fuss about, but it’s the difference between being accurate and, well, not.

Peng’s links for Sunday, 22 Mar

As much as I tried to stay on top of my feeds this week I still end up with 25 items in my ToBlog folder. Luckily I’m going to cull out some of the older ones as well as a few things that aren’t so post-worthy at this point. But I have a great (OT) vid to share with y’all at the end.

• ArsTechnica: Get it done with GNOME Do 0.8. A very nice story on how much easier Gnome Do makes using GNOME-based GNU/Linux distros. Thanks to Peter Stuifzand over on the Do Google Group for letting me know about it.
• Jonathan Ernst: HP refunds 520$ for unused software. There was just now way I wasn’t going to share this story.
• Jon Beebe: Top 10 Reasons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu. Yes, it’s from a Linux guy, but it’s a great tongue-in-cheek list.
• Srinivasa Ragavan: Announcing ‘Anjal’- the new mail for netbooks. If you use a netbook you should definitely check out Anjal for your email client.
• Stefano Forenza: Chinese MID deploying Ubuntu by default. Speaking of netbooks, I may have to find a way to get one of these. Not only do they run my fav OS, but they’re pretty darned inexpensive as well.
• Stefano Forenze: New wallpapers for Jaunty. Don’t hold your breath. I’m liking how some of them look, although I know they won’t be everyone’s cup of espresso.
• Wouter Verhelst: Dealing with apt’s GPG signing stuff — the right way. If you use third party sources for installing and updating your GNU/Linux you know about adding GPG signing keys. Wouter has instructions for adding them in a way that doesn’t inject a security flaw, and that defeats the purpose of importing a GPG key in the first place.
• Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo: Is ext4 unsafe? The next update to Ubuntu will add support for ext4 partitions, and lately people have been talking about security concerns with ext4. Luckily Jose has info to set your mind at ease.
• Josselin Mouette: Which logo for the main GNOME menu in Debian? I could have skipped this post from Friday, but the “swirl foot” icons are so cute I may have to grab them for my own system.
• Isabelle Duchatelle: Ubuntuforums nuts and bolts. Isabelle has some very handy Ubuntu Forums links you may want to bookmark, as well as some rather nice numbers for what’s going on at UF)
• Tom Dryer: How-to Install Google Earth 5 on Ubuntu. The latest update for GE brings some really nice new features. Tom gives us a very quick and easy way to install this new version, as well as some troubleshooting info.
• Joe Barker: Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) – My Thoughts So far. Joe’s been playing with late alpha of Ubuntu 9.04 and is kind enough to let us know how it’s behaving on his system. Remember, no matter how well (or unwell) any software runs on a person’s system, Your Milage May Vary, simply because their hardware, software and particular configuration is bound to be different from yours. But so far Joe’s pretty happy with it, although I’m hearing that those of us on the Mac4Lin dev team are unhappy about yet more bloody changes to things that are affecting our software. Yet again. Grrr.
• Guillaume Desmottes: Good GNOME news. We’re just about to see a beta release of Ubuntu 9.04 and that means there is an update coming down the pike for GNOME. And as a matter of fact it came out on Wednesday. Guillaume has the best post that I’ve seen with info on what’s new in this update, next to the release notes, that is. Hell, just looking at the improvements for users makes me want to snag the beta for Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” just so I can play with it sooner!
  

I had a few other links I was going to share with y’all, but I think that’s enough for a weekend. If you’re in need of a good laugh (and some of your NCAA brackets may be in the toilet by now from what I’m hearing), check out this vid. As much as I try not to laugh at what happens to the poor feline I just can’t help myself.