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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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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