Have you gotten your koala yet?

The bad news is that everyone and their brother (or sister) seems to be either trying to get the disk image to burn or trying to perform the upgrade. Randy Cole posted a comment on the Mass. Ubuntu Local Community maillist that the upgrade script being used is “extremely inefficient.” But as Paul Smith points out in his response, “Probably your better bet is just to wait a week or so. Then it won’t be so bad.”

If you’re finding that downloading the disk image seems to be flowing through molasses, it’s because the download servers are getting hammered on all fronts. You may want to try the download via BitTorrent if you can. I’m hearing that torrent downloads are going pretty fast as people have finished their download and making it available to others via torrents, in fact Randy posted a response to Paul’s advice and pointed out that he got the got the ISO in about an hour from torrents. Yes, Virginia, there are files being shared via torrents that are perfectly legitimate. Go figure, eh?

If you’re not sure if you want to take the time to even download an ISO file your can burn to test out the latest version of Ubuntu, you may want to take the tour of all of the features and benefits that Ubuntu 9.10 brings to the table.

Once you get Ubuntu 9.10 installed you will want to check out an article by Danny Piccirillo, another member of the Mass. Ubuntu LoCo Team, Top things to do after installing Ubuntu Linux 9.10 Karmic Koala. It’s filled with great advice, in fact I plan on going through it once I finish checking my email to see if there’s anything I missed in the past week and a half of using the beta.

I just found a new Must Have DVD and CD

I was looking through the On Demand listings today and didn’t find any TV shows or movies I wanted to see so I turned to the music listings. What I didn’t expect was to see an excerpt from a killer concert combining one of my favorite classic rock bands and a youth orchestra.

Concert.tv has let me see some great footage from some of my favorite bands, but when I found a 18 minute clip from Styx and a Cleveland orchestra I wasn’t expecting to get my socks blown off. What I found as a video made with the Contemporary Youth Orchestra (CYO) from a 2006 show. The concert was released as One With Everything in CD and DVD versions in November of 2006 with a Blu-Ray disk coming out earlier this year. The clip from concert.tv only has three songs (Blue Collar Man (Long Nights), Too Much Time on My Hands, and Boat on the River), but I was already sold. I had to watch it again just so I could enjoy watching the young musicians get into the songs while playing. I’m not saying that it’s odd that orchestral musicians don’t like rock and roll or that I’m surprised to see a group of high school students enjoying Styx so much, I just got a kick out of watching the players. It’s clear that they were having a blast.

It turns out that Liza Grossman and the orchestra are no strangers to working with big name artists in the rock arena, having already worked with Ray Manzarek of The Doors, Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young), Jon Anderson of Yes, Pat Benatar and her husband Neil Giraldo, as well as Styx and others. The orchestra has also premiered 46 world premieres and has received the Northern Ohio Live Award of Achievement in the Classical Music/Opera category.

If you have any interest in classic rock music, orchestral music, young musicians or any combination of these to visit the CYO website. After you find out more about this great bunch of musicians click on the “listen+ watch” link on the lower left and get ready to both see and hear just how good they are. Plus you get to see a clip of Lorelei from the One With Everything DVD. If you’re like me you’ll want to fly, not surf, over to Amazon and buy the DVD, CD, or Blu-Ray of One with Everythingfor yourself. Even if you hate classical music I bet you’re going to love this performance.

It’s almost time…

No, I’m not referring to the release of Ubuntu 9.10, although Peng and I are keeping an eye on the Ubuntu home page so we can see when they change the Coming Soon graphic showing that it is in fact out. Instead I’m referring to All Hallow’s Eve, which is coming up on Saturday.

Greg Evans has a great panel of his Luann comic today and as soon as I saw it I knew I had to share it with our readers.

Do you have some kids’ books that you no longer need? Visit Books For Treats and see how you can promote literacy rather than cavities.

I’m not saying candy is bad, because both Peng and I definitely have at least a couple of sweet teeth (I’m pretty sure he has more than I do ), but sharing the gift of reading is always a good idea.

And speaking of candy, make sure you’re ready to celebrate the next adult holiday, Half Price Chocolate Day, which falls on Sunday 1 November. After all, if you share the gift of reading you deserve a treat.

Before the cage is opened…

We’re now less than a day form the release of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” (just to be clear, that’s version 9-point-one-zero, not nine-point-one) and now that I’m finally caught up with my news feeds (thanks in no small part to the great work by Antoine Pairet and Andrew Starr-Bochicchio on resolving Bug #460462 for evolution-rss I am back to using Evo for my news feeds) I’ve got some links to pass along. I won’t post links for all 62 articles I flagged as wanting to blog, but I will share a number of links that could be of direct assistance in deciding whether to hold onto Ubuntu 9.04 (or even Ubuntu 8.04 LTS if that’s what you’re using).

• Chenthill Palanisamy: Evolution 2.28.0 released!! I already mentioned some nice updates in Evo and Chenthill wrote a post on Planet GNOME that gives some more info on how Evo has been improved. Shane Fagan has another important post on backing up your Evolution data. You are going to perform a backup before you upgrade. Right?
• Fabián Rodríguez: (Almost) risk-free Karmic testing. Fabián has some very nice information on putting Ubuntu onto a USB flash drive rather than on a disk. I know some of you may be looking for just that kind of info.
• Leandro Gómez: Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 CD labels. Anyone can burn a disk and write on it with a Sharpie to label it, but do you really need to do that? Leandro has 25 pieces of artwork for labels you can use to make your home-burnt disks look even nicer. It could be just what you need to help make the perfect gift for family and friends this coming holiday season. If those aren’t your cup of espresso Ubuntu Geek has compiled a listing of other designs.
• Musings on maintaining Ubuntu: Caveats for audio in Ubuntu Karmic Beta. Granted, some of this info may be a smidge outdated now, but it has some info you may want to have as you look at the upgrade. This is a big part of why some of us recommend testing the new version with either a LiveCD (or a USB drive) before committing to the update. That way you can get an idea of any gotchas you may have coming your way. There is one thing that’s started bugging me about the upgrade, and that’s the loss of a perfectly useful volume controller and replacing it with a Sound Preferences dialog that is nowhere as usable as it was in Ubuntu 9.04.
• Alan Lord: Another Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Review. Alan has a nice review of Ubuntu 9.10 with a lot of screenshots so you can get a better look at how things look in the newest version.
• Martin Owens: Ubuntu’s Minimum Requirements. While not about the new release, Martin has a very nice look at exactly what kind of hardware you need to run Ubuntu. Bryan Quigley takes it a step further and compares it with the minimum memory requirements of some other operating systems. You should also check out Martin’s piece on The BBC Ubuntu Experiment.
• Benedict Stein: How to use Google Calendar in Evolution. Ben’s got just the info you need if you want to merge your gCalendar with your local calendar. It’s now even easier than it used to be. And if you use an encrypted home directory then you absolutely have to read another of Ben’s posts.
• David E. Cruz Avalos: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. Want more specifics? Want more screenshots? David may have just the post you’re looking for.
• Ubuntu Geek: Nice themes for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) users. I don’t know anyone who gets a single desktop theme and never changes it. Hell, not even I do that, although I do tend to come back to the Mac4Lin themes before long. Ubuntu Geek has also found some other great themes and makes it easy to get them.
• Collin Pruitt: Advice on Downloading Ubuntu Karmic. I definitely wanted to save the best for last. If you think about snagging a disk image on Thursday you could be in for a looong wait. Colin has the key to bypassing the lag that will be created by everyone trying to get it at once. And no, it’s not “wait a day or three.”

If you want to check out an Ubuntu 9.10 Release Party you can check out the list of confirmed parties on the Ubuntu Wiki. Due to some scheduling issues the party for the Boston area, organized by the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo Team, will be held on the 7th of November.

It’s Colin Pruitt’s fault (SFW but NSFYE)*

I enjoy getting the latest XKDC comic in my RSS reader, but it wasn’t until I checked out Planet Ubuntu did I know I should go hit their home page.

As pointed out by both Brian Burger and Colin Pruitt, GeoCities will reach it’s end-of-life tomorrow. I’m one of the millions of users that has had a GeoCities site at one time or another (until I learned how to create my own site, of course) so I definitely took note of the closing when I first heard about it some time back.

But as I read Colin’s post on Planet Ubuntu I discovered that the crazy folks (in a good way) over at XKCD have decided to note the passing of GeoCities by redesigning their site to look like it as created as a GeoCities site. He also includes a thumbnail screenshot that I won’t post here. Not because the pic isn’t CC licensed but to help preserve your eyes.

That’s right, XKCD has made their site look like it was designed by a noobie over at GeoCities. Almost as soon as the page loaded my eyes started screaming MAKE IT STOP!!! It’s that hard on your retinas, as pointed out by some readers on the XKCD forum thanks to Brian for the link).

Go check it out while it lasts, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

—–
*NSFYE-Not Safe For your Eyes

[UPDATED] Initial thoughts on Ubuntu 9.10 beta

[Updated to include some great news on the evolution-rss bug. -Peng]

The Ubuntu devs released the beta of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” back on the first of the month (now available as a Release Candidate), and while I snagged the disk image pretty quickly it wasn’t until Friday a week ago that I was able to actually get a chance to fire up the LiveCD long enough to see how well it played with my system. I couldn’t find any major glitches in it other than a problem with my USB WiFi adapter, and I had already seen that people were having enough major issues with the combination that there was a request to change the status on the support for the adapter from some support to absolutely no support. Luckily I was already having enough connectivity issues with our Linksys WiFi router that I has already gone back to using the good, old-fashioned CAT 5 cable to connect to it.

After looking at a number of other items that are important to me I went to the page on the Ubuntu website about the 9.10 beta to check for any known issues that I needed to be aware of and decided it was an upgrade I could probably do safely. I ran command sudo do-release-upgrade -d with the Run Application (Alt-F2) tool, although you could also run it in the terminal, and waited the two hours plus while my system got upgraded. Your system may take the upgrade more quickly or more slowly than mine, but having done a clean installation for version 9.04 I decided I didn’t want to go through the hassle of having to reinstall every bloody app and tool I use this time around. I did notice a number of dbus errors during the upgrade and unfortunately I didn’t think to document what they were about. They may have had something to do with how long my upgrade took, but I hadn’t found any dbus issues connected with the upgrade so I have absolutely no clue what the errors should have told me.

Now that I’ve used and updating Karmic for just over a week I found some things that I want to point out, some good, some not so good.

Overall Thoughts

I kept seeing people say that the boot times for Ubuntu 9.10 are shorter and sure enough my boot time is shorter. Of course since the Ubuntu devs decided to switch from using Usplash for the initial boot splash to XSplash any Mac4Lin boot splashes would have been broken anyway (I never did get a Usplash working for Mac4Lin 1.0, much to may chagrin) but I have to say that I really do like the look of the new splash screens. The boot splash is a simple Ubuntu logo on a dark background, but I have to say the new XSplash is a thing of beauty. As you can see in a YouTube video posted on Softpedia’s article on the newly released Ubuntu 9.10 beta, it’s no longer a simple case of the Ubuntu logo and a progress bar. The Ubuntu logo is now suspended and lit by an overhead spotlight and the animated bar now scrolls up rather than going from left to right.

In addition, they’ve added the Ubuntu Software Center (USC) as a new tool for adding software to the usual collection of Synaptic and Add/Remove Software. When I first looked at it I thought, “So what? I can do the same thing with existing tools.” Except the UI for the USC makes it a lot handier than Add/Remove Software. You can either search for a specific app or browse through the library and when you find what you’re looking for you’re provided with a much nicer information screen complete with buttons to wither install the software as well as to go to the app’s website where you can get even more information. The information screen even lets you know the version that’s available, something that Add/Remove Software never had. Have software you installed from a Debian package (.deb)? The USC knows about the app (at least what the package told the system) and gives you a button to remove it. It may not always have the application’s icon, but that may be more of a limitation in the package itself. Yes, you can do all this via Synaptic, but not everyone’s all that comfortable with it.

The Good

For the most part I’m pretty happy with the upgrade. I won’t bore you with a ton of specifics or screenies (I’ll include a link to some screenshots I made at the end) but there are a few things that I noticed are definite improvements in the user experience for me. The first thing I noticed was a dialog that popped up on my first reboot after the upgrade was done. I knew my hard drives were getting a bit old in the tooth, but now I could see just how bad things are getting. I dismissed the dialog, but now when I boot up I get an icon in my notification area and when I click on it I get a helpful message. I can click on the message and get more information, and I know I need to replace that drive one of these days but now I know I need to do it sooner than later (picture). I can disable the message if I want, as I can for the warnings that I’m getting low on disk space on my partitions. Those warnings come up each boot, as well as when I’m working with videos and the available space gets too small. Yes, they can be a little annoying, but I haven’t decided to silence them just yet.

An even nicer improvement comes in the Update Manager. Now it lets you know the source for the particular updates, plus it flat-out gives you more information on the update, such as the version number. This is information that’s been missing from the Update Manager for as long as I’ve used Ubuntu.

Another small, yet a very nice set of improvements came in Evolution. The first is a better visual notification of new messages coming in. In the past when you fired up Evo you simply saw the folder names bold when you had unread messages, which is okay, unless you left some messages marked unread to follow-up on as I do. Now you’ll see that there’s a star on the folder that has brand new unread messages.

The other improvements come to those who use Evo as their RSS reader. Not only does Evo show the site icons for the folders with feeds where available (the other folders use the stock RSS feed icon), but on many sites you can now see the comments when you look at the article summaries. I’m not sure why they show up on some feeds and not others, but I have noticed that some feeds still show a count for the number of comments without actually showing the comments themselves. But it’s not all good news with Evo though.

There’s one more fan-damn-tastic improvement in Ubuntu 9.10 that I just discovered trying to get caught up on my RSS feeds: It’s a piece of baklava to enable using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to force a new X session. Just go to System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Layout Options. Then select Key Sequence to kill the X server and check Control + Alt + Backspace. That’s all it takes. Yooouge thanks to Panji Nushantara for pointing it out on his blog.

The Not So Good

First off all let me warn you about a potential deal breaker in the updated Evolution. If you’re like me and you use Evo for your RSS/ATOM feed reader you won’t want to grab the new Evo. The reason for this warning is the fact that for some unknown (to me) reason the evolution-rss plugin no longer works and no feeds are updated (filed as Bug #460462 with fixed link). Luckily you can export your feed list (Edit > Preferences > News and Blogs > Export) so you can migrate your subscribed feeds to another app like Liferea and hopefully not miss too many days’ posts. There’s also an advantage that Liferea has over Evolution’s RSS plugin: You can sort and rename your feed folders to your heart’s content without borking the feed settings, something that you can’t say about evolution-rss. Updated 26 October 4:00 pm: Thanks to some very quick work by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio the evolution-rss bug is already fixed. There’s a .deb package on comment #6 on the bug, or you can wait for it to be available through the Update Manager as it’s already been accepted for distribution.

There are more upgrades in Ubuntu 9.10 that aren’t such good news, and one that sticks out like a sore thumb on my system is the GNOME web browser, Epiphany. As I mentioned back in December I finally got tired of the decisions Firefox devs were making and switched to using Epiphany for my web surfing. There were two flavors of Epiphany, one using the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine and one using Webkit, but the Webkit version didn’t quite seem ready for prime time so I was using the Gecko version. It was great that I had the option and it allowed me the option of using a Gecko-based browser without dealing with what I thought were boneheaded UI decisions from Firefox devs. Unfortunately the Epiphany devs have stopped supporting the Gecko engine and since with the release of Epiphany 2.26.3 Epiphany/Gecko no longer exists, Epiphany/Gecko is simply not available in Ubuntu 9.10. You may think that’s not a big problem, except there are some basic behavior issues that no longer available.

There’s finally a semi-usable spell checker in Epiphany now. I saw semi-usable because if I select a correct spelling the misspelled word is deleted but not replaced with the correct spelling (filed as Bug #460450).

The biggest issue is that you can no longer right-click a link and select Open in New Tab from the context menu. You also can’t middle-click a link on every site and open it in a new tab, especially when the links are on a Google site like Gmail.

Another serious usability issue for me is that the extensions that I used don’t seem to work quite properly anymore. The biggest issue for me is the fact that my beloved New Blank Tab extension no longer seems to be working. I’m hoping someone will come along and fix it because while the Tab Foreground extension works it doesn’t let me open a new tab and go straight to the location bar so I can type (or paste) in a URI. This is a rather big pain in the arse, although not quite as big as the no middle-click issue.

Wallpaper Tray is another app that has broken in the upgrade. For some reason it flat out won’t launch on booting for some reason. I ended up switching to Desktop Drapes, which is a nice app that I can put right on my upper panel, but doesn’t have the hover feature of showing the path and filename for the current wallpaper like Wallpaper Tray does. Hopefully we can get that fixed before too long.

On the Whole

One the whole there are some nice benefits to the upgrade, as long as you don’t depend on the features I mentioned above. As I finally finish this post we have a mere four days before Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is released, now may be a great time to snag the ISO for the Release Candidate and try it out on your own system. Remember, try the LiveCD before you make the upgrade, and look at every app that you use now to make sure the upgrade won’t bring bad news as I found. make sure you also read the overview before you make the upgrade for more information on what’s coming in the upgrade as well as the known issues.

Check out all of my Ubuntu 9.10 screenshots in my Picasa Web Album.

Karmic Upgrade screenies

Have you requested your free karma-laden LiveCD yet?

I’ve been working on my review of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” Beta but the week has been busy enough that I’m hoping I can get it finished and published tomorrow, but I realized that I hadn’t checked to see if the LiveCD’s are available for pre-order in a while. They are, and I suspect they’ve been available for a bit and my brain just didn’t read the page yet.

If you’d like a free, professionally published Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD just head on over to shipit.ubuntu.com and place your request. As with previous versions, you will need to be a registered user of the Launchpad site, but there’s absolutely no charge to join. They can take up to ten weeks to arrive once they ship, so if you don’t want to have to wait that long you can always download a disk image once the new version is released.

Want to buy a larger quantity of LiveCD’s? You can place orders for them at the ubuntushop/US, or in the international Canonical Store if you live outside of the US. A 10-pack of Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition disks is a mere $5 plus shipping, or you can get a bulk order of at 100 or 200 and get free shipping! The disks you want to pay for will ship in early November, but I think you’ll find them worth the wait. While you’re at the Ubuntu or Canonical stores you should take a little time and see all the great Ubuntu swag you can get to help you let people know that you love the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux at some pretty sweet prices.

Love Do but not Docky? That’s cool. Want Docky but not Do? We’ve got a project for that, too.

There have been a few open source projects that have made the GNU/Linux community all happy as hell and one of the best is GNOME Do. While not really a member of the GNOME project many of us will admit to considering it one of the best apps ever written, which you can see on their new Preview page, and once you’ve used it for a while you hate having to use an operating system without it.

When they brought out version 0.8 they added a new theme, Docky. It’s great for people who already use a dock like Avant Window Navigator (AWN) or the Cairo-Dock.  (The Mac4Lin project supports both AWN and Cairo, although I prefer AWN for my use.) While a lot of people love Docky, some of us just don’t. That’s one of the beauties of open source software, you can use what you want and not use what you don’t like. With Do it’s simply a matter of choosing the Docky theme or choosing another theme.

Yesterday I reading a thread on the GNOME Do Google Group that asked why Do isn’t listed as a GNOME project and I saw a comment about Docky being pulled from Do. That’s right, cats and kittehs, members of the Do community got together on IRC and decided to spin Docky off from GNOME Do, making it a project of its own.

If you love Docky please consider surfing over to Launchpad and helping make Docky, The Finest Dock No Money Can Buy, the best it can be.

In the midst of joy . . .

(Updated 14 October to include links to Kathy’s obit and memorial guest book.)

As happy that I am that the Dodgers are headed to the NLCS I got some news that definitely didn’t leave me very happy. For the past several years I’ve known that my ex-wife Kathleen, the mother of my only son, has been very sick with bad kidneys, to the point where she had been on regular dialysis for at least a few years and had gone on the national kidney transplant list.

As I was checking my email this morning I found an email from my mother informing me that Kathleen died yesterday afternoon at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans. I’ve had a feeling for some time that KM was probably living on borrowed time, so the news wasn’t as big a shock as it could have been. Since I’m in Boston I could try to head back to New Orleans for the funeral or memorial service, but it’s a known issue that I’m not one of my in-laws’ favorite people and I suspect my heading back to New Orleans could make things worse, not better, especially for our 23-year old son Stephen.

I know I have a number of things I’ve been wanting to blog, but my todo list may get shunted aside for any number of reasons relating to KM’s death. Thank you for your patience as I see what I can do to help my son in the wake of the loss of his mother.

I’ll add a link to her obituary when I find it, if it’s posted at all in the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The picture below is several years old, but it’s the latest picture I have of her, but at least it shows both her and our son Stephen.

Updated 14 October: Kathleen’s obituary was published in the local newspaper today. There’s also a memorial guest book available for anyone who wants to sign it. Please keep our son Stephen Graham Hardin in your prayers as he is probably having the hardest time of all in the wake of his mother’s passing.

Kathleen McGill Hardin
1966-2009
We didn’t always see eye to eye,
but that doesn’t mean I’m glad
to see you gone

[UPDATED] Should I reach into the YDW archives?

[I shortened how much shows up on our bolg's home page to let you scroll less to see our newer content faster. Sorry it took so long to add that. -Peng]

After writing the previous post Nanci and I were talking about my old blogs and she asked if I had any backups from them. Being rather anal retentive, and having my arse bitten by upgrades in the past that tried to hose data, both with my blog and with other software, I do have some backups. We ended up talking about the possibility of pulling up some of my old posts and publishing them here.

Updated 2 November: The poll is now closed, and only one person voted. They voted to republish my old posts, so I’ll see about doing that. Unfortunately with only one vote cast the task won’t jump to a front burner right away, which is actually a good thing since my stove top is pretty full as it is. I’ll keep this post stickied to the end of this week to give people a chance to see the results and this weekend I’ll let it drop down to it’s normal position in the list of articles.