Regain Compiz desktop rotation with the mouse in Ubuntu 9.10

One of the nice uses for the cube in Compiz Fusion is to place your mouse over a clear area of your desktop (an area without a window) and roll your mouse’s scroll wheel to rotate your screen to another desktop. Unfortunately somewhere in the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala that feature was broken. I finally did a search on the problem today and found an easy answer.

LittleCannon posted the fix in this thread where he said

Hi, I had same problems as you.

open gconf-editor and under

/apps/compiz/plugins/vpswitch/allscreens/options

find “next_button” and give value “Button5″, find “prev_button” and give value “Button4″

Viewport switcher should work now

I found the correct setting in CompizConfig Settings Manager under Desktop > Viewport Switcher > Desktop-based Viewport Switcher and was able to change the settings to bring back desktop rotation with your mouse wheel. Here’s a screenshot of my settings to help you get the right settings.

Youge thanks to LittleCannon for helping me resolve this very annoying issue.

Epiphany, take a seat. Chromium, you’re up.

As I mentioned in my earlier post on using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala the Epiphany devs stopped supporting the Gecko rendering engine and switched to exclusively supporting the WebKit engine. While I understand their decision, I don’t think Epiphany/WebKit is quite ready for prime time, although I was willing to continue using it as my default browser. As I used Epiphany/WebKit I was left with the feeling that there are too many things about Epiphany/WebKit that simply pisses me off too much to let it remain as my default web browser. Among the issues that left me banging my head against a brick wall are

• Epiphany-extensions-more is uninstallable in karmic (Launchpad bug #452845). That leaves the third-party extensions needing to be manually installed, but there’s no guarantee that they will work, because…
• Add-ons need to be rewritten to work with the WebKit engine. That leaves some of my MustHave extensions broken, including Middle Click Tab Close, New Blank Tab, Window Icon, AWN Favicon, and Video Downloader.
• Opening links in a new tab can be completely impossible, especially in Gmail but not necessarily on other Google sites (LP bug #272808). To add insult to injury, if you click on a link on an offending site it opens the link in a window so small as to be completely useless without resizing it. (screenshots available in my comment on that bug).
• Login information is no longer saved (LP bug #483566). This leaves you having to manually enter login information to sites you’ve visited many times before, even with Epiphany/karmic, and had the temerity to log out or the site automatically times out your session.
• If you click a link to download an archive or a software package Epiphany complains that the file could damage your system and offers to let you download it instead, presenting you with options to “save as…” and “download” (LP bug #151787). In addition, right clicking on an image and selecting to save it results in a dialog complaining that Epiphany has no idea what application to open the file in. This may be the same issue, but I can’t find another bug that fits it better.
• Epiphany refuses to recognize apturl links as an authorized method of installing software (LP bug #235128).
• There’s no way to get favicons, the icons provided by web servers to visually identify the website you’re on (LP bug #355755). While some users like not having favicons on their browser tabs many of us so want it.
• Closing a tab with a form, with fields filled out or not, will get you a dialog warning that there are unsaved form elements (LP bug #21597).
• While we finally have a working spell checker, the UI sucks. There’s no way to easily tell the browser to always check your spelling, leaving you to manually right-click to make sure the spell checker is on for a text field. To make matters worse, once it’s enabled you have to manually right-click and tell Epiphany to Check Document Now to move to the next typo. Talk about a pain in the rump.
• If you find a typo with the spell checker and select the correct spelling, the typo is removed but the correct spelling isn’t inserted in its place (LP bug #460450).

That’s not even an exhaustive list of the things in Epiphany/karmic that makes me go “Grrrrr!” As much as I liked using Epiphany/Gecko under Ubuntu 9.04 it’s simply pissing me off too much to use it as my default browser any longer, so I switched to Chromium. While Chromium isn’t perfect, and there are things that don’t work quite as well as I’d like it to, it definitely works better than Epiphany/WebKit. And thanks to the Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds Team’s PPA I get updates to Chromium on a daily basis so I can see fixes almost as soon as they’re released. The biggest PITA bug that I’m waiting to get fixed is one I posted, Issue 28517: Can’t import bookmarks from Epiphany. Until it’s fixed I’ve added a link to my Epiphany bookmarks file on my Bookmarks Bar so I can get at it easily when I need it. I’m also unable to add words to my spell check dictionary for some odd reason, but at least when I select a correct spelling the error gets corrected and not just wiped out.

While you can use extensions in Chromium the devs haven’t opened the extensions gallery, you can find some installable extensions at the Google Chrome Extensions site. Among the extensions I already have installed are

• AdBlock+ 1.1.9.9 – It doesn’t work as transparently as Firefox’s AdBlock+ works, and I can’t seem to able to block ads in Gmail, but hopefully that will change before too long. I just saw the AntiADS extension and it seems working better than AdBlock+.
• Bookmarklets Manager 3.2.0 – A great way to add and use bookmarklets, although several of my search bookmarklets don’t want to work. It may be due to Issue 2238: Add search engine dialog doesn’t allow “{” (open curly brace); can interfere with javascript.
• New Tabs Always Last 0.1 – Sometimes I just don’t want a new tab opened next to the active tab, like 90% of the time I click a link on my custom start page. This extension brings the behavior I want, and I can always disable it if I want new tabs opened next to my active tab and not at the far right of my tab bar.
• Tabs to the front 0.1 – Like it says on the tin, because I hate having to manually select a tab I just opened from a link.
• YouTube Downloader 1.1 – While not as feature rich as the Firefox Video DownloadHelper extension in that I can’t download my local television news videos or MLB highlight videos, it does bring one killer feature to the table: Easy to find buttons to select which version of the video you want to download, as shown in the image on the right (click the image for the full size image in a new window).

There’s also one killer feature to Chrome’s add-ons. You don’t need to close Chrome to get the benefits of an extension. Yep, you can use a new extension as soon as it’s installed. The same goes for enabling/disabling an add-on. I seem to remember hearing that other browsers can do that (I know Epiphany can), but Chrome/Chromium kicks Firefox’s tail on this count.

There are a couple of other bugs that may keep some users from switching to Chromium full-time. The first is that Chromium doesn’t seem to know how to open PDF files (Chromium issue 19587). I can’t open PDF’s in Epiphany either, so downloading PDF files is one more thing I keep Firefox around for. I also can’t drag a URI from Chromium to the desktop (issue 24210) to remind me to get back to the page. If you’ve created a bookmark on your desktop with another browser Chromium can’t open it either (issue 27339).

If you’re unhappy with Firefox and Epiphany and are looking for a browser that can make it easier to surf the web you should definitely look into Chromium. You may find that it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Happy Thanksgiving!

On behalf of Nanci and myself I want to wish all of our readers in the US (and abroad) a very happy Thanksgiving Day. May your food prep go smoothly, your meal be nom-iful, and the family and friends you spend this day with markedly low on asshattery.

Yes, I know that link may be 404, but I’m including the link in case they get it fixed.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Update the GlobalMenu in Ubuntu 9.10

[Updated 25 November to include a link to the release notes. -Peng]

I’ve noticed for some time that when I open the Epiphany browser the GlobalMenu identifies it as “Epiphany Web Bookmarks”. Since the web browser and the bookmark manager are two different apps I wanted to file a bug against it. There’s just one problem. When you go to the page to report a new issue with the GlobalMenu the first thing you see is

IMPORTANT: Before reporting an issue:

1. Make sure the issue has not been fixed in the
latest version:

http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/issues/list?q=label:Milestone-

Release0.7.8

What’s the problem? The GlobalMenu PPA, which supports jaunty, intrepid and hardy but not karmic, and it only has version 0.7.5. You could build version 0.7.8 from source, but when I tried to build it I immediately went into dependency hell. Luckily I discovered Issue 524: PPA for Karmic on the GlobalMenu section of Google Code. Abhishek Dasgupta has managed to build packages for version 0.7.8 on his PPA, although only for karmic.

If you’re running Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala getting the updated GlobalMenu is easy. Open a terminal and run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:abhidg/ppa

That will not only add Abhishek’s PPA to your sources.list but also get the GPG signing key for it. Let’s update your available package information with

sudo apt-get update

If you already have GlobalMenu installed you should see the Update Manager icon in your notification to let you know that there’s an update available. Just click that icon and follow the normal steps for applying updates.

If you don’t have GlobalMenu installed yet and want to get it add the repo with the above command and update your package info. Once the apt-get update is completed run this command:

sudo apt-get install gnome-globalmenu

Then add the GlobalMenu panel applet to your panel and enjoy having menus for your application windows in one place and not on each window. Just remember, Firefox and OpenOffice.org, as well as any apps that need administrator privileges (like Synaptic), won’t use GlobalMenu.

If you want to follow the bug I was filing that prompted this post it’s Issue 548: Wrong app title shown for Epiphany/Webkit in Ubuntu Karmic.

Updated 25 November: If you aren’t sure if you really want to get the upgrade you can read the release notes, although they haven’t completely updated the docs for version 0.7.8 yet. There are some really nice updates in version 0.7.8 from 0.7.5 so I heartily recommend getting the upgrade.

Get more info on the decision to dump the Gimp from lucid

Sunday’s link post included a link to Stefano Forenza’s post about the Gimp being removed from plans for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Linx. I was checking out a video posted by Alan Pope that was on Planet Ubuntu last week and now I have a better understanding of why they made the choice.

Alan posted some videos from the Ubuntu/Lucid Developer Summit, and he also posted a separate video about application selection in the default install. After watching the video I feel a lot better about Gimp being pulled. It also makes me want to check out Eye of Gnome again, and they even mentioned my favorite image viewer, gThumb.

The video also has a discussion about the rather Jabba-sized list of games that are in the default install, and it looks like not only will we be able to cherry-pick what we want but also be able to ditch games we don’t want. As late as Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has a base package of games and if you want to ditch one you have to lose them all. They also looked at including gbrainy, a game that I’ve mentioned in the past.

If you’re interested in not only what decisions are being made for the next version of Ubuntu you should check out all of the videos on the Ubuntu Developers’ YouTube channel. It will take some time to watch them all, but it’s definitely worth checking out.

[UPDATED] Enjoy YouTube without your web browser

One of the RSS feeds I subscribe to is for the Ubuntu Geek site. They publish some great tutorials and news, and I keep learning new things from them. (They’ve been in our sidebar links for some time.) Friday they had an article about a great way to watch YouTube videos that I flagged to look at more when I had the time. Yesterday I got time to check it out and found what could be one of my new MustHave apps.

Minitube is a killer app for enjoying YouTube vids that not only doesn’t have anything to do with your web browser, but it also doesn’t require Adobe Flash. Instead you simply enter a keyword and Minitube creates a video stream for you. Of course you don’t have to watch the whole stream, you can cherry pick the video or videos that you want to watch and just sit back and enjoy the videos. There isn’t a way to save any of the vids you find to enjoy on your Digital media player (like my beloved E100), but you can open a video in your web browser.

One of the best features of Minitube is that it isn’t a GNU/Linux-only app. You can also run it on the MacOS, but there hasn’t been success building it for Windows yet.

The Minitube website has great installation instructions, complete with links to a PPA, and you can even get a Debian-style package from GetDeb. Just remember that a package on GetDeb may not be completely compatible with other Debian-based distributions. But you can also snag the source code, as well as a universal for OSX.

Thanks to the good folks over at Ubuntu Geek for turning me on to this amazing app. If you end up loving Minitube as much as I do please feel free to use his donate buttons. It’s definitely worth contributing some of your disposable income to.

Updated 26 November: Thanks to comments from Eric and Pat I have seen that Ubuntu Geek isn’t quite as good a resource as I thought. I’ve removed the links to their article about Minitube and removed them from our sidebar links. Thanks for the advice, Eric & Pat. I owe you two a brew.

Peng’s links for Sunday, 22 November

• Sense Hofstede: Ubuntu Bug Control starts mentoring. Reporting bugs is an important part of using open source software so they can get squashed and in time others won’t have to deal with them. Of course there are already a lot of bugs reported, with many of them unconfirmed. Any user can help simply by triaging bugs to confirm the bug and the package it’s in. Sense has some very easy info on how to help with triaging.
• Stefano Forenza: Ubuntu One Music Store. You read that right, Canonical wants to include a way to buy music within next spring’s Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Linx. Stefano also has a follow-up post with answers to some questions that came up in his original post. Welcome back, Stefano!
• Aaron Toponce: Debian – The Universal Operating System. While Debian (the foundation for the Ubuntu family of GNU/Linux operating systems) isn’t perfect, is is pretty powerful, not to mention flexible as hell. Aaron gives us a great overview of Debian. Even I didn’t realize Debian was so good.
• Stefano Forenza: No more Gimp for you little Joe. Stefano mentioned it before, but it’s been confirmed. Gimp will no longer be part of the default installation of Ubuntu, although they are keeping F-Spot for image editing. In all honesty I have to admit that the Gimp doesn’t have the best UI, but I use it regularly. I tried F-Spot before, and with some versions I couldn’t get the damned thing open, while in others I was just so overwhelmed trying to figure out how to use it I shut it down and opened my image up in the Gimp. Luckily you can install Gimp easily, so you won’t have to jump through too many hoops. We’ll have to wait and see if in-place upgrading to 10.04 deletes Gimp. If it does I’m going to be one ticked off penguin.
• Danielle Madeley: Why Telepathy is not like libpurple. Some people think Telepathy, Ubuntu 9.10′s default messaging client, is like Pidgin, the client so many of us have come to love over the years. Danielle shows that they are two very different apps. Thanks for the clarification, Danielle, even though I still prefer to use Pidgin.
• Maia Kozheva: UI Rant: Computer Janitor. Thank the diety I’m not the only one who thinks Computer Janitor has one of the fugliest interfaces I’ve ever seen. Dude, we’ve gotta get this fixed and soon if we want people to use it.
• Anirudh Acharya: Chrome OS: First Impressions… Artem Nosulchik and Stefano Forenza have both written nice articles on the newly announced Google ChromeOS, but the developer of Mac4Lin gave it a spin and shares his thoughts, as well as some screenshots.
• Christoph Langher: Secure and unique passwords with PwdHash for Chromium. I asked for help with an add-on for Chrom[e|ium], but Christoph has found a Chrom[e|ium] version of a Firefox add-on that he is damned glad to find.

To those who live in the States I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. But be careful when selecting your bird. I hear they’re fighting back this year.

Open in Firefox … from Chrome?

Back when I was a Firefox user on Windows I used an extension called IE View. The simple idea behind it was to right-click on a link within Firefox and be able to open it in Internet Explorer. There’s also an OperaView extension which does the same thing for Opera, which is a lot more practical for people who have made a decision to use an OS other than Windows.

Now that Google’s Chrome (as well as the open source Chromium project, which is what I’m using to write this and has lead me to refer to this browser as Chrom[e|ium]) is so popular someone’s come out with an extension to let you open a link in Chrom[e|ium] from within Firefox. There’s just one problem. Sometimes you’re on a site and you want to use an extension that is only available in Firefox, such as DownThemAll! (DTA) I ran into this when I found a site with wallpapers for the EarthHour project.

Right now I have to snag the URI, open Firefox, and then paste the URI into the Firefox location bar to get the benefit of DTA on the site. What a pain in the arse. Can someone help make a Chrom[e|ium] extension to give us this flexibility? People are finding that Firefox doesn’t “float their boat” anymore and Chrom[e|ium] is a great alternative for them, but some of us have to keep the fox around just to be able to use some of their favorite Fx extensions. An extension to open a link in Firefox from within Chrom[e|ium] would be a very popular addon.

What about the Epiphany browser? I’m definitely falling out of love with it since they killed the Gecko version, but that’s the subject of another post, which I’ll hopefully be able to write this weekend.

We decided to Vote Earth

Raphael over on Planet Debian was kind enough to post a link to the Earth Hour web website to allow others to support their efforts to fight global warming. I spoke with Nanci about it and we agreed that we need to do more than simply vote ourselves.

You’ll find a button in our right sidebar to cast your vote. Please join us and cast your vote. It’s more important than voting for open source software or supporting GNOME. It’s free. It’s Easy. And it definitely makes a difference.

Peng’s links for Saturday, 14 November

That’s right, I’m finally getting another links post written. I’m sorry it took so long. I’ve been trying to run down some bugs, and when I haven’t been on bug hunts things have been simply crazy here in Boston.

I’ve got a couple of things from early this month, but I ended up dropping some of the article I noticed last month because they’re just to old to post. I promise to try to do better and do what I can to get at least a post on every week.

• Alan Pope: A Question of Perspective. There are definitely some complaints about Ubuntu 9.10, and not just the things I wrote about last month. One user even calls the new release a “total fail.” That’s overly harsh IMO, and Alan reminds us of some very important facts about the upgrade.
• Jordi Mas: gbrainy 1.20. Back in June I mentioned this great open source version of those brain training games you see advertised for the Nintendo DS. There’s a new version out and it’s even better than it was before with six new games. It’s available in most major GNU/Linux distros (although it may not be up to date), and there’s even a version for running on Windows. Sorry, Mac users, you need to run an emulator to enjoy it, but at least you don’t need a DS any more to have fun while training your gray matter.
• Martin Pitt: My desktop backup solution. Backing up your system regularly is important, as we all know. Martin didn’t like any of the packaged backup solutions so he came up with his own. He walks us through it, and it’s so simple even my technologically-challenged (late-)wife could have used it.
• Vincent Untz: GNOME 3.0 in September 2010. Vincent has the announcement for the new version of GNOME, as well as what it means for users of GNOME 2.30. Andre Klapper has some links to more info.
• Panji Nushantara: How To Change Windows Key Logo to Ubuntu for Free. It may be a minor detail, but why do GNU/Linux users have to use keyboards with logos for that closed-source OS from Redmond? We don’t have to any longer, thanks to System76.
• Ara Pulido: Ubuntu Testing Team. Think that testing software is a piece of cake? Think it’s too hard? Ara has news for you either way, and yes, even you can help test the next version of Ubuntu.
• Martin Owens, Karmic Art, What the Paintbrush is Saying. Martin has found some great Ubuntu-themed artwork on deviantArt. Check them out, and if you have any you’ve created why not share them as well?
• Risto H. Kurppa: Smile – a great photo show software for Linux. Not only is it easy to use, it gives some damned nice results.
• Miguel de Icaza: The future of Moonlight. Miguel has some updates for us, although it isn’t a software update just yet. If you think you even might want to enjoy Silverlight content Miguel has some good news for you.
• Aurélien Jarno: Thought of the day. It’s a short post, but if you want to see a new feature in a software app you should take the time to read it.
• Colin Watson: Tissue of lies. Some knucklehead has posted that there will be a service pack for Ubuntu 9.10 in this coming spring. (Ubuntu releases new versions every six months, not service packs.) I’m passing it along, not to give the asshat more “ink” but to make sure our readers know it’s just a bunch of malarkey.

That’s it for today. Before I go I want to congratulate Dodgers center fielder Matt Kemp and second baseman Orlando “O-Dawg” Hudson on winning Gold Glove Awards this week. Congrats also go out to outfielders Kemp and Andre Ethier for receiving Silver Slugger Awards this week. I have to wonder if Juan Pierre would be getting honored if only Manny hadn’t been the team’s primary right fielder this year. There are still some awards to be handed out this week so hopefully we’ll have more good news for Chavez Ravine before the month is out.