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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I hate boring screensavers, and while I used to use the Skyrocket screensaver it from the GLX port of Really Slick Screensavers (so non-GNU/Linux users can enjoy the cool graphics as well) didn’t always play well on my system. When I upgraded my video card a while back I was able to rub it much more easily, but I was getting tired of it by then.
As I was looking for a new screensaver I came across the ElectricSheep screensaver. It’s in the Ubuntu universe repo but there’s a newer version available in Khashayar Naderehvandi’s PPA (karmic only). Once you have it installed you can select it from your list of available screensavers as your computer joins with others around the world to create some really beautiful electronic art. (And no, it’s not spyware and their server is regularly checked for spam and virii.) Here’s a sample of ElectricSheep that they posted to YouTube.
The only problem I had was that I couldn’t get the screensaver to make use of my entire screen. I tried the advice on their FAQ but it didn’t work for me. Today I tried another search to see if I can find a solution and I managed to find one one on their Linux Client Instructions page. Way down the page I found some instructions using the electricsheep-preferences app. Simply call it from the terminal (or with Alt-F2) and look where it says Video Driver. Mine said x11 so I tried changing it to gl. Once I made the change I closed the preferences window and launched the standalone Electric Sheep app by simply running electricsheep and voilà! I had a screen with nothing but the ElectricSheep animation, with no border, so I got out of that and opened my screensaver settings (System > Preferences > Screensaver). I selected the ElectricSheep screensaver and clicked the Preview button and confirmed that it used the entire screen as a screensaver as well.
Your mileage may vary, of course, and if neither x11 or gl work you may want to try using the xv video driver.
If you read my review of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” you probably noticed that GNOME’s Epiphany web browser has ditched it’s Gecko rendering engine for the WebKit engine. Part of the problems that one action has brought is that not only do web pages render differently under WebKit than they do under Mozilla’s Gecko engine, but every single extension for Epiphany have to be recoded to work with the new backend. As a result some of the wonderful extensions we used with Epiphany/Gecko flat don’t work anymore and I have yet to find updated code for them.
Today I was going through my news feeds and realized that while I do have the Epiphany blog on my feed list via Planet GNOME I want to subscribe to the blog itself so it’s easier to find updates to my default web browser. As I looked at the last ten posts on Epiphany’s blog I discovered the announcement that they were making the switch. They actually have a very good reason for ending Gecko support.
The Epiphany dependency on Gecko creates a number of problems for us. The Gecko release cycle is very long (e.g. Gecko 1.8 was released with Firefox 1.5 in 2005; 1.8.1 with Firefox 2.0 in 2006 and 1.9 will be released sometime this year with Firefox 3.0), prone to delays and not synchronised with the unvarying 6-month Gnome release cycle. Furthermore, it and the feature work on Gecko are mostly driven by the Firefox browser, our main competitor on the Gnome desktop. Also the embedding API of Gecko (GtkMozEmbed) has been unmaintained and stagnant for a long time. Finally, the current plans for “Mozilla 2.0″ bring much uncertainty to us, as well as much work to account for their proposed big API changes.
We are a small team, with only one maintainer and a hand-full of regular contributors. Maintaining the abstraction layer, and the Gecko back-end require lot of effort and time. Much time alone is spent on keeping up with Gecko API changes, and we have not had much contributions to the Gecko back-end in a long time.
Even I have to admit that their logic makes sense. The announcement also reveals the advantages to using WebKit including a redesigned set of API’s and the fact that WebKit directly uses GNOME technology so it makes sense that the default GNOME web browser would use GNOME tech.
Epiphany/Gecko reached it’s end of life back in July so the release of Ubuntu 9.10 naturally includes Epiphany/WebKit. While there is a package for Epiphany/Gecko available for Ubuntu 9.10 it’s a dummy package information states that it’s been made obsolete and is safe to remove. It certainly can’t be installed on my system. Epiphany-extensions is installed with Epiphany/Gecko and works without a hitch, but some of my favorite extensions are third-party extensions that are included in epiphany-extensions-more, which won’t install. When I try to install it I get a very odd error:
:~$ sudo apt-get install epiphany-extensions-more
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
epiphany-extensions-more: Depends: epiphany-extensions (< 2.27) but 2.28.0-1 is to be installed
E: Broken packages
Frick-frick-frickety-frick! This is a known issue and I hope someone is on the case although I can’t find an upstream bug to show it. Working from the Ubuntu package details I can say that while Tab Foreground seems to work, most of the extensions in the package that I want to use simply don’t work on my system. Here’s a list of extensions in the package with their status as far as I can tell.
Extensions bringing new features: * Automatic Find As You Type – Start typing, and you will find text. Doesn’t seem to work. * Automatic Find Links As You Type – The same, restricted to links. Doesn’t seem to work. * Bookmark shortcuts – Use deskbar applet shortcuts in the URL bar. Works, thank the deity. * Session Manager – Save session to a file and restore it later. Don’t use. * Tab Links – Copy the opened URI’s to the clipboard. Don’t use. * Universal Edit Button - A single shortcut to bring the editor for sites with editable content (wikis). Don’t use. * Video Downloader - Automatically download or open Flash videos from popular sites, without Flash support. Doesn’t work, much to my chagrin, so I have to use my Firefox video downloading tool, which works on more sites anyway. * View Source – View page source inside the browser. Doesn’t work, source still opens in Gedit.
Modifications of the user interface: * Confirm Window Close - Confirm closing when several tabs are open. Don’t use. * Hidden Menu - Hide and show the menu with a toolbar button. Don’t use since I use the GlobalMenu. * Menubar and Toolbar beside each other.Don’t use. * Quit menu item. Doesn’t use. * Single Menu - All the menus merged in a single one. Don’t use. * Tabs on treeview - Replace tabs by a treeview in a sidebar. Don’t use. * Throbber remover - Removes the throbber from the toolbar. Don’t use. * Urgent Content Notify - Warn the Window Manager when a page changes in the background. Works.
Modifications of the tabs behaviour: * Close Other Tabs - Close all tabs but the current one. Don’t use. * Colour tabs - Colorize tabs depending on the website. Don’t use. * Close tabs with middle-click.Doesn’t work. * Only One Close Button - Replace close buttons on the tabs by a single one in the toolbar. Don’t use. * Restore Closed Tab.Doesn’t seem to work. * Tab Foreground - Open new tabs in the foreground. Works, as long as you open a new tab with Ctrl-T or the New Tab button on the toolbar. * Tab Key Tab Navigate - Use control-tab to navigate between tabs. Don’t use. * Less Tab Label Border - Reduce the border around tab labels. Don’t use. * Wide tabs - Expand tabs to use all available space. Don’t use, and I wish I could make tabs smaller like Firefox does to let me view more than 5 open tabs at once.
I did try downloading the source code for epiphany-extensions-more and dropping them into my profile folder (~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions) to use them that way, but the results are the same. Hopefully we can get these extensions working, as well as getting the spell checker working better and more intuitively, because it’s making me want to either compile Epiphany/Gecko from source (which will mean I lose the WebKit improvements) or make another browser my default. I do use Chromium as my #2 browser, and it’s working pretty well for me, but I’d really prefer to see Epiphany fixed rather than switch. After all, switching won’t do a damned thing toward making Epiphany/WebKit a better browser for other users.
I have some things I hope to blog later today, but there is a local story that I want to share with our readers. One of the great things we have here in Boston is a very rich history, and part of that history is the battleship USS Constitution berthed in Charlestown. On Saturday news broke that some of the residents of Charlestown hate the fact that Old ironsides fires off their cannons twice a day and they want the Navy to find some way to silence, or at least tone down, the sound of the cannon fire. Needless to say this has brought out a rather understandable response from others in the city, including some residents of Charlestown itself.
I tried to find a better link for this information, but as Richard Weir wrote in an article in the Boston Herald,
The tradition of its daily gun salute, which dates to 1798, was halted in the early 1900s but then revived in 1975. It requires naval officers serving on the ship to fire one of its working guns every day at 8 a.m. and again at sunset.
You can read all of Mr. Weir’s article, and you can also see read twostories from WBZ TV here in Boston. You can also an article by David Robichaud on WBZ’s Conversation Nation blog as well as comments from other viewers. Hopefully before long we will also be treated to a nice video about the matter on the station’s YouTube channel.
Image courtesy of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs
For the record, I am one of the commenters on the Conversation nation post who suggest that the complainers could easily move elsewhere. Especially with today being Veterans Day here in the States it’s an interesting bit of timing that the story should be out as we celebrate the work done by my fellow veterans of our armed forces. Not all of them were able to come home as I was (although I did serve with the Air Force during peace time) and we should be be thanking our service men and women for their service, not kvetching about how the noise of the daily cannon fire interrupts the serenity of their days. I say Let Freedom Ring, including with the firing of cannons from our commissioned warships.
And to our service men and women, as well as their families and loved ones, I have just one thing to say:
THANK YOU!
And yes, I know those words don’t come anywhere near close to expressing the appreciation we feel for your making our country safe to live, work, and yes even complain in. There’s no way we’d be the same without your service and sacrifice.
One of the best ways to get updated software for Ubuntu Linux, as well as other Debian-based distros, is from GetDeb.net. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used their packages to get an update that isn’t available from official Ubuntu repositories or PPA’s.
They’ve recently launched an updated site for users of Ubuntu 9.04 and newer, and one of the great new benefits is that they now have a repository you can add to your sources.list. You can either manually add their repo and key, or you can do it even more easily by downloading their getdeb package which will automatically add their repo and repo’s PGP signing key.
If you’re needing software for older versions of Ubuntu, or want to use the familiar website interface you already know and love, you can use their legacy website that remembers all of the users who signed up with them.
Unfortunately, if you have a free account with their old site you’ll need to create a new account to use their new site. I used their contact form to email the devs about not being able to log in, and Vadim Peretokin informed me that he doesn’t believe the user database was migrated to the new site. It may be a pain to have to create a new account, but it is free, and it only takes a few minutes to create the account and validate it from the email they’ll send you.
Either way, you’ll definitely want to check out the new GetDeb website and repository. It will make your life easier as you try to use newer versions of software than is in the official repositories and you won’t have to compile any code to use them, either.
If you first came to our site last month you are probably noticing that we’ve changed our color scheme from pink to blue. Of course those who are regulars on our site know that the switch is back to blue. For those who missed why we went pink, it was in support of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. We hope that you no longer look at something pink and just think about the color, because while there have been great strides in diagnosing and treating breast cancer there’s still a long way to go.
When I started this blog two years ago our color scheme was mainly green and we kept that color through a theme change, but we switched our color scheme to blue back in May of last year. Our beloved Dodgers didn’t get past the NLCS again but we’re still going to root for Dodger Blue when the new season gets started with spring training next year.
We could switch to a red theme for the coming holidays, although of course not nearly as early as the beginning of November, but that’s something Peng and I will have to think about as the month goes on. For now we’re talking about maybe changing the theme we use for our blog and we’re looking at the different layout and color schemes available. I really like the three column layout we’re using now with sidebars on the left and right, but since we’ve used it for over a year we’re definitely thinking about a change by the end of the year.
Speaking of changes to the blog, Peng has already said he’s looking into bringing some of the articles from his old blog to this site but he’s pretty busy so we’re having to talk about how much work will be involved with getting at his old articles and republishing them here. It’s not an easy task so I told him to take his time even to get his old posts available for browsing by the two of us so I can help find articles I’d like him to republish. We won’t make any promises of a timetable for getting it done, but we’re glad to see that at least one person would like us to try to make them available here.
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