Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is now available

I am happy to pass along the news that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx has officially been released. Rather than rehash the new features in the release I’ll point you to both my post from last week about its impending release , the press release announcing its release and the announcement on the Ubuntu Announcements group. You can also peruse the release notes and take the tour of the lynx. Of course before you take the upgrade please make sure you back your system up in case something goes wrong. You really don’t want to lose any of your data just because something goofed on the upgrade (not that it’s likely but you should always do a backup before running upgrades).

The Ubuntu home page has been update to show the release of 10.04 and I just fired up the Update Manager and sure enough, I’m greeted with a notice that “New Ubuntu release ’10.04 LTS’ is available.” I haven’t had a chance to fire up the RC disk I burned the other day yet (yes, I’ve been that busy this week) so I’m not taking the update just yet, but I’m hearing the update takes the 2+ hours to run that my recent fresh Karmic install required so I won’t even start the update process until tomorrow at the earliest.

There is also a brand new users manual available thanks to the Ubuntu Manual Project. The cover of the manual carries the friendly title “Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04″ which gives a great idea of what’s inside. The Ubuntu Manual Team has put a lot of hard work into this new resource and it really shows. You may even want to snag the PDF and look it over while you’re downloading a disk image if you choose to go that route, or even put the PDF on your laptop or ebook reader and read it on your commute. As long as you’re not driving, of course.

You may not want to read it as a PDF, and if you’re thinking of printing it out you’re looking at 165 pages to print, which may take that option right off the table for you, but you can buy a physical book thanks to Lulu for a mere $9.68 plus shipping.

I’ll post a review of it sometime next week but it’s looking pretty nice from all the things I’m reading about it. I could take the update today (or tomorrow) but I really want to see how some of the changes look before I commit to the upgrade. Call me silly, but after seeing that iriverter’s rip from CD function broke with karmic  I definitely want to play with the new release before I commit myself to it.

You can finally order a free Ubuntu Lucid disk

With a mere 3 days until the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS I’ve been checking the Ubuntu ShipIt site daily to see if they’re accepting orders yet and every day I’ve still been disappointed.

Thanks to a tweet from OMG! Ubuntu! I’m tickled pink to be able to say that you can finally request your free cd’s. (Yes, I’m using OMG! Ubuntu’s link from it’s tweet rather than giving you a direct link to ShipIt. They deserve the referrer traffic.) As always “requests usually take from 4 to 6 weeks to deliver, depending on the country of shipping.”

Fix Google Gadgets for Linux’s incessant crashing with an update

I love using Google Gadgets for Linux, partly because I use two gadgets I can’t seem to find an equal to anywhere, WeatherBug Sidebar Gadget (WeatherBug for Linux just doesn’t work as well for me) and No-frills Google Mail (to know when to check my alternate Gmail accounts). There’s just one problem: The Google Gadgets in the repository (version 0.10.5-0.2ubuntu2) crashes so many times a day it’s ridiculous. When I run it from the terminal I get complaints about old JScript grammar, which I’m guessing is from the WeatherBug gadget based on the errors that are given, but it always fails with

ggl-gtk: ath.c:193: _gcry_ath_mutex_lock: Assertion `*lock ==
((ath_mutex_t) 0)' failed.
Aborted

Sometimes it will run for an hour or more, but sometimes it will crash before it even finishes loading. I finally asked about it on the discussion group and heard from James Su, one of the devs. His reply was enlightening.

First, please upgrade to 0.11.2. Second if you built GGL by yourself, please build it with libcurl-openssl rather than libcurl-gnutls

I tracked down a PPA on Launchpad for fidojones with the updated package. I added it to my packages list with

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fidojones/ppa

ran sudo apt-get update and version google-gadgets – 0.11.2-0.1ubuntu3 was ready for me to use. I took the upgrade, launched Google Gadgets again with ggl-gtk -s and voilà! Google Gadgets Sidebar hasn’t crashed since.

If you’re using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackal fidojones has a package with version google-gadgets – 0.11.1-0.1ubuntu1 that you can use as well. If you’re already running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx you don’t have the issue since version 0.11.2-1ubuntu1 is already in the universe repo.

Yoouge thanks to James Su for the great assist in resolving my issue. I owe you a brew.

[UPDATED] It’s almost Lynx time

We have a mere 7 days until Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS is released and this morning I got an email from Steve Langasek through the Ubuntu Announcement email list letting me know that they now have a release candidate available for testing.

You can read the release notes on the Ubuntu web site to get the instructions and caveats, along with some known issues. Some of the important new features in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS are (thanks to the OMG! Ubuntu! site for their great coverage):

• Built-in integration with Twitter, identi.ca, Facebook and other social networks
• Faster booting with a cleaner look
• New icons and themes as well as some great new wallpapers
• The brand new Ubuntu One Music Store
• Improved cloud computing installer
• Dmraid “fake raid” support right out of the box

Some of the items you may need to pay particular attention to if you’re looking to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron LTS are

• Changes to the GRUB menu.lst
• Wireless regulatory domain via module options is no longer supported since 9.04
• Bonded network interfaces require hotplug-style configuration since 9.10
• Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is still disabled (since 9.04) so you may need to re-enable it
• Update notifications changed in 9.04
• MySQL 5.0 has been upgraded to 5.1 in 9.10
• /etc/event.d is no longer used (since 9.10)

As always, this release (while a release candidate) is not necessarily final code and could contain dangerous bugs that could damage your system. Please don’t use it on the computer you use for  your daily work without backing it up in the event that you find you need to roll back to your current version or restore lost or damaged files.

You can perform an upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS if you already use Ubuntu, and  download disk images to use in getting Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installed on your system, and we strongly recommend that you use torrents if possible. I snagged the rc from the torrents this morning and had the task finished in almost no time at all.

If you do use the release candidate disk images please report any issues you find with these instructions.

I’d love to be able to tell you that you can request free Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installer disks from shipit.ubuntu.com but ShipIt has been closed for well over a week, despite their promise that it’s only for “a few days”. Meh. Luckily the good folks over at OMG! Ubuntu! has news of a way to get free copies of the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS install disks from OS Discs for the next 7 days, although you’re limited to one disk per person. Luckily they can use Google Checkout, complete with letting you keep your email addy from the OS Discs databases. I’ve used Google Checkout for online purchases and have been completely satisfied. I’d take OS Discs up on their offer if I were you. Never mind about getting disks from OS Discs. It seems the offer expired long before I saw it.

One more note about OMG! Ubuntu! If you’re on Twitter you should definitely follow them to get notified when they post new articles. I hope you’ll also follow me on Twitter.

Updated 26 April: One quick update: You can now request a free Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS LiveCd. Details are in this post.

Got a refillable coffee cup? Get free brew and help save forrests

I’ve already tweeted it this morning, but if you’re in one of 50 different countries Starbucks has a way to let you help save our trees and forests while giving you a chance to enjoy a free cup of brewed coffee, including a cup of Café Estima Blend, a 100% Fair Trade Certified coffee.

Why does it matter? If you look at The Big Picture you have to realize that every cup of coffee you get in a paper cup means that our planet has to lose a tree. Not only does that mean that we lose some shade but it also means that the ecosystem, as well as animals in that region, lose the benefits that a tree brings. I can drink a lot of coffee in any given week (granted, mostly in china cups or plastic tumblers), and if my coffee consumption uses just two paper cups a day it can add up to 36,500 cups over 50 years. That means the loss of 16 trees over half a century, and while I haven’t used that many cups in my first (almost) 50 years on the planet it still means a lot of timber killed off for my coffee habit.

If you multiply that by ten thousand people it adds up to 228 acres of forest felled just to help enjoy a nice hot (or even cold) beverage. I’ll admit I’m no tree hugger but there’s no way in hell our planet can sustain that kind of demand.

One day in March Starbucks asked New Yorkers to switch from paper cups to reusable travel mugs. This video shows a great illustration of the impact those thousands of New Yorkers made just by switching.

Do your part today to help the planet. Getting free coffee is the bonus your bod will enjoy.

(Yes, I know I’m posting this a little late. It took longer than I thought to get this post researched and written.)

Chromium getting you down? I finally found out what’s sexually assaulted the poor pooch

I’ve been enjoying the new Radiance theme that was created for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and I’ve been meaning to post the way to get the new theme and scrollbars in the Chromium web browser. I was even going to mention that adding the scrollbars extension finally fixes the missing stepper issue in Chromium, which is great news to those who disagree with the Chromium devs who feel there’s little or no need for steppers in the GNU/Linux versions. (I too think they’re dead wrong on that matter, regardless of whether or not other OSes have them.)

But for the last several days I couldn’t help noticing that Chromium has wanted been crashing so often that I could hardly do a bloody thing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to open a link, no matter whether the link started in my browser, my Twitter app or even my email/RSS app. It would be click… CRASH! It’s gotten to the point where I’ve considered doing some of my browsing in Epiphany or Opera just to be able to use URI’s without crashing every few minutes. Or less.

I hate to admit this but I’d gotten really bad about not checking my email and news feeds in Evolution lately. I’d read my email online, but I just wouldn’t make the time to fire up Evo and look at the messages that came in through it. If I had I would have see Tuesday’s post on Jorge’s Stompbox entitled Sad chromium tabs got you down?

Just a warning that the chrome-ubuntu-theme scrollbar extension has been causing crashes for people. Mike Basinger reported the bug here but it appears to be triggering a webkit bug.

Disabling the extension fixes the crashes for me.

While I hate losing my themes scrollbars and the setters that went with them I have to say that simply disabling the extension removed the issue on my system. I didn’t even need to restart Chromium, which is a damned nice things since my ability to recover crashed tabs isn’t exactly reliable.

Yooouge thanks to Jorge Castro for discovering and publishing the workaround. I definitely owe you a bewskie or two. At least.