Looking for a Radiance theme that works with Mac4Lin on Lucid? I may have what the doctor ordered.

Back in March I saw articles on OMG! Ubuntu! showing us how nicely Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” was looking with information on how to get the icons and themes to use while still running karmic. (The secret is to use the theme engine, themes and icons from Matteo Pagliazzi’s PPA.)

I did some hunting around Gnome-Look.org to see if I can find an Emerald theme that uses the buttons from the Elementary theme with the lucid colors, but the buttons on the Elementary elegante (lucid version) Emerald theme don’t work for me. The Pint – Radiance theme by Antonio Serrano is great to go with the Radiance theme, but then I lose the OSX-look that I use Mac4Lin to get.

I ended up making a mashup Emerald theme using the colors of the Pint – Radiance theme, combined with buttons from the Mac4Lin theme as well as from Merman’s great Elementary Modified theme. After showing them to Anirudh, Mac4Lin’s creator, we agreed that they should be shared  with everyone. We know the Menu button doesn’t quite look right but it will have to do for now until I can get the buttons replaced.

There are two versions of the theme available on Gnome-Look.org. The first is the Mac4Lin Radiance 1.0 theme with the “traffic lights” on the left hand side.

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Elementary+Modified?content=106491

The second is the Mac4Lin Radiance B 1.0 theme for those like me who prefer the traffic lights on the right.

Both themes are now available on Gnome-Look.org for downloading. I had hoped to help Anirudh get Mac4Lin updated to work with Ubuntu 10.04 before lucid was released, but my plate has been so busy lately that I wasn’t able to get the themes on Gnome-Look.org and finish this post until today. I hope these are worth the wait.

Lifehacker readers love Mac4Lin

I know we get a large percentage of our daily traffic from people looking for information on the Mac4Lin project, and I often see people coming from Lifehacker, but the Lifehacker folks have even better news for the project.

When they were compiling their Most Popular Linux Post of 2009 they found that they had to include their article Mac4Lin Gives Linux Desktops the Complete Mac Look on the list. Right between their mentions of their articles on Elisa and Jolicloud we find this:

Mac4Lin Gives Linux Desktops the Complete Mac Look

It really, really does. If you don’t mind the obvious break in your your free-as-in-speech fidelity, it’s a pretty nice setup.

You can read Anirudh’s post about the good news on his blog. Congrats to Anirudh and the rest of the team on making software so nice that it seems everyone wants to know about it.

Full Disclosure: I am a member of the Mac4Lin dev team. I mostly helped update the documentation for their (somewhat) recent version 1.0 release.

Peng’s links for Monday, 21 September

No, your eyes are not deceiving you, I finally have a new omnibus links post. I’ve meant to write one a lot sooner than today, but time and my todo list have been busted for conspiracy to deny me the time and energy to do quite all the things I want to get done.

And yes, you are seeing a new hackergotchi on my posts on Ubuntu Weblogs and the Ubuntu Universe, as well on my About page here. Since I finally got some pics of me that I don’t hate I decided it was time to make a new hackergotchi that reflected two of my loves: Mac4Lin and the Los Angeles Dodgers. As I write this the Dodgers are a mere four wins away from locking up their trip to the post season and they’re 8 wins away from repeating as the champions of the National League West.

Some of these links are a tad old, but as I went through the items I’d flagged in Evolution (there’s no way I was including 70 links in a pair of posts, let alone one post) there were a few things I’d found early last month that I really did want to share.

• Panji Nushantara: Digsby: All in One IM Client for Linux (soon). Not everyone loves Pidgin, and Panji has info on a multiple IM client that’s currently available for OSX and Windows. the good news is that the Digsby devs know we’d like a Linux version and they’re hard at work on a native GNU/Linux version. They even have a page you can use to ask them to let you know when Digsby for Linux is available. With Pidgin getting replaced as the default IM client for Ubuntu 9.10, and I’m really not thrilled with what I’ve seen of Empathy so far, there’s a good possibility that Digsby may become a favorite IM client for fans of the penguin.
• directhex: Vive la différence. The person responsible for getting Moonlight easier to install for Ubuntu users has a great post about “Free Software”, including links to how a few others define that term. A must read, and I apologize for not getting the link posted before Saturday’s Software Freedom Day.
• Panji Nushantara: 2.6.30 Kernel on Jaunty Jackalope and Karmic Koala’s Kernel on Jaunty Jackalope. As always, the 9.10 version of Ubuntu Linux will include an update to the Linux kernel. Alpha 6 of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has just been released (see below), but since it’s a really bad idea to install testing releases on computers you use every day, especially alpha versions, Panji has given us a pair of posts on how to update your kernel to the newer version while still running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. I haven’t made the upgrade myself (see the above mentioned conspiracy charges) if you’re interested in making the jump yourself I’d love to hear your responses to it. Just remember the very important disclaimers about what can go wrong if you apply this upgrade. If you make the jump and your computer breaks please don’t come crying to myself, Panji or even Nanci. If you do we reserve the right to use those three words we hate using almost as much as you hate hearing: told you so.
• Colin Walters: Pay no attention to the processes and X Windows behind the curtain… Colin, a Fedora user whose posts are syndicated on Planet GNOME, gives us a nice preview of GNOME 3. There’s quite bit of geek speak in his post, but there’s also a nice glimpse at how GNOME 3 will make being a GNOME user even better than it is now.
• Scott James Remnant: Making a splash. One of the biggest pains in working with the Mac4Lin dev team is that every time Ubuntu rolls out an upgrade there are a number of things that break until we can get the components upgraded. This is the reason getting a Mac4Lin 1.0 Usplash created has been such a royal pain in the arse, and Ubuntu 9.10 includes a major change. They’re dumping Usplash for the boot splash screen, the first splash screen you get when you boot a computer into Ubuntu, and they’re replacing it with xsplash. Scott looks at the matter, including why the change is in fact a good idea. And yes, once I get 9.10 installed on my system (hopefully soon after it reaches beta status) I’ll see about getting a xsplash screen created for Mac4Lin.
• Stormy Peters: 3 ways our awesome habits get us into trouble. Currently the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy has long been a great source of information, especially on security issues within GNOME. This time Stormy looks at three habits that it’s great to develop if you don’t already have them, but she also points out “gotchas” that can turn on us if we’re not careful.
• Stormy Peters: Stacks of books are disappearing. If you love books you may be aware that libraries around the world are changing, and not always for the better. Stormy looks at the problem and why libraries are no longer the great resource they used to be.
• Dustin Kirkland: Encrypted $HOME Now Offered at Installation. I’m not one of them but some users make a point of encrypting the data on their hard drives. It’s a good idea, but in Ubuntu’s past it’s been a bit of a pain to do it. Ubuntu 9.10 has given users the ability to encrypt their home directories as a part of the install process since the fifth alpha came out earlier this month.
• André Gondim: New Ubuntu Screens Installer. Installing Ubuntu 9.10 will no longer be the rather boring experience it’s been in the past thanks to new installer screens that will finally let you know about some of the programs that are getting installed with the OS. André is kind enough to give us screenshots of the ten new information screens.
• Matthew Helmke: Drowning out what I want to hear. While not a tech post, Matthew has written a must read article on how to present your viewpoints, whether the subject be technical, religious or political. This is an article that should be bookmarked at the very least, and printing it out for future reference wouldn’t be a horrid idea.
• Stefano Forenza: LifeHacker’s Ubuntu Wishlist. LifeHacker has some things they’d like to see in Ubuntu, and it turns out the Ubuntu devs are already working on the first item. It turns out that LifeHacker has some very nice words for Mac4Lin, and Jono Bacon has written a very well thought out response to LifeHacker’s wishlist.
• Kees Cook: uninstall sun-java6. The vrms meme that’s been going around the ‘net has brought out an important reminder that there’s a very good open source replacement for Sun’s Java. I need to look into that to see if I could kick some non-free software on my system to the curb. And yes, I know I have two versions of Java installed. There’s a good reason I did that but I don’t recall what it was at this point.
• Jono Bacon: The Art of Community Available for Free Download. Jono wrote a great book about how to build a community of like minded people. While it’s not explicitly a tech book it does look at things that Jono discovered in the open source community. Now you can get a free PDF of the book, although Jono does recommend buying a printed copy of the book (and not just to put some money in his pocket). Whether you pay for your copy or not he asks that you write a review of it on Amazon.
• Christoph Haas: Tired of Nagios and Cacti? Try Zabbix. If you run network monitoring software, or even think you may want to run some, Christoph found an open source app that you should definitely consider.

There are a few more things I definitely want to post before I hit the Publish button. First off, as I mentioned above, the sixth alpha version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has been released. It’s likely to be the last alpha release, and I’ll try to post when it gets it’s first beta release, but feel free to start taking a look at what’s coming in the new release. The devs are working on a countdown banner that I’m hoping to add to the sidebar here once they have a version that will play well with WordPress.com blogs.

On a lighter note, if you saw the Emmy awards last night you know that the show was taken over temporarily by Dr. Horrible. If you missed it then thank the good people over at the SciFi Wire because they have the video posted so we can enjoy it.

That’s almost it for today but I have one more thing to post that deserves a post all of it’s own. I trust tomorrow’s first day of fall brings you some decent weather.

Mac4Lin 1.0 documentation has been released

While fighting with a dead parrot, er computer, Anirudh Acharya, the lead developer for Mac4Lin, announced in a post on the Mac4Lin support thread on the Ubuntu Forums that the Mac4Lin 1.0 Documentation is finally available. You can download it form the Mac4Lin download page.

That’s not all the good news Ani has for us, either. He posted on his own blog yesterday that Mac4Lin has gotten some nice in an article by Howard Wen in ComputerWorld magazine about Transformation Packs.

Of course with Ubuntu 9.10  “Karmic Koala” reaching the Alpha 5 milestone there’s a good chance that once it comes out some parts of Mac4Lin will break, all thanks to changes devs are making in features that Mac4Lin uses. (This is why the Usplash for Ubuntu 1.0 hasn’t been released yet, unless I missed something.) The Mac4Lin development team will be looking at the interaction of Mac4Lin and Ubuntu 9.10 as Karmic moves it’s way to the final release and we will do all we can to make sure the Mac4Lin themes, etc., play well with the newest release of our favorite open source OS.

The polls are open at SourceForge

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.

Nominate Mac4Lin, and Gmail stupidity

One of the pleasant surprises I’ve seen while perusing our stats is the amount of traffic we’ve gotten from people looking for info on the Mac4Lin Transformation Kit. (Yes, we’re still in Release candidate status for version 1.0, but we’re hoping we can get it out before summer ends.) The good people at SourceForge are taking nominations for the 2009 Community Choice Awards. Please help us by nominating the Mac4Lin for Best Visual Design.

Mac4Lin

Did Google’s servers suffer a concussion?

Now for the not so great news. As the tech news media is reporting, yesterday Google had a network glitch that made many parts of their sites unavailable for about an hour. But as many Gmail users will tell you, they’ve been having a pretty major issue with showing images for a couple weeks now. The problem is that when Gmail shows you an image that includes images they ask you if you want to see them, but their servers have suffered amnesia as to whether you have said to always show the images or not. It’s getting to the point that I’m having to say “always show the damned images from this sender” on a daily basis for many of the same senders, and some users are reporting that they’re doing it multiple times in a single day. Just today I had to tell Google that I always want to see the images from a good 90% of the senders that I have email subscriptions with for news, shopping info (such as sale flyers) and entertainment (such as ICHC and Comics.com). Sarah, one fo Google’s employees, said that the devs are aware of the issue and are working on it, but she posted that on 30 April and we don’t seem to be any closer to a resolution than we were when she posted the response and their blog has been strangely silent on the matter. Unfortunately it’s making some of us question whether we were smart when we elected to rely on Google for many of their services, such as email, online documents and site search.

So if you’re thinking about signing up with Google for something, you may want to hold off on it or go with someone else until they get their act together better.

Mac4Lin gets ink in Linux Mag

Anirudh Acharya, the developer of the Mac4Lin Transformation Kit, has let me know that they got some very nice coverage in the January issue of Linux Magazine as they look at two programs, Mac4Lin (with the docking benefits of the Avant Window Navigator) and Pdfsam, an open source PDF document editor.

Now, thanks to the Mac4Lin project, Linux users can enjoy the visual side of Mac OSX without dipping too deeply into their pockets for expensive Apple hardware.

Congratulations on the coverage for Mac4Lin, and I’m glad to say that the Subversion (svn) repo for Mac4Lindoes have the latest possible files for the otherwise unreleased 1.0 Release Candidate 2, including the latest version of the PDF documentation. For those who look at the svn files and wonder how the heck you use them, I was wondering that as well. I asked Ani and he said that the install scripts you get from svn don’t work because they look for .tar.gz files that are in the normal download of Mac4Lin but not in the svn versions. Luckily he wrote a post on his own blog about how to use them so you won’t have to spend too much time trying to use them.

For those who have looked at the Places icon on the AWN dock from Mac4Lin and thought it looked out of place, you’re not alone. Ani is going to change it (thank you!) and if you update the svn files regularly you’ll see when the icon gets changed.

Mac4Lin gets Subversion support

After much demand from our users and testers, Mac4Lin 1.0 now uses the Subversion (svn) version control system.

What does this mean in plain Engrish, I mean English? It means that rather than having to wait for Anirudh or another member of the Mac4Lin development team to put together an updated testing build for Mac4Lin 1.0 you can now snag the updated files quickly and easily. And as an extra bonus, you can get the internal Mac4Lin 1.0 RC2 that isn’t being made available on our Downloads page. You can also get the latest update of the PDF documentation via Subversion. Mega thanks to whoever made that available, because I know the docs have been updated them since I last touched them and I haven’t updated the PDF yet.

I get updates of the Sonata MPD client via Subversion and it’s a great way to keep up to date with the efforts of the developers.

To get the details you need read Ani’s announcement on the SourceForge Mac4Lin Discussion Forums.

Peng’s links for Thursday, 12 February

It took a bit longer to get this post written, but while the post is longer than I wanted it to be I have some links I just saw this morning so you only need to read one post to get them all.

• Russell John: UNIX Time 1,234,5667,890! I meant to blog this a lot sooner, but this weekend will see the above number as the total number of seconds since 1 Jan 1970 UTC/GMT. Russell has more info and a simple way to find out when that milestone will be reached in your area. (For those in in the Eastern time zone it will be tomorrow night at around 6:30 pm. Read Russell’s post if you want the exact time.)
• Thomas Thurman: More on themes, and why Human’s slow. In my last links post I had a link to a post by Thomas about why the Human theme (Ubuntu’s default theme) takes so long to draw theme elements. Thomas has a followup with some info that themers should make sure you read.
• Jun Auza: Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” Wallpapers. Jun has some user-created wallpapers for the next version of Ubuntu. I’m not thrilled with all of them but I like yoyovlt’s wallpapers, although I’m not 100% in love with either of them. I do love checking out the user-created materials for new versions of Ubuntu.
• Aaron Toponce: Ubuntu Codenames. Aaron makes an important point about our love of referring to versions of Ubuntu by their nicknames (Hardy, Intrepid, etc.). After reading it you’ll understand why I have started referring to versions of Ubuntu by their version numbers (8.04.2. 8.10, etc.). Please remember that the numbers after the decimal point are always two digits, and there is no such creature as Ubuntu 8.1. Ever.
• Justin Scott: Better Safe than Sorry. Justin found two posts from the developer of Adblock Plus about extensions development. Whether you create extensions for Firefox or not they’re definitely worth reading.
• Mark Lee: Awn/Awn Extras 0.3.2 Released! There’s a new version of Avant Window Navigator and Mark has screenshots and the rather large list of changes to the new version, as well as a link to the best location for Ubuntu users to get the updates. The AWN devs are working with other Linux distros to get their packages updated as well. After using testing packages for some time I have to say that AWN is just getting better with every release. Of course you need some sort of compositor to run AWN, but if you can’t run Compiz for some reason you should check out xcompmgr. That’s how I ran AWN while I was waiting for updated Nvidia drivers after I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10.
• Dion Almaer: Will the real WebKit please standup. It turns out that there doesn’t seem to be a single definitive WebKit (which was news to me) and that means that something built for WebKit doesn’t necessarily mean it will run on everything that runs WebKit. Just the thought of it makes my head hurt and makes me love standards even more.
• Stefano Forenza: Ubuntu saw from the eyes of a Mac user. Stefano found an article from November (which I may have linked to before, now that I think of it) that gets into some pretty nice detailed comparisons between OSX apps and Ubuntu apps. The author knows about Mac4Lin, although it doesn’t look like they used it.
• Nick Ali: Ubuntu Training in the US. You can now take training courses on Ubuntu within the United States. I see this as only helping the spread of our favorite GNU/Linux distro, and GNU/Linux in general.
• Miguel de Icaza: Moonlight 1.0 goes live. Miguel has info on the official release of Moonlight 1.0 (which I had already blogged back in December) as well as info on how Moonlight 2 is coming along. Also check out the interview with Miguel over at DesktopLinux.com.
• Mackenzie Morgan: Malware Terminology: Trojans, Worms & Viruses. Someone recently wrote an article on writing a virus that will effect Linux (thanks, knuclehead) but Mackenzie points out that his terminology is wrong. She also has a nice clarification of the three terms in her title.
• Aaron Bockover: Announcing Moonshine, the project never formerly known as Pornilus. Moonshine, a project based on Moonlight, makes it easier for GNU/Linux users to enjoy Silverlight content without having to deal with codec hassles. A pretty nice project, although it’s Firefox-specific at this point. Hopefully that will change for users of Epiphany and Opera on Linux.
• Ingo Juergensmann: Automatically restore files from lost+found. Ingo wrote a couple of scripts for getting files that found their way into your lost+found folder.
• LinuxDevices.com: Real-time Linux gains accelerated graphics. The Open Source Automation Development Lab has come up with a way to get even accelerated graphics with even lower latency in the Linux 2.6.26 kernel.

Whew! I just did once more check through my RSS feeds and didn’t see anything more to pass along at this point. It’s a good thing, too, because I need to update some screenshots for Mac4Lin to reflect some changes in version RC2 (an internal release, so it’s not available to our users and testing community) so we can get a smidge closer to releasing version 1.0. It’s taking a while to get Mac4Lin 1.0 out, but I think you will all find it worth the wait.

[UPDATED] Install Vala without compiling source code

Last week I wrote a post on installing GlobalMenu (nee MacMenu) and I said you had to install Vala, which had to be installed from source code. This morning I saw ayoli’s comment and it sent me hunting through Launchpad for a PPA that held Vala 0.5.1. After finding several PPA’s with older versions I found the one that had the current version.

Before we install Vala from Bruce Cowan’s PPA we need to uninstall our current build of Vala. You’ll need to restart your computer during the change so either bookmark this post or print it out so you can refer to it after you restart. Since GlobalMenu depends on it let’s shut down the GlobalMenu first. Go into your home directory and open ~/.gnomerc again in your favorite text editor and comment out all of the lines that you had uncommented to run GlobalMenu. Save the changes and close your text editor, then open a Terminal (or your favorite command line app). Change to the folder where you installed Vala and let’s run the uninstall command.

cd vala-0.5.1
sudo make uninstall

Enter your root password when asked and you will see a rather long list of remove file operations. One that’s done you’ll need to reboot to apply the changes, but before you do right click on your Global Menu Panel Applet and remove it, then add either the Main Menu or the Menu Bar to your panel. This will give you the main application menus to use after you restart your computer. Now close any application you’re running (including your web browser) and restart your system to apply the changes we made. I’ll see you when you get back.

/me fires up Sonata and plays a little Fragile while he waits for you to get back

Welcome back. Let’s get Bruce’s PPA added to your sources.list file.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bruce89/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bruce89/ubuntu intrepid main

Updated 2 June: Vadi’s comment reminded me that there’s a better PPA for Vala, namely the one for the Vala Team. Use these sources in your sources.list for the latest builds of Vala:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/vala-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/vala-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Update your package list (sudo apt-get update) and install Vala by running

sudo apt-get install valac

I know that look weird but you want Vala, a “C# like language for the GObject system” (from Bruce’s PPA page), if you want to run the current version of GlobalMenu. I’m running GlobalMenu as I type this so I can confirm that valac is the package that you need from Bruce’s PPA.

Go back to ~/.gnomerc and edit the file to the setting you used the last time you ran GlobalMenu. You can either replace your Global Menu Panel Applet now or when you get back, but it’s time for yet another reboot.

/me enjoys a little Mood for a Day while you reboot again

If you didn’t put the Global Menu Panel Applet you should put that back on your panel now. The GlobalMenu should be working, showing that the valac package was the right one to install. I’ll be adding these updated instructions to the documentation for Mac4Lin 1.0 so Mac4Lin users will have the compiled instructions in a single handy file.

Thanks to aoli for giving me the idea of finding a PPA that has Vala, and thanks to Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman, Chris Squire and Bill Bruford (collectively known in 1971 as Yes) for making such a sweet album to listen to as I blog.

Updated 20 November 2009: Commenting on this post is closed due to its age and use by somment spammers.