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.

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 two stories 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.

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 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.

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.

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.