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.

Tuesday’s links post included news that GNOME Do 0.8 has reached alpha stage and since then I found an easy way to get it. The GNOME Do team has added a new PPA on Launchpad for GNOME Do testers that will probably be the easiest way to get testing builds of GNOME Do 0.8 and keep them up to date. To get them you want to add these two lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file

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

Now update your package list with

sudo apt-get update

If you already have GNOME Do installed you should get a notification from the Update Manager that you have updates to install, but if you don’t have Do installed yet just run this from your terminal:

sudo apt-get install gnome-do

That will install not only GNOME Do but also the plugins as well. Once they’re installed you can simply run gnome-do to launch it.

But GNOME Do 0.8 can get silly in version 0.7.95.1 (the second alpha release of GNOME Do 0.8). I had an issue where none of my launchers were available in Do so I had to use my menus just to be able to run Synaptic or even Sonata, the two apps I run most often. I posted a question about it on the Do support thread on the Ubuntu Forums and davidsiegel was kind enough to promptly ask me to run gnome-do --debug and post the output. When I ran that I saw that a link that I had created to a post on the Ubuntu Forums was causing problems so I moved it to a folder away from my desktop, restarted Do and saw that I could once again launch apps from Do.

I did notice that the Do icon shows up in the notification tray regardless of what I had set in the preferences dialog, but someone had already filed a bug for it. There’s also a problem with the Files and Folders plugin, but I think what I’m seeing is covered by one of two bugs already filed.

There is one very cool thing I’m seeing in Do 0.8, and I found it when I was reading my RSS feeds the other day. When I set Do to use the Docky theme I saw this on the bottom of my screen:

Yes, Do is now available as a dock, but it’s nowhere near as configurable as something like AWN, which you may notice behind the Do dock. Go ahead and play with it, but if you need to figure out how to get Do back to another theme simply use your trigger keys (usually Super (aka the Windows key)+space) or click on the first icon to get Do ready for your input, then start typing GNOME Do Preferences. When it offers that option simply go into the Appearance tab and select a different theme. I’m really liking the Nouveau theme, myself, especially when I change the background color and opacity, as you can see on the right. It still needs some work, but this is good for now.

I do have sone suggestion for you. I’d stay away from the Read Help Documentation (man) plugin. When I enabled it I got options to read the manuals for several apps before getting anywhere near the launcher for the app I wanted to run.

• Emanuele Gentili: nUbuntu 8.10 Alpha Release is out. nUbuntu is an Ubuntu-based security distro, and if you’re willing to help test it you can snag the alpha.
• Northsider: Ubuntu Logo. Firefox fans have been putting the logo everywhere, including in the middle of some oats in Oregon, but a user of the Ubuntu Forums has stumbled across a pic of the Ubuntu logo in an unexpected place.
• Steven Harms: Creative open sources their driver. Creative Labs has released the source code for their X-Fi driver under the GNU GPLv2. Good on ya, Creative!
• Mike Hommey: Another tool to mount virtual disk images. There’s a new tool for mounting virtual disks, but the news isn’t as good as you might think.
• Behdad Esfahbod: Improving Login Time, Part 2: gnome-settings-daemon fixed. The GNOME devs are working on getting the boot time down and they’ve posted a progress report. Warning: A lot of the post is technospeak so you may end up asking if any of the post is food.
• Ara Pulido: Are you running Hardy? Join us in a new testing day! Not everyone is upgrading to Ubuntu Intrepid since Hardy is a long-term support (LTS) release. If you’re one sticking with Hardy there’s an Ubuntu Testing Day on Monday and the devs would love you to join them in testing some new ISO images.
• Linux-Watch.com: Microsoft breaks HotMail for Linux users? Linux users are having trouble using and creating new HotMail accounts. Could Microsoft be showing it’s noncompetitive side again?
• Dustin Kirkland: VP-Elect Joe Biden is responsible for Open Source Email Encryption? We all know that Al Gore supposedly invented the Interweb, and it looks like the Obama campaign used Ubuntu (which I meant to blog a while back), but it looks like Senator Biden actually had a hand in getting open source encryption tools in widespread use.
• John Goerzen: Search for Backup Tools. A member of Planet Debian takes an other shot at looking for backup software. If you’re looking for some you should read his post, which provides some nice info on the options available. And while you’re at his blog you should definitely read his post about “memorable moments.”
• Vincent Tunru: Ubuntu from your flash drive – easier than ever before. If you find yourself wanting to use a flash drive for carrying around your documents you may also want to put your preferred OS on it as well. You may not always be able to use it (you can’t boot from it on computers at the Boston Public Library, for example) but it will be very handy for those times when you can use it.
• LinuxDevices.com: Voting-machine firm sued for GPL violations. Those silly folks over at PES (a subsidiary of Diebold) have been sued for including the Ghostscript Postscript interpreter without complying with the terms of the GPL. Woops!

An Intrepid update

Using the intrepid-proposed repository, I’ve finally managed to get not only WINE and my video card working properly under Intrepid (thanks in part to updates to not only the Nvidia 96 legacy drivers but also jockey, which is the new front end for managing drivers), they also put out an update to gnome-pilot that let me properly sync my PDA again. I had been having to kill gpilot-applet and gpilotd not only to be able to sync my PDA but also after syncing to keep gpilotd from going crazy with my CPU.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

The dev team at Ubuntu released the sixth alpha release of Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” yesterday. While it’s not encouraged for anyone on their main system, I did burn a DVD of it today and in even a quick check it looks pretty cool. The new NewHuman theme is darker than we’re used to, a definite brown rather than the usual orange, and I can see it becoming many user’s theme of choice. I’m also loving the ability to use tabs in Nautilus.

The Firefox End Users Licensing Agreement shows up when you first run Firefox, but as I’ll post next that “bug” should be fixed in the next milestone.

You can check out the changelog to see what’s getting changed, as well as a list of known issues in this alpha release. Disk images are available for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu education Edition (formerly Edubuntu), Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Ubuntu Studio. There are also DVD images available, which can be used as a LiveCD as well as an install/upgrade disk.  Just remember this is a development release, not even a beta release yet, and should not be installed on any computer that absolutely has to work.

• Markus Thielmann: Neat trick: Faster access to Ubuntu’s menu entries. It was posted by a colleague on Planet Ubuntu Users but it’s such a handy post that I wanted to make sure my readers see it.
• Mariano Iglesias: Transparent chat windows. Another PUU post that’s great for those who want a transparent window for their buddy list. Or any other window, for that matter. Although his blog theme needs a little tweaking.
• Launchpad News: Launchpad 1.2.6: code review by email and improved bug page Ui. Launchpad, the bug tracking site for Ubuntu, got an update for the start of July that makes the site even easier to use.
• Softpedia News: Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 1 Screenshot Tour. The next version of Ubuntu has reached Alpha stage and Softpedia has posted a collection of screenshots from it. Feel free to discuss it here or in this topic on the Ubuntu Forums.
• CNET: CBS closes CNET Networks acquisition. I meant to post this sooner, but the Eye net has officially bought one of the top sources of tech news, as well as Gamespot, MP3.com, ZDnet and TV.com. For more information on how it will impact CBS’s coverage you can check out this story from the Boston CBS owned-and-operated station.
• New York Times: Starbucks Announces It Will Close 600 Stores. In January Starbucks announced that they’d be closing 100 US stores, but yesterday the number of underperforming locations to be shuttered jumped to 600. The closures, 70% of which have been open less than three years, will lay off over 12,000 employees. Starbucks chairman and CEO Howard Schultz stated that he expects to notify the specific locations of the impending closure by mid-July.

I was finally able to do some hunting around Launchpad to find out why the numeric keypad on my keyboard “broke” once I got Ubuntu Hardy installed, and I was able to find a workaround for it. It’s also not a Hardy bug after all but a GNOME bug, and I’ve got both a workaround and bug links for all that need it.

First off, there’s an easy workaround for it. Go into the Keyboard Preferences (System >Preferences > Keyboard) and go to the Mouse Keys tab. Simply uncheck the box for Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard. (I know the grammar sucks on that sentence. I need to find a bug for that as well.)  That will let users of Ubuntu Hardy, and other distros that use GNOME 2.22, to regain the use of their numeric keypad.

There are two bugs for this on file. for Ubuntu Launchpad has bug #197589: Numeric keypad no longer works after upgrade. That bug actually pointed me to the GNOME bug on Bugzilla, #521197 – Numeric keypad no longer works after upgrade. With any luck we’ll have this fixed for the next milestone for Hardy.

If you’ll recall I upgraded to the Ubuntu Hardy kernel a couple of weeks ago, while still using Ubuntu Gutsy for the most part, and everything was going smoothly so after checking things on the forums and deciding it was safe to go ahead and do a dist-upgrade to Ubuntu Hardy. It definitely didn’t go well, though, and I spent most of the next 18 hours or so trying to get my computer usable again. I finally succeeded by installing from the Hardy Alpha 6 CD I had burned, but there were definitely some issues.

The biggest issue was getting my graphics to work properly, but I had already seen that there was a known bug there that had supposedly been resolved. What I ended up with as a consistent crash to the bulletproof X at a lousy 800×600 resolution. Neither the Nvidia drivers from the Restricted Drivers Manager nor drivers from EnvyNG were doing the trick for me, so it was a pretty long battle. I ended up blowing away my root partition and reformatting it during a reinstall, letting the Restricted Drivers Manager handle making sure I had the right the video drivers (reinstalling over the current data didn’t work at all, but I had my /home directory in its own partition so I didn’t lose that data).

I’m now pretty much back to where I want to be, although with a few issues.

• The numeric keypad on my Logitech Access Keyboard is dead as a doornail, meaning I have to use the number keys to enter digits, plus I have to use the Zoomer icons to zoom the text in Firefox 3 Beta 5pre. (I stayed with Firefox 3 from Mozilla rather than using the earlier beta that Ubuntu now installs as the default browser, mainly because my version is newer.) This bug has been identified, and I have a workaround for it.
• The drivers for my specific LCD monitor cause me to crash to bulletproof X, so I’m working with the generic Plug and Pray monitor settings. Only time will tell what issues that’s going to cause me.
• The Avant Windows Navigator in the repo is an older, incomplete version, but by using the instructions in the Ubuntu Forums  I was able to get all of my AWN applets back and working properly.
• The Griffin movie DVD cataloging program is borked, leaving me with an error about an XML module being missing, but I’ll have to see about getting that fixed at some point because it’s what helps me remember which of the over 100 DVDs we haven’t seen in a while.
• Downloads seem to be taking a lot longer than they should, but I trust that’s an issue that will be fixed as we get closer to the release date.
• Thunderbird 2 didn’t want load (BIG issue!) but once I loaded libstdc++- it worked.  (WTF was that? It’s never happened to me before, not even when I first installed Ubuntu about 19 months ago.)

All in all Hardy seems to be working pretty well, but I’m going to recommend that you stay away from it at least until the first beta version comes out in a week or so. There’s just too many things that need to be fixed in it for most users. I’m pretty good with computer tech and it took me probably an extra day or so to get my computer fully usable again (if I were better I may have been able to get things fixed before going to bed Friday evening) so I know even Nanci, who’s gotten pretty good at installing things in Ubuntu, would probably loose too much time getting her computer upgraded.

Ubuntu Hardy is still a work in progress, though, so as we get closer to the late April  release date you can know that the current issues will probably get ironed out. So far it looks ike Ubuntu Hardy is better than Feisty, not the rather small step back in usability out of the box that Gutsy was.

I meant to post this a few days ago, but Ubuntu has released Alpha 6 of Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron.” Plus if you’re looking for some good financial management software for Linux I may have a program you are looking for.

Among the changes from Ubuntu Hardy Alpha 5 is an updated kernel, plus Xorg 7.3. A new Xorg may not seem like a big deal, but the new version has better autoconfiguration to let users set up a second monitor more easily. They’ve also replaced xvnc4viewer as the default VNC client with Vinagre. The one thing I am unhappy with is that they’ve replaced Firefox 2 with Firefox 3 Beta 3 as the default web browser. I’m sorry, but using beta software should really be the user’s decision, and just because someone is using an alpha version of an OS doesn’t mean they want to use the beta of a web browser. And no, Firefox 3 is not expected to come out before Hardy ships.

You can get the details and download links from the Hardy Heron Alpha 6 wiki page. Thanks to Andre Gondim and Mackenzie from Planet Ubuntu for letting me know this alpha was out.

BillReminder

Og Maciel from Brazil has made a dynamite little app in Python/PyGtk called BillReminder that may be just what the doctor ordered if you’re looking for a Linux program to help you remember to pay bills on time, especially if the bills arrive some time before they become due. The best part is that it has a daemon that runs in the background so you don’t even need to actually launch BillReminder to get notifications.

I expect this is the last  post I need to write about software updates this weekend. Don’t forget to set your clocks ahead if where you live starts Daylight Saving Time tonight.

Ever since SecondLife started having a Linux version it’s been listed as alpha, although many of us felt shorted by that label. But that’s changed (a little) as SecondLife has released a beta version of the Linux viewer software.

The bottom line is that the Linux client is now “feature  complete” as compared to the viewers for Windows and OSX. As Johan Linden wrote on the SL blog,

Now Linux users can enjoy the same capabilities as Windows and Mac users to explore, create and socialize!

Linux users have actually had Voice for the last few Release Candidate releases, and video has been pretty m much fixed  since before the last round of RC releases. The good news is that you can now get the Linux SecondLife viewer from the main downloads page rather than from a special alpha releases page.

Last month I wrote that walkerk had written another script for upgrading the Ubuntu Kernel from the Gutsy kernel to the one being used for the development of Ubuntu Hardy, but I wasn’t making that upgrade just yet.

Today I finally downloaded and ran the upgrade script and it’s amazing how simple it was for me.

Before I go any further, let me give you my hardware specs since other hardware may give different results.

• Old kernel: 2.6.20-16-generic
• Hardware: psuedo-homebuilt (white box with several upgrades)
• Motherboard: Intel D845GLVA
• CPU: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.20GHz (128KB L2 cache)
• RAM: 748MiB
• Video: Nvidia GeForce2 MX 100/200
• Display: Envision H712a
• Wired network on mobo
• Sound card: Creative SB Live! EMU10k1 (rev 0a)

When I started making the upgrade from Ubuntu Feisty to Gutsy I upgraded the kernel manually but this time I gave the script a try. It was incredibly easy. It saw that I have an Nvidia video card and asked if I wanted to upgrade the video drivers automatically with the kernel or manually with Envy and since I had used Envy to install the current driver back when Envy got an update I opted to let Envy update the video drivers once again.

After verifying that I wanted to perform the upgrade it was pretty much automatic. The script updated my sources list so it could grab the new kernel, then ran the apt-get update.When everything was installed it asked if I wanted to remove unneeded files with autoremove (I did). From there it was simply a matter of rebooting and I was ready to run Envy one more time and boot into the 2.6.24-11-generic kernel.

By running the script I don’t have to worry about the possibility of accidentally upgrading any other files while the source for the Hardy kernel was in the source list. This is good because walkerk is quite explicit about doing this.

Do not upgrade any packages while you have the Hardy repository open.

Just for the sake of clarity, here’s a rundown of the steps I preformed.

1. Grabbed the upgrade script off the Ubuntu Forums
2. Made the script executable by getting into the directory I downloaded it into in the Terminal and running chmod +x hardy.py
3. Ran the script by running sudo python hardy.py
4. Rebooted into Recovery mode so I could run Envy via sudo envy -t and installing the new Nvidia drivers (Envy removed the old drivers)
5. Rebooted into the normal GUI

Th-th-th-that’s all folks. I’m now writing this post from the 2.6.24-11-generic kernel, which is the current kernel for the development of Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”. I’m not running any other part of Hardy, and I’m not even running EnvyNG since I’m technically still running Ubuntu Gutsy.

Some hardware and software require workarounds, and walkerk has added them to his original post on the thread. The thread is now up to 52 pages (my post reporting on my kernel upgrade is post  520), which can be a lot to read, but I strongly recommend you read the entire thread before running the upgrade. That way you can see what people have been running into, as well as any possible instances where things still aren’t working yet.

I’ll be running the script every week until I make the upgrade to testing versions of Ubuntu Hardy, but they’re only up to Alpha 5, with Alpha 6 due out on 6 March, and I’m just not sure if I’m ready to risk my production computer (the one I use daily) to Hardy at this point. It’s specifically recommended against if for no reason other than they know there are still some big bugs in it. Hardy is due out in April (thus the version number 8.04) so we should be getting into beta status soon. Once Hardy reaches beta (perhaps beta 2, just to be on the safe side) I’ll be making the leap to Hardy. I have to admit that seeing what’s in store for Hardy and what’s getting checked in for it I’m getting kind of impatient to run it.