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.

Mac4Lin 1.0 is out!

I was going to hold off on posting today until after I got finished going through my email and news feeds, but I decided there’s one bit of news that simply can’t wait. That’s right, Virginia, Mac4Lin 1.0 has finally been released!

We’ve been waiting for a while, but I think you’ll find it worth waiting for with all these improvements:

• Fully supports GNOME 2.26 and backwards compatible
• Improved support for GlobalMenu, support integrated in the default GTK theme
• Better native Xfce support
• Icon additions
• Statusbar is now fixed
• New progress bars
• New tabs
• Improved installation and uninstallation scripts
• Integrates well with Gloobus
• Finer UI refinements
• Metacity theme now supports different button sizes
• Firefox 3 themes are now updated
• Songbird plugins included
• Pidgin AWN 64bit plugin now included
• Fonts are now consolidated
• Transparent top panel
• GDM theme is now in-line with Mac OS X login window
• Cairo dock is the default recommended dock

The docs aren’t included in the release but we should have that posted in the next day or two, if not by the end of today. We ended up having one section of the docs added at the last minute and we’re simply needing to make sure it doesn’t need changing before we generate the PDF version.

There are a few known issues (in addition to the missing docs).

• There is an issue with how the installation script installs the Emerald themes. You will have to install them manually until we can get that fixed.
• The wallpapers aren’t showing up due to a permissions issue. It should be an easy fix for us and we’ll include them in the update already being planned. Until then you can always add them by hand from the Wallpapers folder where you extracted the .tar.gz.
• Usplash is still buggy (I hope to have that fixed today)
• Thunderbird theme is still buggy
• GDM theme is not automatically set by the script (this seems to be a GNOME limitation rather than a Mac4Lin issue)

There is one other thing that I just saw: The uninstall script will not actually remove your installed files. This is due to an issue in the bash script itself that we’re still having to deal with so we’ve disabled it for the time being.

Check out some screenshots on the official announcement, and if you run into any issues we haven’t covered in the documentation feel free to post them in our Ubuntu Forums support thread. Just please don’t post that there aren’t any instructions. We’ve already said we’re working on that.

Mac4Lin is a finalist!

Anirudh had some great news for us this week. You may remember that last month I shared with everyone that Mac4Lin was getting nominated for the 2009 edition of the SourceForge Community Choice Awards. Now we’ve learned that Mac4Lin was selected as one of the finalists, and it looks like the final voting should start around the 22nd. I’ll let you know when the voting is open.

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.

WWL-TV takes home several Emmys

Congratulations to WWL-TV, the television station we used to watch back in New Orleans, on receiving Emmy awards! You can see what they were awarded for on their website in WWL-TV takes home several Emmys. I especially love the last paragraph:

Channel 4 had more Emmy nominations than any other New Orleans news station.  The region covers Louisiana, Florida, Mobile, part of Georgia and Puerto Rico.

Way to go WWL!

Peng’s links for Thursday, 4 December

• Stefano Forenza: Has Torvalds finally won? The father of Linux once said that he’d have won if Microsoft ever makes an app for Linux. Some people might say that the availability of a beta version of Moonlight, GNU/Linux port of Silverlight, means Torvalds got his win. But Stefano isn’t so sure.
• Jono Bacon: Governments And Free Content Policies. The current website for president-elect Obama used to protect their content with a traditional copyright. But not anymore. Jono has the details, if not the scoop.
• xkcd: xkcd store. You love reading the strips. You may even have some of them on your fridge or the wall of your cubical. Now you can slap it on your clothes. If you order by the 12th you’ll get it by Chrismukkuh Eve if you’re in the States. If you’re in the EU they’ll try to get it to you in time, but you need to order soon.
• TualatriX: Ubuntu Tweak became Brothersoft Editor’s Picks! Congrats to the gang at Ububntu Tweaks for their latest, and very well deserved, honor. And he says the next version “will come soon.”
• Uwe Hermann: Playing Starcraft on Linux using Wine. I wasn’t sure how big a deal this is until I mentioned it to a Windows-loving roomie and big-time gamer, and he was impressed. That tells me that I need to post a link to the story, especially since it’s a tutorial.
• Dr. Horrible News: DVD Launch on Amazon! Earlier this year we had the joy of enjoying a three-part video written specifically and produced for the web by Joss Whedon and company. The DVD is finally coming on the 19th of December, and it will include “Commentary! The Musical!” I can’t wait. Amazon also has a behind-the-scenes clip you can watch for free. Now if we could only buy a CD or tracks without having to go through iTunes. Do I need to have Jayne Cobb have a talk with Joss about it?
• Biella Coleman: FLOSS Manuals. I’m going to cheat here and tell you that Beilla has a very short post about an easy way to get manuals for a wide range of free and open source programs. You definitely want to go get the links from her. And my little blurb about her post is longer than her post is, but she’s got the links you want.
• Nick Ali: Linux Basics Classes at Micro Center. If you need a nice introductory course to using GNU/Linux you better get to MicroCenter and reserve a seat. Nick’s got the date and links.
• MJ Ray: Do Your Shop Photos Leak? Do you take pictures with a digital camera and then post them online? You may be sharing more information than you realize.
• Mozilla Developer News: Firefox 2.0.0.18 users to be offered a free upgrade! Firefox 2.x will soon reach the end of it’s support, and the Mozilla devs are giving users one more chance to use their upgrade mechanism to get Firefox 3 without having to manually download and install it. Although this is one user who is damned sorry to see Firefox 2 reach the end of its security updates, and I can’t promise it won’t be used from time to time. The interface is still better than Firefox 3′s because it doesn’t need remove-ons just to keep the default behavior that Firefox users have been using for so long. And Firefox 3.1 is going to bring the need for even more remove-ons. Sometimes I hate Mozilla devs with the heat of a thousand nuns because of some of the add-ons they fold into the base product. What the hell happened to using add-ons to add new behaviors rather than removing them?

Congrats Mac4Lin!

It has just come to my attention that the Mac4Lin Transformation Pack, the tool many of us have used to bring the look of Mac OSX Leopard to their Linux systems, has been selected as one of 100 winners in the FOSS India Awards 2008.  Congratulations to its developer, Anirudh Acharya, on being recognized for such an awesome program. It certainly is well earned.

From what I hear Mac4Lin version 0.5 is progressing well. I can’t wait to be able to use it. And yes, I asked if I could be a beta tester but it turns out beta testing is not required. Damn.