Peng’s links for Tuesday, 16 December

Sorry about not posting my new links sooner. Yesterday was a very full day and today I was hunting down some things for Epiphany, and while I’m writing this in Epiphany (with an assist from the Fox) I’ll share what I found in a post tomorrow.

• Ted Gould: Where are my messages? The Ubuntu devs are working on a new combined applet for fast user switching, session management and IM status. Users of Ubuntu Intrepid will know that it’s already in use, but they’re making it even better for the Jaunty Jackelope.
• Daniel Holbach: Alberto Milone. I meant to post this sooner, but the developer of Envy is now a member of the Ubuntu Hall of Fame. Congrats, Alberto! You definitely deserve it.
• Mackenzie Morgan: Dear Phisher… Mackenzie has an open letter to an asshat that tried to get her in a fishing scam. You should read it, especially if you need a smile or a laugh today. I got both when I saw it.
• Leonardo Fontenelle: Student punished for distributing Linux. You nay have heard about the instructor who caught a student giving his friends CDs with GNU/Linux on them. The instructor confiscated the CDs, thinking that the student was promoting software piracy. Don’t just read Ken Starks’ original post about the matter, you should definitely read his follow-up, which includes the report of the instructor in question. Ken is refusing to name the instructor, and I salute his insistence on not identifying her for all of the people who would have tried to make the instructor’s life a living hell for their errant belief about the Free and Open Source Software movement. I’m linking to Leonardo’s post because he gave me the most complete links on the matter so I could have the full story. Thanks, Leonardo!
• Karl Lattimer: Free software developer punished for using free software. Karl posts his unfortunate experience in response to Leonardo’s post that had him getting told that his ISP refused to support him for using Linux. Woops!
• Dustin Kirkland: Ubuntu Allstars Bootlegged! Did you miss the performance of the Ubuntu Allstars at the UDS Jaunty? If you did you can download audio files of their perf for your enjoyment, and you can either download individual songs or a .tar.gz of the entire performance. The files are a tad on the quiet side, but crank up your volume and enjoy the show.
• Tom Dryer: Animated Wallpaper on your Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop. Do you wish you could have an animated background? You can, but you can’t have links on your desktop and you will need to have a bunch of CPU cycles you can spare for the job. Tombuntu has all the info you need, including (of course) instructions for how to do it.
• Jono Bacon: UDS Killed The Radio Star. No, he’s not channeling the Buggles, he’s instead celebrating the release of videos from the recent UDS Jaunty. They even have video of a presentation from out fav spaceman.
• TualatriX: Ubuntu Tweak 0.4.4 released! Believe it or not, but Ubuntu Tweak is even better than it was the last time it got updated. TualatriX has screenshots of the new features.
• Christopher Denter: Ubuntu Logo Similarity Contest. Christopher has noticed some corporate logos that are almost eerily similar to Ubuntu’s. Is it trademark infringement? Are there others?
• Bastian Venthur: How many bugs have you fixed today? It’s easy to criticize the software release process. I know I’m guilty of doing it when Firefox 3.x is concerned, but Bastien has a response for the people who complain about how long it takes without helping move the process forward. Patrick Schoenfeld has a response to Bastien that points out something that Bastien may be missing. For the Mozilla devs who want to belittle me for not being constructive in my criticism of some of the decisions the Firefox dev team have made, I finally saw the best way to follow the development process and communicate with the devs, and you really need a better way to let your testing community give you feedback on some of your choices. But then I haven’t enjoyed the same Koolaid you guys have so my opinion probably isn’t worth the energy it took to type this.

[UPDATED] Nvidia released beta 96 legacy drivers, and we almost have Compiz back

[Updated to reflect Alberto Milone's advise on the matter. Please read the entire post, including what Alberto says, before installing the new driver. -Peng]

When I checked my email this morning I saw that Nvidia has released a beta version of their 96.43.09 legacy drivers. After following the instructions that Takahani posted on the Launchpad bug about it I finally have Nvidia drivers working again.

- Download NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.09-pkg1.run (or the other one if you’re running a 64 bit system) to your home folder (/home/simon/ for me)
- switch to pty1 (CTRL+ALT+F1)
- log in
- sudo service kdm stop (will kill X server) (or gdm if you are running gnome)
- sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-96.43.09-pkg1.run
- say yes to everything (will compile nvidia kernel module)
- sudo reboot now (reboot now !!)

And that should be enough, login and check that “glxinfo | grep direct” says “YES”

Sure enough, I ran the grep and this is what I got

And yes, despite the fact that my computer still calls itself Icebox-Hardy, that’s with Ubuntu Intrepid running.

I did find that with Compix enabled I was getting white sections where my Screenlets were running, but I was able to get things fixed by following the instructions in this post on the nV News Forums.

I was able to get Compiz running and even use my desktop cube/sphere, but I changed a setting and it broke. Unfortunately I didn’t check things at each step so I don’t know which setting borked things, but Takahani said there’s an override that I can run to get Compiz working properly again, and as soon as I find ut what it is I’ll post it as an update to this post. In the meantime I’m back to Xcompmgr so I can use AWN. It’s getting so bloody close, but still no cigar.

Do you need the Nvidia 71 legacy driver? Good news: Nvidia release a beta for their 71.86.07 driver that you can give a try.

Updated 3:47pm: Alberto Milone, the developer of Envy, strongly recommends waiting until they come out into the -proposed repo, which should be fairly soon. Woops! I hadn’t seen his advice before I installed the new driver. I guess we’ll see what issues need to be dealt with downstream.

Peng’s links for Wednesday, 16 July

• Ben Collins: Canonical and the Linux kernel. There’s an incorrect belief that Canonical, parent company of the *Ubuntu family of Linux distributions, doesn’t contribute much to the development of the Linux kernel. The truth is that the person who made the claim was looking at some faulty numbers. Ben sets the record straight for us and explains why the numbers were so short in the first place.
• Alberto Milone: Updates on the NVIDIA drivers in Intrepid. The man behind the Envy video driver setting program (which has saved Nanci’s and my bacon on several occasions) discusses the state of Nvidia drivers as work continues on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. I do believe that if everyone who has been helped by Envy bought Alberto a beer we’d have to check him into the Betty Ford clinic or something.
• Aaron Toponce: Windows Replaced. While Aaron was on a business trip last week his wife didn’t just get hit by a virus, it turns out some hackers hit her badly with several virii, Trojans and worms, as well as malware, sypware and dialers. Luckily it was just on her Windows XP machine rather than on his Linux boxes. It turns out supporting open source really isn’t the only reason to go with Linux, here’s a home network that benefited by Linux’s improved security as well.
• Stephan Hermann: Linux Haters Blog ? Windows Lover Blogs ? WTF? I had resisted the urge to post about the battling OS blogs, but Stephan has a great comment about the whole thing. Personally I’m hoping someone will soon ask “What’s next?” and let us all get on to more important things in our lives. Like the names celebrities pick for their kids. And why we should even care.
• Meg/Cute Overload: Duck Darwin Awards. I try not to post many of the adorable feline pics I see (and I see a lot, believe me *g*) but I had to share this story of humans coming to the aid of a family of baby ducks in a big bad city. Good on ya, mate!

Can we get an assist pls?

Alberto Milone, the developer of the Envy line of programs foe automating the installation of Nvidia and ATI graphics drivers, is working on the next upgrade for EnvyNG and would like some help from testers.

Alberto has Graduated

Alberto Milone, the developer of the Envy video driver utility, has completed his thesis and graduated from grad school.

I made the move to Hardy after all

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.

I started the move toward Ubuntu Hardy. Kind of.

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.

A pair of important software updates

Two pieces of software got updates in the past few days or so and I wanted to make sure our readers knew about them. The first is an upgrade for the Pidgin instant messaging client, and the second is more if a release announcement than an update as EnvyNG is now available for people testing Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

Envy gets ready to kill off Legacy and roll out NG

Sunday I blogged about the upcoming EnvyNG for Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”, and the developer has rolled out an update to Envy Legacy to get things ready for the release of EnvyNG.

Envy and Java updates

I’ve been meaning to write about some updates for Envy, that uber tool for installing graphics drivers in Linux, but I keep closing Thunderbird before remembering to write. There’s also a new plugin coming for Java, but you’ll need to use Firefox 3 to get the benefits of it.