Peng’s links for Thursday, 17 December

Sorry about not posting a links post last week (or two). I’m going to include some of the links I found because they’re still beneficial even a week (or two) after they were published.

• Stephan Peijnik: How to copy partitions under GNU/Linux the easy way. I may not be the only one hoping to find a new hard drive under the Chrismukkuh tree next week, and you may need a way to transfer your data off a dying drive, or even just a smaller one, to a new one. Stephan has a very easy way to accomplish the task. And he has the added benefit of spelling his name the right way. Just ask my son Stephen.
• Launchpad News: Getting the most from bug mail. Filing bugs is an important part of being a member of he open source community, but sometimes the follow up emails may not seem to be giving you much value for your time. The Launchpad team has some information that may help you make the most of your bug reporting work while taking up less time out of your busy days.
• Chromium Blog: Extensions beta launched, with over 300 extensions! I know this post is just over a week ago, but if you don’t know that there is an official home for extensions for Google’s Chrome browser and its open source sibling Chromium then you should definitely check out this post. It’s not as easy to surf as Mozilla’s addon site but they have a lot of very helpful extensions to help you use Chrome or Chromium as your new default web browser. To make things even better, Google Chrome for Linux is now available for beta testing.
• Panji Nushantara: How To Use Google Public DNS or OpenDNS in Ubuntu 9.10. If you find that your ISP’s Domain Name System lookups are slower than you find on other systems you can try a pair of public DNS services. Panji makes it easy with step-by-step instructions and screenshots.
• Rick Spencer: And Do it Begins. We can no longer say that there are no malware threats to Ubuntu users. Luckily the news isn’t nearly as bad as you may think from that last sentence. Kees Cook follows up on Rick’s article with a very simple bit of advice: “As quickly pointed out by Rick, don’t install random software that isn’t in the official distribution archive unless you really know what you’re doing (and copy/pasting commands from a website doesn’t count). You’re just asking to be made part of a botnet.” You’re damned Skippy, Kees.
• Juanje Ojeda: Is GNOME 3.0 for users or developers? GNOME Shell is being mentioned as one of the cooler things in the upcoming 3.0 release of the GNOME desktop environment but Juanje looks at the important question of who are the new features designed for?
• Andrew Cowie: Get your icons back. Have you lost the icons on your dialog buttons? Some people prefer a plain text look to their buttons but some don’t. Andrew has information on on why it changed and how to get them back if you prefer seeing them.
• The Fridge: LoCo Directory. The official Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) Directory is now online! If you’re a part of a LoCo make sure your information is accurate, and if you’re able please help get it translated so even more people can make use of it.
• Launchpad news: Showing the number of affected users. Launchpad has long allowed you to say if a particular bug affects you, but you can now see how many of your fellow users have been bitten by the same bug. That is one nice feature they’ve added.
• Martin Owens: Anime Boston: First Goal Reached. Back on the third I included a link to Danny Piccirillo’s article about efforts to get Ubuntu represented at Anime Boston. Martin has some very good news for us about the plans.
• Robert Ancell: The demise of the function key. If you’re like me you often use function keys to do things without having to wade through menu after menu to do something. Unfortunately many keyboards are re-purposing those very keys, if they include them at all. That’s not just bad news for users, it’s bad for developers as well.
• Tom Dryer: Setting up Ubuntu 9.10. Tom has finally gotten Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on his system and he shares some tricks he used to get it to run better. He’s also got screenshots of a damned nice theme that he uses.

I hope you’re all getting things ready for Chrismukkuh. Rather than add to the holiday post I wrote last Saturday Nanci and I have been adding some vids to her stickied holiday video post. If you’re still looking for some great holiday wallpaper you should check out the offerings over at blirk.net. You can also check out the posts in the Delicious December 2009 Screenshot Thread over on the Ubuntu Forums. And speaking of Chrismukkuh posts, I have one more link to share with you all before I hit Publish:

• Collin Pruitt: Christmas Online. Collin has some sites to help you make the most of your holiday. And if you’re more of an anti-Chrismukkuh person you should definitely check out the official YouTube channel for Foamy the Squirrel and all the folks over at iLL WiLL PrEss.

Epiphany, take a seat. Chromium, you’re up.

As I mentioned in my earlier post on using Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala the Epiphany devs stopped supporting the Gecko rendering engine and switched to exclusively supporting the WebKit engine. While I understand their decision, I don’t think Epiphany/WebKit is quite ready for prime time, although I was willing to continue using it as my default browser. As I used Epiphany/WebKit I was left with the feeling that there are too many things about Epiphany/WebKit that simply pisses me off too much to let it remain as my default web browser. Among the issues that left me banging my head against a brick wall are

• Epiphany-extensions-more is uninstallable in karmic (Launchpad bug #452845). That leaves the third-party extensions needing to be manually installed, but there’s no guarantee that they will work, because…
• Add-ons need to be rewritten to work with the WebKit engine. That leaves some of my MustHave extensions broken, including Middle Click Tab Close, New Blank Tab, Window Icon, AWN Favicon, and Video Downloader.
• Opening links in a new tab can be completely impossible, especially in Gmail but not necessarily on other Google sites (LP bug #272808). To add insult to injury, if you click on a link on an offending site it opens the link in a window so small as to be completely useless without resizing it. (screenshots available in my comment on that bug).
• Login information is no longer saved (LP bug #483566). This leaves you having to manually enter login information to sites you’ve visited many times before, even with Epiphany/karmic, and had the temerity to log out or the site automatically times out your session.
• If you click a link to download an archive or a software package Epiphany complains that the file could damage your system and offers to let you download it instead, presenting you with options to “save as…” and “download” (LP bug #151787). In addition, right clicking on an image and selecting to save it results in a dialog complaining that Epiphany has no idea what application to open the file in. This may be the same issue, but I can’t find another bug that fits it better.
• Epiphany refuses to recognize apturl links as an authorized method of installing software (LP bug #235128).
• There’s no way to get favicons, the icons provided by web servers to visually identify the website you’re on (LP bug #355755). While some users like not having favicons on their browser tabs many of us so want it.
• Closing a tab with a form, with fields filled out or not, will get you a dialog warning that there are unsaved form elements (LP bug #21597).
• While we finally have a working spell checker, the UI sucks. There’s no way to easily tell the browser to always check your spelling, leaving you to manually right-click to make sure the spell checker is on for a text field. To make matters worse, once it’s enabled you have to manually right-click and tell Epiphany to Check Document Now to move to the next typo. Talk about a pain in the rump.
• If you find a typo with the spell checker and select the correct spelling, the typo is removed but the correct spelling isn’t inserted in its place (LP bug #460450).

That’s not even an exhaustive list of the things in Epiphany/karmic that makes me go “Grrrrr!” As much as I liked using Epiphany/Gecko under Ubuntu 9.04 it’s simply pissing me off too much to use it as my default browser any longer, so I switched to Chromium. While Chromium isn’t perfect, and there are things that don’t work quite as well as I’d like it to, it definitely works better than Epiphany/WebKit. And thanks to the Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds Team’s PPA I get updates to Chromium on a daily basis so I can see fixes almost as soon as they’re released. The biggest PITA bug that I’m waiting to get fixed is one I posted, Issue 28517: Can’t import bookmarks from Epiphany. Until it’s fixed I’ve added a link to my Epiphany bookmarks file on my Bookmarks Bar so I can get at it easily when I need it. I’m also unable to add words to my spell check dictionary for some odd reason, but at least when I select a correct spelling the error gets corrected and not just wiped out.

While you can use extensions in Chromium the devs haven’t opened the extensions gallery, you can find some installable extensions at the Google Chrome Extensions site. Among the extensions I already have installed are

• AdBlock+ 1.1.9.9 – It doesn’t work as transparently as Firefox’s AdBlock+ works, and I can’t seem to able to block ads in Gmail, but hopefully that will change before too long. I just saw the AntiADS extension and it seems working better than AdBlock+.
• Bookmarklets Manager 3.2.0 – A great way to add and use bookmarklets, although several of my search bookmarklets don’t want to work. It may be due to Issue 2238: Add search engine dialog doesn’t allow “{” (open curly brace); can interfere with javascript.
• New Tabs Always Last 0.1 – Sometimes I just don’t want a new tab opened next to the active tab, like 90% of the time I click a link on my custom start page. This extension brings the behavior I want, and I can always disable it if I want new tabs opened next to my active tab and not at the far right of my tab bar.
• Tabs to the front 0.1 – Like it says on the tin, because I hate having to manually select a tab I just opened from a link.
• YouTube Downloader 1.1 – While not as feature rich as the Firefox Video DownloadHelper extension in that I can’t download my local television news videos or MLB highlight videos, it does bring one killer feature to the table: Easy to find buttons to select which version of the video you want to download, as shown in the image on the right (click the image for the full size image in a new window).

There’s also one killer feature to Chrome’s add-ons. You don’t need to close Chrome to get the benefits of an extension. Yep, you can use a new extension as soon as it’s installed. The same goes for enabling/disabling an add-on. I seem to remember hearing that other browsers can do that (I know Epiphany can), but Chrome/Chromium kicks Firefox’s tail on this count.

There are a couple of other bugs that may keep some users from switching to Chromium full-time. The first is that Chromium doesn’t seem to know how to open PDF files (Chromium issue 19587). I can’t open PDF’s in Epiphany either, so downloading PDF files is one more thing I keep Firefox around for. I also can’t drag a URI from Chromium to the desktop (issue 24210) to remind me to get back to the page. If you’ve created a bookmark on your desktop with another browser Chromium can’t open it either (issue 27339).

If you’re unhappy with Firefox and Epiphany and are looking for a browser that can make it easier to surf the web you should definitely look into Chromium. You may find that it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Why oh why did Epiphany have to ditch Gecko?

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.

[UPDATED] Initial thoughts on Ubuntu 9.10 beta

[Updated to include some great news on the evolution-rss bug. -Peng]

The Ubuntu devs released the beta of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” back on the first of the month (now available as a Release Candidate), and while I snagged the disk image pretty quickly it wasn’t until Friday a week ago that I was able to actually get a chance to fire up the LiveCD long enough to see how well it played with my system. I couldn’t find any major glitches in it other than a problem with my USB WiFi adapter, and I had already seen that people were having enough major issues with the combination that there was a request to change the status on the support for the adapter from some support to absolutely no support. Luckily I was already having enough connectivity issues with our Linksys WiFi router that I has already gone back to using the good, old-fashioned CAT 5 cable to connect to it.

After looking at a number of other items that are important to me I went to the page on the Ubuntu website about the 9.10 beta to check for any known issues that I needed to be aware of and decided it was an upgrade I could probably do safely. I ran command sudo do-release-upgrade -d with the Run Application (Alt-F2) tool, although you could also run it in the terminal, and waited the two hours plus while my system got upgraded. Your system may take the upgrade more quickly or more slowly than mine, but having done a clean installation for version 9.04 I decided I didn’t want to go through the hassle of having to reinstall every bloody app and tool I use this time around. I did notice a number of dbus errors during the upgrade and unfortunately I didn’t think to document what they were about. They may have had something to do with how long my upgrade took, but I hadn’t found any dbus issues connected with the upgrade so I have absolutely no clue what the errors should have told me.

Now that I’ve used and updating Karmic for just over a week I found some things that I want to point out, some good, some not so good.

Overall Thoughts

I kept seeing people say that the boot times for Ubuntu 9.10 are shorter and sure enough my boot time is shorter. Of course since the Ubuntu devs decided to switch from using Usplash for the initial boot splash to XSplash any Mac4Lin boot splashes would have been broken anyway (I never did get a Usplash working for Mac4Lin 1.0, much to may chagrin) but I have to say that I really do like the look of the new splash screens. The boot splash is a simple Ubuntu logo on a dark background, but I have to say the new XSplash is a thing of beauty. As you can see in a YouTube video posted on Softpedia’s article on the newly released Ubuntu 9.10 beta, it’s no longer a simple case of the Ubuntu logo and a progress bar. The Ubuntu logo is now suspended and lit by an overhead spotlight and the animated bar now scrolls up rather than going from left to right.

In addition, they’ve added the Ubuntu Software Center (USC) as a new tool for adding software to the usual collection of Synaptic and Add/Remove Software. When I first looked at it I thought, “So what? I can do the same thing with existing tools.” Except the UI for the USC makes it a lot handier than Add/Remove Software. You can either search for a specific app or browse through the library and when you find what you’re looking for you’re provided with a much nicer information screen complete with buttons to wither install the software as well as to go to the app’s website where you can get even more information. The information screen even lets you know the version that’s available, something that Add/Remove Software never had. Have software you installed from a Debian package (.deb)? The USC knows about the app (at least what the package told the system) and gives you a button to remove it. It may not always have the application’s icon, but that may be more of a limitation in the package itself. Yes, you can do all this via Synaptic, but not everyone’s all that comfortable with it.

The Good

For the most part I’m pretty happy with the upgrade. I won’t bore you with a ton of specifics or screenies (I’ll include a link to some screenshots I made at the end) but there are a few things that I noticed are definite improvements in the user experience for me. The first thing I noticed was a dialog that popped up on my first reboot after the upgrade was done. I knew my hard drives were getting a bit old in the tooth, but now I could see just how bad things are getting. I dismissed the dialog, but now when I boot up I get an icon in my notification area and when I click on it I get a helpful message. I can click on the message and get more information, and I know I need to replace that drive one of these days but now I know I need to do it sooner than later (picture). I can disable the message if I want, as I can for the warnings that I’m getting low on disk space on my partitions. Those warnings come up each boot, as well as when I’m working with videos and the available space gets too small. Yes, they can be a little annoying, but I haven’t decided to silence them just yet.

An even nicer improvement comes in the Update Manager. Now it lets you know the source for the particular updates, plus it flat-out gives you more information on the update, such as the version number. This is information that’s been missing from the Update Manager for as long as I’ve used Ubuntu.

Another small, yet a very nice set of improvements came in Evolution. The first is a better visual notification of new messages coming in. In the past when you fired up Evo you simply saw the folder names bold when you had unread messages, which is okay, unless you left some messages marked unread to follow-up on as I do. Now you’ll see that there’s a star on the folder that has brand new unread messages.

The other improvements come to those who use Evo as their RSS reader. Not only does Evo show the site icons for the folders with feeds where available (the other folders use the stock RSS feed icon), but on many sites you can now see the comments when you look at the article summaries. I’m not sure why they show up on some feeds and not others, but I have noticed that some feeds still show a count for the number of comments without actually showing the comments themselves. But it’s not all good news with Evo though.

There’s one more fan-damn-tastic improvement in Ubuntu 9.10 that I just discovered trying to get caught up on my RSS feeds: It’s a piece of baklava to enable using Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to force a new X session. Just go to System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Layout Options. Then select Key Sequence to kill the X server and check Control + Alt + Backspace. That’s all it takes. Yooouge thanks to Panji Nushantara for pointing it out on his blog.

The Not So Good

First off all let me warn you about a potential deal breaker in the updated Evolution. If you’re like me and you use Evo for your RSS/ATOM feed reader you won’t want to grab the new Evo. The reason for this warning is the fact that for some unknown (to me) reason the evolution-rss plugin no longer works and no feeds are updated (filed as Bug #460462 with fixed link). Luckily you can export your feed list (Edit > Preferences > News and Blogs > Export) so you can migrate your subscribed feeds to another app like Liferea and hopefully not miss too many days’ posts. There’s also an advantage that Liferea has over Evolution’s RSS plugin: You can sort and rename your feed folders to your heart’s content without borking the feed settings, something that you can’t say about evolution-rss. Updated 26 October 4:00 pm: Thanks to some very quick work by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio the evolution-rss bug is already fixed. There’s a .deb package on comment #6 on the bug, or you can wait for it to be available through the Update Manager as it’s already been accepted for distribution.

There are more upgrades in Ubuntu 9.10 that aren’t such good news, and one that sticks out like a sore thumb on my system is the GNOME web browser, Epiphany. As I mentioned back in December I finally got tired of the decisions Firefox devs were making and switched to using Epiphany for my web surfing. There were two flavors of Epiphany, one using the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine and one using Webkit, but the Webkit version didn’t quite seem ready for prime time so I was using the Gecko version. It was great that I had the option and it allowed me the option of using a Gecko-based browser without dealing with what I thought were boneheaded UI decisions from Firefox devs. Unfortunately the Epiphany devs have stopped supporting the Gecko engine and since with the release of Epiphany 2.26.3 Epiphany/Gecko no longer exists, Epiphany/Gecko is simply not available in Ubuntu 9.10. You may think that’s not a big problem, except there are some basic behavior issues that no longer available.

There’s finally a semi-usable spell checker in Epiphany now. I saw semi-usable because if I select a correct spelling the misspelled word is deleted but not replaced with the correct spelling (filed as Bug #460450).

The biggest issue is that you can no longer right-click a link and select Open in New Tab from the context menu. You also can’t middle-click a link on every site and open it in a new tab, especially when the links are on a Google site like Gmail.

Another serious usability issue for me is that the extensions that I used don’t seem to work quite properly anymore. The biggest issue for me is the fact that my beloved New Blank Tab extension no longer seems to be working. I’m hoping someone will come along and fix it because while the Tab Foreground extension works it doesn’t let me open a new tab and go straight to the location bar so I can type (or paste) in a URI. This is a rather big pain in the arse, although not quite as big as the no middle-click issue.

Wallpaper Tray is another app that has broken in the upgrade. For some reason it flat out won’t launch on booting for some reason. I ended up switching to Desktop Drapes, which is a nice app that I can put right on my upper panel, but doesn’t have the hover feature of showing the path and filename for the current wallpaper like Wallpaper Tray does. Hopefully we can get that fixed before too long.

On the Whole

One the whole there are some nice benefits to the upgrade, as long as you don’t depend on the features I mentioned above. As I finally finish this post we have a mere four days before Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is released, now may be a great time to snag the ISO for the Release Candidate and try it out on your own system. Remember, try the LiveCD before you make the upgrade, and look at every app that you use now to make sure the upgrade won’t bring bad news as I found. make sure you also read the overview before you make the upgrade for more information on what’s coming in the upgrade as well as the known issues.

Check out all of my Ubuntu 9.10 screenshots in my Picasa Web Album.

Karmic Upgrade screenies

[HOWTO] Grab your favorite YouTube vids in Epiphany

It’s bound to happen every now and then. Your surfing through the videos on YouTube, marking some of them as Favorites and putting some on playlists to share with others. But every one in a while (or more often), you find a vid that you absolutely love and wish you could snag for your hard drive so you can always have it handy for when you want to watch it again.

Firefox users have the VideoDownload Helper extension to save and even convert your favorite vids. But perhaps you’re like me and prefer to use GNOME’s Epiphany web browser. Except although Epiphany is based on Mozilla’ s Geko rendering engine,  you can’t simply install Firefox extensions into Epiphany. Luckily there are quite a few extensions for Epiphany (as well as third-party extensions, as well as unofficial extensions) and one of them is Adam Schmalhofer’s Video Downloader extension.

While it isn’t as flexible as the Firefox extension, Adam’s extension brings a much needed ability to Epiphany. The first thing you will need to do is make sure you have Clive installed (install via apturl), as Clive does the heavy lifting of downloading and converting the video for you. Once Clive is installed snag the files for the Video Downloader from Adam’s brzr repository (yes, you can simply grab the files from the page I linked to). The main files you need are video-downloader.ephy-extension and video-downloader.py, but you can grab the other files if you want. I strongly suggest grabbing the README file (or README.it if you speak Italian).

Once you have the files downloaded, move (or copy) the files to ~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions and launch Epiphany. You can move the files into that folder while Epiphany is running, but I recommend at least closing and relaunching Epiphany when installing any extensions. Now, before we enable the extension there is one thing that absolutely has to be done. Get into your Preferences window by running Edit > Preferences from within Epiphany. Even if you want Epiphany to ask you where to save your downloads each time, this extension requires that you have a location specified. Click the box for Automatically download and open files and select the location where you want Video Downloader to save the videos for you. If you want to be prompted where to save your other downloads then simply clear the checkbox once you make your selection. I decided to use the same folder that the Firefox extension uses, simply to keep things simpler. Unfortunately Video Downloader is unable to ask you where to save each video you download with it, so you have to set this preference via the Preferences dialog, but hopefully it will come in a later version of the extension.

Once you have the files in the proper folder (~/.gnome2/epiphany/extensions), you have Clive installed, and you have selected where the downloaded videos should go, it’s time to enable the extension itself. Simply go to Tools > Extensions and check the box for the Video Downloader extension. Once it’s checked you’re ready to start downloading.

Go to the page for your favorite YouTube video, and once the page is finished loading you will see a film icon in your status bar. (My screenshot shows the icon from the Mac4Lin theme. You can see the default icon on the extension’s page.) Simply click on the icon and the video(s) on the page will be downloaded as MP4 video files to the location you specified.

One very nice feature I found about from Adam this morning is available if you do a middle-click on the icon. In Firefox and Epiphany middle-clicking a link will open it in a new tab, and if middle-clicking the icon will attempt to load the video file into a new tab. What I discovered today, however, is that when I middle-clicked the icon I got an offer to either open the video or simply save it for me. As you can see from the screenshot, RealPlayer 11 is installed on my system and registered as the default MP4 player, and I’m asked if I want to open the file in RealPlayer 11 or save the file. Selecting Save As… will give you the file picker window so you can save the video file wherever you want it, and you will also have an opportunity to rename the file however you want.

For a list of all of the sites that Adam’s Video Downloader extension will work on, simply check out the README file.

I want to send a yooouge THANK YOU! to Adam Schmalhofer for all his help as he helped me resolve some issues I was having. That dude totally rocks, and I owe him several brews.

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.

Is Epiphany ready to replace Firefox?

(Woops! This is an article about the Epiphany browser, not the Evolution email client. I’m blaming it on the fact that the names are so similar and I switched to Evo some time back. -Peng)

I mentioned yesterday that I’ve been hunting some things down for Epiphany, the GNOME web browser, and I was hoping that Epiphany 2.24.1, the current version in Ubuntu Intrepid, was good enough to let me kick out Firefox when version 3.1 comes out. While I’ve gotten really spoiled by some of Firefox’s features and extensions I’ve got some things that I have to be able to do in Epiphany if it’s going to replace Firefox.

• I have to be able to import my bookmarks from Firefox, if not the saved passwords
• I need to be able to open a new tab and have that new tab be the selected tab without having to do anything besides middle clicking on a link
• I need to be able to use Ctrl key combinations to zoom the text
• I have to be able to run Adblock Plus
• I have to be able to spellcheck my writing
• I need to be able to write blog posts without doing anything different

If any one of those things isn’t possible in Epiphany it could be a deal breaker for me. I know that there are a few extensions available for Epiphany, and there are some I’d like to be able to use, but they’re nice-to-haves, not Must Haves.

I went into my Firefox bookmark manager window and exported a fresh set of saved bookmarks, and when I tried to import them into Epiphany they installed without a hitch. Already this is different from what I experienced when I tried to do the same thing before Firefox 3 was released, so I started to hope that I’d end up pleasantly surprised by Epiphany. I set up my initial home page, a customized page I created several years and keep updated as I have new sites I want handy, and opened tabs with the two other pages that make up my Firefox “home page”, and the tabs opened in the background but that was something I’d check on later. I opened the preferences window and tried to set my home page to the three tabs I had open, but all that happened was to make the tab I was in the home page. That wasn’t what I had hoped for, but it’s a nice to have, not a deal breaker. The new tabs opening in the background? That didn’t make me happy. It was time to use my two Ubuntu-related search engines to see what I could come up with.

I found an question on Launchpad about the problem and found out someone made a third-party extension called Tab Foreground. I went to the page they linked to and found a page full of Epiphany extensions that weren’t part of the official extension package. Among them is Tab Foreground, and it looked like it would do the job, except for one problem. The newest version of Epiphany that the extensions supports is version 2.22 and I rub version 2.24. I installed it and enabled it, but it didn’t work. I emailed Chica, the person who wrote the extension to thank them for writing it anyway, and in a second email later I let them know it doesn’t play well with the newest version of Epiphany. Not to whine or complain, because I’m really thrilled that someone would take the initiative and put the time and energy into writing it in the first place.

Between the list of official Epiphany extensions, the list of third-party extensions and a separate list of unofficial extensions that I found  I found most of the things I’d really like to use in my Firefox replacement, and I was starting to think it might actually be close enough that I’d be able to make something other than Firefox my default browser. Yes, I’d miss the Smart Location Bar after all, but I’d just get used to not having it again. I tried to zoom the text in and out with the Crtl-+/Ctrl– (Ctrl and either plus or minus) and was pleased to see the size of the text change. Resetting the zoom with Crtl-0 didn’t work so well, but it’s easy enough to use View > Normal Size to reset the zoom level. Three Must Have’s down, three to go.

Make that four down, because when I first opened Epiphany and opened Tools > Extensions I saw an ad blocker with no other installation needed, I just had to make sure it was enabled. (It may have been enabled by default, but I don’t think so.)

When I was posting yesterday’s links I found out that the last two items on my Must Have list weren’t so easy to cross off. The first problem I saw is that I’m used to simply selecting text and then hitting Ctrl-B to make some text bold but when I hit those keys in Epiphany it opened the Bookmark Manager. Huh? That’s not what I’m used to from other browsers I’ve used. I put the mouse over the Bold button on my WordPress.com post editing window to see if a shortcut key was available and it showed a shortcut of Ctrl / Alt+Shift + B, but no matter what I tried I couldn’t bold text from the keyboard. You may find that an annoyance but I consider it a pain in the ass.

I finished writing the post I was working on and I looked for a spell checker but i couldn’t find one. Usually GNOME apps that edit text (like Gedit and Evolution) have a spell checker built in, but I couldn’t see where to turn it on. I saw a Link Checker and an HTML Checker, but no spell checker. I went back to my search tools and found a regression on Launchpad about not being able to use spell checking on Ubuntu Gutsy and another bug that keeps me from being able to edit the setting in about:config.

Epiphany isn’t ready to be my primary browser yet, but if you use a GNOME-based GNU/Linux distro and are looking for a replacement for Firefox you should definitely take a look at Epiphany. You may find it just what the doctor ordered, especially since the Firefox devs keep making decisions that make us want to either throw something at our computer or throw our computer itself out the nearest window. From what I’m seeing Firefox 3.1 will make things worse, not better.

I scream, you scream…

Someone’s come out with an extension for Firefox 3 which is just simply cute. And it’s only for Firefox 3.