Peng’s links for Friday, 26 February

It’s been a while, hasn’t it. I’ve been marking some things to blog this week but I simply haven’t had the chance to share them so this will be a fairly long post.

• Stafano Forenza: [HOWTO] Get the new Notifications on Intrepid. The release of Ubuntu 9.04 will see some new, and much nicer display of the system notifications. Unfortunately they’re not being met with universal love. Luckily those of us too chicken to start testing the alphas of Ubuntu Jaunty (alpha 5 has just been released) can still play in a corner of the big kids’ pool.
• Morten Welinder: The Gtk+ File Chooser Dialog, Take II. Users of Ubuntu 8.10 have complained quite a bit about the very borked File Chooser dialog (which should be fixed in Ubuntu 9.04), and the current attempts at a new dialog in OpenSuSE 11.1 isn’t making very many friends either. Hopefully we’ll get something that won’t make people stick with the 8.04 LTS release just to have a usable dialog. And yes, I am aware that a dialog is a pretty lame reason to stick with the LTS release, but for users on the fence it could be the deciding factor.
• Karl Bowden: Retheaming Ubuntu – Part 3. Karl has a really nice series on making a new theme for GNOME and Ubuntu.
• Omshivprakash HL: Medibuntu for Jaunty Jackalope. Medibuntu has log been a favored way to get non-free tools and codecs for Ubuntu, and the Platonic blog has easy steps for Jaunty users and testers to get the tools they may need.  (My apologies to the blog owner but I have no clue which name I should use for you so I took the easy way out.)
• Miguel de Icaza: Gnome Do. That wonderful tool that I simply can’t use Ubuntu without has gotten a website update. If you love things shiny you want to check out the new site. And if you use Do you’ll find some great resources for how to make the most of it.
• Christer Edwards: Enable Basic Compositing for Gnome-Do 0.8.x. Gnome Do’s latest update joins AWN in requiring some sort of compositing to work properly. Metacity will let you do it, especially in Ubuntu 9.04, an Christer posts a tutorialthat shows you how, although it will cause issues for Compiz. But first Christer has an easy to follow tutorial on using my favored backup compositor, xcompmgr.
• David Futcher: My Experiences with PulseAudio. PulseAudio is loved by many users but is a thorn in other users’ sides. David relates his experiences, which lead him to believe Ubuntu may have picked it up prematurely.
• Launchpad News: Links to external bug trackers right where you need them. Launchpad has made it much easier for bug reporters to track and file bugs upstream. This has been something long needed and I’m glad to see Launchpad is making it easier to get bugs filed in GNOME, Mozilla, etc.
• Mackenzie Morgan: Ubuntu audio blog. Mackenzie has found a great blog about PulaseAudio and ALSA that isn’t part of Planet Ubuntu, nor is it part of part of Planet GNOME or Planet Debian, but subscribers to the Ubuintu Weblogswill find his posts (along with mine). If  you use audio on your Ubuntu system you should subscribe to Daniel Chen’s blog. I could just link to Daniel’s blog, but I’m going to let Mackenzie give you not only the link but more reasons to read his blog. It will also give you a chance to peruse some of her most excellent posts since I don’t link to every one of them.
• Matt Zimmerman: Random Ubuntu sighting. You’d be surprised some of the places you can find an Ubunutu logo, like the place Matt found it. Martin Albisetti has found an Ubuntu user in a very interesting place.
• Ubuntu QA blog: Totem & Rhythmbox Testing Day! One of the most important parts of getting a new version of Ubuntu ready to rock is the Testing Days where they focus on a particular part of Ubuntu and see what needs to be done for it. On 2 March they’ll look at two of the most popular media players in Ubuntu, so if you have a machine to spare, or some time to download and test a LiveCD, please consider joining the testers.
• Jim Campbell: Xfce is released! Xfce is kind of the less voracious cousin to GNOME and the basis of Xubuntu. If your system can’t handle the demands of Ubuntu or Kubuntu, Xubuntu may be just what you’re looking for.
• Vincent Untz: Getting the GNOME 2.26 release notes ready.Ubuntu 9.04 will use GNOME 2.26 and Vincent is making sure we can understand why it’s better than the current version.

I have a few more links but I’ll save those for another post. Have a most excellent weekend!

Peng’s links for Wednesday, 10 December

(Yesterday was so bad I inadvertently lagged my comp to hell and back and was unable to post this. I’ll add today’s links and get it posted. Sorry ’bout that! -Peng)

Holy, crap! Is it Wednesday already? It seems like every time I plan on doing something specific (like making new Usplashes for Mac4Lin 1.0) something else comes up and insists that it get higher priority. Either that or the weather changes (like we’re having now) and everything goes a lot slower because I feel like George Carlin’s kitteh (especially at about 35 minutes into his classic HBO special).

I ended up having to disable GlobalMenu because it was lagging my computer’s arse off but I’ll be checking back with it from time to time, especially since it looks like they’ve fixed a bug I’ve been monitoring. But enough about me. I have some links to share. Some may be a few days old, but I wanted to make sure you got the info.

• David Futcher: Playing with CrunchBang Linux. You may have heard about this kind of new distro that shoots for a balance between speed and getting stuff done. I haven’t looked at it, but David has, and if you’re looking at a backup distro CrunchBang may be a good candidate.
• Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency: Precautions for extreme cold weather. I got this in a feed from the City of Boston but it’s good reading no matter what cold weather climate you are in. It’s got information on what to do both before and during an extreme cold emergency.
• Tom Dryer: What’s Been Bugging You in Ubuntu 8.10? Yes, Ubuntu Intrepid isn’t nearly as ready to rock out of the box that Hardy was. If you’re looking at trying Intrepid you may want to check out Tom’s list of annoyances.
• Window Snyder: Malicious Firefox Plugin. A bad add-on for Mozilla Firefox was making it’s way around the interweb earlier this week, and Ms. Snyder has the official Mozilla Security report on the matter. It’s all the more reason to only get Firefox add-ons from Abominations.Mozilla.org or from the developer. Or perhaps from the Addons Mirror. Aza Dotzler also has a post on it, complete with a link to the one other place I’d go for the real scoop. Because some folks are just getting it wrong.
• Fabián Rodríguez: The single most important thing you should know about Ubuntu… Fabian has a link that may strike some of us semi-oldtimers as kind of a “duh” link, but how many time have we gone through the hassle of compiling software from source code, only to find out that there’s a pre-built package of the software (often in the exact version that you want to install) already out there? Read it. Learn it. Love it.
• DesktopLinux.com: Open source office suites compared. Most of us know that OpenOffice.org version 3 is a pretty good alternative for us non-Microsoft users, but did you know they’re not the only game in town?
• Luis Villa: why I’m not a big fan of OOo, part 53240. Yes, not everyone loves OpenOffice.org, and I think Luis’ concerns need to be seen by more than just Planet GNOME readers.
• Lydia Pintscher: Amarok 2.0 released! The über KDE media player (so good that a lot of us non-KDE desktop drivers use it) has finally rolled out version 2! I have a few blog posts about it but Lydia has the best links so I’ll point you toward hers.

I’m going to call that a lid, mainly because I have to go cook dinner (mmmmm, tacos) but before I head on into the kitchen I want to point out to any Firefox dev reading this that there’s a reason you’re getting so many “me too” comments on bug 457187, ‘New Tab’ button should be customizable. It’s because once again you’re shoving a new feature down the throats of users that not only breaks a basic functionality of Fireofx, you’re doing it in a way that kills usablility. Users keep getting told that bitching on the MozillaZine forums is the wrong place to let devs know how we feel about one of your boneheaded design decisions so they’re using the best way they know of, on a Bugzilla bug. If you’d actually ask long-time users of Firefox about things before you throw it in you’d save yourselves, and us users, a lot of time and energy. Plus extension coders can stop having to make Remove-ons to undo your ill advised decisions. When will you guys learn???

@sasa:
I’m not ignoring your comment, I’m just trying to get some info to get you a helpful answer.

Peng’s links for Monday, 3 November

Thanks to everyone who corrected my inaccuracy yesterday. I hate getting facts wrong (even if I do have to post in a hurry sometimes) but it’s good to see so many people not just reading our blog but also contributing.

• Brian Burger: Got Goat? Brian shares the things he loves (and isn’t quite crazy about) Ubuntu 8.10.
• Matthew Helmke: Did my hardware get dropped? It seems that older Nvidia graphics boards aren’t alone in seeming to lose their welcome in Ubuntu Intrepid. Matthew’s ATI board isn’t playing well with Compiz anymore either.
• Aanjhan Ranganathan: FOSS, Education, Career, Skill Development – the relationship. Aanjhan has found some nice articles about the prospect of making a living in the Free and Open Source Software community/industry.
• Richard Harding: Which comes first, the linux penguin or the linux egg? A Flint, MI, community college is moving from Linux to Windows, and Richard looks at the issue of training Linux admins.
• Pundit Kitchen: HOW MICROSOFT SEES OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE. Ok, so it’s not an article, but it is a cute bit of captioning. Although it’s not as nice as a pic I ran last week.

I hope your week is off to a good start. Of course, if you live in the United States don’t forget to vote tomorrow! If you’re still undecided, look at where the candidates stand on tech and open source issues. (I know, I should have posed that question months ago. My bad.)

Get Full Circle Issue 18

The newest issue of the independent Ubuntu magazine Full Circle is now available! Of note (IMO) in this issue is another installment in the series on Package Management, Programming in C, using a secure network drive, and GIMP, as well as an opinion piece on How Many Distros Is Too Many?

Of course there’s also a nice HowTo on installing Ubuntu 8.10, an interview with MOTU Harald Sitter, a review of first-person shooter Urban terror, and a whole lot more.

Remember, Full Circle isn’t just for people who use Ubuntu and its derivative distros, it’s also for people who are considering trying them. A lot of people are intimidated by the mere thought of running Linux because they think everything is done via the Command Line Interface (CLI) but that’s not the truth anymore.

They’re also working on compiling some of their tutorial series into single PDF files that include each installment of the particular series. I don’t see that they’ve made them available yet, but you can keep a look out on the Full Circle website.

Alberto Milone: Call for testing: NVIDIA drivers and nvidia-settings in Intrepid

As I posted last week, Nvidia came out with beta drivers for the older Nvidia graphics cards that hopefully would fix the issues we’re currently experiencing with Ubuntu Intrepid, but that we should hold off until Alberto Milone, the developer of EnvyNG, was able to create packages of the new drivers. Early this morning I got notices from the Intrepid Changes list that Alberto’s packages were accepted.

There are now 71.86.07 and 96.43.09 drivers available in the intrepid-proposed repository and if you’re running *ubuntu 8.10 and need the 97 or 96 drivers please help test them. To enable them go to System > Administration > Software Sources > Updates and make sure you have the Pre-released updates (intrepid-proposed) box checked, then run an update and snag the updated drivers for your system. (CLI instructions for enabling the repo is available on the Ubuntu Wiki.) If you’re like me and got the drivers directly from Nvidia you’ll need to go into Synaptic, select the drivers, then force the version to the one intrepid-proposed. That will show an earlier version than what you’re using, but it’s also the one we need tested.

Once you have the drivers updated (or downgraded if you had the Nvidia beta drivers) then restart your system and see what happens. Chances are good that it will work for you, but whether they do or not please post a comment on this Launchpad bug, along with which driver you’re using, so they can get an idea of whether or not the bugs have truly been fixed for a majority of the testers.

Alberto’s also packaged a new version of nvidia-settings (i.e. Nvidia’s control panel) that hopefully fixed a bug that can cause major segfault crashes. if you can try the new version on intrepid-proposed please provide some feedback on this bug report.

Once you’ve installed the newer versions from intrepid-proposed you can go ahead and disable that repo unless you want to help test updates for other apps.

The new drivers work well enough for me that I’m able to run Compiz, so long as I don’t try to enable the rotating cube effect in CompizConfig Settings Manager. I’m still having some trouble with invisible fonts in WINE, but it looks like that may in fact be due to a different Nvidia regression that affects KDE3 apps (but not KDE4) but also WINE. I’ve subscribed to that bug so I can get updates on the work to munch the bug.

You can get some additional information on Alberto’s call for testing on his blog.

Ubuntu Intrepid is here!

Canonical has now released Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. For all the good news you can read the news release on the Ubuntu website, as well as the release notes. You can also get a graphical overview of the new features in Intrepid, and of course you can also download a disk image of the final release to check out at your leisure.

Mark Shuttleworth has posted a nice article to his own blog about the design for the new user switcher, although I did notice that it seems to be hooked into Pidgin to show my current IM status. Although not everyone is entirely thrilled with the new Ibex.

Updated 3:55pm: I realized that I had forgotten to include a picture that seems to be very apropos today.

The keypad glitch is back in Ubuntu Intrepid

I hate to have to say this, but after I got the distro updates this morning to my Ubuntu Intrepid install I found that I couldn’t use my numeric keypad again. I did a reboot and the keypad was still borked.

As was the case with Ubuntu Hardy to fix it required a simply fix in the keyboard settings (System > Preference > Keyboard > Mouse Keys). Simply clear the checkbox for controlling the cursor with the keypad. The fix will be applied as soon as you clear the checkbox.

It looks like bug #197589: Numeric keypad no longer works after upgrade still needs to be fixed, but it turned out that the GNOME bug I referenced nack in March, #521197 – Numeric keypad no longer works after upgrade isn’t the culprit. Hopefully we can get this resolved once and for all without having to deal with it again next April when the Jaunty Jackelope scampers across the globe.

Peng’s links for Monday, 27 October

• Gerry Ilagan: VirtualBox 2.0.4 now available, support for Ubuntu 8.10 added. I wish I had seen this news before I started the upgrade to Intrepid. I would have checked it in VirtualBox before running the dist-upgrade. Now you have a choice that I didn’t have.
• Christer Edwards: A Better Integrated Forum. Christer has tweaked the Ubuntu Tutorials Forum and you should be able to use any existing site registration or even openID. It’s now even easier to get (and give) assistance with Christer’s tutorials.
• Christer Edwards: Five Tips to Prepare for Release Day! Are you ready for Intrepid’s official release on Thursday? Use Christer’s short list to make sure you are.
• Sayak Banerjee: Ubuntu’s Live USB Disk Creator. Have you ever used a USB drive for a portable Ubuntu installation? Have you ever wanted to? It’s even easier to set up thanks to the new USB start-up disk creator.
• Colin Eatson Watson: Totem BBC plugin. Yesterday I mentioned the BBC plugin for Totem when I was looking at my upgrade to Intrepid. Colin tells us why it came to be, and what they look to do to improve the plugin. And it’s all DRM-free, so you don’t have to worry about onerous licensing restrictions to how you can use the content.

There’s one more link I want to provide, but I wanted to set it apart from the other links a little. Codeweavers Crossover, the popular commercial program that brings Windows compatibility to both Linux and MacOS computers, launched a campaign to get President Bush to “make the most of his remaining days in office by accomplishing a major economic or political goal by January 20, 2009.” One of the goals was to get gas prices in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul down to $2.19 a gallon.

Two weeks ago that price was observed at a Twin Cities gas station, and Codeweavers has responded by giving their $40 software package to anyone tomorrow, whether they run Linux or MacOS on their computer.

For all of the details check out the press release and get ready to snag your copy of Codeweavers tomorrow, complete with tech support. If any of the other goals they set for President Bush are met they’ll have another free software giveaway.

Thanks to Mike Rushton of the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo (Local Community) Team for passing along the news in the form of a link to the story on the TUAW website.

I knew I was forgetting a change. Main Menu got updated in Intrepid, too

I knew there was another change in Ubuntu Intrepid I wanted to blog, and it wasn’t until I was checking an Ubuntu Forums question about Google Earth not launching did I remember what it was. The Main Menu applet, the window that lets you modify the main application menus in Ubuntu, also got a very nice change. If you’ve used it at all in the past you know that if you want to delete or modify an existing menu item you had to right click it and select an option from the context menu. Not anymore.

Now there are Properties and Delete buttons right on the right hand side of the window so you won’t have to hunt down how to make changes.

Greetings from Ubuntu Intrepid!

as of the date this was written

Now that I’ve had a day to work with Intrepid other than to figure out what some bugs are, I kind of like it. There are a few things I need to track down but on the whole it’s working pretty well, although truth be told I think they rolled out the Release Candidate a little early. Supposedly a Release Candidate is supposedly saying “We’ve taken care of all of the really big bugs and while there may be a few things that we may need to fix we’re confident that the program is ready to rock for users of all sill levels.” That is unless they want to take a page from Mozilla’s playbook and label some bugs as WONTFIX until after the new version is officially released.

I did promise you more info on a couple of things that I needed to fix, so let’s look at that those. The biggest, most glaring bug is the fact that  they included X.Org 7.4, the newest stable version of the open source implementation of the X Window System. The only problem is that there’s a known issue in that the proprietary legacy video drivers from Nvidia are simply not compatible with X.Org 7.4. What this means in English is that you will lose your 3D acceleration as well as any eye candy that depends on it, like Compiz-Fusion. This isn’t a problem that users, or Ubuntu devs themselves, can fix. Nvidia has to write new drivers for it, and I’m assured that they know about the issue and are supposedly on the case. The problem really occurs for those using older video cards, and we’re at the unfortunate point where we may end up having to upgrade our video cards before too long. I just hope I can find a decent PCI video card since my old comp doesn’t support AGP or PCI-Express. And before anyone says I need a newer computer I’ll as you this Are you going to buy it for me? I’m disabled and a new computer isn’t anywhere near my budget, even with avoiding the Microsoft tax.

So we’re S.O.L.* for Desktop Effects or AWN if we need the Nvidia Legacy drivers?

Not entirely. While I can’t enable even Normal Desktop Effects I did find a way to run Avant Window Navigator (AWN) even without 3D acceleration. While I was doing some hunting yesterday I came across a program called xcompmgr that can handle the compositing that AWN requires even if your video drivers can’t handle 3D acceleration. It not only gives the compositing that AWN requires it also let me use my Google Gadgets Sidebar again without a box around my undocked WeatherBug Sidebar Gadget. The ArchLinux wiki has some nice info on it, and all you need to do is to simply install it with

sudo apt-get install xcompmgr

Then simply run it from your Terminal (or Alt-F2). You can even add it to your Startup Programs under System > Preferences > Sessions, although I recommend that rather just using xcompmgr to launch it you use

xcompmgr -c -C


which, according to the xcompmgr parameters, will avoid drawing shadows on dock/panel windows and put fuzzy shadows on everything else. There is gcompmgr, a GNOME GUI that lets you set the xcompmgr parameters without the command line. Unfortunately you won’t want to use the download from SourceForge since it’s an RPM file for Red Hat Linux rather than a DEB package or source code. Instead use the link in this post. That will give you a .tar.gz file that when extracted will give you a DEB that can be installed.

Why do I get a search window when I click on a folder on my Places menu?

This bugged the living hell out of me. It’s almost like Nautilus, the default file manager for GNOME wasn’t installed anymore, but it turns out the explanation is easy and the fix is pretty easy, too. It seems the issue is that something’s getting installed after Nautilus and is hijacking the file association. The first thing I saw was a case of F-spot getting launched when you tried to access a mounted partition via the Places menu. But the longer I looked the more relevant bugs I discovered. I ended up finding Bug #260492 – Opening a directory using an application change associations incorrectly. It has also been reported upstream so that the GNOME devs and it looks like they’ve fixed it so it may just have to make it’s way into Ubuntu. Until it does the issue is easily resolved by following jojo’s instructions:

Simple workaround

Right click -> Open with -> custom command -> nautilus

repeat for all folders

now should open folders from Places in Nautilus

You shouldn’t have to repeat it for all folders, but I was able to launch mounted partitions and bookmarks from the Places menu and have it open in the right app after changing the Open With preference only once. You can also select File Browser from the list of applications in the top part of that window and it will open your folders, etc. in Nautilus. If you have the PCMan File Manager installed and want to use Nautilus do not select Open Folder. This will open your partition/bookmark in PCMan.

Dude, what happened to my PDA?

The other rather major glitch I discovered is that something happened to my ability to sync my PDA. It turns out that the current version of gnome-pilot is borked thanks to some changes in HAL (Launchpad bug – upstream bug). For now the workaround is to kill HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) with

sudo /etc/init.d/hal stop

and then restart the gpiloted daemon on the panel. Big thanks to froghopper for providing the diagnosis and workaround. Hopefully we’ll have this resolved before Intrepid is officially released in four days.

What else is new in Intrepid?

As I mentioned before, Nautilus now supports tabbed browsing like web browsers do. Ctrl-T opens a new tab, and you can drag files between tabs for copying and moving. Unfortunately there’s no option to always show the tab bar that I’m able to see, and if you have one window with tabs and one window without tabs it seems that closing the window without tabs will close a tab in the other window, but I haven’t taken the time to confirm this behavior.

An evolution in Evolution

In addition there are some pretty apparent changes in Evolution 2.24.1 (Novell’s Evolution page). The first is in the way the statusbar shows the progress as you check you various email accounts and RSS/ATOM subscriptions. It used to be that if you had a ton of RSS feeds (like I do) the statusbar would get filled with individual status notifications. Now they combine all of the RSS/ATOM statuses into a single notification.

That’s much easier to deal with! Unfortunately they also changed the dialog for marking messages read when you’re doing it on a folder with subfolders. It used to be just a button to mark just the current folder read and a button to mark the current folder and subfolders read. If you wanted to cancel the operation completely you just closed out the dialog completely. My one complaint about the new dialog is that I’m used to the current and subfolders button used to be on the right rather on the left and I have to learn to select the middle button. It’s a minor thing, but it’s still annoying to me. Plus it seems I may have to recreate my Search Folders because the folders I created for unread messages and messages to blog now show zarro messages even though there are in fact messages in each folder.

The Beeb in Totem

One of the things I saw in the Intrepid Intro that I looked forward to is the Totem BBC Plugin. To use it just fire up Totem, then go to Edit > Plugins and make sure it’s enabled. Then go to the Playlist dropdown and select BBC. What you’ll get once the playlist is downloaded and parsed is a rather Jabba-sized selection of media from the BBC that you can enjoy, broken down into eight groups. Unfortunately it doesn’t include some of the live streaming feeds that I can enjoy in the Radio Screenlet, but it could be a great way to enjoy some of your favorite Beeb programs like All Things Considered.

But wait, there’s more!

Ubuntu Intrepid also brings us the ability to start a Guest Session for those times when you need to let a bud borrow your comp to check their email without the hassle of having to create a new user (the new Guest Session doesn’t allow any changes or even saving files to the system), Dell’s DKMS that will automatically build new kernels allowing the devs to roll out new kernels even faster to fix kernel bugs, as well as updates to Sun’s Java OpenJDK, ClamAV, SpamAssasin and Apache’s Tomcat. You can check out all of the new goodies in Intrepid at the Introduction to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.

Just remember, until it’s officially released on Thursday what is available is a Release Candidate and is still a testing version. There are still some things to get fixed, and hopefully they’ll get fixed in the next 4 days. But other than the issues I mention at the top of this post I definitely recommend Intrepid, even though in all honesty it’s going to be more like the upgrade to Gutsy than the relatively painless upgrade to Hardy.

Woops! I forgot to include a screenie of my desktop after I tweaked things and got AWN working again.

—

*S.O.L. – “Sorry, Out of Luck”, or as my stepdad would put it “Shjt Out of Luck”