Looking for a Radiance theme that works with Mac4Lin on Lucid? I may have what the doctor ordered.

Back in March I saw articles on OMG! Ubuntu! showing us how nicely Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” was looking with information on how to get the icons and themes to use while still running karmic. (The secret is to use the theme engine, themes and icons from Matteo Pagliazzi’s PPA.)

I did some hunting around Gnome-Look.org to see if I can find an Emerald theme that uses the buttons from the Elementary theme with the lucid colors, but the buttons on the Elementary elegante (lucid version) Emerald theme don’t work for me. The Pint – Radiance theme by Antonio Serrano is great to go with the Radiance theme, but then I lose the OSX-look that I use Mac4Lin to get.

I ended up making a mashup Emerald theme using the colors of the Pint – Radiance theme, combined with buttons from the Mac4Lin theme as well as from Merman’s great Elementary Modified theme. After showing them to Anirudh, Mac4Lin’s creator, we agreed that they should be shared  with everyone. We know the Menu button doesn’t quite look right but it will have to do for now until I can get the buttons replaced.

There are two versions of the theme available on Gnome-Look.org. The first is the Mac4Lin Radiance 1.0 theme with the “traffic lights” on the left hand side.

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Elementary+Modified?content=106491

The second is the Mac4Lin Radiance B 1.0 theme for those like me who prefer the traffic lights on the right.

Both themes are now available on Gnome-Look.org for downloading. I had hoped to help Anirudh get Mac4Lin updated to work with Ubuntu 10.04 before lucid was released, but my plate has been so busy lately that I wasn’t able to get the themes on Gnome-Look.org and finish this post until today. I hope these are worth the wait.

Lifehacker readers love Mac4Lin

I know we get a large percentage of our daily traffic from people looking for information on the Mac4Lin project, and I often see people coming from Lifehacker, but the Lifehacker folks have even better news for the project.

When they were compiling their Most Popular Linux Post of 2009 they found that they had to include their article Mac4Lin Gives Linux Desktops the Complete Mac Look on the list. Right between their mentions of their articles on Elisa and Jolicloud we find this:

Mac4Lin Gives Linux Desktops the Complete Mac Look

It really, really does. If you don’t mind the obvious break in your your free-as-in-speech fidelity, it’s a pretty nice setup.

You can read Anirudh’s post about the good news on his blog. Congrats to Anirudh and the rest of the team on making software so nice that it seems everyone wants to know about it.

Full Disclosure: I am a member of the Mac4Lin dev team. I mostly helped update the documentation for their (somewhat) recent version 1.0 release.

Mac4Lin 1.0 documentation has been released

While fighting with a dead parrot, er computer, Anirudh Acharya, the lead developer for Mac4Lin, announced in a post on the Mac4Lin support thread on the Ubuntu Forums that the Mac4Lin 1.0 Documentation is finally available. You can download it form the Mac4Lin download page.

That’s not all the good news Ani has for us, either. He posted on his own blog yesterday that Mac4Lin has gotten some nice in an article by Howard Wen in ComputerWorld magazine about Transformation Packs.

Of course with Ubuntu 9.10  “Karmic Koala” reaching the Alpha 5 milestone there’s a good chance that once it comes out some parts of Mac4Lin will break, all thanks to changes devs are making in features that Mac4Lin uses. (This is why the Usplash for Ubuntu 1.0 hasn’t been released yet, unless I missed something.) The Mac4Lin development team will be looking at the interaction of Mac4Lin and Ubuntu 9.10 as Karmic moves it’s way to the final release and we will do all we can to make sure the Mac4Lin themes, etc., play well with the newest release of our favorite open source OS.

Peng’s links for Sunday, 2 August

Holy crap it’s been a busy month and a half. Remember the long links post I wrote last month? I’m afraid this one may be even longer, in fact when I started writing it on Friday and I ended up having to save the post and finish it later. I honestly hoped it would have been published on yesterday, but that didn’t work out like it that.

I’ve pulled some of the older items I had flagged for posting, but there are still a few from early this month that I just couldn’t justify not passing along.

• Andrewsomething: GNOME-Colors in Karmic. I’ve played around with some of the Shiki-Colors themes available but I ended up sticking with the Mac4Lin themes. Your milage, of ourse, may vary. Which is the beauty of open source software. Andrew even has a screenshot to help you see why you may love GNOME-Colors.
• Dustin Kirkland The Ubuntu Museum. With Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) reaching the end of it’s support lifespan Dustin put together a great site with some great info and images from Ubuntu’s past. If you want to know more, just go to Dustin’s post. It’s one museum you don’t even have to get dressed to go visit.
• Chenthill Palanisamy: What’s cooking in evolution? There are some nice additions coming down the pike for GNOME’s email client, and Chenthill has some info.
• Tyler Mulligan: The “easy” way to listen to internet readio in Ubuntu. Tyler has gone through the usual pain of trying to listen to his favorite ‘net radio station while running Ubuntu, and he’s found a way to do it that is probably easier than any other way, including Rhythmbox and Exaile.
• Alan Pope: Migrating from WUBI to Full Ubuntu Install. Have you (or a friend of yours) looked at Ubuntu with the WUBI tools running on Windows? If so you may have decided you like Ubuntu and don’t really need Windows around anymore. If that sounds like you or someone you know Alan has a nice tutorial on making the switch to full Ubuntu without losing any of the data you currently have.
• Martin Owens: Learning: Identifying Computer Ports. Alan is teaching a System Adminsistration course, and he’s had to come up with some of his own materials for it. Luckily he’s sharing his guide to computer ports with the rest of us. Thanks, Martin!
• Christer Edwards: Updating Default GDM Theme: Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty” and My Ubuntu Look and Feel. Christer has posted a pair of tutorials that will show you just how easy it can be to change how Ubuntu looks. Who says you have to settle for how an operating system looks when it comes from the “factory”? Not a GNU/Linux user, that’s for sure, although in all fairness it’s getting to be easier for other OSes as well, although Linux users have a crap load of possibilities to choose from.
• Matthew Helmke: The Official Ubuntu Book, Fourth Edition — first review and more. If you have a copy and want to get an updated edition, or if you’ve been meaning to get a copy and never have yet, you can now get it in PDF format rather than in dead tree format. Matthew”s even got a link for you to get a sample chapter if you’re not sure you want to get it yet.
• Muammar El Kahtib: Flash player in Google Chrome for Linux. If you’re testing Google Chrome, or even Chromium, you can now enable plugins such as Flash in Chromium! No more having to open another browser just to see Flash applets, whether it’s cheezburgers or something as simple as the MLB Gameday applet to keep up with your favorite baseball team. You can also get some addition info in a post by Omshivaprakash H L.
• Marc Deslauriers: Goodbye Apple. Marc and his wife have had quite a few iPods, but they won’t get another one. I’ll let you read his post for more details, and it’s not simply an I-frigging-HATE-Apple post. I will say, however, that once I can get some details worked out with the device I got a month ago I’ll be posting info on getting another company’s digital media players (DMP) working with GNU/Linux. There’s just one or two annoying little bugs I’m trying to get resolved, but I will say this: You can get a DMP that plays Ogg Vorbis files right out of the box, and as soon as you get it out of the box you can load not only Ogg Vorbis files on it, but also text, pictures and videos (but sadly not Ogg Theora vids) on the little buggers using nothing but your favorite file manager.
• Andreas Nilsson: A tale of menus. I really hate saying this, but they’re at it again. The GNOME devs are changing the themes yet again, this time adding 256×256 icons for places, etc. But it’s not all bad news, unless you’re a third-party theme designer like the good folks at Mac4Lin. At least this time we’re forewarned.
• Garrett LeSage: Nautilus, streamlined. The GNOME artwork devs have come up with a bit of a winner: a simplified Nautilus that gives you more space for the things that count, the filespace you’re working with. There’s a PPA with the new look and I have to say that it looks like it fits with the Mac4Lin themes really well.
• Hylke Bons: Adding fonts in GNOME. Yes, we have yet another post on adding fonts to your system, but Hylke is working on an even easier way to do it, complete with visual mockups. I have to say I really like what he’s come up with so far. Thomas Wood has a followup with a little more work on the idea.
• Linux * Screw: Top 3 Linux HTML editors. If you’re running the MacOS or Windows there are a plethora of options for doing HTML coding, including the old standby “real web designers code  by hand”. Let’s face it, some of us just like having a visual editor handy when we write or change HTML code, even if it’s just for some of the time. The guys at Linux * Screw have looked at three tools you may want to add to your Linux toolbox.
• Steven Rose: Removing Evolution Mail is NOT dangerous in the slightest… Some people want to remove Evolution from their Ubuntu installation, because they prefer another email client, and others are quick to predict doom and gloom if they even attempt to uninstall Evo. Personally I love Evo, but not everyone likes the same apps. Steven dumps some of the FUD and brings the truth of the matter of removing Evolution. And guess what, it doesn’t unleash the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Although you can have my Evo when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.
• Mark Brown: Full quoting. Yes, it refers to replying on email lists, but it’s not another rant about the right way to write a response. In fact he says nothing about replying above or below the quoted message, although Mark reminds me I need to spend another half minute (or less) before I hit Send on any email response.
• Jono Bacon: Change for Change. Jono’s got a great idea for some of the loose change we keep finding in our pockets and purses. I can’t wait to see it get started and make its way to Beantown. It’s a hell of a lot better idea than all of the stemmers I keep finding outside of stores and restaurants, but then I know some stemmers who make more money in a given day than I do.
• Dougie Richardson: Replacing Firefox. I admit it, the moment I saw his post title I flagged it to read later, but now that I’ve read it I knew I had to share it. Dougie needed something leaner to use on his netbook and looked at all the possibilities “from Epiphany to Opera”, and he decided to go with a Webkit browser. He looks at Midori and Arora in his post, complete with some screenshots. If you need a browser for a device with a smaller screen (and available memory) you owe it to yourself to read his post. He does bring up some bad news, namely that some apps in Ubuntu’s repositories aren’t exactly current, and while he doesn’t have a solution he does have some good information.
• Shane Fagan: Reply to Ballmers recent interview. You may have read or heard an interview with Steve Ballmers on cNet, especially his comparison with Mac about quality and price. Shane has a great response for Ballmers, and no matter what OS you prefer you should see what Shane has to say.

For those who voted for Mac4Lin in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards, I’m afraid to say that they didn’t win. Anirudh Acharya, the main dev for Mac4Lin, does thank all their supporters and mentions a very nice surprise in the final tally. There was also a great article in Linux Magazine comparing Ubuntu 9.04 with Mac OSX, and while it doesn’t mention Mac4Lin it does present Ubuntu in a very nice light.

Baseball fans were made very happy last week with the news that Vin Scully, the voice of the LA Dodgers would keep working for one more year.You may remember that almost a year ago I posted the good news that he’d be working for this, his 60th year, and even if you hate the Dodgers you have to respect that man’s talent. There’s no better example of Suclly’s talent was shown just last month when Manny Ramirez his is pinch hit grand slam. Check out the video on that page if you need any more evidence of Vin Scully’s wisdom and class.

And for those who hate baseball and need a smile on this first Sunday in August, there’s a post by directhex from last weekend that I dare you to read and not smile at.

That’s a full lid. Have a good week, or at least have as good a week as you want to have.

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.

Mac4Lin gets ink in Linux Mag

Anirudh Acharya, the developer of the Mac4Lin Transformation Kit, has let me know that they got some very nice coverage in the January issue of Linux Magazine as they look at two programs, Mac4Lin (with the docking benefits of the Avant Window Navigator) and Pdfsam, an open source PDF document editor.

Now, thanks to the Mac4Lin project, Linux users can enjoy the visual side of Mac OSX without dipping too deeply into their pockets for expensive Apple hardware.

Congratulations on the coverage for Mac4Lin, and I’m glad to say that the Subversion (svn) repo for Mac4Lindoes have the latest possible files for the otherwise unreleased 1.0 Release Candidate 2, including the latest version of the PDF documentation. For those who look at the svn files and wonder how the heck you use them, I was wondering that as well. I asked Ani and he said that the install scripts you get from svn don’t work because they look for .tar.gz files that are in the normal download of Mac4Lin but not in the svn versions. Luckily he wrote a post on his own blog about how to use them so you won’t have to spend too much time trying to use them.

For those who have looked at the Places icon on the AWN dock from Mac4Lin and thought it looked out of place, you’re not alone. Ani is going to change it (thank you!) and if you update the svn files regularly you’ll see when the icon gets changed.

Mac4Lin gets Subversion support

After much demand from our users and testers, Mac4Lin 1.0 now uses the Subversion (svn) version control system.

What does this mean in plain Engrish, I mean English? It means that rather than having to wait for Anirudh or another member of the Mac4Lin development team to put together an updated testing build for Mac4Lin 1.0 you can now snag the updated files quickly and easily. And as an extra bonus, you can get the internal Mac4Lin 1.0 RC2 that isn’t being made available on our Downloads page. You can also get the latest update of the PDF documentation via Subversion. Mega thanks to whoever made that available, because I know the docs have been updated them since I last touched them and I haven’t updated the PDF yet.

I get updates of the Sonata MPD client via Subversion and it’s a great way to keep up to date with the efforts of the developers.

To get the details you need read Ani’s announcement on the SourceForge Mac4Lin Discussion Forums.

[UPDATED] Install Vala without compiling source code

Last week I wrote a post on installing GlobalMenu (nee MacMenu) and I said you had to install Vala, which had to be installed from source code. This morning I saw ayoli’s comment and it sent me hunting through Launchpad for a PPA that held Vala 0.5.1. After finding several PPA’s with older versions I found the one that had the current version.

Before we install Vala from Bruce Cowan’s PPA we need to uninstall our current build of Vala. You’ll need to restart your computer during the change so either bookmark this post or print it out so you can refer to it after you restart. Since GlobalMenu depends on it let’s shut down the GlobalMenu first. Go into your home directory and open ~/.gnomerc again in your favorite text editor and comment out all of the lines that you had uncommented to run GlobalMenu. Save the changes and close your text editor, then open a Terminal (or your favorite command line app). Change to the folder where you installed Vala and let’s run the uninstall command.

cd vala-0.5.1
sudo make uninstall

Enter your root password when asked and you will see a rather long list of remove file operations. One that’s done you’ll need to reboot to apply the changes, but before you do right click on your Global Menu Panel Applet and remove it, then add either the Main Menu or the Menu Bar to your panel. This will give you the main application menus to use after you restart your computer. Now close any application you’re running (including your web browser) and restart your system to apply the changes we made. I’ll see you when you get back.

/me fires up Sonata and plays a little Fragile while he waits for you to get back

Welcome back. Let’s get Bruce’s PPA added to your sources.list file.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bruce89/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/bruce89/ubuntu intrepid main

Updated 2 June: Vadi’s comment reminded me that there’s a better PPA for Vala, namely the one for the Vala Team. Use these sources in your sources.list for the latest builds of Vala:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/vala-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/vala-team/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Update your package list (sudo apt-get update) and install Vala by running

sudo apt-get install valac

I know that look weird but you want Vala, a “C# like language for the GObject system” (from Bruce’s PPA page), if you want to run the current version of GlobalMenu. I’m running GlobalMenu as I type this so I can confirm that valac is the package that you need from Bruce’s PPA.

Go back to ~/.gnomerc and edit the file to the setting you used the last time you ran GlobalMenu. You can either replace your Global Menu Panel Applet now or when you get back, but it’s time for yet another reboot.

/me enjoys a little Mood for a Day while you reboot again

If you didn’t put the Global Menu Panel Applet you should put that back on your panel now. The GlobalMenu should be working, showing that the valac package was the right one to install. I’ll be adding these updated instructions to the documentation for Mac4Lin 1.0 so Mac4Lin users will have the compiled instructions in a single handy file.

Thanks to aoli for giving me the idea of finding a PPA that has Vala, and thanks to Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Rick Wakeman, Chris Squire and Bill Bruford (collectively known in 1971 as Yes) for making such a sweet album to listen to as I blog.

Updated 20 November 2009: Commenting on this post is closed due to its age and use by somment spammers.