Love Do but not Docky? That’s cool. Want Docky but not Do? We’ve got a project for that, too.

There have been a few open source projects that have made the GNU/Linux community all happy as hell and one of the best is GNOME Do. While not really a member of the GNOME project many of us will admit to considering it one of the best apps ever written, which you can see on their new Preview page, and once you’ve used it for a while you hate having to use an operating system without it.

When they brought out version 0.8 they added a new theme, Docky. It’s great for people who already use a dock like Avant Window Navigator (AWN) or the Cairo-Dock.  (The Mac4Lin project supports both AWN and Cairo, although I prefer AWN for my use.) While a lot of people love Docky, some of us just don’t. That’s one of the beauties of open source software, you can use what you want and not use what you don’t like. With Do it’s simply a matter of choosing the Docky theme or choosing another theme.

Yesterday I reading a thread on the GNOME Do Google Group that asked why Do isn’t listed as a GNOME project and I saw a comment about Docky being pulled from Do. That’s right, cats and kittehs, members of the Do community got together on IRC and decided to spin Docky off from GNOME Do, making it a project of its own.

If you love Docky please consider surfing over to Launchpad and helping make Docky, The Finest Dock No Money Can Buy, the best it can be.

Peng’s links for Monday, 21 September

No, your eyes are not deceiving you, I finally have a new omnibus links post. I’ve meant to write one a lot sooner than today, but time and my todo list have been busted for conspiracy to deny me the time and energy to do quite all the things I want to get done.

And yes, you are seeing a new hackergotchi on my posts on Ubuntu Weblogs and the Ubuntu Universe, as well on my About page here. Since I finally got some pics of me that I don’t hate I decided it was time to make a new hackergotchi that reflected two of my loves: Mac4Lin and the Los Angeles Dodgers. As I write this the Dodgers are a mere four wins away from locking up their trip to the post season and they’re 8 wins away from repeating as the champions of the National League West.

Some of these links are a tad old, but as I went through the items I’d flagged in Evolution (there’s no way I was including 70 links in a pair of posts, let alone one post) there were a few things I’d found early last month that I really did want to share.

• Panji Nushantara: Digsby: All in One IM Client for Linux (soon). Not everyone loves Pidgin, and Panji has info on a multiple IM client that’s currently available for OSX and Windows. the good news is that the Digsby devs know we’d like a Linux version and they’re hard at work on a native GNU/Linux version. They even have a page you can use to ask them to let you know when Digsby for Linux is available. With Pidgin getting replaced as the default IM client for Ubuntu 9.10, and I’m really not thrilled with what I’ve seen of Empathy so far, there’s a good possibility that Digsby may become a favorite IM client for fans of the penguin.
• directhex: Vive la différence. The person responsible for getting Moonlight easier to install for Ubuntu users has a great post about “Free Software”, including links to how a few others define that term. A must read, and I apologize for not getting the link posted before Saturday’s Software Freedom Day.
• Panji Nushantara: 2.6.30 Kernel on Jaunty Jackalope and Karmic Koala’s Kernel on Jaunty Jackalope. As always, the 9.10 version of Ubuntu Linux will include an update to the Linux kernel. Alpha 6 of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has just been released (see below), but since it’s a really bad idea to install testing releases on computers you use every day, especially alpha versions, Panji has given us a pair of posts on how to update your kernel to the newer version while still running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. I haven’t made the upgrade myself (see the above mentioned conspiracy charges) if you’re interested in making the jump yourself I’d love to hear your responses to it. Just remember the very important disclaimers about what can go wrong if you apply this upgrade. If you make the jump and your computer breaks please don’t come crying to myself, Panji or even Nanci. If you do we reserve the right to use those three words we hate using almost as much as you hate hearing: told you so.
• Colin Walters: Pay no attention to the processes and X Windows behind the curtain… Colin, a Fedora user whose posts are syndicated on Planet GNOME, gives us a nice preview of GNOME 3. There’s quite bit of geek speak in his post, but there’s also a nice glimpse at how GNOME 3 will make being a GNOME user even better than it is now.
• Scott James Remnant: Making a splash. One of the biggest pains in working with the Mac4Lin dev team is that every time Ubuntu rolls out an upgrade there are a number of things that break until we can get the components upgraded. This is the reason getting a Mac4Lin 1.0 Usplash created has been such a royal pain in the arse, and Ubuntu 9.10 includes a major change. They’re dumping Usplash for the boot splash screen, the first splash screen you get when you boot a computer into Ubuntu, and they’re replacing it with xsplash. Scott looks at the matter, including why the change is in fact a good idea. And yes, once I get 9.10 installed on my system (hopefully soon after it reaches beta status) I’ll see about getting a xsplash screen created for Mac4Lin.
• Stormy Peters: 3 ways our awesome habits get us into trouble. Currently the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy has long been a great source of information, especially on security issues within GNOME. This time Stormy looks at three habits that it’s great to develop if you don’t already have them, but she also points out “gotchas” that can turn on us if we’re not careful.
• Stormy Peters: Stacks of books are disappearing. If you love books you may be aware that libraries around the world are changing, and not always for the better. Stormy looks at the problem and why libraries are no longer the great resource they used to be.
• Dustin Kirkland: Encrypted $HOME Now Offered at Installation. I’m not one of them but some users make a point of encrypting the data on their hard drives. It’s a good idea, but in Ubuntu’s past it’s been a bit of a pain to do it. Ubuntu 9.10 has given users the ability to encrypt their home directories as a part of the install process since the fifth alpha came out earlier this month.
• André Gondim: New Ubuntu Screens Installer. Installing Ubuntu 9.10 will no longer be the rather boring experience it’s been in the past thanks to new installer screens that will finally let you know about some of the programs that are getting installed with the OS. André is kind enough to give us screenshots of the ten new information screens.
• Matthew Helmke: Drowning out what I want to hear. While not a tech post, Matthew has written a must read article on how to present your viewpoints, whether the subject be technical, religious or political. This is an article that should be bookmarked at the very least, and printing it out for future reference wouldn’t be a horrid idea.
• Stefano Forenza: LifeHacker’s Ubuntu Wishlist. LifeHacker has some things they’d like to see in Ubuntu, and it turns out the Ubuntu devs are already working on the first item. It turns out that LifeHacker has some very nice words for Mac4Lin, and Jono Bacon has written a very well thought out response to LifeHacker’s wishlist.
• Kees Cook: uninstall sun-java6. The vrms meme that’s been going around the ‘net has brought out an important reminder that there’s a very good open source replacement for Sun’s Java. I need to look into that to see if I could kick some non-free software on my system to the curb. And yes, I know I have two versions of Java installed. There’s a good reason I did that but I don’t recall what it was at this point.
• Jono Bacon: The Art of Community Available for Free Download. Jono wrote a great book about how to build a community of like minded people. While it’s not explicitly a tech book it does look at things that Jono discovered in the open source community. Now you can get a free PDF of the book, although Jono does recommend buying a printed copy of the book (and not just to put some money in his pocket). Whether you pay for your copy or not he asks that you write a review of it on Amazon.
• Christoph Haas: Tired of Nagios and Cacti? Try Zabbix. If you run network monitoring software, or even think you may want to run some, Christoph found an open source app that you should definitely consider.

There are a few more things I definitely want to post before I hit the Publish button. First off, as I mentioned above, the sixth alpha version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has been released. It’s likely to be the last alpha release, and I’ll try to post when it gets it’s first beta release, but feel free to start taking a look at what’s coming in the new release. The devs are working on a countdown banner that I’m hoping to add to the sidebar here once they have a version that will play well with WordPress.com blogs.

On a lighter note, if you saw the Emmy awards last night you know that the show was taken over temporarily by Dr. Horrible. If you missed it then thank the good people over at the SciFi Wire because they have the video posted so we can enjoy it.

That’s almost it for today but I have one more thing to post that deserves a post all of it’s own. I trust tomorrow’s first day of fall brings you some decent weather.

Peng’s links for Friday, 13 Mar

[Corrected the first link. Thanks to Nick and Keba for pointing it out. -Peng]

I bet you guys thought I wasn’t going to post any links this week. I’ve actually been snagging a bunch of links into a gDocfile so I can share them without clogging up my feed reader with unread posts. Unfortunately there are a bunch of them, so rather than give you the link with my thoughts on each I’m just going to copy and paste the links for you. Feel free to follow any and all links that tickle your curiosity.

• The Fridge: Ubuntu 9.04 Countdown Banners Wanted
• Neil Williams: Goodbye network-manager, hello wicd (I want to check this out some more since we changed out WiFi settings a week ago and I can’t figure out where the hell to update my settings)
• Dirk Demke: Ubuntu Certificate of Authenticity
• Dustin Krikland: Jaunty Encrypted Home Directories
• Stefano Forenza: Microsoft tax on Linux’s horizon?
• Omshivprakash HL: Playing WMA files on Ubuntu
• Sense Hofstede: Oggon your music player with Banshee
• Macenzie Morgan: Link to a shell escaping tutorial
• Ronnie Tucker: Full Circle Magazine Issue 22
• Jono Bacon: LoCo Directory Moves Forward
• Colin Watson: Bug triage rants
• Stemp Xan: WebKitGTK+ 1.1.1
• Stefano Forenza: [HOWTO] Candid theme in 2 minutes
• Omshivprakash HL: Jaunty-Elegant Notifications
• Oxford Archaeology: Evolution is better than revolution (not necessarily referring to the GNOME email client, but still a good read)
• Jeffrey Detras: Ubuntu Evolution (same thing thing applies here as well, and these are two completely different articles)
• Benjanmin Otte: browsing in GNOME
• Gerry Ilagan: Linux Foundation is new owner of Linux.com
• Daniel T. Chen: Triaging bugs in Ubuntu, or How Not To Tee Off The Most Important Person: Yourself
• Dustin Kirkland: Mounting your Encrypted Home from a Jaunty LiveCD
• Christer Edwards: How To Find What Package provided a File
• Colin Watson: Bug triage, redux
• Richard Hughes: Application installing
• David Baucum: Anothther reason I don’t run Windows
• Richard Hughes: Application installing (II)
• Daniel Burrows: Help make aptitude faster!
• Ken Van Dine: Pidgin sucks less for IRC
• Martin F. Krafft: Case Logic cases ruin your CDs
• Johannes Schmid: Filtering in gnome-system-log
• Christoph Langner: Is Ext4 ready for the desktop?
• Stefano Forenza: What’s this Ubuntu thing all about?
• Lionel Dricot: Getting Things Gnome! 0.1 – “Just 5 minutes more”
• Sense Hofstede: Thank a Dev Day
• Matt Zimmerman: Ubuntu is based on Debian unstable
• Greg Grossmeier: Jaunty Release Party – Aprin 25th
• Christer Edwards: New GDM Login Theme in Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty”
• Jeffrey Detras: Completing the MacOSX look – Global menu
• Steven Harms: Make your bash shell cool again
• Joege Castro: Desktop Deployments and Stuff
• Daniel Holbach: Packaging Training
• Christian Schaller: Theora in Empathy
• Michael Lustfield: Ubuntu Drupal 6.2.0 Released
• Matthew Revell: Shutter
• Matthew Helmke: Ubuntu Education
• Og Maciel: So you want to sell open source
• Philip Whitnall: Totem manual
• Tom Dryer: Free Disk Space by Reducing Reserved Blocks
• Bodhi.Zazen: How to Moonlight
• Keniv Kubasik: Making Silverlight Applications Available Offline
• Bastien Nocrea: Our new volume feature
• David Welton: Linux “Just Working”
• Matthew Helmke: French police save millions by adopting Ubuntu
• Scott Wegner: Testing Ubuntu Jaunty and Ext4 WITHOUT Trashing Your Data
• Stefano Forenza: LifeHacker’s best distro contest
• Stefano Forenza: Vote for game support in Linux at Ubisoft forums
• Nagappan Alagappan:  Announce: Linux Desktop Testing Project 1.5.1 released
• Risto H. Kruppa: Pay for your Open Source software!

Whew! That should give you some things to read over the weekend. I know some of the articles are from late last month, but that’s how long I’ve been grabbing these links and I wanted to make sure you guys had seen them.

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to let your favorite open source devs know you appreciate all their hard work. And speaking of hard work, I have an idea for a promotional vid or two, and if all goes well I may have some footage for you guys to check out sometime in the next month or so. See y’all next week!

Peng’s links for Thursday, 8 January

Are you still writing “2008″? I caught myself writing the wrong year earlier today, so if you are doing it too don’t feel too bad.

I apologize for not posting much so far this year. We started the new year with my getting not only a new video card but having our router die and having to move to a wireless network here at home. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get Ubuntu to remember that I have a wireless USB “card” when I reboot but I’m still needing to open my AWN Terminal applet and run two commands as I get logged in after a reboot. I thought I had it fixed, but a reboot earlier today proved me wrong. I had some issues when I first installed my EVGA e-GeForce 6200 card but I think it may have had something to do with the fact that I forgot to disable the drivers for my current, very old, graphics card first. I was hoping to give the new graphics card another shot today but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. It’s now at the top of my list for tomorrow (after I check my email and news feeds, that is) so hopefully I will have some good news tomorrow afternoon.

• Ana Beatriz Guerro Lopez: New year’s proposal: look at your reported bugs. This post from Planet Debian is a great idea. If you’ve filed a bug online anywhere you should check to make sure the information is current. Some bugs may no longer effect you, and some bugs may still need more information so the bug can get resolved. You should take a look at bugs no matter where they were filed or what they were filed against, which means I should take one more look at my open bugs on  Bugzilla, even though I no longer use Thunderbird and I only keep Firefox around as an emergency backup in case something isn’t working quite properly with Epiphany.
• Jorge Castro: Resolutions and mean people. Jorge found someone who was giving Ubuntu a test drive for a week. Jorge does have some responses to things the person is writing, but he says he’s glad to see things like that because it reminds us why we do things to support open source software.
• Ubuntu Productivity: Best of both worlds . Geany, the text editor that so many of us love (it’s my preferred text editor of all sorts of plain-text tasks) is available for Linux and Windows, but not OSX. Jon Beebe found a way to get it installed on his other OS and he is kind enough to let us all know how he got it working with his favorite spotted kitteh.
• Vincent Fourmond: Switching to mpd. Vincent has discovered one of the best parts of using MPD: it isn’t the resource hog that other media players can be. Vincent’s post is short on details, but I couldn’t help sharing the good news that another user has discovered my favorite audio player, even if he prefers using a command line interface rather than my personal favorite front end.
• Felix Kaser: Announcing gnome-format 0.1.0. The GNOME devs are working on a new formatting tool for removable memory devices like memory cards and USB drives. Yes, Gparted handles that task already but gnome-format will be even easier to use.
• DesktopLinux.com: Vietnam mandates open source for gov’t servers, desktops. The minister of information and communications for Vietnam has asked both national and local government IS workers to get all their users on open source software by the end of June. It seems a tad soon for the deadline, but he’s mandated that all government workers use open source software by 2010 in some of the best news in a while for proponents of open source software. I bet the boys and girls in Redmond are trying to figure out who let this happen.
• Sven Muller: About Usability. Another resident of Planet Debian has a great post that I think you guys should read. Sven had seen a post by Sami Haahtinen about usability and while he agrees with most of what Sami wrote there’s one part he disagrees with. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better written post about making things easy not only easier for beginners but also keeping settings available for more advanced users. One of the problems I have with Epiphany is that several relatively easy tweaks I performed with Firefox are difficult, if not flat out impossible, with Epiphany thanks to the GNOME mindset of locking controls down and out of reach of users who could bork things royally by changing the wrong thing improperly.

There is one more bit of news I want to pass along. Back in June I started getting my Ubuntu-related posts syndicated on UbuntuWeblogs, also known as Planet Ubuntu Users. Tiago Faria, also known as Gouki, has added Ubuntu Universe, a new area on the UbuntuWeblogs, that will expand the posts of Ubutu bloggers syndicated to include non Ubuntu related posts. This means that if a person has their technical posts on Planet Ubuntu, UbuntuWeblogs or any of the Planet websites for the Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) teams. Gouki and I sent emails back and forth this morning, and it looks like I have come up with a way to get all of my posts on the new Ubuntu Universe.

For those on WordPress.com blogs with other authors, like Nanci and I have here, I’ll share how we got the URI to submit. Have the owner of the blog go into the blog’s Appearance screen, and have them put up a widget that will let users see the articles posted by each author. Grab the link for your posts and simply add “/feeds” to the end of the URI. That should give you an RSS feed for only that author’s posts.

Peng’s links for Tuesday, 16 December

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

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

Veza’s back!

Back in October I told you about Veza, a nice open source alternative to TinyURL, but it got borked a few weeks ago and has been pretty useless. Yesterday I finally managed to post a comment on the blog of David Futcher, Ubuntu MOTU and the developer of Veza, to make sure he knows it doesn’t work.

This morning I found an email from David waiting for me, and he told me that he ended up completely rewriting the code for Veza as he switched from using Apache for his web server to Lighttpd which caused issues for his original code. Veza now uses PHP code to perform its magic and he has added “some shiny AJAXy stuff on the frontend now.” It’s definitely fancier now, as I learned when I created a Veza link to the Mac4Lin project site.

Tell your friends about Veza, and the next time you need to shorten an insanely long or complex URI, like the URI for Amazon.com’s 25 Days of Free Holiday Music promotion, let Veza shorten it. It’s great for putting links on your desktop, because Ubuntu flat out wouldn’t use a link to that Amazon promotion page with the full URI but it works fine with the Veza URI. Which means I can now get the email from Amazon where I first learned of their holiday MP3 promotion out of my Gmail inbox.

If you’ll excuse me there’s a new Dave Brubeck MP3 for me to check out, and I believe my music library has just made a place for it, once I convert it to an Ogg Vorbis file that is.

Peng’s links for Thursday, 9 October

You’d think that with the Dodgers sweeping the Phillies Cubbies so early that I’d have more time to do blog posts. I’m still not sure where the last three days have gone, but I do have a few links for you.

• DesktopLinux.com: Google rev’s photo editor for Linux. Google’s Picasa, their image editing and sharing program, has gotten even better with the beta release of version 3.0. Not only is there better integration with web albums, a new collage tool, and an auto-red-eye removal, but one of the best things is the speed of loading. It used to be a case of click the launcher and go get a cup of coffee while it loads, but when I first launched Picasa after getting it upgrade it quickly showed the splash screen and asked about migrating my old settings. While there is a repository for Linux users to help you get updated more quickly you’ll want to add their test repo to get Picasa 3’s beta.
• Julian Saraceni: Appnr, searching and finding Ubuntu apps. I don’t usually post things I see on the Ubuntu Weblogs, simply to limit how many duplicate postings they get, but Julian has a great way to find packages without remembering what the heck they’re called. It doesn’t require a sign-up or installing software no included in Ubuntu’s repos to use Appnr, either.
• David Tutcher: Veza – An Opensource TinyURL Replacement (Aplha One). I love TinyURL, especially how easy it is to get a URI that doesn’t telegraph what the link goes to, but it’s not exactly open source. But there’s a new way coming down the pike that is 100% open source. Veza turns long URIs into not just short URIs but ones that are pretty easy to remember. I look forward to when there’s a bookmarklet that grabs the long URI and starts the process like there is for TinyURL, but that’s just a matter of time. (Yes, that post is kind of old, but I wanted to check it out more before I blogged it, and then I forgot to change the flag on it in Evolution so it would come up in my list of things to blog. Sorry ’bout that.)

I have news of an update to a favored program, but there’s a slight glitch in one file. The bug was reported and resolved, but until it makes the PPA archive so we can easily grab it I’m going to make you wait to see which app it is. Trust me, it will be worth the wait.

In the meantime, I trust at least some of you will be catching game one of the NLCS tonight. I plan on obeying a wallpaper I made for at least the next week or so.

Did you see SecondLife had to push out a Security Update on Friday?

Some time back SecondLife decided they would peel the grid status messages (updates, rolling restarts, login issues, etc.) off of their main blog an put them on a stats blog under the Second Life Grid domain. While I haven’t been on SL nearly as much as I used to be, I totally missed the fact that there was a “potential security issue” that could have left malicious users able to act as if they were you, right down to stealing your Linden dollars.

I kind of have to laugh at the way the Lindens described the potential for stealing your Linden dollars.

In the case of L$ transactions, this action would be visible to you: if this were to occur, the viewer would report the transaction after it occurred in the normal blue dialog box. Also, you are always able to inspect the transaction log to see recent transactions. This would allow you to notice and report these actions for violating the Second Life Terms of Service.

This type of malicious action would constitute a violation of the Terms of Service, and would be against the law in some locations. At this time we have no evidence that this vulnerability was ever exploited.

Wow, both a violation of the ToS and against the law? I bet those meal old malicious users didn’t even think that may be the case.

Anywho, If you haven’t fired up SecondLife since Friday you may not be aware that you’re strongly advised, although not required for some odd reason, to download new viewers, whether you’re running the main viewer (version1.20.15, released 24 July) or the Release Candidate Viewer (1.21 RC2, and please don’t get me started on beta software being called RC’s).

You can get more on the SecondLife Grid Status blog. Personally I think this is just one more reason why I’m looking at the open source Meerkat viewer, although downloads are currently disabled due to SL’s security issue. I saw about the security issue on the Meerkat site, so big thanks to them for letting me know abut it.

Peng’s links for Friday, 15 August

Before I get into today’s links I want to apologize for my sister’s post about Debian’s birthday showing up on the Planet, with my picture on it nonetheless. I’ll let her know that anything tagged Ubuntu goes to the planet with my name on it so she may want to refrain from using that tag. Although it saves me the work of making sure readers of PUU know about tomorrow’s Debian Day celebration. (I’ll make sure she fixes the spelling in the post title, as well.)

• New York Times: Ruling Is a Victory for Supporters of Free Software. A federal appeals court rules for an open source programmer and also gives Creative Commons a win. John Lily from Planet Mozilla also covers this story and includes a link to a response from Creative Commons CEO Lawrence Lessig. (Full Disclosure: All articles on this blog, whether by myself or by Nanci, are covered by a Creative Commons license, as the left sidebar shows.)
• Steven Rose: Intrepid Ibex for the cautious. Another post form Steven (yes, I made sure I spelled it his way rather than my son’s way this time) has great information for anyone wanting a sneak peak at the new features in Ubuntu Intrepid without the risk of running an alpha version of an operating system. I’ve started using the PPA he lists (as well as Steven’s PPA) and I have to like I’m liking what I’m seeing so far. Except for the possible change of the default IM client from Pidgin to Empathy. I looked at Empathy and feel Empathy is much easier to set up and use.
• Bob Lord: Banks still act like phishers. After reading Mary Hammak’s  comment on my post about Bank of America and Bob’s post I’m wondering if I need to try to do more to protect my personal information. This isn’t a Chicken Little thing, it’s a pull-your-head-out-of-your-arse thing.
• Daniel Stone: ryan farmer is a spammer. Here’s a guy that thinks there’s nothing wrong with whining about a problem and not taking the time to bother with a little something many of us like to call “facts.” He (Ryan, not Daniel) also gave some of the Ubuntu leaders the gift of being signed up for spam lists, but he won’t take the time to allow someone questioning his so-called-facts on his blog. But then he was caught breaking the Ubuntu Forum house rules and then had the audacity to whine about it rather than fess up. What a maroon. The moral? People always pay attention when you least want them to.
• Atul Varma: Tab Navigation: Tradeoffs. Atul looks at a change coming in Firefox 3.1. I’m not sure how I feel about it from reading Atul’s post, but I wanted to let you guys (and gals) know that the Firefox 3 changes haven’t stopped just because Firefox 3 got uncaged. It may be a great change, but once again get ready for your browser to tell you that the way you use tabs is evidently the wrong way. (That came out a lot more pissed than I meant it to.)
• Eddie Martinez: The Myth of the Operating System Install. Every OS, whether it’s Windows, GNU/Linux or OSX, has basically the same install process. Yes, there are different details, but if you read Eddie’s post you’ll see that the basic install process of, say Linux, is no more difficult than the install process of, say, OSX. To borrow a favorite phrase from Adam, Jamie, Kari, Grant and Tory, the myth of the hard/stupid OS install is BUSTED!
• Jussi Schultink: Testing Firefox QT. KDE users rejoice! FIrefox 3 is getting a native build rather than forcing you use a web browser that’s made for a different desktop technology.
• Jorge Bernal: Is Ubuntu the new Linux? I’m not sure what Shoes is, but I’m glad they’re cross-platform (OSX, GNU/Linux, Windows). And thanks for reminding me of the proper way to refer to GNU/Linux. Please tell me Tux isn’t unemployed now.

/me checks my feeds one more time

Yep, that’s a lid. I hope everyone enjoys National Relaxation Day, and I hope you all have a great weekend. I know my weekend got better when I found out I can see my beloved Dodgers play the Brewers on national TV when their game Sunday is the TBS Game of the Week. Go Dodger Blue!

My history meme

The guys over on Planet Ubuntu have a rather long running thread of people posting their top ten commands. Now that things are quieting down a skosh I wanted to chime in with mine, even though my posts are syndicated on Planet Ubuntu Users rather than on Planet Ubuntu itself.

$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head

166 sudo
29 cd
27 evolution
20 locate
13 espeak
11 ssh-keygen
11 gpg
11 chmod
10 crontab
8 themeinfo

This list doesn’t show my daily running of Firefox for some reason, nor my use of Pidgin, let alone Google Gears or AWN. The eight runs of themeinfo was to try to get a screenshot for the August 2008 Desktop Thread over on the Ubuntu Forums.