[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

Ubuntu 9.04 reaches RC status, and orders for the next LiveCD release is now open

I  see in my inbox this morning that the Ubuntu devs have officially released the Release candidate for Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”. The official release of Ubuntu 9.04 is due in a mere six days, so now would be the time to help make sure there are no critical blocking bugs in the ISO or the release.

As always, you should check out the release notes for special instructions and caveats before downloading and installing the upgrade, as well as the short list of known bugs in the RC.

You can check out the official announcement on the ubuntu-announce mail list, as well as the announcement of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.04 Beta, which was also announced today.

I’m also happy to be able to say that Ubuntu’s ShipIt is now accepting pre-orders for the official 9.04 LiveCD. You will need to have an account with Canonical’s Launchpad site (Canonical is the parent company of Ubuntu), but it’s totally free. Even if you never report a bug or want to subscribe to a bug to keep up-to-date with it’s status, a Launchpad account is handy for those twice-yearly requests for a free LiveCD.

I had hoped to have an Ubuntu 9.04 Countdown iGoogle gadget available but for some dumb reason the bugger has never been published, despite making sure it was set to be published on multiple times. Luckily frbastida has gotten a gadget published, so you do have a chance to use the countdown in the days before the release.

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”

Ubuntu Tutorials help you get ready for Intrepid

as of the day the post was written

Christer Edwards over at the Ubuntu Tutorials website has started doing a series of posts on getting you ready to upgrade or install Ubuntu Intrepid, especially since the Release Candidate is due out tomorrow.

Yesterday’s first installment looked at network upgrades, first checking to make sure your desktop system is as up to date as possible under Hardy and then starting the move to Ubuntu 8.10.

Today’s post hasn’t gone online as of this writing, but now’s the time to subscribe to Christer’s RSS or ATOM feed so you can get the updates automatically. Just remember, this gets you software currently undergoing development testing. While the big bugs should be squashed by now there’s no guarantee that you won’t have an issue. Before you apply any of the upgrades to Intrepid make sure you read the release notes so you can see if any of the known issues will apply to you, as well as any workarounds you may need to perform. The hair you save may come from your own head.

SecondLife has another security fix

A little over a week ago I posted about a security update from SecondLife that made it harder for hackers to access your inventory and Linden Dollar balance. It turns out that they have another oopsie that was pushed out Monday evening.

If you tried to log into SecondLife since Monday evening you already know that you need to get the new viewer to log in, whether you use the officially released viewer or the release candidate viewer. You now need version 1.20.17 of the viewer or release candidate five of viewer version 1.21 to be able to log in.

Exactly what wet wrong this time? This is what they said on the SL Grid Status Report blog:

We recently updated the Second Life server and viewers to enhance the communications code. All transfer operations are now restricted to files that the user has expressly chosen, and specific directories that the viewer uses for transferring data. For the safety of all Second Life users, we are releasing this updated viewer to all Residents.

Potential vulnerabilities had been identified in those message communications directed at a Second Life viewer over the previous protocol. By taking advantage of this vulnerability, while extremely difficult technically, a malicious user could potentially use the viewer to access files on the victim’s computer. We currently have no evidence of this vulnerability ever being exploited.

I apologize for not posting this sooner but I was away from my computer for most of yesterday. It works out well, though, because yesterday they notified the readers of the grid status blog that there is currently problems rezzing objects, and they’re still working on getting the problem fixed. So if you try to rez something and can’t, they already know about the problem and they’re on the case.

The JIRA Public Issues Tracker was offline this morning, but they’ve managed to get it back online so you can once again report bugs in SecondLife and see the bugs others have reported.

While you’re in SecondLife make sure you stop by DollyRock and pick up a set of their very cool Halloween Stockings as well as their Halloween Freebie. The freebie is a very cute, and very sexy, Halloween outfit, complete with a hat. The hat does come with some straight black hair, but if the hair doesn’t work for your avatar (it doesn’t for me) at least you’ll get a sexy outfit to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve in.

Peng’s links for Saturday, 20 September

• DesktopLinux.com: Ubuntu to fund Linux development. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Ubuntu parent (and Free Software Day 2008 sponsor) Canonical has hired a team of designers to make Linux the most usable operating system in the world.
• Markus Thielman: Flash 10 RC2 for Ubuntu Hardy. Adobe has updated Flash 20 to a second release candidate (aka version 10.0.10.12) with a bunch of new features and bug fixes, and Markus was kind enough to package it and make it available the updated flashplungin-nonfreebeta his PPA. Being in his PPA means that if you’ve added his PPA to your software sources list you’ll get the update in your next upgrade cycle. (Markus’ post was written on Tuesday and I didn’t have it flagged properly for my last links post. My bad.)
• Nick Bauermeister: How to set up Compiz Fusion 0.7.4. With Compiz Fusion’s  update to 0.7.4 earlier this year (available with Ubuntu Hardy) came some new goodies you can play with. Nick once again has an updated post for how to Desktop Effects to get some really cool effects, like using the Desktop Cube and setting up transparencies, as well as making your cube into an aquarium with the Atlantis plugin. Alas, I believe the Desktop Sphere comes in a new version of CF but he still has some great settings. If you are a Linux user and use Compiz Fusion Nick’s post should be bookmarked, whether you usually bookmark pages or not.
• Scott Ritchie: “Native Ports” are not better. Many people love to rant about how using programs like WINE to run apps is bad and how devs should simply port their favorite app/game/whatever to Linux. Scott, being a pretty smart guy, gives the rant a reality check and points out that properly bringing an app to work nativity in Linux is a ton of work.
• Wine HQ News: Wine 1.1.5 Released. Speaking of WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator), the WINE devs have rolled out yet another update, with “substantial JavaScript implementation” a quite a bit more. If you have WINE HQ on your repository list you should have gotten the update this morning. If you don’t, what are you waiting for?
• Alan Pope: No competition. Have you seen the Microsoft ads with Jerry Seinfeld? They’ve been replaced by ads that take aim squarely at Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads. But those ads remind Alan of something that happened to him at a pub not to long ago.
• Ed Bott: Apple continues to deceive users. You may remember Nanci’s post from March about Apple trying to shove Safari down the throats of Windows users who have installed iTunes and the ruckus Apple got for doing it. It looks like they’re doing it again, and this time they’re not even respecting the user’s decisions on what not to install. Thanks to Asa Dotzler for bringing the matter to my attention.
• Marius Nestor: Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 6 Screenshot Tour. When I wrote about Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha 6 being released yesterday I didn’t know about this, but the good people at Softpedia have once again put together a snapshot tour of how the Ibex is coming along. I would have added this to yesterday’s post but I wanted to make sure all of our readers got this update. Thanks again to sharks from the Ubuntu Forums for letting me know this latest tour was available.

Before I hit the Publish button on this post I wanted to join Matthew Helmke in urging everyone in the United States who are eligible to vote but haven’t yet registered, check out this very comprehensive list of info on voter registration in the USA. Being a republic, the voters here don’t actually make the decisions, we elect people who will make them for us. Do you really want someone else to pick who’s going to make decisions that affect so many areas of your life, especially with the current economic crisis? If you’re a convicted felon you may want to see if you’re eligible to vote again. Some states, including Virginia and Florida, have decided that some felons are eligible to vote again. You may be able to vote again, too, so check with your local Registrar of Voters to see if you are.

Get ready to override all those annoying facelights in SecondLife

If you’ve been in SecondLife when the lights go down you know what I mean. Sometimes they’re nice and subtle, but other times they’re so fricking bright that they light up an entire room. The problem is that they can mess up a sim owner’s carefully designed lighting, as if you forced the sun to noon when the sim owner recommends that you force the sun to midnight to enjoy the full effect.

Our hero Torley Linden has ridden to the rescue once again, telling us about a new setting in the new 1.21 Release Candidate will let you completely disable facelights, as well as “particle-emitting attachments.”

Thank you, Torley!

/me hopes Torley’s wife won’t mind my walking up and placing a big, wet kiss on his avatar.

Peng’s links for Friday, 12 September

• Wladimir Palant: Filtering HTML code in Adblock Plus. Firefox can now allow extensions to inspect and modify responses to HTTP requests before the sender gets it (coming soon to Firefox 3.0.3), and Adblock Plus is taking advantage of it by letting you use HTML code to prevent malicious JavaScript from running on yoru computer. The developer of Adblock Plus wrote a fairly technical article about how to do it, but it’s definitely worth the read.
• Tom Dryer: Test OpenOffice 3 Release Candidate 1. OpenOffice.org version 3 has some great new features and Tom has step-by-step instructions for you to get OOo3 installed so you can start checking it out, as well as instructions for removing it if you decide you want to wait for it to get into the Ubuntu repos.
• Og Maciel: BillReminder “Royal with cheese” released. Version 0.3.2 of Og’s BillReminder software has a number of bug fixes and translations to make this already good software even better.
• Ton Dryer: Control your Desktop with Mouse Gestures. If you use the Mouse Gestures extension for Firefox you know how easy it can be to use your mouse to do things. Now you can control your Linux system with gestures thanks to Easystroke.

Mac4Lin 1.0 has a new support thread and an RC

Late yesterday Anirudh Acharya, aka infra_red_dude, started a new support thread for the Mac4Lin Transformation Pack on the Ubuntu Forums. The old thread was moved to the archive section of the forums some time back and a couple weeks ago it had been locked so there was no good way to get assistance for it. But Anirudh, the developer of Mac4Lin, has opened a new thread so people with questions about it can go there.

In addition he has put out a Release Candidate for Mac4Lin 1.0. It’s been in the works for quite some time, and it isn’t 100% complete yet as the installation script still forces some manual installation of components and the documentation isn’t complete yet. In the announcement he says

This is the version 1.0 Release Candidate. Some components are still under development. Currently the shell script is not able to set the GDM theme, cursor theme, sounds, emerald theme. They need to be manually set.

Also components like Firefox3, Thunderbird theme, awn theme/plugins etc. are still under development. The Mozilla themes may not be stable. Hence use the non-core components of Mac4Lin at your own risk. Documentation is still in the pipeline. I decided to release the RC anyway so that patrons can start using it and update to the stable version when development is complete.

Here’s a list of the improvements and additions awaiting users in Mac4Lin version 1.0.

• New! Automated Installer in the form of a shell script
• New GDM theme
• Supports the newest version of GNOME and Xfce
• New Mozilla themes specifically built for Mac4Lin
• Adium style AWN status icons for Pidgin
• Mac style scrollbars, menus
• Other tweaks in GTK theme
• Adium sounds for Pidgin
• New usplash

The install instructions are pretty simple now.

Download the Mac4Lin_v1.0_RC.tar.gz archive to any folder. Extract the archive and run Mac4Lin_Install_v1.0_RC.sh file.

Earlier this year Mac4Lin 0.4 was selected as a recipient of the 2008 FOSS India Award and is available from UptoDown.com. Version 1.0 looks even better from the beta releases. (Yes, I’ve been a beta tester but Anirudh asked me to keep that to myself until it was released. I’m hoping the release of the RC is close enough.) You can get the RC from SourceForge, and look for a final release in the near future.

Peng’s links for Monday, 18 August

• Markus Thielmann: Adobe updates Flash 10 to RC. Flash 10 is a little closer to release, although it seems some new bugs were introduced for x64 users. Markus looks at not only the update but also gives info for possibly dealing with issues in the RC.
• Jonathan Carter: Not blogging enough? No, it’s not a question of where either Nanci nor our buddy Sus has been lately. Jonathan posts a small collection of links, but within the post is a response to Mark Shuttleworth’s challenge to make Ubuntu prettier than OSX. (I meant to blog the challenge to Ubuntu devs but I see that I didn’t. My bad.)
• David Futcher: Announcing Freespeech: Simple Cross-Platform Text To Speech. Some may consider text-to-speech just a toy, but there are a lot of people for whom it’s a must have. And this is truly cross-platform, working on not just on Linux but also Windows and Mac.
• Douglass Clem: Comcast Gives Cold-Shoulder To Non-Profit School Running Linux. I was checking out this week’s issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter when I found this story about a Florida school that had to deal with the joy of getting Comcast support for their Linux system. The boys and girls at Comcast really need to support Linux, especially since they already support OSX and Unix, and both Linux and OSX share a basis in Unix. I trust that Comcast tech support guy got enough detention to help him realize that they should support Linux, too.