[UPDATED] Peng’s links for Friday, 27 March

Updated to include note about the PHP version of the Ubuntu 9.04 [countdown. -Peng]

I tried to post some links yesterday but as soon as I hit the save button to lock in some tage and my text I was rewarded with a 100% blank post. Hopefully this post will last long enough to publish it.

• Pavel Rojtberg: Giving Google Earth a native look & feel. One of the biggest complaints about Google apps on Linux (other than some apps actually not being native Linux apps because they shove an extra installation of WINE down our throats) is how butt ugly they are. Pavel walks us through what we need to do to get them looking like the theme we have selected.
• Jonathan Carter: The correct way to file bugs in Ubuntu. Filing bugs is important when you help test new releases, but I found out yesterday I was doing it wrong because I went straight to Launchpad to file my bug. Jonathan lets us know not only how do to it properly but also why the way I was doing it is a bad idea.
• Steven Harms: Thank You. Steven writes a wonderful post to the people who help make Ubuntu Linux such a wonderful distribution. As for me, I’m just going to say, “What Steven wrote.”
• Tiago Vaz: Some cool audio stuff for Debian. Usually when people write about cool audio tools for GNU/Linux they’re referring to media player apps like Amarok, MPD and Totem. But Tiago has good news for musicians, especiallt guitar players, as he tells us about some virtual processing gear.
• Steve Langasek: Ubuntu 9.04 Beta released. I know this should probably get a post of it’s own, but I’m tight on time since I needed to reclaim yesterday’s links from Google Reader. The first beta release of Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” is now available for downloading. I’ll snag it this weekend and post my thoughts about it.
• Nick Ali: Ubuntu 9.04 Countdown Banner. If you have your own blog or website you may want to snag the countdown banner to help countdown the says until Ubuntu 9.04 is released. Stefano Forenza also has the code on his site, as well as tips for people like Nanci and I who aren’t allowed to use any JavaScript on their blog. That was a pain in the rear the last two releases (Thanks, WP.com) and we’re glad the devs thought of us this time around. Updated 29 March: If you can’t use JavaScript grab the PHP code from Stefano’s post. It’s working fine on our blog!
• Daniel T. Chen: Lessons Learned at Jaunty Beta. Not everything went 100%smoothly with the alpha versions of Ubuntu 9.04, and Daniel clues us in on some of the things the dev team had to deal with.

That’s it for today. I may have some links to share tomorrow, but look for our report on how Jaunty behaves on our hardware this weekend. Until then, enjoy the weekend!

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 Friday, 26 February

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

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

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