Get more info on the decision to dump the Gimp from lucid

Sunday’s link post included a link to Stefano Forenza’s post about the Gimp being removed from plans for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Linx. I was checking out a video posted by Alan Pope that was on Planet Ubuntu last week and now I have a better understanding of why they made the choice.

Alan posted some videos from the Ubuntu/Lucid Developer Summit, and he also posted a separate video about application selection in the default install. After watching the video I feel a lot better about Gimp being pulled. It also makes me want to check out Eye of Gnome again, and they even mentioned my favorite image viewer, gThumb.

The video also has a discussion about the rather Jabba-sized list of games that are in the default install, and it looks like not only will we be able to cherry-pick what we want but also be able to ditch games we don’t want. As late as Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has a base package of games and if you want to ditch one you have to lose them all. They also looked at including gbrainy, a game that I’ve mentioned in the past.

If you’re interested in not only what decisions are being made for the next version of Ubuntu you should check out all of the videos on the Ubuntu Developers’ YouTube channel. It will take some time to watch them all, but it’s definitely worth checking out.

Peng’s links for Saturday, 14 November

That’s right, I’m finally getting another links post written. I’m sorry it took so long. I’ve been trying to run down some bugs, and when I haven’t been on bug hunts things have been simply crazy here in Boston.

I’ve got a couple of things from early this month, but I ended up dropping some of the article I noticed last month because they’re just to old to post. I promise to try to do better and do what I can to get at least a post on every week.

• Alan Pope: A Question of Perspective. There are definitely some complaints about Ubuntu 9.10, and not just the things I wrote about last month. One user even calls the new release a “total fail.” That’s overly harsh IMO, and Alan reminds us of some very important facts about the upgrade.
• Jordi Mas: gbrainy 1.20. Back in June I mentioned this great open source version of those brain training games you see advertised for the Nintendo DS. There’s a new version out and it’s even better than it was before with six new games. It’s available in most major GNU/Linux distros (although it may not be up to date), and there’s even a version for running on Windows. Sorry, Mac users, you need to run an emulator to enjoy it, but at least you don’t need a DS any more to have fun while training your gray matter.
• Martin Pitt: My desktop backup solution. Backing up your system regularly is important, as we all know. Martin didn’t like any of the packaged backup solutions so he came up with his own. He walks us through it, and it’s so simple even my technologically-challenged (late-)wife could have used it.
• Vincent Untz: GNOME 3.0 in September 2010. Vincent has the announcement for the new version of GNOME, as well as what it means for users of GNOME 2.30. Andre Klapper has some links to more info.
• Panji Nushantara: How To Change Windows Key Logo to Ubuntu for Free. It may be a minor detail, but why do GNU/Linux users have to use keyboards with logos for that closed-source OS from Redmond? We don’t have to any longer, thanks to System76.
• Ara Pulido: Ubuntu Testing Team. Think that testing software is a piece of cake? Think it’s too hard? Ara has news for you either way, and yes, even you can help test the next version of Ubuntu.
• Martin Owens, Karmic Art, What the Paintbrush is Saying. Martin has found some great Ubuntu-themed artwork on deviantArt. Check them out, and if you have any you’ve created why not share them as well?
• Risto H. Kurppa: Smile – a great photo show software for Linux. Not only is it easy to use, it gives some damned nice results.
• Miguel de Icaza: The future of Moonlight. Miguel has some updates for us, although it isn’t a software update just yet. If you think you even might want to enjoy Silverlight content Miguel has some good news for you.
• Aurélien Jarno: Thought of the day. It’s a short post, but if you want to see a new feature in a software app you should take the time to read it.
• Colin Watson: Tissue of lies. Some knucklehead has posted that there will be a service pack for Ubuntu 9.10 in this coming spring. (Ubuntu releases new versions every six months, not service packs.) I’m passing it along, not to give the asshat more “ink” but to make sure our readers know it’s just a bunch of malarkey.

That’s it for today. Before I go I want to congratulate Dodgers center fielder Matt Kemp and second baseman Orlando “O-Dawg” Hudson on winning Gold Glove Awards this week. Congrats also go out to outfielders Kemp and Andre Ethier for receiving Silver Slugger Awards this week. I have to wonder if Juan Pierre would be getting honored if only Manny hadn’t been the team’s primary right fielder this year. There are still some awards to be handed out this week so hopefully we’ll have more good news for Chavez Ravine before the month is out.

Have you gotten your koala yet?

The bad news is that everyone and their brother (or sister) seems to be either trying to get the disk image to burn or trying to perform the upgrade. Randy Cole posted a comment on the Mass. Ubuntu Local Community maillist that the upgrade script being used is “extremely inefficient.” But as Paul Smith points out in his response, “Probably your better bet is just to wait a week or so. Then it won’t be so bad.”

If you’re finding that downloading the disk image seems to be flowing through molasses, it’s because the download servers are getting hammered on all fronts. You may want to try the download via BitTorrent if you can. I’m hearing that torrent downloads are going pretty fast as people have finished their download and making it available to others via torrents, in fact Randy posted a response to Paul’s advice and pointed out that he got the got the ISO in about an hour from torrents. Yes, Virginia, there are files being shared via torrents that are perfectly legitimate. Go figure, eh?

If you’re not sure if you want to take the time to even download an ISO file your can burn to test out the latest version of Ubuntu, you may want to take the tour of all of the features and benefits that Ubuntu 9.10 brings to the table.

Once you get Ubuntu 9.10 installed you will want to check out an article by Danny Piccirillo, another member of the Mass. Ubuntu LoCo Team, Top things to do after installing Ubuntu Linux 9.10 Karmic Koala. It’s filled with great advice, in fact I plan on going through it once I finish checking my email to see if there’s anything I missed in the past week and a half of using the beta.

[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

Have you requested your free karma-laden LiveCD yet?

I’ve been working on my review of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” Beta but the week has been busy enough that I’m hoping I can get it finished and published tomorrow, but I realized that I hadn’t checked to see if the LiveCD’s are available for pre-order in a while. They are, and I suspect they’ve been available for a bit and my brain just didn’t read the page yet.

If you’d like a free, professionally published Ubuntu 9.10 LiveCD just head on over to shipit.ubuntu.com and place your request. As with previous versions, you will need to be a registered user of the Launchpad site, but there’s absolutely no charge to join. They can take up to ten weeks to arrive once they ship, so if you don’t want to have to wait that long you can always download a disk image once the new version is released.

Want to buy a larger quantity of LiveCD’s? You can place orders for them at the ubuntushop/US, or in the international Canonical Store if you live outside of the US. A 10-pack of Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition disks is a mere $5 plus shipping, or you can get a bulk order of at 100 or 200 and get free shipping! The disks you want to pay for will ship in early November, but I think you’ll find them worth the wait. While you’re at the Ubuntu or Canonical stores you should take a little time and see all the great Ubuntu swag you can get to help you let people know that you love the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux at some pretty sweet prices.

Counting the Days

Yesterday the Ubuntu devs released Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” Beta was Thursday, and after a quick check of the new LiveCD I must say the update looks pretty nice. Just booting in with the LiveCD brought a very nice new feature that I have to write about in the coming days. I saw a message that one of my partitions has a number of errors, something I suspected but hadn’t confirmed yet. You should definitely grab the ISO file and burn the disc yourself to see some of the great improvements coming down the pipeline for us.

You’re also asked to help test some of the new goodies, and we really do need as many people as possible to test the new beta on their own computer since everyone’s computer is different and you may find a problem that nobody else catches. Of course this is a beta release and should not be used on the computer you use for your day-to-day computing tasks. It’s very possible that there’s a really nasty bug out there that may cause some major issues for you, and as much as we’d like to say you won’t find any major bugs we simply can’t promise that. Yet.

I’ll try to write my review of at least the LiveCD in the coming days (I’m not sure I’m ready to upgrade my Ubuntu box to 9.10 yet since it is my primary comp and I still have some tasks to complete with 9.04), and I also want to pass along some links to what others are saying about the beta.

With the release of the beta we also have a new countdown available. Unfortunately they still don’t have an option for those of us who can’t use JavaScript so you won’t see the real countdown on the right until someone is kind enough to create a PHP version of the countdown. Thanks to Jeffrey Detras for blogging the new countdown on Ubuntu Weblogs, which is where I saw the countdown has come out.

First the Jackalope, then the Lynx

[Corrected the version names. -Peng]

As I mentioned in the previous post, Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has reached it’s sixth, and probably last, alpha version. Not only does that mean that it should hit beta very soon (it’s scheduled for 1 October) it also means that it should have hit the feature freeze by now. And that means that the next version of Ubuntu should get its name soon.

We usually post an item when the new codename, but this time we have something even better. Over the weekend Mark Shuttleworth made the announcement as he was speaking via video to UbuCon at the Atlanta Linux Fest. Since the vid is on YouTube I’ll post it here rather than sending you off to another site to see it.

Image courtesy Wikipedia

Yes, Ubuntu 10.04, an LTS (long term support) release, will be called the Lucid Lynx. It’s nice to see the Ubuntu community will be sharing the feline love next April.

Suggestions are already coming for the 10.10 version of Ubuntu, although they may break the normal naming scheme and coordinate the name with the Debian release. I guess only time will tell on that one.

Good news for open source loving musos

I have some things that I want to post from my usual sources (hopefully tomorow), but I saw this on Google News and I wanted to make sure it got posted before I forgot about it. Or left an icon on my desktop for so long it’s no longer newsworthy, but it’s practically the same things.

The good news was seen on Nillabyte.com, a tech news and rumor site, and it’s about the so-called fact that if you want to make music you have to use a Mac. This is ignoring all of the great software available like Cubase, cakewalk, etc., for Windows users, not to mention all the great open source titles available for Linux.

Karl Martineau over at Nillabyte has the tale of a music professional who switched all of his Mac live and recording gear over to Ubuntu.

Now if it only didn’t make me miss working as a soundguy.

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.

Running GNU/Linux and seeing CrunchBang in your kernel list? We’ve got a fix for it.

[Updated to include a response from corenominal himself with one final fix some may need. -Peng]

I usually don’t look at the Grub kernel list when I boot my Ubuntu box, but last month I noticed that all of the kernels in my list showed “crunchbang” rather than “Ubuntu 9.04″. I did some searching and found a thread on the Ubuntu Forums about the issue and dstew made a great comment that helped me track down the problem.

It turns out it came from Philip Newborough’s PPA , which I have in my Third-party sources list. Philip, aka corenominal, has some great packages in his PPA, some of which Nanci has written about previously. If you have his PPA in your /etc/apt/sources.list you may have gotten update notices for grub or one of the other apps he has packages for. If you accepted his grub package you may have unconsciously had your /boot/grub/menu.list updated.

This is because Philip is one of the driving forces behind CrunchBang Linux, a GNU/Linux distro based on Ubuntu but designed to be faster, not to mention prettier (as their wiki states, “Finally, unlike Ubuntu, CrunchBang Linux isn’t brown ” ) and has several CrunchBang packages in his PPA. While I can’t confirm this with 100% certainty, I suspect the change got made when I accepted grub - 0.97-29ubuntu50-1crunchbang1 as an update.

The solution

There are a few things you can do to get rid of the “CrunchBang” on your boot menu. The first is to roll back grub to the previous, official Ubuntu Jaunty, package. Open Synaptic (System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager), and once it opens do a search for Grub (Edit > Search or Ctrl-F). Once you find grub select it and to go Package > Force Version. You will want to select the highest version that doesn’t include “crunchbang”. On my system the version I want is version 0.97-29ubuntu53 (jaunty), but your system may be different. Now apply the change you made by either clicking the icon on the toolbar (it’s a green check mark, but your theme may be different), using Edit > Apply Marked Changes, or by using the Ctrl-P shortcut. Once the change has been made, go ahead and lock the version on grub by selecting the package and using Edit > Lock Version. That way you won’t be prompted to apply that upgrade again in the future. At this point I strongly recommend that you disable his PPA until you know there’s an update in his packages that you know you need. While it may not be needed, I recommend at least logging out and back in to finalize the changes you just made, although you will need to reboot to actually see if the changes show up in your boot list.

Unfortunately I’m seeing that this process doesn’t actually undo the changes to your /boot/grub/menu.list, the file used to present you with the kernel options at boot time. If you have the application Starup Manager (SUM), you can you can run that to at least verify that the kernel carries the identifier “Ubuntu 9.04″ rather than “CrunchBang”. When I opened /boot/grub/menu.list in the Text Editor (gedit) to see if the change had been made my kernel list still showed “CrunchBang” (which is what prompted this post in the first place), but once I ran SUM it showed that my kernels did carry the “Ubuntu 9.04″ name. Once I closed SUM the menu.list, which I still had open in gedit, had been updated on my hard drive, and sure enough the kernels now showed the identifier “Ubuntu 9.04″. I’m not sure what exactly happened, but I’m glad it did.

If that doesn’t resolve things for you, or if you don’t use SUM, you will need to open /boot/grub/menu.list in a text editor with administrative permissions (backing up the current file first!) by running this in a terminal window:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.list

Scroll down to where you see ## ## End Default Options ##. Below that is the list of kernels available for booting into. Change the title on each kernel listing to change “CrunchBang” to “Ubuntu 9.04″, or whatever you want the title to read, then save the file and close the window. The next time you boot your computer look at the kernel menu and you should see that the options no longer carry the moniker CrunchBag.

I have emailed Philip about this, and if he gives me information to pass along I’ll add it.

Update 2:30 PM: I got a response from Philip and he didn’t realize putting the packages on his PPAwould cause problems, and he’s pulled them. As far as this particular issue, you definitely want to roll back to the official version of grub, as detailed above. For after that I’ll quote Philip’s email.

Regarding fixing up your grub boot list, if you have already rolled back the package, you should be able to run the following command to remove the CrunchBang references:

sudo update-grub

Apologies again for the boob.

That should take care of any issues you’re still experiencing. If anyone runs into Philip someplace, I’d buy him a pint. He’s definitely earned it for all the good work he’s done for the Linux community, whether you use any package from his PPA or not.

Thanks again, Philip. You rock.