Potentially excellent news for Linux Mint KDE users

I’m afraid I’ve fallen behind with reading posts on the Linux Mint Forums, but I see Boo, the (lead) developer behind the KDE version of Linux Mint, has shared why it’s taking so long to get Linux Mint 11 KDE. As he posted on the Mint 11 KDE development thread a couple of weeks ago there’s a very good reason we haven’t seen any updates in the Testing ISO page at the Mint Community site.

News people!!
Good and bad as it turns out, due to all the Ubuntu problems I am swapping the base from Kubuntu to Debian.
What does this mean? A bit more of a wait but it is DEBIAN!
Hopefully this wont take too long as I have the packages built and the ISO build process is very similar.

It’s not being met with unanimous cheers, though, because some people, with older hardware or other issues, aren’t able to run any of the Debian-based versions of Mint. It’s unfortunate because it seems the Ubuntu devs are definitely not making everyone happy with their delay or lack of interest in fixing bugs introduced with the release of Ubuntu 11.04. As a result KDE users will have to decide between either not upgrading their Linux Mint 10 KDE install or switching to Kubuntu or another KDE release of Linux. It’s unfortunate because Linux Mint gets so many things right, especially with their implementation of KDE, but the change will also make Mint KDE a rolling release and a bit easier to update in the future.

You can find the announcement and user responses over on the Linux Mint KDE development thread at the Linux Mint Forums.

HELP! My mouse has gone completely idiotic!

For the last month or so I’ve noticed off and on that my mouse has had it’s sensitivity settings dramatically changed. I’d try to click a link or a button in my web browser and I’d end up clicking two links, which is a real pain in the rear if I’m in Gmail and all I want to do is remove the Inbox label but end up removing both of the labels on a piece of email. Or I’d click the menubar of a window to bring it to the front and find the window suddenly maximized. Hell, just clicking the category tags for this post is almost impossible because every time I click a checkbox the system treats it as a bloody double-click and trying to click to edit a word turns into selecting the whole frigging paragraph! Grrrr!

I tried resetting the mouse settings in GNOME to no avail, and when I installed KDE on top of GNOME to begin using that DE a week ago the problem seemed to have been resolved. “Seemed” being the operative word. Today the mouse is back to being a complete PITA and I don’t know what to do to resolve it. I’ve tried Googling and found nothing. The same results specifically searching Ubuntu, KDE, and even other distro resources. I could start a thread on either the Ubuntu or Kubuntu Forums but I don’t have a clue where to even post it.

I know the issue reared it’s ugly head after getting an update from lucid-proposed or a PPA but I don’t even know what package to look at. Can anyone make a suggestion (or ten) for things I could check? I know I can try a fresh, clean install of Kubuntu but I’m not at the point where I’m ready to show GNOME the door. I still have data in GNOME apps (like Evo) to bring into a KDE app plus I’m not really sure there are no GNOME apps I want to hold on to, although I haven’t used Gnome Media Player since I moved to KDE and even Do has lost it’s preferred shortcut keys so I could assign them to Krunner.

Looking around: Considering other Linux distros

I was checking out the news at Google News today when I came across an article on Datamation called Break your Ubuntu Addiction: Three Strong Distros. I’m not looking to ditch Ubuntu like I did Firefox a couple of years ago, although some of the recent edicts from Mark Shuttleworth and company (I know there are probably some glaring examples in the last six months or so but the only one that comes to mind is the decision to move the traffic lights to the left for lucid and Shuttleworth’s statement that Ubuntu isn’t a democracy) have left me feeling I may want to look around, just to consider some GNU/Linux alternatives.

The article on Datamation looks at Meips, Fedora and PCLinuxOS, and I’m seeing a preference to KDE as the desktop environment over GNOME, but I have to say that I tried KDE briefly back when I was making the switch from Windows and I wasn’t entirely thrilled with it. Plus I’ve used GNOME for the last couple of years and I’m really used to how it works so if I switch distros I’ll probably stick with GNOME .

My question to you guys: Have you ever tried Meips or PCLinuxOS? If you have, what of you think of them? There’s a wealth of info about Fedora but I don’t really know much about the other two.

Benjamin Humphrey writes a Must Read article for anyone helping in the Ubuntu Community

One of the things I love about Facebook is that not only can I find some great articles but it gives me more information than Twitter does to help me decide if I actually want to click the link and read the article. Today I saw a link to an article on OMG! Ubuntu! written by Benjamin Humphrey. It was actually posted to Facebook twice, and the first time it gave me just enough info to make me want to read the article.

OMG! Ubuntu! writer Benjamin Humphrey shares his thoughts on Ubuntu’s standard of quality: http://goo.gl/fb/FeGmu

Since I’ve been less than wholly pleased with the upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx I was definitely curious to see what Benjamin has to say. His first paragraph was definitely written to grab the reader’s attention.

Ubuntu lives in a special place between Windows and Mac OS X reserved only for Linux: more shine than Windows, less than OS X, resulting in a steaming pile of mediocrity.

While I loved the Ubuntu experience with version 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon I can’t help noticing that the upgrades have left me less satisfied with each new release. It seems the last two upgrade cycles have been especially aggravating, with applications that I use on a regular basis breaking to the point where I have to find some hoops to jump through to get even a good measure of the function that I used before the upgrade. With the upgrade from 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope to 9.10 Karmic Koala I found that iriverter, an app I use every day to convert video files to take on my iriver E100 digital media player, can no longer read files from my DVDs to convert them to the AVI  format that my E100 can play. And now that I’ve upgraded to 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx my beloved Webilder was borked and I’m having problems just booting my system thanks to changes in how the boot screens are rendered on my Nvidia GeForce 6200 video card. (I just realized I haven’t written a report on my upgrade to lucid yet. I think I was trying to chase down bugs first and I’ve been getting some new bugs in the past week that have taken my attention. I’ll try to write my report this week for those who are still looking for it.)

If you think Benjamin’s article is simply the whining of a user who is being asked to take some extra steps to figure out how to do things you’d be wrong. Benjamin does take Ubuntu devs to task on what I think are some pretty boneheaded errors, including the fact that some of the newer “features” don’t work nearly as easily as advertised and the lack of documentation on how to use one of the features that are supposedly a big selling point for this new release.

If you are one of the programmers that help develop software for Ubuntu you should consider Benjamin’s article, Many hands make the light work; few make it shine, a Must Read. If you don’t develop code but help in the Ubuntu Forums you should consider the article as strongly recommended. In other words, if you come under either of those two groups go read the article now.  If you’re someone who is simply a user of Ubuntu you may want to read it as well, if only to make yourself aware of what Benjamin has to say.

If you’re simply considering trying Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx you may want to read it as well. And then find either an Ubuntu 9.10 Jaunty Jackalope Karmic Joala LiveCD or grab the disk image and burn it yourself. It’s not the newest and “best” release but you will find it supported for longer than any of the older Ubuntu releases. That’s right, I’m not recommending Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx to new users. If those of us who have used Ubuntu for several years are having big problems with it, it would be a mistake to use it as your introduction to the operating system.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is now available

I am happy to pass along the news that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx has officially been released. Rather than rehash the new features in the release I’ll point you to both my post from last week about its impending release , the press release announcing its release and the announcement on the Ubuntu Announcements group. You can also peruse the release notes and take the tour of the lynx. Of course before you take the upgrade please make sure you back your system up in case something goes wrong. You really don’t want to lose any of your data just because something goofed on the upgrade (not that it’s likely but you should always do a backup before running upgrades).

The Ubuntu home page has been update to show the release of 10.04 and I just fired up the Update Manager and sure enough, I’m greeted with a notice that “New Ubuntu release ’10.04 LTS’ is available.” I haven’t had a chance to fire up the RC disk I burned the other day yet (yes, I’ve been that busy this week) so I’m not taking the update just yet, but I’m hearing the update takes the 2+ hours to run that my recent fresh Karmic install required so I won’t even start the update process until tomorrow at the earliest.

There is also a brand new users manual available thanks to the Ubuntu Manual Project. The cover of the manual carries the friendly title “Getting Started with Ubuntu 10.04″ which gives a great idea of what’s inside. The Ubuntu Manual Team has put a lot of hard work into this new resource and it really shows. You may even want to snag the PDF and look it over while you’re downloading a disk image if you choose to go that route, or even put the PDF on your laptop or ebook reader and read it on your commute. As long as you’re not driving, of course.

You may not want to read it as a PDF, and if you’re thinking of printing it out you’re looking at 165 pages to print, which may take that option right off the table for you, but you can buy a physical book thanks to Lulu for a mere $9.68 plus shipping.

I’ll post a review of it sometime next week but it’s looking pretty nice from all the things I’m reading about it. I could take the update today (or tomorrow) but I really want to see how some of the changes look before I commit to the upgrade. Call me silly, but after seeing that iriverter’s rip from CD function broke with karmic  I definitely want to play with the new release before I commit myself to it.

You can finally order a free Ubuntu Lucid disk

With a mere 3 days until the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS I’ve been checking the Ubuntu ShipIt site daily to see if they’re accepting orders yet and every day I’ve still been disappointed.

Thanks to a tweet from OMG! Ubuntu! I’m tickled pink to be able to say that you can finally request your free cd’s. (Yes, I’m using OMG! Ubuntu’s link from it’s tweet rather than giving you a direct link to ShipIt. They deserve the referrer traffic.) As always “requests usually take from 4 to 6 weeks to deliver, depending on the country of shipping.”

Fix Google Gadgets for Linux’s incessant crashing with an update

I love using Google Gadgets for Linux, partly because I use two gadgets I can’t seem to find an equal to anywhere, WeatherBug Sidebar Gadget (WeatherBug for Linux just doesn’t work as well for me) and No-frills Google Mail (to know when to check my alternate Gmail accounts). There’s just one problem: The Google Gadgets in the repository (version 0.10.5-0.2ubuntu2) crashes so many times a day it’s ridiculous. When I run it from the terminal I get complaints about old JScript grammar, which I’m guessing is from the WeatherBug gadget based on the errors that are given, but it always fails with

ggl-gtk: ath.c:193: _gcry_ath_mutex_lock: Assertion `*lock ==
((ath_mutex_t) 0)' failed.
Aborted

Sometimes it will run for an hour or more, but sometimes it will crash before it even finishes loading. I finally asked about it on the discussion group and heard from James Su, one of the devs. His reply was enlightening.

First, please upgrade to 0.11.2. Second if you built GGL by yourself, please build it with libcurl-openssl rather than libcurl-gnutls

I tracked down a PPA on Launchpad for fidojones with the updated package. I added it to my packages list with

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fidojones/ppa

ran sudo apt-get update and version google-gadgets – 0.11.2-0.1ubuntu3 was ready for me to use. I took the upgrade, launched Google Gadgets again with ggl-gtk -s and voilà! Google Gadgets Sidebar hasn’t crashed since.

If you’re using Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackal fidojones has a package with version google-gadgets – 0.11.1-0.1ubuntu1 that you can use as well. If you’re already running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx you don’t have the issue since version 0.11.2-1ubuntu1 is already in the universe repo.

Yoouge thanks to James Su for the great assist in resolving my issue. I owe you a brew.

[UPDATED] It’s almost Lynx time

We have a mere 7 days until Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS is released and this morning I got an email from Steve Langasek through the Ubuntu Announcement email list letting me know that they now have a release candidate available for testing.

You can read the release notes on the Ubuntu web site to get the instructions and caveats, along with some known issues. Some of the important new features in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS are (thanks to the OMG! Ubuntu! site for their great coverage):

• Built-in integration with Twitter, identi.ca, Facebook and other social networks
• Faster booting with a cleaner look
• New icons and themes as well as some great new wallpapers
• The brand new Ubuntu One Music Store
• Improved cloud computing installer
• Dmraid “fake raid” support right out of the box

Some of the items you may need to pay particular attention to if you’re looking to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron LTS are

• Changes to the GRUB menu.lst
• Wireless regulatory domain via module options is no longer supported since 9.04
• Bonded network interfaces require hotplug-style configuration since 9.10
• Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is still disabled (since 9.04) so you may need to re-enable it
• Update notifications changed in 9.04
• MySQL 5.0 has been upgraded to 5.1 in 9.10
• /etc/event.d is no longer used (since 9.10)

As always, this release (while a release candidate) is not necessarily final code and could contain dangerous bugs that could damage your system. Please don’t use it on the computer you use for  your daily work without backing it up in the event that you find you need to roll back to your current version or restore lost or damaged files.

You can perform an upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS if you already use Ubuntu, and  download disk images to use in getting Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installed on your system, and we strongly recommend that you use torrents if possible. I snagged the rc from the torrents this morning and had the task finished in almost no time at all.

If you do use the release candidate disk images please report any issues you find with these instructions.

I’d love to be able to tell you that you can request free Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installer disks from shipit.ubuntu.com but ShipIt has been closed for well over a week, despite their promise that it’s only for “a few days”. Meh. Luckily the good folks over at OMG! Ubuntu! has news of a way to get free copies of the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS install disks from OS Discs for the next 7 days, although you’re limited to one disk per person. Luckily they can use Google Checkout, complete with letting you keep your email addy from the OS Discs databases. I’ve used Google Checkout for online purchases and have been completely satisfied. I’d take OS Discs up on their offer if I were you. Never mind about getting disks from OS Discs. It seems the offer expired long before I saw it.

One more note about OMG! Ubuntu! If you’re on Twitter you should definitely follow them to get notified when they post new articles. I hope you’ll also follow me on Twitter.

Updated 26 April: One quick update: You can now request a free Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx LTS LiveCd. Details are in this post.

Now that I tweet, do I have the best client?

Late last week I finally set up an account on Twitter so I can post share-worthy items I find without waiting to write a links post. Sharing things via Twitter has it’s pros and cons, including the fact that I spend so much time in the am getting caught up on the tweets from the 15+ hours I’ve been away from my comp that it leaves me with even less time for writing links posts. Just today it took well over 2 hours just getting caught up on tweets and re-tweeting that I’m seriously wondering if I have the best Twitter client. I know I can simply use the web-based front end for Twitter, and I do use it for some of the really old(-ish) tweets I haven’t seen, but I really prefer not to tie up my browser like that.

I looked through the Ubuntu Software Center and through both Uboontu and CrunchBang’s Ubuntu Search tools and settled on Gwibber for my primary Twitter client. I really like the fact that it can be themed, although the daily builds doesn’t like the older themes. I also like the fact that I can pull up the tweets from a single user pretty easily, which is extra handy for getting caught up after being AFK for a while. You can’t clear the users you isolate but it comes in handy first thing in the am for obvious reasons.

But Gwibber isn’t prefect, even in the current stable release. To get back to a user you previously isolated tweets from you have to hover your mouse over each icon (the simian heads on the left in my screenshot) to see which user is which, and there doesn’t seem to be much reason in the order the icons appear. Plus every time you do much of anything with a tweet it wants to refresh the list, even if you just mark a tweet as “liked”, as I do for each tweet I retweet so I can find them more easily. It makes doing multiple operations, such as marking as liked and responding to or retweeting, a real pain in the rear because it may want to refresh your list, taking the tweet you’re looking for out of the current view. If you’re looking at older tweets and retweet something you have to scroll back down, even if you’ve got the refresh frequency to 10 minutes.

I also finding Gwibber lagging my arse off so getting back to where I was just before retweeting can take quite a bit of time. I know it may be due to memory requirements of Chromium, with it’s failure to clear the cache after closing tabs, but even without Chromium open, or even freshly started before starting a Twitter session, Gwibber seems to flow through molasses.  Thanks to the lag I checked out the Pino client when I saw it mentioned on Twitter. It takes it’s look from the current active theme so it doesn’t always look as nice as Gwibber does, and it does seem to have a little more flexibility than Gwibber has in terms of interacting with each tweet, but I keep going back to Gwibber, despite the immense lag.

Does anyone know of a better Twitter client I should check out? It needs to work on GNU/Linux without WINE, so Windows apps are useless for this task, and I’d prefer an app that has packages for Ubuntu 9.10 so I don’t have to compile it. If it can use the lists I’ve set up in Twitter it’s all the better.

I look forward to hearing your suggestions, and feel free to let me know @BostonPeng on Twitter. I love getting tweets that mention me, as well as getting direct messages in Twitter. What can I say? I’m already a bit of a Twitter addict.

How did that happen over just a few days and why wasn’t I warned that this would happen?

Peng’s links for Sunday, 31 January

• Lior Kaplan: Hamakor, the Israeli Free Software Society, calls for the annulment of Software Patents. People have been calling for the end of software patents since it’s getting (almost) to the point where it’s getting tough to determine whether a new patent contains prior art due to so many patents being granted. I found this post on Planet Debian and I’m glad to see the Israeli Free Software Society taking the lead on this.
• MJ Ray: Get the Survey Monkey Off Your Back. I’ve long thought using surveymonkey was a pain in the rear because they (seem to) ask for so much from people who are just voting on a survey. It turns out that surveymonkey may be not just a pain in the rear but also violating UK accessibility and privacy laws.
• Lasse Havelund: OpenOffice.org is “a piece of crap” – or is it? OOo has gotten some pretty bad press lately so Lasse did a personal recreation of a study that had a group of teenagers try their hands at word processing and presentation management tasks using both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007, all in the name of seeing how OOo really compared. He tends to use LaTeX for his writing and hasn’t used either OOo or Office 2007 much “over the last few years.” I won’t spoil his results so you need to read his post. You may be glad you took the time to read it and you can follow his links to get more background info on the test.
• Siegfried Gevatter: GNOME Activity Journal, and installing it on Ubuntu. I’ve been hearing about this app (formerly known as GNOME Zeitgeist) and am curious about it. Siegfried some nice info on why you’d want to use it as well as some easy steps for getting it installed.
• Stephan Hermann: Is it just me, or… People have been kvetching about non-free software being included in distros like Ubuntu ever since it first came out. Stephan writes such a good post on the matter that I doubt I could have said it better myself.
• DesktopLinux.com: Second Lucid Linux alpha said to offer 15-second start-ups. Eric Brown takes a good look at the latest early test release of Ubuntu 10.04, listing both the good and bad to be seen in this bleeding edge release, including some kvetching about support for some proprietary software being included (see previous link).
• Google Chrome Blog: Over 1,500 new features for Google Chrome. Google Chrome dev Nick Baum writes about some of the new features in Chrome and includes a video walk-through for installing an extension (not one that I personally use but you may find it helpful). The post is mostly about using Chrome on a Windows-based box but some of the info is also good for Mac and GNU/Linux users, as well as users of Chromium. There’s also a great tips post on the Chrome blog about managing tabs that you may find helpful.
• Launchpad New: ACTION: Back up old sources from PPAs. It turns out that Personal Package Archives on Launchpad are a little too popular. You may need to back up some of the packages you’ve gotten from PPAs. Jonathan Lange has some info every user of software from a PPA should have.
• Bastian Venthur: How to find packages installed/updated yesterday? If you’re like me you take regular updates to the software you run and every now and then you find a problem has cropped up after updating. The problem is that sometimes you don’t recall what got updated to know where to start tracking down your issue. Bastian asked he readers for ways to find out which packages got updated or installed and he got some really good responses. This is one post you’ll want to add to your permanent reference/resource list.
• Nick Mamatas: Ursula K. LeGuin to Google: Hands off my books! Not every author is satisfied with the proposed solution to the problem of Google’s plan to digitize books to make available online.
• Carlos Garnacho: Multi-touch support in Linux/Xorg/GTK+. Apple made other OS’s jealous with their ability to use two fingers to select and modify content on their smartphones and DMPs (Digital Media Players). Now GNU/Linux users can use it, if they can resolve the dependencies, that is.
• Steve Langasek: Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS released. The Ubuntu devs have released the fourth maintenance update to Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” LTS (Long Term Support). Since Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” will also be an LTS release this will be the last maintenance release for 8.04 LTS but there are about 70 updates in this update so if you run Ubuntu 8.04 you’ll want to take this update.
• Mike Hommey: Feeling alone. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an experiment to see how much info your browser lets web servers know about you. I’m kind of worried about how much information they report about me.
• NewsAskew: Green Hornet #1 FREE! May 10, 2010… All right all you lovers of comics and Jay & Silent Bob. Kevin Smith has been lending his talents to comic books, including being the writer for the very first of the new series of Green Hornet comic books. Thanks to Free Comic Book Day you have a chance to pick it up without having to shell out any cash for it. And without risking an arrest for shoplifting!
• Nigel Tao: The Road to One Point Zerodom. Nigel is the author of the SuperSwitcher app, and he’s glad to announce that he has a goal of getting Superswitcher 1.0 out in time for the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I. Can’t. Wait.

I have more things to post but I want to give them their own posts so if you’ll allow a  little commercial promotion, I found a great product that you may join me in wanting to buy.

• QMx Insider: Put a Firefly in Your Pocket for $9.95! Fans of the Joss Whedon show Firefly and it’s follow-up movie Serenity will be glad to know that you can finally own your own Firefly-class ship without having to spend an arm and a leg. Shiny!

Have a most excellent start of February 2010!