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.

Before the cage is opened…

We’re now less than a day form the release of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” (just to be clear, that’s version 9-point-one-zero, not nine-point-one) and now that I’m finally caught up with my news feeds (thanks in no small part to the great work by Antoine Pairet and Andrew Starr-Bochicchio on resolving Bug #460462 for evolution-rss I am back to using Evo for my news feeds) I’ve got some links to pass along. I won’t post links for all 62 articles I flagged as wanting to blog, but I will share a number of links that could be of direct assistance in deciding whether to hold onto Ubuntu 9.04 (or even Ubuntu 8.04 LTS if that’s what you’re using).

• Chenthill Palanisamy: Evolution 2.28.0 released!! I already mentioned some nice updates in Evo and Chenthill wrote a post on Planet GNOME that gives some more info on how Evo has been improved. Shane Fagan has another important post on backing up your Evolution data. You are going to perform a backup before you upgrade. Right?
• Fabián Rodríguez: (Almost) risk-free Karmic testing. Fabián has some very nice information on putting Ubuntu onto a USB flash drive rather than on a disk. I know some of you may be looking for just that kind of info.
• Leandro Gómez: Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 CD labels. Anyone can burn a disk and write on it with a Sharpie to label it, but do you really need to do that? Leandro has 25 pieces of artwork for labels you can use to make your home-burnt disks look even nicer. It could be just what you need to help make the perfect gift for family and friends this coming holiday season. If those aren’t your cup of espresso Ubuntu Geek has compiled a listing of other designs.
• Musings on maintaining Ubuntu: Caveats for audio in Ubuntu Karmic Beta. Granted, some of this info may be a smidge outdated now, but it has some info you may want to have as you look at the upgrade. This is a big part of why some of us recommend testing the new version with either a LiveCD (or a USB drive) before committing to the update. That way you can get an idea of any gotchas you may have coming your way. There is one thing that’s started bugging me about the upgrade, and that’s the loss of a perfectly useful volume controller and replacing it with a Sound Preferences dialog that is nowhere as usable as it was in Ubuntu 9.04.
• Alan Lord: Another Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Review. Alan has a nice review of Ubuntu 9.10 with a lot of screenshots so you can get a better look at how things look in the newest version.
• Martin Owens: Ubuntu’s Minimum Requirements. While not about the new release, Martin has a very nice look at exactly what kind of hardware you need to run Ubuntu. Bryan Quigley takes it a step further and compares it with the minimum memory requirements of some other operating systems. You should also check out Martin’s piece on The BBC Ubuntu Experiment.
• Benedict Stein: How to use Google Calendar in Evolution. Ben’s got just the info you need if you want to merge your gCalendar with your local calendar. It’s now even easier than it used to be. And if you use an encrypted home directory then you absolutely have to read another of Ben’s posts.
• David E. Cruz Avalos: Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. Want more specifics? Want more screenshots? David may have just the post you’re looking for.
• Ubuntu Geek: Nice themes for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) users. I don’t know anyone who gets a single desktop theme and never changes it. Hell, not even I do that, although I do tend to come back to the Mac4Lin themes before long. Ubuntu Geek has also found some other great themes and makes it easy to get them.
• Collin Pruitt: Advice on Downloading Ubuntu Karmic. I definitely wanted to save the best for last. If you think about snagging a disk image on Thursday you could be in for a looong wait. Colin has the key to bypassing the lag that will be created by everyone trying to get it at once. And no, it’s not “wait a day or three.”

If you want to check out an Ubuntu 9.10 Release Party you can check out the list of confirmed parties on the Ubuntu Wiki. Due to some scheduling issues the party for the Boston area, organized by the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo Team, will be held on the 7th of November.

[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

Peng’s links for Monday, 21 September

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, Virginia, Ubuntu 9.04 is now available!

Yesterday the Ubuntu devs officially released Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”, bringing the newest and best versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu to a waiting world, as well as the newest versions of Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and the Ubuntu server edition. Plus this morning I got word that the

You can take a tour of all the great new features in Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition and you can read the release notes. When you’re ready to get Ubuntu 9.04 you can download a disk image or request a free LiveCD, and if you’re currently running Ubuntu 8.10 there are instructions on how to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04.

For more info, as well as links to the other versions of Ubuntu that I listed above, you can read the official release announcement. You can also attend one of a number of release parties where you can meet others and just plain have a good time.

---

My bad.

I meant to post this yesterday, but I ended up taking the advice of James Malanowski and Tacone in their comments to my post of the 16th and blew away my old Ubuntu install and do a fresh install of 9.04, making a new profile so I could get rid of some problems that had cropped up. I thought I could simply bring in my Epiphany and Evolution data (especially the email, etc. for Evolution) and use it with no special efforts. D’oh! I should have done a proper backup from Evo and done a restore from that backup. Instead I’m having to go through the hassle of importing my messages from my old Thunderbird data all lover again. Luckily in the info on my PDA was snagged with no problem, but I’m having to manually import a veritable ton of messages into Evolution one folder at a time, then I have to recreate my message folders. I’m still not finished with that.

I was able to get MPD working again (thank the Great Penguin in the Sky), and while I am having a problem with pympd I’m back to being able to use Sonata. I also haven’t tried to use SecondLife yet (Actually I’ll connect to SL with the Open Metaverse Viewer) to see if the resolution issue got fixed but I want to get all my email, etc., working properly first. All in all I’m pretty happy with the Jackalope.

A follow-up on my upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04

As I said back on the 6th of this month I made the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope”. While most of it’s been pretty good (other than the three plus hour upgrade time and no visible improvement in the boot time on my system) there is one thing that’s bugged the living daylights out of me. Something happened while I was installing the upgrade that essentially killed my MPD/Sonata install. I’ve spent a number of hours trying to get it resolved, including completely uninstalling it and blowing away my existing configuration files to start from scratch, and what I ended up with yesterday is a complete inability to even update my MPD database. Since I use MPD/Sonata on a daily basis when I’m at my Ubuntu box the inability to use it is a deal breaker. Plus it seems that the .deb package for Google Gadgets has been edited to remove the Gmail Notifier applet, which is something I rely on several times a day to use my multiple Gmail accounts. The fact that I don’t use Firefox as my default browser anymore has added even more insult to the “injury”, and I haven’t seen a reliable way to have an applet or gadget check my multiple accounts outside of the Gmail Notifier addon for Firefox.

All of these issues may come from something I discovered over a year ago, and that’s the fact that something in my user profile has been borked. It first showed up when I was unable to do something no matter what I tried (I don’t even recall what it is at this point) but I suspect it’s gotten worse in the last year with my installing apps to try them out and getting rid of them when I decided I didn’t like them enough. I’ve decided that I’m simply going to clear out some of the config files on my primary profile, get rid of things that I don’t have in other forms (like .tar.gz’s), and back up some of my most critical data (such as bookmarks for Epiphany and my Evolution email/rss settings). Once that’s done I’m going to dig out my old Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” Live CD and do a fairly clean install, blowing away my current root partition and creating a new user profile. My /home directory resides on it’s own partition so once I make room for a new partition I’ll be able to create a new user account and simply move my documents, etc., into the new user space (and updating permissions as needed). I don’t think it will be a completely easy task, and I’m preparing myself for the very real probability that it’s going to end up being a ton of work. I know just starting that far back and upgrading the system one version at a time is going to take many hours, and I’m hoping 7.04 is the proper version to go back to. I remember starting with Ubuntu in November of 2007, and 7.04 came out in April of that year so I’m not sure why I started with that rather than Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, but I distinctly remember using Feisty so that’s where I’ll start. Nanci and I were able to set up our LCD monitors back in December 2007 so that SecondLife would let us use the 1280×1024 resolution, and I haven’t been able to do that properly in recent reinstalls so I know I need to go that far back.

The process will begin this weekend, so if I don’t get much posting done between now and when it’s done you will know why. I do have my RSS feeds available to me in the GoogleReader, which will allow me to find things I want to post about, but I still have limited access to my Ubuntu box so I’ll have to watch how much I mark for  posting for a bit.

TTFN!

I dood it

As promised I managed to snag the update to Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” Beta yesterday. The first thing I noticed, even as I was taking the update, is that the estimated time for the update was 3 and a quarter hours. Holy crap! I’ve never seen an Ubuntu update take that bloody long. EVAH. Of course one of the possible causes could be that I have so many damned apps installed, but somehow I’m not sure that’s the issue. (Although yes, I did go through and clean out some of the crap.)

Once I finally got to the reboot stage I noticed an error message about something crashing during the update. I didn’t notice what it was, but I get the feeling it’s in relation to Bug #356157 in hotkey-setup (Ubuntu): “package hotkey-setup 0.1-23ubuntu10 failed to install/upgrade: subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2”. It seems everyone is getting bitten by this bug, and even though an update came down the pipeline to fix it, I couldn’t apply the update yet. Sergios was kind enough to post very specific instructions that fixed the issue for me. In short, get to a terminal window and run this command

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/hotkey-setup

When the file opens go down to around line 46. You should see

# This entire block does nothing on desktops right now
if laptop-detect; then
do_video
;;
restart|force-reload)
$0 stop || true
$0 start
;;
esac

exit 0

What you want to do is to add a line below where it says do_video so it will now read like this:

# This entire block does nothing on desktops right now
if laptop-detect; then

do_video
fi

;;
restart|force-reload)
$0 stop || true
$0 start
;;
esac

Save the file, and then apply the update with sudo apt-get upgrade. Your problem will be solved.

I ended up with problems trying to get Avant Window Navigator (AWN) reinstalled, but that’s because I’m running the trunk packages and one of the first thing the update process does is to disable any and all third-party repositories like the Launchpad PPA’s. I went through and verified which of my PPA’s have Jaunty packages available (I have about 40 PPA’s that I’ve used from time to time and had to see if they could be enabled for 9.04 Beta) and was finally able to get my AWN back working (for the most part).

I’ve seen some really short boot times, but I just did fired up my comp (from being completely off) and from selecting the specific GRUB entry to being able to do anything on my system (with autologon) took me about two minutes. That may not be the start/end events that others are using but I’m not seeing a noticeable change in the startup time on my system. I’m also seeing that I’m still getting issues of Compiz not getting started properly so I get a nice message from AWN that it can’t see any compositing. I’m definitely going to have to try to sit down one day and spend some time in an exhaustive search for what could be causing the problem because it really bugs the living daylights out of me. What I end up having to do for now is to go to my Compiz Fusion Icon and make either reloading the window manager or manually selecting Compiz as the Window Manager, which seems to “hang” my system while Compiz does it’s thing. In the process of doing all that I have to kill my Google Gadgets Sidebar and restart it once I get Compiz running properly, which is just one more pain in the rear that I have to get resolved. I know I probably have a faulty profile and I need to create a new profile to try to get things cleaned up but I really don’t feel like going through that hassle, plus I seem to have filled up most of my partitions so I’ll need to see what I can do to clear out some space to make a new profile.

There’s a new icon on my panel for the Indicator Applet, and I’m honestly not sure if it’s useful or not. At the moment it’s showing an envelope to let me know that Evolution has a new message, and I have a feeling it’s going to stay there until I mark all of my email read, which I don’t do that often since I tend to use the unread flag to help me see the messages and articles I want to blog about or use in some other way at a later date.

One of the nice things I’m seeing is that there’s now a fade transition when Wallpaper Tray changes my desktop wallpaper. I’m not sure what’s generating the transition effect but it’s pretty nice.

During my first reboot after the update (while I was still making sure I had all my apps updated properly) I didn’t have any sound, not even the Test sound from the Sound Preferences window, but once I got all of my Gstreamer  codecs updated properly and logged out I was able to hear sounds from my comp again.

If you’re like me you use the Sessions window pretty often. It’s been renamed so typing “Sess” into Gnome Do won’t do any good anymore. It’s now called System > Preferences > Startup Applications.

Speaking of Gnome Do, I’m finding that when I use the hotkeys to call up GNOME Do 0.8.1.3 it wants to come up behind whatever window I have active unless I make the desktop the active “application”. Of course now when I try to use the hotkeys it doesn’t do that, even with calling up Do when I’ve got the cursor in Epiphany, so I’m not sure if I just needed to to do a reboot or what. I’m also noticing that I’m not seeing the Nouveau theme, even though it’s my selected theme in the Do Preferences dialog.

There’s also a very nice new feature in Synaptic. Now when you select a package you’ll see a button labeled “Get Screenshot”. When you click the button it will grab a screenshot for the application (if one’s available). They’re rather on the small side, and I haven’t seen a way to enlarge them, but it’s nice to be able to see a screenie of an app.

I seem to be having an issue with Sonata and the Music Player Daemon itself. For some reason MPD isn’t seeing any music it can play. It’s probably a change in the configuration but I didn’t keep my old config settings when the update came in. I’ll play around with it some more later on but I already miss my Sonata.

I honestly haven’t had much chance to play with the update yet, mostly because the update itself took so bloody long plus I wasted a lot of time trying to chase down the sound issue before I relogged. I strongly recommend that you snag the Ubuntu 9.04 beta iso and either burn yourself a LiveCD or put it on a flash drive and check it with that before you take it, especially while it’s still in beta. Plus make sure you backup your important files before doing any major upgrades like this. The Ubuntu 9.04 beta is for testing purposes only and shouldn’t be used on a production system (the computer you use on a daily basis). There are still some things being fixed and the members of the Ubuntu community can not be held responsible for any data loss that arises from upgrading your daily system to this beta.

Otherwise, what I’ve seen so far looks pretty good. I can’t wait to play with it more and see all of the changes and improvements the dev teams have made. :p Now if we could only get a useful spell checker in Epiphany I’d be even happier.

Peng’s links for Sunday, 29 Mar

The hell??? A Sunday links post on top of the other posts from today? You betcha.

I’m going to have to hold off on the promised post about Ubuntu 9.04. I’ve got it downloaded and burned (I’m not sure why my flash drive with it just sits there like a log’s bump) but I haven’t had a chance to do more than a quick look at it, plus I want to take the upgrade before I report on it. Yes, it looks solid enough that I’m going to snag the upgrade but before you do I strongly recommend that you check your computer with the iso on either a burned CD-ROM or a flash drive. That way you will get a better idea of how well your system will play with the Jackalope.

• Ronnie Tucker: Come grab Issue #23, hot from the digital presses! You need to read the latest issue, I’m just going to give you the link and leave it at that.
  
• Jonathan Jesse: Successful upgrade from Intrepid to Jaunty. It’s a short post, but Jonathan had an easy time going from Kubuntu 8.10 to Kubuntu 9.04 (both 64-bit versions). He also finds something he really likes, which is why you should read it regardless of which flavor of *Ubuntu you prefer.
• Isabelle Duchatelle: Kill X session in Jaunty Jackalope. The devs have decided that users don’t want to be able to use Ctrl-Alt-Backspace as an emergency way to get out of a frozen session. (Silly devs, we really do need that every now and then.) Luckily Isabelle shows us how to get it back.
• Jun Auza: Easy Way To Save Flash/YouTube Videos on Linux. Yes, Linux users like to not only watch Flash movies, we like to snag them every now and then to our hard drive so we can enjoy it without having to go back to the server to get the vid again. You know what? It’s eeeeeasy to do if you’re a GNU/Linux user.

That’s it for today. Enjoy the end of March, because April is looking pretty nice for the GNU/Linux community. Plus Opening Day is just 8 days away!

Peng’s links for Sunday, 22 Mar

As much as I tried to stay on top of my feeds this week I still end up with 25 items in my ToBlog folder. Luckily I’m going to cull out some of the older ones as well as a few things that aren’t so post-worthy at this point. But I have a great (OT) vid to share with y’all at the end.

• ArsTechnica: Get it done with GNOME Do 0.8. A very nice story on how much easier Gnome Do makes using GNOME-based GNU/Linux distros. Thanks to Peter Stuifzand over on the Do Google Group for letting me know about it.
• Jonathan Ernst: HP refunds 520$ for unused software. There was just now way I wasn’t going to share this story.
• Jon Beebe: Top 10 Reasons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu. Yes, it’s from a Linux guy, but it’s a great tongue-in-cheek list.
• Srinivasa Ragavan: Announcing ‘Anjal’- the new mail for netbooks. If you use a netbook you should definitely check out Anjal for your email client.
• Stefano Forenza: Chinese MID deploying Ubuntu by default. Speaking of netbooks, I may have to find a way to get one of these. Not only do they run my fav OS, but they’re pretty darned inexpensive as well.
• Stefano Forenze: New wallpapers for Jaunty. Don’t hold your breath. I’m liking how some of them look, although I know they won’t be everyone’s cup of espresso.
• Wouter Verhelst: Dealing with apt’s GPG signing stuff — the right way. If you use third party sources for installing and updating your GNU/Linux you know about adding GPG signing keys. Wouter has instructions for adding them in a way that doesn’t inject a security flaw, and that defeats the purpose of importing a GPG key in the first place.
• Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo: Is ext4 unsafe? The next update to Ubuntu will add support for ext4 partitions, and lately people have been talking about security concerns with ext4. Luckily Jose has info to set your mind at ease.
• Josselin Mouette: Which logo for the main GNOME menu in Debian? I could have skipped this post from Friday, but the “swirl foot” icons are so cute I may have to grab them for my own system.
• Isabelle Duchatelle: Ubuntuforums nuts and bolts. Isabelle has some very handy Ubuntu Forums links you may want to bookmark, as well as some rather nice numbers for what’s going on at UF)
• Tom Dryer: How-to Install Google Earth 5 on Ubuntu. The latest update for GE brings some really nice new features. Tom gives us a very quick and easy way to install this new version, as well as some troubleshooting info.
• Joe Barker: Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) – My Thoughts So far. Joe’s been playing with late alpha of Ubuntu 9.04 and is kind enough to let us know how it’s behaving on his system. Remember, no matter how well (or unwell) any software runs on a person’s system, Your Milage May Vary, simply because their hardware, software and particular configuration is bound to be different from yours. But so far Joe’s pretty happy with it, although I’m hearing that those of us on the Mac4Lin dev team are unhappy about yet more bloody changes to things that are affecting our software. Yet again. Grrr.
• Guillaume Desmottes: Good GNOME news. We’re just about to see a beta release of Ubuntu 9.04 and that means there is an update coming down the pike for GNOME. And as a matter of fact it came out on Wednesday. Guillaume has the best post that I’ve seen with info on what’s new in this update, next to the release notes, that is. Hell, just looking at the improvements for users makes me want to snag the beta for Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” just so I can play with it sooner!
  

I had a few other links I was going to share with y’all, but I think that’s enough for a weekend. If you’re in need of a good laugh (and some of your NCAA brackets may be in the toilet by now from what I’m hearing), check out this vid. As much as I try not to laugh at what happens to the poor feline I just can’t help myself.

Peng’s links for Saturday, 7 February

I’m baaack! It was nice to get emails from readers asking when I’ll have a new post, but it took me longer to get caught up on two weeks worth of newsfeeds than I expected. A big part of that is thanks in part to the way some of the planets I’ve subscribed to are set up. Most newsfeeds are set up so that when someone’s feed reader hits the server it presents the 10-20 newest posts, with a few sites offering as many as 50 posts. Some of the planets I read went so far back that I’m not certain but I think I may have gotten all of the posts I hadn’t seen yet.

Anyway, I had over 100 posts waiting to be read from enough sources that when I finally got Evolution fired up earlier this week I ended up with over a thousand posts and messages to deal with. I’ve decided to not share many of the older links I had found before my power supply died (yoooouge thanks to the friend who bought me a new PSU!) but I do have some posts I want to make sure you guys and gals know about.

• Jun Auza: Linux Keyboard Shortcuts: Safe Way to Exit During System Freezes. We’ve all had times where our computer seems to lock up in the middle of doing something. Windows users run some serious risks of borking their system if they simply shut the computer off and turns it back on (also known as a hard reset), but Linux users can do that with the risk of little more than losing any new data they were working on. Jun knows ways to get the system responding to you without the data loss that Ctrl-Alt-Backspace can cause when you force the end to your current session. I need to add these to my PDA so I have them handy the next time I need them.
• Jon Beebe: Installing Fonts in Ubuntu 8.10. It’s the rare user that never adds any additional fonts to their computer, and as the Mac4Lin dev team discovered the process changed when Gnome 2.22.2 was included with Ubuntu Hardy (8.04). Jon gives us the skinny on how to add fonts in Ubuntu Intrepid, and you’ll probably want to bookmark his post for future reference.
• Thomas Thurman: So why is Human so slow? It turns out that Human, the default theme on Ubuntu, takes longer then any other common theme to finish drawing the screen. (Thomas has numbers to back that statement up.) How do we fix that? (@infra: We may want to look at the Mac4Lin themes in the light of this article.)
• Michael Rooney: Gnome Do 0.8 released, awesomeness ensues! The latest version of GNOME Do has been officially released, and while I covered it when it was in alpha stage Michael gives some additional coverage to the one thing I dislike in it: the Docky theme. Some folks love it, but I’m in the camp that will stick to AWN for my dock.
• Ken Kovash: Some Firefox Users Still on Fx2. The metrics team over at Mozilla is wondering why some users haven’t upgraded to Firefox 3 yet. Ken looks at the issue, but probably doesn’t realize that some users hate the UI decisions that the Fx3 dev team made and may even hate Fx3 with the heat of a thousand nuns. I have Fx3 installed but I use it only as a backup to Epiphany and I’m considering rolling back to Fx2 as my backup browser. I sure as hell don’t want to touch Fx 3.1 with a 50-foot pole thanks to some of what I’m seeing in terms of UI decisions. (Granted, I haven’t even looked at the daily build threads over at Mozillazine in a while because I honestly don’t care that much about what the Fx devs are doing. That’s how much I hate what I’ve seen.)
• Michael Rooney: How Windows Vista, Digg, and Ubuntu landed me a Sweet Job. And you thought Vista wasn’t good for anything. Monkeys aside, Michael has a great story to tell, and anyone who has any interest in open source software should read it.

That’s almost it for now. I have two free PDF downloads that you’ll want to get onto your hard drive, but I’ll put them in a separate post.