Linux Lover

2009: Year of the Linux Handheld?

2009-01-09T08:09:00.000-08:00

Palm's new Pre handheld will run a Linux-based OS

A common inside joke on Slashdot is the "Year of the Linux Desktop", a revelation about each upcoming year being the mythical time when Linux will obtain wide-scale adoption on desktop PCs. Although the number of PCs running Linux has increased each year, a new emergent trend is that Linux is becoming a popular on more consumer handheld devices.

The reason for Linux's rise in popularity on cellphones is that cell manufacturers (Eg. Motorola) are being forced to ditch their simpler, proprietary operating systems that run on the "dumbphones" they sell because a more powerful operating system is needed to handle better multitasking and internet connectivity. Windows Mobile has been a popular pick with manufacturers because it meets the needs of smartphones, but the licensing costs are enough to make manufacturers like HTC experiment with other platforms, like they did with Google's Android on their HTC G1.

Similarly, Palm has just announced their brand new Pre smartphone, which just so happens to be powered by Linux. Palm's "OS 2.0" (or WebOS, as it is now known as) has been in the works for as long as anyone can remember, and if you check out Engadget's videos of the Pre, you'll find out just how hard they were working.

With the devices like the Palm Pre and the upcoming swath of Android phones, 2009 might be the year that Linux starts challenging Microsoft's dominance in the smartphone arena. At the same time, it will be interesting to see how Linux holds up in the ongoing netbook race as well.

If devices like the Asus Eee PC continue to ship with Linux, it would not be surprising if Microsoft started offering manufacturers crippled versions of Vista for netbooks at a significantly discounted price. If Microsoft were to do that, I think we'd see Linux's market share on netbooks decline because a crippled Vista would be easier for average Joe to use for email/web/IM than Linux and the cost advantage of Linux would not be as good. Still, Microsoft already missed the boat with netbooks - There is no Windows Vista Netbook Edition, as there needed to have been early last year in order for Microsoft to have crushed Linux on netbooks. Instead, manufacturers found that companies like Xandros were willing to provide small, fast, and flexible Linux distributions to meet the needs of their netbook target audience, while Microsoft wasn't interested. This was undoubtedly a good thing for Linux adoption.

The Linux-powered Pandora gaming handheld is due out in Q1 2009. (Yes, this render looks like it was made in 3D Studio Max circa 1998...)

In 2009, Linux will also see interesting applications in devices like the Pandora gaming handheld (a spiritual successor to the GP2X). A 600 MHz ARM processor, 800x480 screen, 802.11g, Bluetooth, USB 2.0 host, and a purported 10 hours of battery life - This handheld sounds like a gamer's dream.

However, the success of any handheld device hinges on one thing being done superbly well; Software, software, software. If the games for Pandora are bad, not even hackability can save it. If the software on the Palm Pre turns out to be garbage, same fate. One can start to see a pattern emerging though - Linux has been successful on netbooks because the software stack of Firefox/Thunderbird/Pidgin is rock solid. The software that tackles the primary use cases of netbooks is fantastic (largely in part because Firefox, Thunderbird, and Pidgin are simply mature, well-run software projects). The tricky part with Pandora is that its primary use-case (gaming) does not have a fantastic stack of off-the-shelf open source software to run, perhaps beyond emulators. No offense, but Supertux isn't exactly what I'd like to be playing on Pandora.

There is nothing magical about running Linux that will make a device better for end-users. It can cut down development and licensing costs, but ultimately the fate of Linux on handhelds in 2009 will come down to the quality of the software that runs on it. Let's hope it goes better than last year.

Has Linux lost the ISV battle?

2008-09-07T15:47:00.000-07:00

For as long as anyone can remember, one of the big problems with Linux has been the lack of commercial applications. Independent software vendors (ISVs) are generally sticking to Windows or OS X, resulting in very little commercial software being available for Linux. Free software ideologies aside, there are many commercial applications that Linux would benefit from being able to run.

As a cross-platform software developer, there are many challenging issues that are unique to developing on Linux. First and foremost, there is the issue of binary compatibility.

In order to build a x86 Linux binary that runs on as many desktop Linux distributions as possible, the most widely documented procedure is to simply build your application on the oldest distribution you can find. Most Linux libraries are backwards-compatible, meaning an application compiled against older version will run with newer versions of the library. In theory, this seems like a reasonable way to make a universal Linux binary. In practice, things are very different - Do you statically link or dynamically link and bundle the libraries? How exactly does one do all of this? Is it practical to roll this procedure into your build system? Furthermore, where is the official documentation for this procedure? What are the best practices for producing a universal x86 Linux binary?

Another issue is software distribution. As a commerical software developer, how do you distribute your software to as many customers as possible? You'd need to create DEB and RPM packages, and probably have some generic graphical installer package as well. On Windows, a single installer .EXE will install on 2000, XP, Vista, etc. On Linux, you either need to create tons of packages, or you have to limit your customer base by creating packages for only the most popular distros. Already you've multiplied the amount of effort required to develop for Linux manyfold.

Additionally, you're fighting an uphill battle against open source software. If Adobe made a version of Photoshop for Linux (and allowed you to buy DEBs from their site), most people would still just install GIMP through Synaptic or Ubuntu's Add/Remove Applications dialog. Even worse (for Adobe), GIMP is installed on every Ubuntu system by default. The best Adobe can hope for is to offer DEBs via their site, and hope that people have a priori knowledge of their product, and go to their website to buy it. There is no "App Store" for Ubuntu, and perhaps there should be because distributions certainly don't make it easy to sell your software for Linux.

Many of these issues that are hindering independent software vendors from developing applications for Linux could be alleviated by much better organization by the Linux Foundation. When I originally heard about the Linux Standard Base (LSB), I was excited at the prospect of finally having universal x86 binaries for Linux, and perhaps it would finally open the door for more commercial Linux applications, I thought. However, to date, I can count the number of LSB certified applications on one hand. Mass adoption of Linux by ISVs did not happen, and I can't say that I blame them. If I were a developer coming from Windows, I wouldn't know where to start. The Linux Foundation's getting started guide includes an article on porting your application to the LSB, but that's for existing Linux applications, not for applications that already run on another platform.

If I were a developer looking to write a new application on Linux, I would not know where to begin. Do I use GTK or QT? wxWidgets? What are the standard system libraries on Linux? Where is everything documented? There is no central documentation repository that guides Linux developers and provides answers to this question. Windows developers have MSDN, OS X developers have Apple's Developer Connection, Linux developers have nothing but a bunch of scattered webpages, each trying to convince you that their library is the best one to use. This is not a productive approach, and an organization like the Linux Foundation should make a serious effort to give developers the information they need to develop their applications quickly. You can't expect developers coming from Windows to know what libraries to use by googling for answers - There needs to be some centralized site that provides developers with the answers they need. To me, this highlights the lack of leadership in the Linux desktop community.

In the kernel, it's very clear who is in charge. There is a clear structure of command, and this allows the kernel developers to work as an effective organization. Within the userspace (ie. libraries and software applications), we do not see the same command structure. We have Freedesktop.org creating "standards" and backend software for the Linux platform, but of the software hosted on it, it claims:

None of this is "endorsed" by anyone or implied to be standard software, remember that freedesktop.org is a collaboration forum, so anyone is encouraged to host stuff here if it's on-topic.

What desktop Linux appears to have is a plethora of organizations acting independently (creating libraries, etc.), with no clear cross-organization leadership. Freedesktop.org has been successful in getting many of these organizations to cooperate and has undoubtably resulted in an improved desktop Linux (see HAL and DBus), but it doesn't seem to be preaching a clear vision to those organizations, nor providing any guidance for new developers wishing to take advantage of the new technologies it has fostered.

Many of my views presented here have been shaped by my experience writing proprietary software on an embedded Linux platform. I've worked with engineers who've never written software for Linux, and they have a hard time answering the questions they have because Linux doesn't have something like MSDN. It's very easy to make bad decisions about what libraries to use on Linux due to the lack of centralized documentation.

The nightmare of binary compatibility, lack of support from Linux distributions, and the absence of centralized documentation and guidance for Linux software developers make it a difficult and expensive platform to develop on. It's a great platform to slap together little applications on, but when you have to deal seriously with the issues that independent software vendors have to deal with when developing desktop applications, Linux as a platform simply isn't worth the effort.

* Update: According to Phoronix, CyberLink DVD playing software appears to be for sale for Ubuntu in the Canonical Store. Two thoughts on this:

Might this be start of the Ubuntu app store?
CyberLink is just experimenting with this, they don't expect to make a lot of money from it. They make their money from distribution deals like getting bundled with DVD-ROMs, or more recently, getting bundled with Linux-based Netbooks/MIDs, not from selling their software in stores. I suspect this is also an experiment on Canonical's part, as they gauge the response of Ubuntu users and find the optimal way to integrate this into Ubuntu (hopefully in Add/Remove Applications one day).

Ubuntu and the ASUS P5Q-E Motherboard

2008-09-07T15:37:00.000-07:00

I built a brand new PC a few weeks ago, and getting my ASUS P5Q-E motherboard to work in Linux took a few tweaks. I had taken my harddrive out of my old PC and dropped it right into the new PC, expecting it to work. Ubuntu managed to start booting, but it hanged at the earliest bootup splash screen, where the progress bar bounces back and forth. GRUB had managed to boot the kernel image, but something was wrong - The kernel image couldn't find my hard disks, so it wasn't booting.

To solve this problem, I had to change the following BIOS options:

Under MAIN / Storage Configuration, I had to change "Configure SATA as ..." to [AHCI]. This allowed the kernel to find my disks and boot.
I experienced some weird USB problems while booting, and so under ADVANCED / USB Configuration, I had to change "BIOS EHCI Hand-Off" to [Disabled].
For good luck, I also made sure ACPI 2.0 was enabled under power saving.

Hopefully someone finds this useful. When I first booted and Ubuntu didn't boot, I thought to myself, "Damn, I should have checked if this new Intel chipset has good support in the kernel". I was worried the motherboard just wasn't going to work. However, after tweaking those BIOS options, things are working fine. +1 for Linux.

Random things

2008-09-07T15:29:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last update, but I'd like to start practicing writing again, so I'd better start blogging more often. Since 2006, I've been involved with a growing open source project and that's been eating up most of my free time.

In the meantime, I'm still a die-hard Linux fan, although I haven't kept up with the latest and greatest stuff as much. I've also recently started experimenting with (drumroll) Windows Vista, and I've been impressed overall with it. My wireless USB stick has the same problems in Vista as it does in Linux, so I guess that's a good thing for Linux (?!). :)

Also on my list of random things to write about is Phoronix. Phoronix is a well-written Linux news site that's written and organized in a style that's aimed at Linux hardware enthusiasts. The editor(s) there do an excellent job of covering the latest and greatest developments in the Linux software world as well. It's definitely worth adding to your RSS reader.

Aha, I just remembered a topic for a post I wanted to write (I have most of the post written down on a napkin here). Next up, how to make Linux work with your ASUS P5Q-E motherboard. Stay tuned.

To iPhone or not to iPhone...

2008-06-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

$199 USD for a 3G iPhone, with a soul-stealing ridiculously-priced contract.

Is it worth it?

I've been considering getting an iPhone when it launches in Canada on July 11th, but rumours indicate that it's going to cost about $90 CAD/month for service with Rogers. I currently pay about $10 CAD/month for a cheapo prepaid cellphone. In 2 months I'll be moving across the country, so now is a convenient time to reconsider my options. I've decided that if I were to get an iPhone, it'd replace my landline. Does it make it any more affordable? No, $90/month on a contract for 3 years still seems insane to me.

The massive draw with the iPhone for me is the software. The sheer amount of cool applications that are going to be released for it make it very appealing, plus the stock software (email, web browser) are top notch. On the other hand, it's a nightmare if you want to make it sync with Linux.

What're my other options? Stick with the $10 CAD/month cheapo phone, and possibly invest in something else for mobile internet. This is where Linux comes back into play...

The Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition has caught my eye. A little known fact is that Canada already has a nation-wide WiMAX network, with access offered by both of our big telcos (as Rogers Portable Internet and Bell Sympatico Unplugged). For about $60 CAD/month (tax inc.), it looks like I can get 1.5 Mbps WiMAX which I believe will work with the N810. As an added bonus, I could just use this WiMAX connection as my internet connection at home too.

Lastly, did I mention that the N810 runs Linux? Nokia's device runs OS 2008 and it looks Android-ready too. I'm a fan of Linux-based embedded devices (like the GP2X), so this adds a bit of hackability to the thing. Unfortunately, the N810 WiMAX Edition doesn't look like it comes out for another month, so we'll have to see what the reviews are like when it's released. Until then, I'll keep pondering...

Debian Bug Screws us All

2008-05-13T16:35:00.000-07:00

This morning, I spotted this nasty tidbit on Slashdot: Debian Bug Leaves Private SSL/SSH Keys Guessable

It turns out a maintainer of the OpenSSL package on Debian removed the "seeding" of the random number generator that is used to generate, among other things, SSH keys. For those unfamiliar with random number generators, they work by generating a sequence of pseudo-random numbers based on some initial seed. The default value most programmers use when seeding their random number generators is simply the time, because it changes quickly and ensures a great deal of variability in what the generated random sequence of numbers will look like. If you seed your random number generator with the same number every time, you'll end up with the same sequence of numbers being generated over and over again - It won't be random at all!

What this means to Debian users is that your SSH keys are not random, and they're much easier to crack/guess because of this. Because Ubuntu is based on Debian, and the OpenSSL packages are relatively untouched by the Ubuntu maintainers, this bug also affects all Ubuntu users.

Both Debian and Ubuntu have released security updates which fix the problem and ensure that any future keys that are generated have the expected level of security. However, keys that have already been generated need to be expired and replaced.

Fortunately, the Ubuntu update that you will receive through update-manager takes care of this for you. For a desktop user, this is sufficient. For system administrators who might use SSH keys widely, it's a massive pain in the ass.

There's much more to this story though - A Slashdot user dug up the original Debian bug report that lead to the "fix" that removed the seeding. The OpenSSL developers used uninitialized memory to seed their random number generator, which caused a warning in Valgrind that someone playing with the code noticed. Valgrind is a tool to help find memory leaks and memory corruption (ie. programmers' mistakes). However, the original code wasn't erroneous at all - The programmer that wrote that code must have asserted that uninitialized memory has more "randomness" than the time, which may or may not have been a good assumption. Regardless, it's clear that the real mistake was "fixing" this code without fully understanding the consequences, and the Debian package maintainers (and the developer that submitted the patch) are at fault.

What happened here is a nightmare scenario for an open source software developer like myself. When my development team makes a release, we do some distribution packaging ourselves, but we also count on other people to make packages for other distributions. If any of those package maintainers modify our software in any way, we can no longer guarantee the quality of our software. If this sounds familiar, you might remember that this is exactly why Mozilla wanted Debian to stop using the Firefox name back in 2006. Mozilla wanted to ensure that all of their users got "Firefox", not "Firefox plus Joe Blow's crappy tweaks", and I completely agree with them. As more open source projects grow and become professionally run, I can see this becoming a more common issue in the future.

Finally, there is the question of whether or not the OpenSSL vulnerability was introduced intentionally. To give the poor guy the benefit of the doubt, I think it was an honest mistake. He fixed something that he thought was broken, and it turns out he was wrong - an understandable, human mistake. The uploader that approved his change probably should have caught the mistake, but again, he too was also only human. Is it possible that this was intentional? Sure. Is it possible that this could be used as a blueprint for future open source sabotage? Absolutely.

Are we any less likely to see security flaws introduced like this again? Absolutely not. It's the process through which packages are maintained and updated that is broken here.

The solution? Discuss.

Disclaimer: Don't go on a witch-hunt for the Debian guys who made mistakes here. Stuff like this happens, and if it were you or I in their shoes, we may have made the exact same mistake. I stress once again that it's the process of distribution package management that is flawed, not the people involved.

Blogger Captcha Cracked?

2008-05-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

I just 50+ emails from Blogger saying new comments were posted on my blog:

Up until now, the spam situation with Blogger was decent. I'd only ever had the odd spam comment come through and I had been able delete them all. With this massive barrage though, I don't have the patience to go through and delete them all, especially knowing that it can happen again.

For now, I'll just hope that blogger deletes the spammer's account and all of the comments he posted.

Toy Story, Cave Story, .... Ubuntu Story ?

2008-05-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

About once a month, I receive an email solicitation asking me to promote something on my blog. 9/10 times I just ignore it, because they're usually asking me to promote a spam blog. Not cool.

It looks like we did better with this month's email. Rather than a pointless spam blog, it was instead regarding UbuntuStory.com, which seems like a friendly advertisement for Ubuntu by a community member. I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but if you haven't tried Ubuntu yet, I'd check out the site.

Sorry, your first impression from that site will be wrong - Ubuntu won't take you on a wild African adventure, but it can make your computer much less of a pain in the ass to use. :)

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta Thoughts

2008-04-22T21:36:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I decided to upgrade to the Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Beta. I've been having problems with internet connection and I thought an upgrade might fix it, but now I'm convinced it's a problem with my LAN segment, not my card. Anyways, among the shiny new goodness:

Firefox 3 - Great new GTK look on all the buttons, they don't look like they're from 1993 anymore!
Wait, more crazy Firefox 3 goodness - apparently now I can cut and paste images around by right-clicking on them in the Blogger "Compose" mode.
Notebooks in Tomboy! If you're a Tomboy Notes user, you won't believe how useful this is. I currently have 78 notes in Tomboy, so being able to organize them is a huge win for me.

Tracker (left) and Tomboy (right)

Tracker for indexing, now with a spiffy tray icon. More importantly, when you right-click on the tray icon, you can easily pause the data indexing (for example, if you have an older PC like me and want to fire up a game that pushes your system, like Quake Wars)
The new screen resolution and display setup dialog. I've read lots of people evangelizing about this - it's supposed to make setting up a second display easier, such as when you're plugging in a projector. I haven't tested this personally though, and I'll believe it when I see it.

Lots of little improvements to Evolution as well. It handles multiple operations nicer now, and seems quite a bit snappier. Big thanks to the Evolution team for their hard work.
Other random things that I haven't personally tested: The new gio stuff in Nautilus is supposed to make doing multiple file copies simultaneously "better", and the old VFS mounts have been replaced with a new system. I use SSH mounts through Gnome frequently, so I'm looking forward to playing with the new system.

I'm sure there's lots of other little things I've yet to stumble across, and it'll take about a month for me to notice any little bugs that crop up. So far so good though - it looks like we've got another good Ubuntu release!

HOWTO: Figure out what's using your soundcard in Linux

2008-01-11T14:52:00.000-08:00

It's 2008, and while Linux audio is getting better for desktop users, I still occasionally find myself running into a situation where one application is tying up my soundcard. Sometimes I'll try to run jackd through qjackctl and it'll fail because Firefox has a flash video loaded in it or something like that.

Anyways, to figure out what's using your soundcard on Linux, you can run:

sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp*
sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*

The first command above will list all the OSS applications using your sound hardware, and the latter will tackle ALSA applications.

For example, if I run those commands with nothing running:

gamegod@home:~/$ sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp*
gamegod@home:~/$ sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
                USER        PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  gamegod    6236 F.... mixer_applet2

The output above is showing me that GNOME's mixer applet is using the "control" interface on my soundcard. This won't interfere with any applications, so you can always safely keep this running.

As another example, if I run Mixxx (software for DJs) before running those commands, I'll see:

gamegod@home:~/$ sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp*
gamegod@home:~/$ sudo fuser -v /dev/snd/*
              USER          PID ACCESS COMMAND
/dev/snd/controlC0:  gamegod    6236 F.... mixer_applet2
/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p:   gamegod   12936 F...m mixxx
/dev/snd/seq:        gamegod   12936 F.... mixxx

This time the output above is showing me that Mixxx is using my soundcard's audio first ouput interface (pcmC0D0p corresponds to ALSA's hw:0,0), as well as ALSA's MIDI interface.

KDE 4.0 Released!

2008-01-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

After having sworn off KDE many years ago, I might just have to give it a second shot - KDE 4.0 was just released, and brings a massive overhaul to the desktop environment. Congratulations to the entire KDE team on making this release happen. A lot of very talented people put a lot of hard work into this.

If you're looking for eye-candy, check out the KDE 4 screenshots on their site. Kickoff and KRunner look well thought-out, and I'm itching to give them a try. They also look like they're better integrated into the desktop environment than their GNOME equivalents (Deskbar and any of those XP/Vista-style system panel clones).

If you want to give it a spin, the source and binary packages for several distros are available on the KDE 4.0.0 info page. Packages for (K)Ubuntu 7.10 are available along with a LiveCD here.

Good stuff.

HOWTO: Get more visualizations in Totem/Rhythmbox

2007-11-16T19:33:00.000-08:00

After 4 years, I finally got sick of GOOM and decided to figure out how to get more visualizers in Totem and Rhythmbox.

This looks really trippy when it's in motion

Turns out all you need to do is install the libvisual-0.4-plugins package through Synaptic. Piece of cake.

In Gutsy this buys you eight more visualizers, although I was hoping for more than that*. I feel the urge to write a cool visualizer one day, seems like a good weekend project.

* I was hoping that it'd be like installing xscreensaver-gl-extra and xscreensaver-data-extra, where you get a ton of really funky new screensavers.

So you remember all of those Mac vs. Vista ads...

2007-11-12T19:31:00.000-08:00

... and you remember the whole "deny or allow" thing?

Well, I don't know why Apple was making fun of Vista, because they decided to join in on the fun in Leopard:

Yes, I know Skype is an application from the Internet. Where the hell do you think I get 99% of my applications from?

It seems like Linux is the only OS moving forwards these days...

Leopard (kinda) hates Ubuntu

2007-11-09T12:58:00.000-08:00

I ended up picking up a MacBook a few weeks ago, and I've been dual booting Ubuntu and OS X (Tiger) on it. Ubuntu's been a bit of a let-down because there's been so many quirks, and so I spend most of my time in OS X on the thing. (I still use Ubuntu on my desktop machine.)

Anyways, I got my Leopard upgrade DVD, and found a nice little surprise when I tried to upgrade: The Leopard upgrader wants to format my whole drive because it can't find my OS X partition or something. The manual and website say that I'm supposed to be able to upgrade if I used a beta version of Bootcamp to dual-boot (which I did), but apparently it wants to format my drive because I've got Linux installed instead of Windows in the other partition.

Did I mention that it wants to format my whole drive? (my old OS X partition too)

It's not like Leopard doesn't have enough problems already....

Update: Arrrrrrg, bloody Apple lingo. The installer says it wants to format my "Macintosh HD", which I forgot isn't actually my whole hard-drive (despite the HD moniker). So it just wants to format my OS X partition.... which is the one I use and store all my data on.... *sigh*

Ubuntu 7.10 Released

2007-10-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu 7.10 was released yesterday after another exciting development cycle, bringing a slew of new features and bug fixes. Among my favourites are:

New printer setup dialog (System->Administration->Printing) - Looks a lot more complete now:

The Firefox plugin finder is integrated into apt now! Not only does the plugin finder detect the correct plugin, but it'll download and install it from the Ubuntu apt repositories. Sweet integrated goodness. (The Add-Ons/Extensions window also has an "Get Ubuntu Add-ons" thing that's tied into apt as well.)

After using the easy codec installation that Ubuntu 7.04 brought along with the new Firefox-apt integration in 7.10, I've realized that my dream of "intelligent package suggestion" has been fulfilled. Way to go Ubuntu/GNOME team!

I've been using Gutsy for almost 2 months now, and I could never go back to an earlier version of Ubuntu. As Dan mentioned, the latest version of Rhythmbox totally kicks ass (it's worth upgrading to Gutsy for that alone). WINE has much nicer integration into the Applications menu now too. There's just tons of nice little features that make Ubuntu 7.10 awesome.

I'm going to try to pick up a laptop this weekend (maybe an Acer TravelMate 6292 or an Acer Aspire 5920), so we'll see how 7.10 handles Intel's new Santa Rosa chipset.

Grappling the Gutsy Gibbon

2007-10-19T08:54:00.000-07:00

I've been invited by GameGod to contribute to this blog giving ongoing updates of my foray into the world of Linux. However, I haven't figured out if it's because he thinks some readers may find it illuminating to see how a total newb is getting along with Ubuntu, or if its because he is sick of helping me with this stuff and wants the comments section to take his place. Regardless, here I am.

As far as operating systems go, I've been using Win2K for probably about 5-6 years. Sure, theres probably something nice about XP, but 2K has been good and stable for me and I dont want to rock the boat. However, I've been tinkering around with an old P3 800mhz thats been kicking around, getting it to run Ubuntu 7.04 so I can make a mythtv box. Everything has been going pretty well, except for the fact that while I'm at school I have a hard time justifying the $150 in hardware I need to purchase to get the thing off the ground. The one thing I did learn in that experience though is that iTunes is a piece of garbage and I want to use Rhythmbox full time. Therefore, I've decided to make the plunge and give this "dual booting" nonsense a try so I can have Win2k for gaming, and Ubuntu for living.

My progress so far is as follows:
Downloaded the new version of Ubuntu (7.10). Booted off the CD to give it a shot. Sound doesn't work, wireless doesn't work. The built-in wireless networking app cant detect the network, and freezes the whole system when I try to manually connect. That may just be a problem with the boot cd, or it may be that I dont have the correct drivers at the moment (I've got a USB key with drivers, apps, and instructions so I hope that'll cure what ails me. Also, here's a handy list of supported wireless cards. Link). After wrestling with some HDs for a while (sata is new to me, and thats a long story that has nothing to do with linux) I've got them both up and running.
The game plan is to format the new 100gb drive to ntfs, backup my files from my primary drive to the 100gb, wipe the primary (a 320gb), partition it with about 100gb for windows, 200 gb for Ubuntu. Install windows, install linux, dual boot. Then if I want, format the 100gb to ext3 (or whatever the linux format is), and then use that.
My first HD problem was with gparted. Got the 100gb HD in, set it to delete the current partition, and format it to NTFS. Everything looked good, but it did everything unusually quickly and then crashed. Cool. Thanks gparted. So I booted back into windows, checked it out, and everything looked fine (I threw a file on it, loaded it from the 100gb). I decided though that I'd like to make sure everything was working properly and make sure there wasnt some corrupted section thats going to make me lose my files. I figured I would give gparted another shot so I used the boot CD, got into Ubuntu, performed the same operation as I did before, only this time it failed making the drive NTFS, and would crash every time I tried to do anything with that drive. So then I booted into Win2K, and formatted it via My Computer in less than 2 minutes without any problems. As it stands, I'm copying my folder of files-to-backup over to the 100gb.
Well actually, this is the second time. The first time the operation failed because it said that one of the files couldnt be copied because the name was too long (what the hell? If the name was too long, why didnt they make me rename it when I saved it on my primary drive? I checked the name, and its just a pdf file without any of the banned characters in the name). So I moved the subfolder with that file in it out of the back-up folder to try again. But because half of the stuff was copied on in whichever order, I decided to delete everything and try again. The recycle-bin told me that some of the files had names too long to be put into the recycle bin....

Why do I have the feeling that this is just the beginning?

Update: I think I have figured out the "filename too long" problem. I guess the "filename" isn't just the name of the file itself, but the location of the file as well. So instead of garbage.pdf, its c:\stuff\garbage.pdf. But if you have it on the desktop or something, its c:\documentsandsettings\users\username\desktop\stuff\garbage.pdf. So apparently for whichever reason, theres a limit to how big the filename would go. I always had this folder of stuff right in c:\ so there was never a problem with the largish filenames. However, once I put it on my desktop, or in a subfolder in my backup folder, they became so large that I couldn't open some of the files (which I definitely have done before). So I guess I learned something new there.
Also, there wont be any updates from me until monday at the least. Going home for the weekend, and bringing back my Win2k cd so I can finish this off. I'll also be meeting up with Gamegod, so I'll be able to ask for annoyingly detailed questions about how to get dual-booting set up

New iPod Firmware Screws Linux Users

2007-09-15T23:05:00.000-07:00

Miguel de Icaza writes:

Yesterday after rumors that new iPods require a cryptographic checksum on the song database we confirmed that Banshee can no longer store songs on the new iPods.
The new firmware will now refuse to play any songs that you legally own unless you use Apple's iTunes (which is only supported for Windows and MacOS)

Read on...

In the meantime, I'll be sticking to my iRiver U10. (Cowon MP3 players are supposed to be pretty Linux friendly as well.)

Update: And thus begins the game of cat-and-mouse - The new iPod checksum has been cracked.

Ubuntu finally gets graphical X configuration

2007-09-04T06:02:00.000-07:00

Almost 3 years after Ubuntu's first release, they've finally added graphical X configuration. Hopefully no more editing your /etc/X11/xorg.conf by hand...

Ubuntu 7.10 users should find it easier to change their graphics settings

Graphics card selection tab

Mark Shuttleworth on MCA Podcast

2007-08-09T16:16:00.000-07:00

I was tipped off that the mighty Mark Shuttleworth is going to be talking about the new Ubuntu Mobile on the next Mobile Computing Authority podcast. The show will be broadcast live at 9 AM EST on August 11th, and available for download after that. More information here.

Ubuntu on one of those UMPCs... drool...

Evolution 2.11.6: A mail client smarter than I

2007-08-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

After putting off doing a fresh install of Ubuntu for almost 2 years (it's just too easy to dist-upgrade), I did a fresh install of Gutsy Gibbon. Among other neat surprises (which I'll try to blog about), this one almost made me fall off my chair:

Being the total klutz that I am, I had forgotten to attach a file to an email I wrote before I clicked send. To my surprise, Evolution made an educated guess that I had done exactly that, and gave me a warning!

I love Evolution + GNOME.

Weekly Blog Round-up

2007-05-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere's full of good reads this week:

I found Paul Buchheit's Amazingly Bad APIs funny because it chronicles my experience with Java quite nicely. (... and man, people do love over-complicating their abstraction patterns in Java)
Benjamin Otte's "Distros..." is another rant I can related to. It'd be nice if the libraries you relied on "upstream" always worked, but the truth is, they don't. I often wonder if we're the only ones who actually use a certain library (who's name I won't mention), because we seem to be the only ones complaining about certain issues we've had. (The solution? Fix it ourselves - we've started getting involved with the upstream guys to help them out....)
Free Gamer's still rocking, and I was pleased to read that a Linux build of SoulFu is kicking around. (SoulFu's written by the same author(s) as Egoboo, which was a little 3D hack-and-slash game.)
MacSlow's been working on more eye-candy goodness, this time a little video player using gstreamer, OpenGL, Cairo, and GTK+. He's hoping one day some of this stuff might end up helping beautify Totem, which I'm all for.

Dear Lazyweb: Software patent lawsuits?

2007-05-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

Dear lazyweb,

A Microsoft exec recently remarked that they're "not litigating". Some people seemed to interpret that as meaning, "we're not going to sue users", although Microsoft wasn't explicit about who they weren't going to sue.

My question for anyone law-savvy is: Can Microsoft (or any other software company) sue users for using software which allegedly violates software patents?

For example, if I buy a DVD player which was manufactured and sold illegally without royalty payments to the DVD consortium (etc.), it's the manufacturer of the DVD player that violated the patents. If I bought and use the DVD player, how on Earth am I the one that broke the law?

Following that logic, how on Earth are users liable when it's the developers who allegedly violated the software patents?

Update: Interesting twist, which supports the growing evidence that Microsoft's statements were/are FUD.

Dell to ship preloaded Ubuntu

2007-05-01T15:59:00.000-07:00

Dell announced today* that they're going to offer Ubuntu on some of their desktop and notebook models, which I think is great news for everyone. Dell's winning points (and more selling computers) with/to the Linux community, Canonical's completed another step in their plan for world domination, and there's a chance that all Linux users will benefit from better driver support.

A tiny bit more information is available on Canonical's site, and a bunch more on Dell's blog (including a video with Mark Shuttleworth). Check it out!

* I have to point out that I called this one in advance in my last post.
;)

Ubuntu 7.04 Released!

2007-04-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

It's been a long six-month wait, but she's finally arrived. Ubuntu 7.04 was released today, and brings a slew of improvements to the popular desktop Linux distribution. Even Michael Dell's in on the buzz this time.*

Among the features that the Ubuntu team has been hard at work on are:

Restricted Driver Manager - Allows you to easily install proprietary drivers for your hardware (like NVidia and some wifi drivers)
Desktop-Effects - Ubuntu now has a single-click way of enabling wobbly windows!
Easier codec installation - Suggests which package(s) you need to install in order to playback movies/audio when you don't have the right codec installed. (Hmmm, reminds me of something...)

I've been using Ubuntu 7.04 for a few weeks now, and I've found that it's much more polished than Edgy was (in terms of application stability and nice little touches). If you're going to dist-upgrade to 7.04, you probably won't notice very much difference besides the new artwork and the features I listed above. In fact, if you've already got all the right codecs installed, you'll probably never even see the easy codec installation thing (I haven't). That being said, these are still useful features because they save new users a good chunk of customization time.

Anyways, long story short: 7.04 is the best Ubuntu release since Dapper (6.06), and I think it might be finally worth giving a copy of it to your non-Linux user friends, without fear of total reject. Features like the restricted driver manager, migration assistant, and easy codec installation make Ubuntu an ever more user-friendly OS, and I think it's going to continue to impress people and make waves over the next few years.

* If you haven't been following the whole Dell/Linux thing, Dell launched this IdeaStorm site a while back to help get ideas from their users. They were totally swamped with requests for Linux and now they're trying to figure out which distro people want. Educated speculation: I'm expecting a big announcement sometime in the next few months about Dell offering Ubuntu on their laptops (which is a huge win for both Canonical and Ubuntu users, because it means we'll probably be getting better hardware support for those laptops.) Why? I just don't see them advertising that Michael Dell uses Ubuntu and then turning around and offering SUSE on their laptops.

Wine-Doors Screencast

2007-04-16T23:20:00.000-07:00

I just noticed a short screencast of Wine-Doors in action over on their site:

Looking pretty slick...

Beryl and Compiz to Merge

2007-03-24T09:57:00.000-07:00

I'll be honest - I didn't see this one happening anytime soon, but alas, it is going to happen (and I suppose sooner is better than later.)

A while after Compiz and XGL's initial release as the enabler of crazy wobbly windows on Linux, some developers from the community didn't like David Reeveman's/Novell's slightly restricted (yet open source) development process that was occuring with Compiz. Personally, I thought Compiz's "I'll work on it for 9 months, not bother with releases, and end up with something amazing" development process worked pretty darn well - Before XGL, there were endless discussions about how to make OS X-like graphics a reality on Linux, none of which materialized into anything really usable. Instead of bickering about it (*cough* design by committee) for years, David decided to just do it. And he did it. And for a 0.1 release, Compiz was pretty damn good.

Can't argue with results.

However, some developers from the community who were getting involved with Compiz didn't like the way development looked like it was going to proceed, so they forked, giving us Beryl. Those developers worked on adding more crazy effects and in the short term took the focus away from stability, but within the last few months it seems like the developers efforts to stabilize Beryl have been successful. In the meantime, the Compiz team has also been plugging away and adding new features to Compiz as well.

This brings us to March 23, 2007, when QuinnStorm announced that Beryl will remerge with Compiz. It won't be easy for the teams to merge, but I think they both realize now that the long-term benefits of cooperation far outway the short-term setbacks that each team will incur.

Now that's progress.

New Ubuntu Site

2007-03-16T23:08:00.000-07:00

I don't know how long it's been up for, but I just noticed the Ubuntu site got a nice overhaul (as did the Ubuntu Forums).

The website looks much more professional now, and feels like it's got a bit more "buzz" to it. Good stuff.

Mixxx 1.5.0 Released

2007-03-03T13:28:00.000-08:00

If you're looking for good free DJ software, Mixxx is the king of the hill. Not only is it much more mature than any other open source DJ application, but it also beats all the spyware riddled freeware apps that do similar things.

After two years of work, the Mixxx team has released version 1.5.0, which adds a decent amount of new features as well as a ton of bug fixes. Mixxx is an interesting project to take a look into because there's something to be learnt from it's history. It started in 2001 as one of the first "digital DJ" apps, before big commercial competitors like Traktor entered the scene. Unfortunately, after several years of development and a couple of releases, the project ended up somewhat abandoned. However, last year the project was revived by a couple of developers and after many months of hard work, they've whipped the project back into shape and finally made a new release. One of the reasons it took so long to fix Mixxx was because it's development seemed to have lost focus - There were tons of unmaintained features added to it over the years, many of which didn't end up working properly on all platforms. (Mixxx is a cross-platform application, and that makes certain things like hardware controller support very tricky.) However, things are looking much better for Mixxx now.

At the end of the day, Mixxx (as an open source project) is a good example of three things:
1) A very well written program who's original developers thought long and hard when designing it.
2) A project that lost it's way as more developers got involved. It looks like not enough discretion was used when screening patches, which eventually lead to tons of bugs and half-working features.
3) The way in which the open source process can give new life to a dead project. After switching maintainers, the project's focus was tightened up and forced developers to fix bugs rather than create them. Now that the ball's rolling once again, you can certainly expect cool new stuff to come from Mixxx in the future.

That being said, if you're interested in DJing, Mixxx is a must-have application for Linux. For more information, check out Mixxx's features or head on over and give it a download (Windows, OS X, and Linux).

The Truth About Switching

2007-02-28T09:28:00.000-08:00

I don't usually post specifically about other blog posts, but I'm going to make an exception here. Alan Pope's "The Truth About Switching" is an honest look at what switching to Ubuntu is really like, and I have to say that it summarizes my own feelings very nicely.

If you're thinking about switching from Windows to Ubuntu, it's definitely worth a read.

Visio, and another reason I love Linux

2007-02-07T20:48:00.000-08:00

Today I had a nice reminder of one of the things I like best about Linux.

I've found myself being forced to draw some UML diagrams in Microsoft Visio 2003, and to be quite honest, I've been totally disappointed with the software. One of the things that bugs me is that Visio seems to have absolutely no intelligence whatsoever when it comes to laying out labels on associations - It'll blindly draw numbers on top of your classes and other diagrams.

You would think after Visio 2000 and Visio 2002 that stupid stuff like this would be fixed, but nope, this is Microsoft, and this is exactly why I love Linux.

Stupid bugs like this get fixed in open source software, because the users are the developers. With each release of Ubuntu (and other good pieces of open source software), there are not only new features added, but also a ton of bug fixes. I've yet to be affected by a bug in Ubuntu that's persisted across releases, and these guys release a new version every six months - not every couple of years (a la Microsoft). That's pretty damn good.

I think another reason why problems get fixed in open source projects is because their software development processes sometimes leave big companies like Microsoft in the dust. Quite honestly, Launchpad and other bug trackers (and the way in which they are used transparently) seems to play a large role in many projects' rapid success by providing developers with organization and a strong continual link to their users. It's this constant interaction, an excellent feedback loop, that some companies seem to lack.

Sure, many open source projects don't follow strict development processes, but you know what?
They not only get their software built, but they get it built faster and better.

Note: If you're looking for a good open source Visio replacement, here's some good ones:

Ubuntu - Intelligent Package Suggestion in Action

2007-02-01T06:59:00.000-08:00

Some of you might remember me rambling about how important intelligent package suggestion is to a desktop user, and what a killer feature it would be in Linux.

I've noted earlier that something along these lines was in the works for the next release of Ubuntu (7.04/Feisty Fawn).

Well, I'm glad to say, it looks like it's finally materialized. The new "gnome-app-installer" now automatically suggests what package the user needs to install (and guides them through the process) in order to play DivX/XviD, MP3, and WMV/WMA files.

Check out this Flickr gallery showing off the new system.

Interestingly enough, some of this infrastructure is already enabled in Edgy Eft. I noticed that if I double-click on a .mid file in Nautilus, the app installer pops up and searches for programs that will play MIDI files.

Lastly, I'd like to thank all the hard workers that brought this feature to reality. Sitting on your ass blogging about something isn't that constructive - The Ubuntu guys (and everyone that actually worked on this) deserves a big thanks. They're making Ubuntu a great deal easier to use for new users, and I think the whole community will reap the benefits in the end.

Ubuntu: Headed in the Right Direction

2007-01-08T18:29:00.000-08:00

Nothing like good news to ring in the new year. Someone on Digg recently noticed that there's a new meta-package in Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn, that allows users to easily install Macromedia Flash, Sun's Java, MP3 playback support in GStreamer apps (eg. Banshee, Rhythmbox), and Microsoft's core TrueType fonts. There's probably a few other big multimedia codecs that I'm missing that are enabled by this as well.

That's a nifty chunk of the common customizations that Ubuntu users perform, hopefully making the distribution that much easier to use. (Although, hopefully there'll be an obvious way for a new user to install this meta-package, without a priori knowledge.)

I've been noticeably lacking on the Ubuntu news lately, and it's certainly not for a lack of news. Ubuntu's made several steps in the right direction towards making the OS more and more usable:

Let's start off with the common customizations that are already in the works. These types of tweaks have the potential to made EasyUbuntu and Automatix a thing of the past.
Among those common customizations, a big one is enabling the "universe" and "multiverse" repositories by default. This feature will almost definitely make it into Feisty, if it isn't already. Enabling these repositories by default unlocks a huge amount of software to new users, without them having to mess around with the "Software Sources" interface. (Again, prior knowledge is currently needed.)
Feisty Fawn will now use hardware acceleration for it's X server out-of-the-box. This will allow Feisty to run Compiz or Beryl out-of-the-box too. However, the biggest boon for users will be the fact that the official NVIDIA and ATI drivers that enable this acceleration will be installed by default. This saves new users from scrambling to figure out why their beloved OpenGL games all run so slowly.
Lastly, the Ubuntu developers are now acknowledging the importance of a so called "bullet proof X server". This means not only providing a useful fall-back for when the X server dies, but also giving the user an easy to use interface for fixing their X server.

HOWTO: Griffin Powermate in The GIMP

2006-12-27T20:12:00.000-08:00

This Christmas, I was graciously given a slick Griffin Powermate from my brother.

It's a nifty little aluminum knob for your PC, with an extremely smooth touch and a blue LED that makes the bottom glow. There's support in the Linux kernel for the device, and it acts like a regular old input device. If you're crafty, you can edit your xorg.conf to make it control X, or you can use other software's built-in support for the device. Both the free DJ software Mixxx and The Gimp support the device. Mixxx's support needs a bit of work, but the device works great in The Gimp. However, there doesn't seem to be any documentation on how to actually set up the Powermate in The Gimp, so here we go:

1. Edit your ~/.gimp-2.2/controllerrc, and add the following to the end of the file:

(GimpControllerInfo "MIDI"
    (enabled yes)
    (debug-events yes)
    (controller "ControllerLinuxInput"
        (device "/dev/input/event2"))
    (mapping
        (map "button-0" "select-all")
        (map "dial-turn-left" "context-tool-select-previous")
        (map "dial-turn-right" "context-tool-select-next")))

If you have more than just a keyboard and mouse hooked up to your PC, you might need to change the "/dev/input/event2" to a different device (/dev/input/event3 or something).

2. Set up the permissions for the Griffin Powermate device (run this in a terminal):

sudo chmod a+r /dev/input/event2

Again, replacing the device with the proper one if your's is different. (Also, see the note at the end of the HOWTO about setting this at bootup.)

3. Fire up The Gimp and change the mappings in the preferences as you see fit:

4. That's it, enjoy!

There's probably a good way of setting the proper permissions (like in step 2) by default at bootup, but I can't figure it out. If anyone does figure it out, drop me a comment. In the meantime, use your favourite hack to run the command in step 2 at bootup ("/etc/rc.local" is a good enough place). :)

PDF + Cube = PDF Cube?

2006-12-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

PDF Cube uses the OpenGL API to add spinning cube page transitions to PDF documents

PDF Cube is an OpenGL API-based PDF viewer that adds a compiz/Keynote-like spinning cube trasition effect to your PDF presentations (including Latex, Beamer and Prosper). You can also zoom on 5 predefined areas of any presentation page with a smooth zooming effect.

That pretty much says it all. It's still pretty alpha-quality, but it might be part of a cool solution to the presentation software dilemma some day. If you're interested, check it out.

GPL kernel modules, reverse DRM, and the future of Linux

2006-12-14T20:10:00.000-08:00

I was doing my daily read of Digg today, and I stumbled across this: Linus Torvalds on the "GPL only modules" debate.

The issue at hand is whether the kernel should only be allowed to load GPLed modules (that is, drivers). That's right, some of the Linux kernel developers want to do away completely with binary-only (ie. closed source/proprietary) drivers, like the (good) Nvidia and ATI ones.

On the one hand, Andrew Morton writes:

Give people 12 months warning (time to work out what they're going to do,
talk with the legal dept, etc) then make the kernel load only GPL-tagged
modules.

I think I'd favour that. It would aid those people who are trying to
obtain device specs, and who are persuading organisations to GPL their drivers.

(Whereas the patch which is proposed in this thread hinders those people)

The patch in question would allow more components of drivers to be handled outside of the kernel, thus allowing developers of binary-only drivers (like Nvidia) to write GPLed skeleton drivers that actually just move their proprietary stuff outside of the kernel. So really, it doesn't solve anything, as Linus himself argues:

It will only result in _exactly_ the crap we were just trying to avoid,
namely stupid "shell game" drivers that don't actually help anything at
all, and move code into user space instead.

What was the point again?

Was the point to alienate people by showing how we're less about the
technology than about licenses?

Was the point to show that we think we can extend our reach past derived
work boundaries by just saying so?

The silly thing is, the people who tend to push most for this are the
exact SAME people who say that the RIAA etc should not be able to tell
people what to do with the music copyrights that they own, and that the
DMCA is bad because it puts technical limits over the rights expressly
granted by copyright law.

Doesn't anybody else see that as being hypocritical?

Linus then goes on to argue that decisions in the kernel should be based on technical merit, and shouldn't seek to limit how people are allowed to write/use drivers for Linux.

Because the history of Linux is so deeply intertwined with that of the Open Source/Free Software movement, many people feel that the kernel should only accept GPLed modules. The idea is that this would put pressure on companies like Nvidia and ATI to release GPLed ("Free") drivers. However, the flip-side is that it may well just end up in the same companies simply shunning Linux all together, or just moving their proprietary code out of the kernel. (The only thing the latter case seems to accomplish is a philosophical cleansing of the kernel.) Furthermore, proponents of this approach seem to be ignoring the other important component of "Free" - that is, being able to do what you like with it.

A "Free" kernel should let the user insert any modules they want in it, regardless of the license. It's almost reverse DRM - Instead of restricting users from freely using something, users would instead be restricted to only using something "Freely" (that is, only in ways that are compatible with their definition of "free"). Lastly, it just so happens that allowing binary kernel modules (as is the case currently) is the best technical decision, at least in the short-term, because Linux does not have the consumer base to persuade vendors to release open source drivers. Think about it - Linux is most popular in server market right now, and all of the popular binary drivers (Nvidia, Ati, Wifi) are needed on desktop Linux, not on servers.

Moving forward, the Linux kernel must continue to walk the narrowing line that balances between commercial success and philosophy. The next few years are certainly going to be interesting, particularly if ATI and/or Nvidia open source their drivers. Keep on the look-out.

HOWTO: Banshee 0.11.3 on Ubuntu

2006-12-09T20:39:00.000-08:00

Update: Banshee 0.13.1 can be installed in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) by running "sudo apt-get install banshee".

Banshee 0.11.3 was released today and features a bunch small new features and bug fixes, but also includes some pretty big performance enhancements. If you're a Banshee user, it's definitely worth upgrading to this new release for the speed improvements alone (switching to your library doesn't take a ridiculously long time anymore.) Since I've already written a HOWTO for Banshee 0.11, I decided to updated it for Banshee 0.11.3. This guide was written for Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft, but there's only one little change necessary for it to work on Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper Drake (which is explained inline below.) On with the installation instructions:

:)

IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you have the QuinnStorm repositories enabled (for Compiz/XGL stuff), you might encounter this compile error: "/bin/grep: can't read /usr/lib/libXrender.la: No such file or directory" or something along those lines. The necessary fix can be found here. (I just ended up removing the "/usr/lib/libXrender.la" part of that line and it fixed it, and I think that's probably a safer route.)

To follow this HOWTO, just punch (ie. copy and paste) the commands listed into a terminal. Good luck!

1. Install prerequisites

First, make sure you have the universe repository enabled. If you're unsure, here's instructions on how to check and enable it.
Next, install the software required to build Banshee:

sudo apt-get build-dep banshee
sudo apt-get install libavahi-cil mono libgconf2.0-cil
sudo apt-get build-dep libipoddevice0
sudo apt-get install libgtop2-7 libgtop2-common libgtop2-dev libsgutils1 libsgutils1-dev
wget \http://banshee-project.org/files/libipoddevice/libipoddevice-0.5.2.tar.gz
wget http://banshee-project.org/files/ipod-sharp/ipod-sharp-0.6.2.tar.gz
tar -xvzf libipoddevice-0.5.2.tar.gz
tar -xvzf ipod-sharp-0.6.2.tar.gz

Note: If you're an Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper Drake user, the above "sudo apt-get install..." line might fail. If it does, try running the following:
sudo apt-get install libsgutils libsgutils-dev
(Note: If this fails, just keep going to with the rest of the HOWTO...)

Now, in order to have iPod support, we're going to install libipoddevice and ipod-sharp:


cd libipoddevice-0.5.2
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
cd ..

cd ipod-sharp-0.6.2
./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-docs
make
sudo make install

(The above iPod steps can be safely left out if you don't need iPod support...)

2. Download Banshee 0.11.3

wget http://banshee-project.org/files/banshee/banshee-0.11.3.tar.gz
wget http://www.banshee-project.org/files/banshee-official\
-plugins/banshee-official-plugins-0.11.3.tar.gz

3. Extract and configure

tar -xvzf banshee-0.11.3.tar.gz
tar -xvzf banshee-official-plugins-0.11.3.tar.gz
cd banshee-0.11.3
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-avahi --disable-docs

I suggest leaving Avahi enabled here as I did so that DAAP sharing works. (It lets you share your music library with iTunes, Limewire, etc. users, as well as listen to other peoples'.) iPod support should be automatically detected if you followed the iPod steps above.

4. Build and install Banshee

make
sudo make install

5. Configure, build, and install the plugins

cd banshee-official-plugins-0.11.3
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

6. Run Banshee!

Either from the console run "banshee" or launch it from the "Applications->Sound & Video" menu in GNOME.

That's it! I've tested this on Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft machine, but if this doesn't work for you, leave a comment and I can try to help you figure it out. :)

Lastly:

3D Album Art in Banshee

2006-12-07T11:19:00.000-08:00

Hot on the tail of Apple's Coverflow, Lukasz Wisniewski is developing a plugin for Banshee called Fleow:

That is hot. (Thanks Gabriel!)

Ecksdee 0.0.9 Release and Developer Interview

2006-11-30T01:00:00.000-08:00

For those of you who remember my Next-Gen Linux Game Roundup, you might recall Ecksdee as one of the games that was highlighted. In the months that have passed, the developers of Ecksdee have been hard at work tweaking and adding new features to the game, which has started to evolve into a playable fast-paced racer. A few days ago, the team released Ecksdee 0.0.9, which features the slick new Ciy map (video) along with some new ships.

With this new release, I had the opportunity to ask two of the Ecksdee developers, Vincent Knecht (vknecht) and Amir Taaki (genjix), a few questions:

Q. What was your original motivation for creating Ecksdee?

VK: I had free time when Amir came up with his hovercraft prototype, and thought it deserved a game project, like XRacer. At that time I was making a visualization application with Crystal Space, and wanted to do something more
fun with CS...

AT: I found myself working with the Crystal Space community, and on a under development game called Crystal Core. Since it was set in the future I imagined some type of hovering vehicle would be useful and began work on a CEL property class for hovering (basically like a kernel module that can be loaded in your game to do stuff). To go with it I made a demo to demonstrate it.

Since Vincent is an active Crystal Space developer, he managed to catch wind of it and started asking questions about the status of it - "Is it a game?", for which I had no ideas about :D Needless to say a week later I got a tarball back with a build system and proper application architecture... This was a great blank canvas to start working from since now everything was properly organised as it should and from there that was real good kick starter. I doubt I ever would've gone at this on my own otherwise.

Nonetheless after some time, the game started to play but looked crap -there were no ships, a poorly designed main menu... Luckily Pascal (who is also a Crystal Core artist), made us all the ships (we've taken some out for this release), the Ciy level and other textures and special effects.

Q. How has your decision to use the Crystal Space engine impacted the development of Ecksdee?

VK: Well, I've be following Crystal Space development and learning it since a few years. When we started, Crystal Core (technical demo for CS) was one of the best source of inspiration to kickstart Ecksdee. So I think Ecksdee wouldn't exist without CS :-)

AT: Very much, all of us come from the Crystal Space community. Using CEL is the biggest help since it simplifies many worked concepts in game development.

Q. What about Python?

VK: Currently, we're using Crystal Entity Layer XML scripting, which is great for simple things. However, we will switch to CEL python scripting to get more control and possibilities. Hopefuly, it will be easier to read and modify too.

Q. You're one of the only open source games that uses Nvidia's Cg Toolkit. How has this enhanced Ecksdee's graphics?

VK: Cg support is actually a Crystal Space feature, so all projects using CS use Cg to some extent. So far, we don't have really specific shaders, and use the ones provided with CS. Afaik, Cg is about shader portability, and is supported by CS since a few years.

Q. Can you tell us more about the Blender integration you're working on? How will it make content development easier?

VK: Basically, it's about having a straightforward way to get Blender models and maps running in the game. Blender and blender2crystal export script are the recommended tools for Ecksdee content creation. There are a couple of HOWTOs in our wiki about that.

AT: Hopefully Ecksdee will become more and more easier to modify in the future. I am also a blender2crystal developer and want to make it easier for people to quickly build levels and ships to make a huge load of quality content rather than developing a game like a traditional closed team.

At the moment you can set a few properties in blender, and click "Run" in the b2cs overlay and just start playing your level. With ships you can make a ship, drag it to a specific directory and the game will automatically show it in the menu.

For those who are interested I encourage them to check out the Blender conference video about Crystal Space, the blender2crystal page and the artists documentation section of our site.

Q. Lastly, what's on the roadmap for Ecksdee in the future?

VK: First there will be some porting from XMLScript to Python, especially for menus and head-up-display handling. Sure, there will be new tracks and ships. We also will look at networking and multiplayer support, though we cannot say now when that will be added.

AT: The addition of python will allow some interesting things like little drones following your ship (as a weapon system) and easier extending of the game for new features and options to the main menu among other things.

To wrap up, I'd like to thank Vince and Amir for the time they've both graciously spent on Ecksdee and this interview. Ecksdee is in good hands, and I'm looking forward to the future of the project. Finally, if anyone would like to get involved with Ecksdee (be it artists or coders), the Ecksdee documentation is a good place to start.

Links:

Show Ballmer the Money

2006-11-21T22:14:00.000-08:00

"Mr. Ballmer, Since you live in a fantasy world, thought we'd pay some fantasy money for your fantasy claim."

I think Tristan Sloughter might be on to something.

If you haven't been following the whole Novell-Microsoft deal, Novell's customers basically get protection from being sued by Microsoft. Microsoft believes that the Linux kernel infringes intellectual property it owns (heard this before?), and that Linux users are liable.

That's right, Microsoft wants you to think it's going to sue you for using Linux. (It's yet to be shown if they actually have a case or not. Many Linux advocates believe they don't.)

In either case, I find it ironic that Novell, who takes a strong stance against proprietary drivers in their kernels, admits that it thinks there's "proprietary" intellectual property in heart of it's Linux distribution, SUSE. That doesn't make very much sense, does it?

Little associated with Microsoft seems to make sense these days...

We need better presentation software

2006-11-19T19:51:00.000-08:00

Let's face it: OpenOffice.org Impress is a lame, boring presentation program. What if you want to do something really fancy? Something Keynote fancy?

Well, if you're a Linux user, you're out of luck. OpenOffice.org Impress is the best you can do, but it's not for a lack of other people trying. A few years ago, GNOME's Agnubis was a potential candidate for a some new presentation software, but it unfortunately never took off. Even more recently, Criawips (aka AbiShow) seemed to show some promise, but never ended up making it very far. Currently, the project looks dead.

So in 2006, if you're going to make a presentation on Linux, it's going to look like it's from 1995. If you're a serious developer looking for a new project, the libraries seem to have fallen into place since Criawips in order to make this a viable project:

Cairo provides a nice SVG 2D graphics canvas.
GStreamer (which has finally reached maturity) makes it easier to handle embedded audio and video.
OpenGL (which has been there all along) is also a fairly straightforward graphics API (can do 2D as well as 3D), and can be used to do funky 3D transitions and such easily.
Hell, even SDL would be a good choice for the graphics API.
If you're feeling rather C#, Mono's Tao provides bindings for both OpenGL and SDL. I can't vouch for how strong GStreamer# is, but it at least seems to exist.

Maybe someone can fill me in as to why nobody's created the killer open source presentation application yet. The libraries are there to handle the fancy stuff, and the simple stuff (allowing creation of text-boxes and insertion of images) should be straightforward to do.

Discuss.

Edgy and Beyond

2006-11-02T19:40:00.000-08:00

It's been a few days since Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft was released, and you haven't upgraded already, here's a few reasons to:

Rhythmbox now has iPod read AND write support. [1]
Avahi/DAAP sharing in Rhythmbox/Banshee
What's this? Rhythmbox also has cover art support now:
The "hubackup" package makes backing up a snap:
Built-in AIGLX means fully accelerated wobbly windows for Nvidia users, and workaround-less OpenGL gaming for everyone.
Better software updating mechanism, less chance of something bad happening:
Firefox 2.0 baby.
Evolution has been noticeably tweaked. It's tendency to hang seems to be gone.
Beagle is actually stable and works for me for the first time ever. Hello instantaneous computer-wide searches.
Did I mention that Upstart makes booting up even quicker now?

So what are you waiting for?
Upgrade to Edgy now, or if you still haven't given Ubuntu a shot, now would be a good time. You won't regret it.

If you're interested in finding out what's on the drawing board for the next Ubuntu, version 7.04/Feisty Fawn, here's some things we might see:

RapidReboot
PulseAudo might finally replace ESD as GNOME's software sound mixer/server...
Easy codec installation finally?

If there's one thing that's clear to me from running Ubuntu 6.10 for over a month now, it's that Ubuntu is still getting better and seems to be making great strides toward becoming the most usable operating system on the planet. I can't imagine where we'll be in three years.

Speed updates...

2006-10-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

Some happenings from the Linux world over the past few days:

Banshee 0.11.1 was released. Check out what's new in on the release page.
The Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft RC (Release Candidate) came out today. (Essentially Beta+1). More release notes on how things are shaping up.
A beta of Flash 9 for Linux was finally released. Even more release notes if you're interested. Long story short: A/V sync is fixed.
Ubuntu 7.04 = Feisty Fawn. From Mark Shuttleworth himself:
The main themes for feature development in this release will be improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies. Ubuntu's Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for both users and developers. Detailed planning will take place at the developer summit next month in Mountain View, California. Please join us there to help shape the Feisty Fawn!
EasyUbuntu, Automatix, and now.... AfterBirth. *sigh* I wish the Ubuntu team would just give me a button to push that installed w32codecs. I might add that w32codecs is no more illegal than any of those Windows codec packs like the Nimo one, which can be pretty handy, and nobody seems to be getting in any hot water for (yet).

NVIDIA Root Explot

2006-10-16T18:12:00.000-07:00

The following says it all:

   The NVIDIA Binary Graphics Driver for Linux is vulnerable to a
buffer overflow that allows an attacker to run arbitrary code as
root. This bug can be exploited both locally or remotely (via
a remote X client or an X client which visits a malicious web page).
A working proof-of-concept root exploit is included with this
advisory.

Yeah, so apparently we don't need Internet Explorer and Windows anymore to have malicious software silently installed on our computers - we just need NVIDIA's closed-source graphics driver. Update: Fortunately, the bug has been fixed in NVIDIA's 1.0-9625 beta driver. The thing is, you need Xorg 7.1 to run that, so everyone running Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper Drake is still vulnerable.

On that note - are there any analogous driver exploits in Windows like this? I didn't even think something like this was possible in Linux...

(Thanks Hubert...)

Portland, TC:E, GWoot, Automatix 2, Mute

2006-10-15T21:04:00.000-07:00

First off, it's been quite a busy couple of weeks for me and I'd like to apologize for the lack of news. Luckily, the world doesn't revolve around me and so some interesting stuff happened in the last few weeks:

The Portland project made their first release. The Portland project is a kind of vague teaming up of various desktop environment developers with the aim of making it easier for software vendors to create Linux software that worked consistently across the various desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, etc.) out there. The first release consists of a daemon that applications can interface with through DBUS and some command line tools to perform various tasks like installing an application's icon or disabling the screensaver. The way a programmer would normally go about doing stuff like this is specific to each desktop environment (in general), and so Portland's DAPI solves that problem by offering a single unified way of going about that. I don't think there's anything in Portland right now that would convince Adobe to release a supportable version of Photoshop for Linux, but making companies like Adobe's lives easier is what Portland aims to do. I think it's a small step in the right direction, but once it reaches critical mass, it'll become a crucial part of the Linux desktop.
True Combat: Elite 0.49 was finally released after a long period of waiting. TC:E is a realistic combat mod for Enemy Territory that's similar to Counter-Strike. However, TC:E has plenty of unique features like the iron-sights system that make it a fun, memorable play. Several of the maps have been updated in this version, as well as new ones being added. Additionally, several of the weapons were tweaked and there are some new snazzy graphics effects as well.

True Combat: Elite 0.49

For any Woot.com fans, someone created GWoot, which might be handy.
Automatix 2 for Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft has been released. This thread has some extra screenshots of it, and it seems like it's come quite a ways from the cheap bash script it once was. Good job Automatix team!

Automatix 2 for Ubuntu 6.10 looks much better than the original
The under-appreciated Linux Rock Star blog uncovered Mute, which is a new rewrite of the incredibly powerful Jeskola Buzz. Buzz is a Windows-only modular synth "tracker-on-steroids" whose source code was lost in 2000, but continued to be developed through clever add-on hacks. The Buzz community has been waiting for something to replace it for a while, and it looks like Mute is a good contender. (Buzztard is another one to get excited about too.) While you're at it, check out the Mute screenshots - it's a pretty impressive clone of Buzz. (I currently use Buzz under WINE for music production as a hobby, but unfortunately it has some issues.)

Mute's user interface is almost identical to Buzz

Also, I upgraded to Edgy last week. If I told you it was easy to do, I'd be lying. Long story short: Wait until it's officially released unless you're prepared to file bug reports. It's working great now though and I've been able to play with some brand new software that wouldn't run in Dapper. I'm enjoying the built-in AIGLX now too - No more hacks to make OpenGL games run with Compiz/Beryl. :)

Freespire's sketchiness and a word on DistroWatch

2006-10-05T19:25:00.000-07:00

Linspire's sister distribution Freespire is reportedly using sketchy tactics to inflate their rank at DistroWatch... again.
I have to admit that I've seen the advertisement in question on Linux Revolution, but the URL pointed to the Freespire wiki.

DistroWatch's ranking index provides a rough sketch of the relative popularity of almost all of the various Linux distributions out there. Why would you want to be near the top? DistroWatch's 50,000 hits/day seems like a decent reason (it makes my blog look like, well, a blog). After keeping an eye on it for many years, it seems like at least the top three distributions are probably correct in their popularity with desktop users. The index is also a good way to find out what the next big Linux distribution is going to be (openSUSE has jumped quite a ways recently).

Firefox Copyright Dilemma

2006-10-05T18:14:00.000-07:00

"I used to be cool"

There's been quite a bit of noise in the Linux community lately over this 'bug' in Debian. That's right, the Mozilla Firefox name goes under the same crappy copyright license as the artwork, so Debian isn't "allowed" to use the name. (This is why Ubuntu and Debian ship Firefox with that uninspiring blue globe icon instead of the Firefox icon.)

So what's Ubuntu going to do about it?
Well, the users clearly want the official logo in addition to keeping the name, and I don't blame them. Firefox made the transition from Windows to Linux quite a bit easier for myself, and I'm sure others have found the same thing. The matter is still up in the air, as the only official word on this has been been from Canonical's Matt Zimmerman saying he's "discussing the relevant issues with representatives from Mozilla."
In the meantime, I was shocked to discover that those crazy GNU people are now maintaining "Gnuzilla" and "IceWeasel", the latter of which I originally thought was a joke.

I think I can honestly say that I wish IceWeasel was joke, because this whole Mozilla trademark thing is ridiculous. Aren't we all playing on the same team?

OT: Fake USB Drives - I was right

2006-10-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

In the last week, three people have come forward and posted comments on my fake USB stick article saying they're had similar experiences at Factory Direct (the retailer I bought it at). If there was any doubt in my mind that it was really false advertising and not just a faulty USB stick, this cleared it up.

The weird thing about this is that the guys who branded the USB keys in California probably didn't even know they were fake. My theory is that the original manufacturer sold these to various companies who branded them and resold them. One (sketchy) guy ended up counterfeiting them by branding the Sony logo on them, and that's why there's all these fake Sony ones around that look exactly like the one I had. Other companies, like the one who branded mine got screwed because they bought the fake keys and didn't know it until it was too late. (Do they even know it now?)

If anyone else has had a similar experience at Factory Direct, let me know here, or if you want to do something about it, contact me at linux*NoSpam*revolution0@yahoo.ca, and we'll see what our options are.

Skype 1.3 (Linux) Released

2006-10-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

Skype 1.3 for Linux has finally been released, now with ALSA support. Still no video support, but I'll take what I can get. (More details over here)

If you've been using the 1.3 betas, not a whole lot has changed with the official release, but if you're using an older version, you'll be quite thrilled with the new version. There's a detailed changelog available for anyone who's interested in that as well.

People always rant about Skype and say "use OpenWengo instead", but the problem is that nobody uses OpenWengo (relatively speaking), so who am I going to talk to with it? The fact that it's open source means nothing if the software is useless due to a lack of users. (Plus, if you live in North America, Skype's free calling to the U.S. and Canada can't be beat.) Yeah, I might be playing devil's advocate here, but for what it's worth, Skype is a pretty good application.

Random News (Beryl release and video, Edgy Beta)

2006-09-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

Here's some interesting recent happenings:

MacSlow's got a video of Edgy running Beryl, showing off blurred transparent windows.
On that note, the first version of Beryl (0.1.0) was released (yeah, it's still lacking a website). If you've already got the QuinnStorm repositories enabled in Ubuntu, a "sudo apt-get install beryl emerald emerald-themes" should do it for you. (Launch it with beryl-manager.) If you don't have XGL or anything set up yet, I suggest waiting until Ubuntu 6.10 comes out at the end of this month, as it'll be much easier to set up then. Beryl does feel a bit snappier than the old QuinnStorm compiz though and things seem less buggy so far. (The nice thing about Beryl is that Quinn's team can now make their own releases and stabilize them beforehand. No more buggy development compiz.)
Ok, last bit of Beryl news for today, I promise! Linux.com has an interview with QuinnStorm on the new release and the divergence from Compiz. It doesn't contain a whole lot of new information, but there is one gem tucked away at the end:
"I would tell a layperson to look forward to a desktop that can really outshine what both other major players in the field offer, especially once X gets its input redirection code in, but even before that we'll be able to really catch some attention."

The article doesn't explain what X's "input redirection code" is, but it rang a bell with me. I've read that in Compiz (and now Beryl), when you click on a wobbling window, your click won't "land" on the right spot. It turns out this is actually a limitation in the X server, so I'm pretty sure Quinn was referring to the solution to this problem. I'm sure this'll open up some interesting ways to interact with windows though. (Also, my memory is terrible, so someone correct me if I'm wrong on this one...)
The beta of Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft has been released. The official Ubuntu release notes details the big noticeable changes and includes some screenshots as well.

Gaim 2.0 Beta 4 coming soon

2006-09-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

I just spotted on the Gaim development blog that a fourth beta of Gaim 2.0 is coming soon. The blog has some screenshots of the new features that are worth taking a peek at (global buddy icon integrated into UI, different indentation). Check them out!

If you're still running Gaim 1.5, I strongly suggest trying out the new Gaim 2.0, even though it's still in beta. The UI overhaul makes it much easier to use - no more nagging "away" screen.

Lastly, Planet Gaim has launched in order to make it easier for avid fans to keep track of Gaim's development. Good stuff.

WINE 1.0 in early 2007?

2006-09-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of the WINE Weekly Newsletter was released last week and has some interesting details about where WINE's headed.

For those not familiar with WINE, it's a software project that allows Micrsoft Windows applications to run under Linux (and other *NIX OSes). It's been in development for about 13 years now and is the result of a tremendous effort by many people. Over the past few years, WINE's compatibility has been improving at an impressive rate, and I consider it to be at that pivotal point where you can download a random Windows app from the internet and expect it to install and actually run (a far cry from the situation three years ago.) Watching a Windows application install significantly faster in Linux than it does in Windows is a sight to behold. :)

Propellerhead's Reason is an example of a complex Windows application that has only recently started working in WINE (thanks WINE team!)

Going back to the newsletter, check out these juicy tidbits about WINE 1.0:

As far as 1.0 goes, there's a lot of things that would be nice to have completed. The default registry needs a bit of help, the IDL compiler (widl) needs to be more feature complete, and Win64 would benefit from printf format fixes. Copy protection would be really nice to get in the tree and Ivan Leo Puoti reiterated that he had patches available. Alexandre responded that there are some critical parts of the design that need to be fleshed out because "the Wine maintainer is a pain in the ass." Finally, Alexandre called for more help with packaging. Most developers don't use the packages and they really could use more eyes with more testing done.

Despite that, a 1.0 release seems to be near (and yes, I should know better than to write such things.) The current plan is to continue working on Direct3D and get it stabilized. After that, a code freeze will begin and the plan is to have it last about 2 months. The target date for that is approximately the end of this year. Alexandre mentioned we have some projects going on right now that are rolling along nicely and it's probably worth letting those continue rather than lose momentum.

Post-1.0, a stable branch will be maintained and new development will eventually begin on a development branch. Using git will help a lot with this and fixes can be cherry-picked back in the stable branch. As far as version numbering goes, there's no clear plan for how it will work, although Jeremy White jokingly suggested "Wine 2007" for the release instead of 1.0.

There's also some stuff on WINE's Direct3D support:

Currently the rendering code is now shared between all versions of Direct3D from version 1 through version 9. There's been a huge improvement in shader code with shaders implemented with GLSL and the GL_ARB_*_program extensions. There's support for up to shader model 3.0.

But what would a Direct3D presentation be without some eye candy? Stefan showed off screenshots of some games. There was also a small contingent of DirectX folks in attendance with some really high-powered laptops that could show off the games. It's quite impressive to see the latest and greatest games running on Linux. Jon Parshall extensively, um, "tested" World of Warcraft throughout the conference (did you finally make it to level 48, Jon?) Tom Wickline had 3DMark2000, 3DMark2001SE and 3DMark2003 running all of there test. There is still some artifacts in the rendering of a couple of the test, but the DirectX guys knew what was to blame for it. Stefan showed off the Microsoft DirectX logo "proving" DirectX is being properly detected.

But perhaps the most interesting bit is this:

Direct3D10, which will ship with Windows Vista in a few months, doesn't seem to be a large cause for concern. At first glance it appears to be more of an evolutionary change rather than revolutionary. New shader support will be needed, but extending ours once OpenGL supports it should be pretty easy. Stefan mentioned Microsoft is currently offering a lot of incentives for Windows developers who develop D3D10-only games since they'll only be usable on Vista - there's no plan to backport D3D10 to XP. Dan Kegel asked if that means we should port Wine's forthcoming D3D10 implementation to Windows, which would be relatively easy when we switch to WGL.

(emphasis added)

That's just a really cool idea, and something that I think people'd appreciate.

If you're interested in other upcoming changes in WINE or would like a peek into the WINE developers' world, take a gander at the full issue here.

Dear Lazyweb: Backing up Email in Evolution

2006-09-24T21:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Lazyweb,

My university generously provides us with a whopping 25 megabytes of email storage, and has been sending me messages on a daily basis that my inbox is 93% full.

I use Evolution as my mail client, and it's an IMAP mail server.
How can I download my 23 megs of emails and a stick them in a tarball?

If anyone has any ideas or hints on this, I'd appreciate it very much if you dropped me a comment. :)

Thanks!

OSS Usability and Linux: What?

2006-09-23T22:34:00.000-07:00

I found an interesting article in the Digg queue today titled, "Windows & OSS: The Usability Problem".

After giving it a read, I realized that I just don't agree with most of the author's points. Allow me to unleash the hounds:

Lack of standardized user interface

Users of open source operating systems are spoilt for choice: Gnome, KDE and Xfce only to name a few desktops and Blackbox, WindowMaker, AfterStep, FluxBox, fvwm and mwm just to name a few of available window managers. Yes, diversity is generally a good thing, but consider how confused an average Windows user must feel when all the programs look and behave differently among different desktops.

Well, I've got some ground-breaking news for you: It's been a long time since I've used a distribution of Linux that actually asked me which desktop environment I wanted to use. I think it's safe to say that most Linux users use either KDE or GNOME [1].

On all my systems, except on the Solaris boxes, I am running KDE. Why? Because it lets me concentrate on getting the work done and does not bother me with trivial tasks like mounting and unmounting devices and the like.

I've got some more news here: That's why everyone runs GNOME too. Both desktop environments offer a complete set of good applications for daily activities that are easy to use.

No, I am not using Gnome because of the poor GTK architecture and the lack of basic stability. On all my systems, from Laptops to workstations, Gnome did not perform well at all.

Poor GTK architecture? Lack of "basic stability"? Since the author carefully failed to provide evidence to support his argument, I'm going to ask all the GNOME/Ubuntu users out there: Have you experienced a lack of "basic stability"? Perhaps someone can point me to the source of this basic instability?

Diversity among Linux kernels

While the author does make some valid points here, I think many people view the Linux kernel the wrong way. Vendor specific kernels allow vendors to do better Q&A testing in order to ensure their distro works as stably as they'd like, while also letting them add new features in-between kernel releases. For example, the Ubuntu kernel often has features backported from the next "unstable" kernel release, to the benefit of the users. As well, new features and bugfixes that the Ubuntu team finds are sent back "upstream" to the official Linux kernel [2], so that other distributions can benefit from them as well. That's how open source is done these days. Essentially, new features and bugfixes are only vendor-specific until they're sent upstream and included in the next official Linux kernel release.

Hardware known to work on one system does not work on the other due to missing drivers or modules

Let me ask the reader the obvious question: If your hardware works in Ubuntu, would you expect it to work on OS X? So is it fair to expect that it would also work in Fedora Core? Fedora is a different operating system from Ubuntu.
I'll finish this thought below...

Effectively no software and hardware certification standards

The author again makes valid points here, but I'd like to mention my own thoughts:
As far as I can tell, a piece of software that's included in the default GNOME desktop environment is as close to being "certified software" as possible. It's guaranteed to be stable, have a consistent/friendly UI, and in general, be useful. I'd rather have my apps be GNOME-certified and Ubuntu-certified rather than LSB-certified. See where I'm heading with this?

Poor stability of many user programs

The days of horribly unstable Linux apps are mostly gone, and that's entirely due to the quality standards that have been set by distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora. It's up to the distributions to make sure they package stable software, and the major ones do!
Also, that big paragraph about Sally installing an RPM doesn't really apply to apt-based distributions like Debian and Ubuntu. (If the package wasn't already in a repository, then a properly created package downloaded from the web wouldn't have a problem.) :P

I'm not even going to start on the documentation stuff. (Actually, I lied: GNOME software is documented well.)

My Conclusion

Over the last few years, I feel there's become a greater distinction between "Linux" and Linux distributions. What exactly is Linux these days?
When I use Ubuntu, I'm using a Linux kernel enhanced by the Ubuntu team. When I browse the internet, I'm using GNOME and Firefox, both of which were tweaked by the Ubuntu team. The Ubuntu team didn't choose all of this software and tweak it accordingly just to be different: They did it to tackle the usability problem and the standardized user interface problem. They did it to provide a rock-solid kernel with the best hardware compatibility out there, to ensure users have stable software, and to ensure that software is quality software. Did I mention they do it every six months too?

The article in question is another example of an article that would have held its ground three years ago, but my, how things have changed.

[1] Desktop Linux 2006 Survey Results
[2] Search the 2.6.18 kernel changelog for the word "ubuntu" to see what I mean.

Goodbye XGL, Goodbye AIGLX (Hello Xorg 7.1?)

2006-09-22T18:02:00.000-07:00

Something awesome happened today.

NVIDIA released a beta of their new 1.0-9625 drivers. I'll just skip to the good part, as NVIDIA's James Jones explained it:

Neither Xgl or AIGLX are required to use compiz with the NVIDIA drivers now that they natively support GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap.

Xgl is an X server that renders using OpenGL and runs on top of another X server. It was the first X server available to support GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap.

AIGLX stands for Accelerated Indirect GLX. It is not related to compiz or GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap at all, except that support for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap in the open source DRI OpenGL drivers required it. NVIDIA has always supported Accelerated Indirect GLX rendering.

NVIDIA supports both Direct AND Indirect rendering with the GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension. Users should not need to install any additional software to run compiz with new NVIDIA drivers. Please see the just-created sticky thread covering the basic setup steps.

That's right. These drivers feature hardware support for the mystical "GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap" extension, which now allows your videocard to accelerate your wobbly windows, among other things.

The catch? They require Xorg 7.1 or later. That means Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper Drake users are out of luck, unless they feel like compiling X from source (not such a good idea.) The good news is that Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft features Xorg 7.1, so NVIDIA users will be able to benefit from this when Edgy is released (or if they're running Edgy already).

If you're using Xorg 7.1 and want to give it a shot, here's the sticky with instructions. (Also, this feedback thread might come in handy.)

Your move, ATI.

Update: A reader has pointed our that AIGLX has been merged into Xorg 7.1, and it's now enabled by default. So while it's not quite "goodbye" forever to AIGLX, you don't actually have to do anything manually to get it (and you shouldn't have to worry about it).

GNOME 3.0 Mockup: "May-B"

2006-09-21T20:58:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting mockup of GNOME 3 over on GNOME-Look.org that someone did:

The mockup looks like a combination of Gimmie, (U)SLAB, and Mathusalem (elements which should probably be merged into GNOME sooner or later.) The tags/files panel on the right looks it could use some work (layout, size, fonts, etc.), but the overall concept seems like it's pointed in the right direction.

On a related note, the new DesktopThoughts blog (who's author created the mockup) aims at discussing ideas for "the next desktop". If you're interested in seeing what people come up with or you've got some ideas of your own, be sure to give it a visit.

Now, we just need to make sure that the GNOME logo doesn't evolve into some scary, evil-looking thing like the one in the background of that desktop...

Edgy CDs, NVIDIA preview, Neuros OSD, Linux 2.6.18

2006-09-20T15:27:00.000-07:00

Lots of Linux news happening around the web today:

Apparently Canonical's ShipIt isn't going to offer free CDs for Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft...
Phoronix.com has a preview of NVIDIA's 1.0-9XXX series drivers, which don't currently have a ETA, but should offer the long saught-after "GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap" extension for hardware accelerated XGL/AIGLX.
Neuros is offering cheap beta hardware of their new "OSD" device to open source hackers. (Think someone can get that thing to run MythTV?)
The new Linux 2.6.18 kernel was released. It's got a ridiculously huge changelog, and features some new SATA stuff, and some other things that I can't seem to find a list of. (If you're interested, read the changelog.)
Polishlinux.org has a very good article on running Linux on older computer and gives a summary of the major distributions designed for the task. Neat stuff.

HOWTO: Banshee 0.11 + Ubuntu

2006-09-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

Dec 9/06: Banshee 0.11.3 has been released! Updated HOWTO here.
Updated Sept 26, 2006 (Added iPod support stuff)
Updated October 16, 2006 (Minor fixes)

With the Banshee 0.11 hot off the press, and no .DEBs for Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper Drake in sight, I figured people would probably appreciate some instructions on how to install the new Banshee. Well, here we go:

IMPORTANT NOTE:
If you have the QuinnStorm repositories enabled (for Compiz/XGL stuff), you might encounter this compile error: "/bin/grep: can't read /usr/lib/libXrender.la: No such file or directory" or something along those lines. The necessary fix can be found here. (I just ended up removing the "/usr/lib/libXrender.la" part of that line and it fixed it, and I think that's probably a safer route.)
Ubuntu 6.10/Edgy Eft Users: Updated Banshee packages will probably hit the Edgy repositories, so just hold tight for a bit and hopefully an updated package will get pushed through the usual Ubuntu update notifier.

To follow this HOWTO, just punch (ie. copy and paste) the commands listed into a terminal. Good luck!

1. Install prerequisites

First, make sure you have the universe repository enabled. If you're unsure, here's instructions on how to check and enable it.
Next, install the software required to build Banshee:

sudo apt-get build-dep banshee
sudo apt-get install libavahi-cil mono
sudo apt-get build-dep libipoddevice0
sudo apt-get install libgtop2 libgtop2-dev libsgutils libsgutils-dev
wget http://banshee-project.org/files/libipoddevice/libipoddevice-0.5.0.tar.gz
wget http://banshee-project.org/files/ipod-sharp/ipod-sharp-0.6.2.tar.gz
tar -xvzf libipoddevice-0.5.0.tar.gz
tar -xvzf ipod-sharp-0.6.2.tar.gz

Now, in order to have iPod support, we're going to install libipoddevice and ipod-sharp:


cd libipoddevice-0.5.0
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
cd ..

cd ipod-sharp-0.6.2
./configure --prefix=/usr --disable-docs
make
sudo make install

(The above iPod steps can be safely left out if you don't need iPod support...)

2. Download Banshee 0.11

wget http://banshee-project.org/files/banshee/banshee-0.11.0.tar.gz
wget http://www.banshee-project.org/files/banshee-official\
-plugins/banshee-official-plugins-0.11.0.tar.gz

3. Extract and configure

tar -xvzf banshee-0.11.0.tar.gz
tar -xvzf banshee-official-plugins-0.11.0.tar.gz
cd banshee-0.11.0
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-avahi --disable-docs

I suggest leaving avahi enabled here as I did so that DAAP sharing works. (It lets you share your music library with iTunes, Limewire, etc. users, as well as listen to other peoples'.) iPod support should be automatically detected if you followed the iPod steps above.

4. Build and install Banshee

make
sudo make install

5. Configure, build, and install the plugins

cd banshee-official-plugins-0.11.0
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

6. Run Banshee!

Either from the console run "banshee" or launch it from the "Applications->Sound & Video" menu in GNOME.

That's it! I've tested this on an "almost" fresh-install Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper Drake machine, but if this doesn't work for you, leave a comment and I can try to help you figure it out. :)

Banshee 0.11 Released!

2006-09-19T19:55:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since the last Banshee release, but the wait was well worth it. Among the new features in Banshee 0.11 are better tagging support (including writing for all the readable formats), the ability to import a selection or all the music from a digital audio player into Banshee, one-click track rating, an improved preferences dialog, and a new song-change notification bubble (using libnotify, so they should have a somewhat consistent look with the rest of the desktop).

A song-change notification

There's also three new official plugins:

Recommendations - This uses the awesome Last.fm service to recommend you different artists based on what you're listening to. The plugin also tells you some interesting stats about the artist you're currently listening to.

Podcast - Banshee now handles podcasts in all their glory. The interface is very smoothly integrated into Banshee and is easy to use. As of the beta, I noticed that you couldn't drag-and-drop a podcast onto a digital audio player, but I haven't tested it yet in the final release.

Downloading a podcast while playing music

Mini-mode - Sick of Banshee taking up a sizable chunk of screen space? This new plugin allows you to flip Banshee into "mini-mode", which provides a compact player interface instead of the usual library view. The mini-mode interface is really well designed, check it out!

The new mini-mode view

As I said before in my Banshee 0.11 preview, this is the Banshee release I think everyone's been waiting for. Banshee is now a fully featured music playback and management application, and has quickly become a shining star in the world of open source software. It's fast development, great polish, and intuitive interface make it a great example of open source done right. Is it perfect? Well, it's still a little sluggish, but I think it's well worth the trade-off for the excellent feature-set.

Update: I've posted a some instructions on how to install Banshee 0.11 in Ubuntu 6.06. Enjoy! :)

Compiz gets forked real good: Beryl

2006-09-18T10:24:00.000-07:00

It was time. QuinnStorm (who maintained her own tree of compiz and provides awesome Ubuntu packages) has forked off Compiz into a new project, Beryl.

It's been clear for a while that QuinnStorm's version of Compiz has diverged from the simplicity present in the first release of Compiz. Quinn's tree has included all sorts of community developed plugins, most of which add shameless bling with little contribution to enhancing usability.

That's the difference as I see it: Novell's Compiz will continue to be a stable compromise between bling and usability, and Quinn's Beryl will become the community-driven bling-machine. And that's not to say that Beryl won't be stable, it's just that Novell puts more effort (and justifiably at that) into creating a top-notch user experience - Something that comes across as being an afterthought in Quinn's tree of Compiz.

At the very least, the next six months are going to bring us the answers to two important questions this fork has posed:
1. Will Beryl plugins remain compatible with Compiz? (mikedee from the Compiz forums asked this one)
2. When other distributions like Ubuntu add some sort of standard AIGLX/XGL support, will they offer Compiz or Beryl as the window manager of choice?

I honestly don't know the answers to either of these questions, but as development progresses, it'll certainly be interesting to find out. (In the meantime, follow this thread.)

Why I love GNOME (part 1?)

2006-09-17T20:55:00.000-07:00

If someone asked me, "What's the most underrated feature in GNOME?", I'd undoubtedly show them this:

Did you see that?

All I had to do to extract that archive was right-click on it, and hit "Extract here". That's it. I didn't have to open an application and choose where I wanted to extract the archive to or anything. (It's probably the feature I miss the most when I use Windows or OS X...)

Oh yeah, and I forgot the coolest part: If the archive you're extracting contains a bunch of files that aren't grouped in a parent folder, it knows to create a new directory to throw them in (so you won't end up with files littered all over your desktop.) Neato.

What do you think is the most underrated feature in Linux, GNOME, or whatever desktop environment you use?

Ubuntu Deja Vu...

2006-09-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Didn't this already happen?

Oops.

Get GNU/Linux and Linux.org

2006-09-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting post on Digg that hasn't quite made the front page yet:

Is Linux.org hurting Linux?

If you've ever visited Linux.org, you'll probably have an opinion on this.
My opinion?
Absolutely.

The majority of the people who've taken the poll on the Ubuntu Forums seem to agree.

Is there something better?
Absolutely.

It's clean, simple, eye-catching, and the information that the community wants to send to potential users is easy to get to. While Get GNU/Linux does have some typos and some GNU-isms (I think the general public might not get the free beer/free speech thing), it's certainly a great start. I think the official Ubuntu site in particular does the best job I've seen at explaining Linux and the concept of open development:

Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. It is developed by a large community and we invite you to participate too!

The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit.

This makes more sense to me than Get GNU/Linux's:

Gnu/Linux, or simply Linux, is an alternative to Microsoft Windows�. It is easy to use and gives more freedom to users. Anyone can install it: Linux is free as beer and as speech.

The last thing I'd like to throw into the mix here is that the GNU label is just plain ugly. The general public doesn't need to know what GNU is (nor will they care). ~~Like I mentioned in the comments of the Digg article, there's a reason it's just "OS X" and not "GNU/OS X"~~ [I stand corrected... While OS X does ship with some GNU utilities, it's apparently not warranted to call it "GNU/OS X" since it isn't 'free'. The Wikipedia article on GNU seems to agree with me at one point though: That GNU/Linux meant GNU utils + Linux kernel... (hence GNU/OS X, by my initial logic)]

(And if I may be so bold, look at the Ubuntu site again. How many times is the distribution referred to as "Ubuntu" rather than "Ubuntu Linux"? Simply put, anyone who doesn't know that Ubuntu is Linux won't care that is, and anyone who does care already knows.)

Release: MythTV 0.20

2006-09-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

After 7 months of hard work, a new version of MythTV (0.20) has finally been released. This release includes support for a bunch of new pieces of hardware, more DVB stuff, and some other cool stuff like OpenGL accelerated menus.

I've been using a copy of MythTV 0.20 from SVN for a couple of weeks, and it seems rock solid so far. My favourite features of the new version have to be the OpenGL menus (which now smoothly fade in/out to one another) and the new "Internal" player. The internal player can be used in MythDVD and MythVideo to play DVDs, DivX/XviD, and MPEG videos. The internal player even features support for DVD menus, which is pretty kickass. There's also two big advantages in using the internal player over something like MPlayer for video/DVD watching:

You don't have to add to your LIRC configuration file (.lircrc?) and set up an extra set of remote button bindings for the extra program (ie. MPlayer)
The OSD that shows up when you pause, adjust volume, etc. is the same now as it is when you're watching TV in MythTV. This visual consistency adds a lot of polish to Myth.

:)

Aside from this stuff, there's tons of other features/fixes in this release, and you can read about the rest of them in the MythTV 0.20 Release Notes.

Formatting your USB stick in Linux

2006-09-09T10:24:00.000-07:00

After all that dealing with all that fake USB key stuff, I ended up picking up a 5 gig USB stick from Z-Cyber (it was cheap). Long story short, I ended up having to format it, and I haven't been able to get it properly formatted since. I could get Linux to see the sole FAT32 partition on it, but not Windows. Oddly enough, even if I formatted it with Windows, it still wouldn't show up properly on Windows machines.

Anyways, I think I've finally found the proper way to format your USB key in Linux. This extremely helpful article walks you through it.

I think I kept making two mistakes before I found that article. The first was that I kept forgetting to actually format the partition using mkfs.vfat (fdisk just creates the partition). The other problem I had was that I forgot that /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 are different. The second one (/dev/sda1) is the "first partition" on the drive, while /dev/sda is the whole drive. (I had ended up adding accidentally creating a new partition on /dev/sda1, which made a partition in a partition or something screwy like that... I should have taken a screenshot of what Nautilus thought the drive contained... trust me, it was bad.)

Anyways, I pretty much feel like a total idiot for forgetting my partitioning basics, but I'm going to take that as a sign that desktop Linux's usability has gotten better, seeing as it's been a pretty long time since I've had to do any crazy manual partitioning like this. (Now, if only GParted worked properly on my USB key in the first place, I wouldn't have had to figure this out... :P)

Updates from the Web: GNOME 2.16, Exaile, and more

2006-09-06T07:44:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty busy over the past few days, and I apologize for the lack of updates. In the meantime, here's some interesting articles I've spotted:

Ars Technica has a First Look at GNOME 2.16
The 2X TerminalServer seems to be getting a bit of press (ie. it popped up on digg, hardly the press though.) It's another open source (but commercial) implementation of the NoMachine server. Honestly, the NoMachine server kicks ass, so I'm not quite sure why you'd want to use this one. (It's a breeze to install in the latest version too - just 3 .DEBs)
Red Herring has an interview with Michael Robertson, founder of MP3.com and Linspire, where he talks about Linux, Linspire, and the music industry. I found this part of the interview particularly interesting - Way to dodge the question Michael:

Q: And so we�ve got to ask you, you�ve recently made CNR�your software update service for Linspire�free. If I�m an Ubuntu user, am I going to be able use this in order to fill up my machine with capabilities like the ability to do DVD playback, Flash, Quicktime? Is that a possibility?

A: If you�ve ever tried to install software on Linux, [you know] it�s really difficult. There�s no easy installer, like an XP user would be used to, and Click and Run goes beyond that, right? One click and everything is downloaded and installed, icons on the desktop, etc. So, absolutely, I think that�s something that makes a lot of sense and so we�re definitely looking at something like that.
CRN has an editorial I think I agree with: "Advice to Linux: Kill the Penguin" (especially the part about the acronyms thing)
A new version (0.2) of the Exaile Media Player has been released. It's apparently described as "Amarok for GNOME". If any long-term readers out there remember my thoughts on Amarok, they'll know that I have beef with the sideways tabs. Worst interface element ever? Quite possibly. Well, now GNOME users can indulge themselves in useless sideways tabs that hide functionality that shouldn't be hidden away. (Compare Banshee's GUI with Exaile's GUI.) Lastly, someone should also quietly tell the author of Exaile that the only good Hooverphonic album is the first one. :P
... and if you made it this far, Charlie isn't the only who's just gone through a breakup. (Albeit mine was for different reasons...) :(

Linux Distros Timeline

2006-09-03T08:03:00.000-07:00

I spotted a cool timeline over on Digg that shows when each major Linux distribution was created and was branched.
It's neat to see how recent Ubuntu really is relative to all the other distros, and to see how many forks/branches there are.

I think MythTV is trying to tell me something....

2006-09-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

I think my MythTV box is trying to tell me something:

Desktop Linux Poll Results

2006-08-31T17:05:00.000-07:00

DesktopLinux.com's 2006 poll results are in.

The most popular distro?
Ubuntu

The most popular desktop environment?
Read on.

There's some other interesting stats there as well. I'm suprised that Gentoo has more users than Fedora. It's nice to see Xfce doing pretty good as well (I used it for a few months a couple of years ago, before I switched over to GNOME/Ubuntu).
I'd like to think these numbers are decently accurate too, seeing as the number of votes is almost 15,000. I can't see posting a link to the poll in a distro-related forum having skewed the numbers too much...
Interesting stuff though.

What kernel would Jesus compile?

2006-08-31T17:03:00.000-07:00

Does the bluescreen of death make you spew forth fire and brimstone, or are you the type that just says a quiet prayer? Now, God can be on your desktop, with Ubuntu: Christian Edition.

Read on at APC Magazine...
(It's funny)

Upstart - Goodbye Init

2006-08-29T16:33:00.000-07:00

I spotted something delicious over on Planet Ubuntu recently:

upstart is a replacement for the init daemon, the process spawned by the kernel that is responsible for starting, supervising and stopping all other processes on the system.

What's so yummy about this? Well, they've got a damn good project outline, explaining why there's a need to replace the ancient init daemon, how upstart is designed, and how it's different from existing solutions such as Apple's launchd and initng. Lastly, it also explains what the state of the project is and what direction it's headed in. This is almost enough to make sure a project succeeds right there - well, that, along with a good leader and lots of free time.

While Upstart is now in Edgy's Universe repository, it's not actually going to be standard in the next Ubuntu. I'm surprised that a next-gen init system hasn't landed in a mainstream distro as of yet. (After a shallow googling, the only distro I could find with InitNG was the obscure Berry Linux.) Most of these next-gen init systems cut startup times, which would make a noticeable difference to the end user. Unfortunately, most of these new init systems just aren't quite ready for public consumption, but when they are, you can bet we'll finally see Linux boot much faster.

Mathusalem

2006-08-28T17:30:00.000-07:00

Now, here's an idea that should have been thought of a long time ago: Integrate a universal progress bar into the desktop environment.

Luckily, Steve Fr�cinaux's finally started working on it, and it's first implementation is called Mathusalem.

The author's breakdown of Mathusalem 0.3 gives a good explaination of how it works (and includes a nice screenshot).

Last week, version 0.4 was released and shows some more progress, including:

- Nautilus integration via extension.
- Improved Epiphany integration.
- Only show the status icon when there is an active task.
- Show a notification bubble on task completion/failure.

Very cool stuff, although I think it might make more sense for this to be implemented as a GNOME panel applet. Either way, the author knows clearly what he's doing, so he probably knows better than I. Google's Summer of Code is over now, but let's hope the author keeps developing Mathusalem - it's just too clever of an idea to let go to waste.
Another one to watch.
:)

If you'd like to keep up-to-date with Mathusalem, it can be followed on the author's blog here.

The Agora Project

2006-08-28T13:53:00.000-07:00

The Agora Project seems like an interesting idea for a library.

dpope from the Compiz.net forums explains that:

Several people expressed interest in working on a library that would package opengl graphics/animation in a useful way so that this functionality can be cleanly and easily integrated into windowing libraries such as gtk or qt.

Quinnstorm later suggested:

[W]hat if agora was the frameworks, and CoDE was the actual desktop environment?

To which MacSlow replied:

Sure, that's the main idea behind "Agora". Be a framework or library (libraries) pulling together the nice low-level bits like OpenGL, cairo, gstreamer & Co and offer a solid set of ready to use animations, effects and filters for everything put on the screen. Kind of the Xgl/compiz on the application- and toolkit-level of things.

What you want to build with it afterwards... the next gtk+, Qt or desktop-environment is up to you.

It looks like this might the Linux community's answer to Apple's CoreImage and new CoreAnimation APIs (and probably others as well). It'll allow application programmers to add a little more bling to their apps. However, don't get too excited yet - Whatever the Agora Project ends up becoming, it's certainly at least a year off. Building a library that melds together several APIs requires a deep understanding of each of those APIs, which is not something tha comes easily. However, if the project attracts good talent like MacSlow (who's made a name for himself by creating some pretty cool apps), it certainly won't be an impossible feat. We'll see where this one goes. :)

If you'd like to follow or contribute to the development, check out the Agora Project forum that has been set up.

Mark Shuttleworth Responds to Ubuntu breakage

2006-08-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

Mark Shuttleworth has responded on his blog about the Ubuntu update breakage that occurred last week.

If there is a silver lining to the error, it is that it happened during the one week in six months when we have the core distribution development team together in one place. This gave us the opportunity not just to analyse and fix the issue, and to talk about the sequence of events that led to the problem, but also to discuss the processes we must improve to further reduce the likelihood of a repeat. The team is now more aware than ever of the responsibility we assume given extraordinary rate of adoption of Ubuntu.

It's a well-written piece, and left (at least) myself with a restored confidence in the Ubuntu team for taking this as seriously as it deserves to be taken.

Ubuntu X Breakage Update

2006-08-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, an Ubuntu security update/bug fix apparently broke the Xorg server (ie. graphics capability) of any user who downloaded the update.

From reports on the Ubuntu Forums, it seems (for now, at least) that the breakage affects all users that have upgraded, and is not limited to a certain subset of hardware.

There is now a large green note at the top of the Ubuntu forums pointing to the new fix.

Ubuntu Demon is reporting that a fix has been published, but that users should wait until the new "xserver-xorg-core_1.0.2-0ubuntu10.4_i386.deb" is uploaded to the Ubuntu servers.

Update: The new package has hit the update servers, everyone's safe to update again.

Linux's Public Image

2006-08-21T20:37:00.000-07:00

I was engaging in a random Skypecast a few days ago, and I found myself talking to a Mac user who was considering installing Linux on one of his Macs.

He explained to me that he was reading about Red Hat Linux, and that he saw there was a lot of console-based stuff going on in the screenshots. From what he was telling me, I got the impression that he didn't realize there IS a graphical interface for Linux (X, or Xorg these days).

I explained to him that he should try looking at Fedora Core or Ubuntu Linux, since much of the information on Red Hat Linux on the internet is very outdated (that's the price of being around forever, I guess). I continued to tell him that any recent version of these operating systems feature a user-friendly graphical interface that rivals the usability of Windows and OS X. (I was speaking about Gnome from experience, but I wouldn't discount KDE at all here.)

This is precisely one of the reasons why I blog about Linux - I want to spread the word about what Linux is really like today, and where it's going.

I've talked to so many people who've reacted to the word "Linux" with, "Oh, all that text-based stuff?". The Linux community needs to do everything they can to shake this image. Somehow I don't think billboard advertisements are going to show people what Linux is really like.
Frankly, the Ubuntu Video project is going to be more effective in this area. Cool YouTube videos don't hurt either. :)

I'm curious to see what other people think the best way to show people what Linux is really like is. Any thoughts?

Also, have you ever talked to someone who had an extremely outdated view of what Linux is like? Share you story in the comments below!

Ubuntu Update Breaks Xorg

2006-08-21T20:14:00.000-07:00

Oops.

At least I had the benefit of seeing this thread before I updated my machine. If you've got an Ubuntu 6.06 machine, I suggest not doing any Xorg-related updates until this is fixed.

Judging from the number of posts and views in that thread and the small amount of time it's been up, I think this is one's a biggie.

If you've already busted your X server, or expect you're going to do it by accident, write down the solution:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10

Edit: There's a sticky at the Ubuntu Forums outlining a slightly different fix.

I think this is pretty much the Ubuntu team's nightmare right here - Pushing out a regular security update or bug fix that ends up breaking every user's system. (At least it's repairable, although I think any non-power user would have a hard time finding the fix.)

The shock factor for a new user when they reboot their PC and are greeted by a friendly non-graphical login is going to leave quite the mark on Ubuntu's good reliability record.
(I have a machine at work set to automatically install security updates, I wonder if it's going to get busted too...)

GNOME's preferences to get overhaul

2006-08-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Word on the street is that GNOME's preferences/administration "capplets" are going to get an overhaul, although it won't be ready for the 2.16 release.

While the specifics are still up in the air, it looks like there's going to be a fair amount of the capplets grouped together. Rodrigo Moya's initial proposal looked like this:

* about-me
* at-properties
* a11y keyboard, keyboard and keybindings: merge them in one single
Keyboard capplet
* background, display, font, mouse?, theme switcher, ui-properties,
windows: merge them into a single 'Display' capplet
* default apps
* file types, mime-type
* localization
* network, url-properties
* sound: add video device setup and call it Multimedia??

If you had to ask me, I'd say that judging by a few similar discussions I've read, the new "preferences/administration" would maybe end up looking like the following: Display, Input Devices, Sound and Multimedia, About Me, File Associations, Accessibility, and Localization. (Note: This is almost complete speculation.)

Now, by the time development starts rolling on this, the whole "preferences/administration" interface may have been blown away in favour of the "GNOME Control Center" or have at least a different interface style (compared to the menu method used now.) Since it looks like the preferences and administration menus might be merged, I'd bet that a bigger redesign and reorganization like this is the most likely thing to happen.
If you'd like to get a more in-depth glimpse of the ideas that people are throwing around, check out "Preferences Revisted" on GNOME Live.

(I should also mention Ubuntu Control Center, which is an answer to Novell's control center in their SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. It'll be interesting to see what the GNOME guys do if Ubuntu ever decides to switch over officially to the Ubuntu Control Center...)

August GNOME Journal

2006-08-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

The August edition of The GNOME Journal has been out for a few days, and it's worth checking out if you want a behind-the-scenes look at GNOME development. I've mentioned Tinymail before, and if you're a developer, the article on it is a good read. (Tinymail is being developed as a sort of object-oriented framework instead of just a library.)

Lastly, the interview with Davyd Madeley is pretty interesting:

In your opinion, what should be the next GNOME big steps?

Integration and collaboration. If I have a Bluetooth device, its useful functionality should be integrated with my GNOME applications. My Nokia 770 (or the one I wish I had) should be able to seamlessly integrate with my GNOME Desktop. Not just by syncing data with Evolution, but also at an application level integration. The Jokosher remote is an interesting example of this.

Collaboration is somewhere where we can really get ahead of the game. Collaborative Abiword, collaborative Inkscape, these applications are really pushing the limits with how people expect conventional applications to function. The way we work is undergoing a paradigm shift, in that we no longer all work together in the same office and sometimes, there is no office at all. The ability to collaborate in the same basic way but over a network is seriously a cool thing.

Read on!

USBSink 0.1

2006-08-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

Today we saw the first release of USBSink:

USBSink is a GNOME program for file synchronization over USB.
It is designed for users of removable drives, such as flash drives
or external hard disks. The goal is to have a complete automation of
data trasfers, after a task has been defined. With file monitoring and
hardware detection features, USBSink is able to respond and act
according to relevant events across the desktop.

I'm surprised nobody's created this utility before, and thankful someone finally has. (How long have USB flash drives been around for?)
There's two screenshots available as well as some basic development plans.
If looking for a useful utility to synchronize files to a USB drive, this is the answer to your prayers - Give it a download!

Edgy Eft and GNOME 2.16 Features

2006-08-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

A Stranger's Universe has a nifty article on Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10) & GNOME 2.16 Features. Most of the items in the preview are mild improvements to individual GNOME applications, but there's still plenty of time for the next Ubuntu to become a bit more "edgy".

Ubuntu 6.06 Artwork - Doh!

2006-08-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

I remember reading somewhere that the artwork in Ubuntu 6.06 didn't quit turn out as good as it should have (due to a lack of time).

Well, after getting my iMac at work to boot off the Ubuntu 6.06 Live/Desktop CD (without Bootcamp, I might add), I was playing around with the Gnome Partition Editor, and I noticed this slight oversight:

Funny :)

(Btw, if anyone's interested: To get my (early 2006 model) iMac to boot off the Ubuntu Desktop CD, I just had to install the latest firmware update for the boot loader. (This page explains it.) After that, I held down the "option" key when I rebooted, and selected to boot off the CD (ironically detected as "Windows"). Linux on a Mac was as easy as that!
(Now, is there any easy way to get a Mac to boot off a USB key with Ubuntu installed?)

Quick Update...

2006-08-15T10:12:00.000-07:00

Here's some interesting stuff I've stumbled across in the last week and a half :

Linux.com has a new article outlining the new Dates and Contacts apps that are in development. They both use the Evolution Data Server as a backend, meaning they'll use your Evolution contact/calender data. (People have been complaining about Evolution being slow forever, so maybe we'll finally see a lighter frontend coalesce in the next year or two.

Ubuntu developers Canonical have hired Jono Bacon as their new Ubuntu Community Manager. Jono is well known throughout the GNOME community, and will serve Canonical very well in this position. (Jono's also heading up the Jokosher project, which has turned into a fantastic multi-track studio.)

Christian Schaller has covers some recent developments with Rhythmbox and Totem. (It sounds like the Totem Mozilla plugin might turn into the end-all-be-all media plugin that it should be.) :)

Linux Rock Star Blog

2006-08-13T19:31:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across the "Linux Rock Star" blog, which covers Linux audio applications, hardware, synths, etc.
If you're into audio/music production and run Linux, this site will most definitely come in handy.

There are many music apps available for Linux including Synthesizers, DAW's (Digital Audio Workstations), Trackers, Sequencers and much more. There are also complete Linux Distributions available with all of the programs setup and ready to use. My goal is to cover many of these available programs and make them accessible to the reader.

Sounds like a niche that could use filling! Check it out and be sure to add this one to your feed reader.

Another Fake USB Drive Note

2006-08-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

Guess what I just spotted on Geeks.com?

Same packaging, ergo same manufacturer, but different USB key.

Has anyone bought one of these? Can it actually hold ~4 GB of data?

Open Source Graphics Drivers - The Revolution?

2006-08-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

Digg scooped up two very important tidbits today:

Intel just released open source drivers for their i965 chipset graphics controller.

InfoWorld is reporting that AMD is "strongly considering open-sourcing at least a functional subset of ATI�s graphics drivers", following the recent aquisition of ATI by AMD.

What's all the fuss about?
First off, Intel has a good history of releasing open source drivers, and they're continuing to set a great example for other big industry players. (Their new "Intel Linux Graphics" site is a good move.) The press coverage that they're getting for these new drivers comes at a particularly opportune time, considering what AMD/ATI's thinking about doing. I think this'll put some pressure on AMD/ATI to release open source graphics drivers, which is a good thing. (The current legal situation with Linux distributions bundling and using binary-only drivers is a bit sticky.)

NVIDIA's closed-source drivers and support have consistently beat the quality of ATI's offerings, so it would be quite the shocker if ATI open-sourced their drivers. ATI would suddenly have much more respect within the Linux community and their graphics cards would (hopefully) all work "out-of-the-box" in Linux. The decision would essentially leave NVIDIA no choice but to similarly open-source their own drivers.

Now, this is all best case scenario - There's other possibilities here as well. I think the worst that could happen if ATI's drivers do get open-sourced is that, well, we have "at least a functional subset". That could mean just 2D acceleration support, which is better than nothing, but not nearly as good as it could be. In that case, I doubt that NVIDIA would end up releasing any form of open source driver in response - ATI just wouldn't have upped the ante enough.

Regardless, the push for open source graphics will definitely be one to keep an eye on over the next year.

Shuttleworth: Communicating Release Goals

2006-08-06T12:51:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu head honcho Mark Shuttleworth has just blogged about communicating release goals. Most of the article is an email from Matt Zimmerman (an Ubuntu team member) which talks about the importance of clearly expressing the team's release goals in order to prevent end-user disappointment.

Matt Zimmerman writes:

Many are criticizing shortcomings in Ubuntu which have existed for years now, or deplore the lack of eye candy and other superficial features, as justification for an overall negative impression of the release. In particular, I see repeated mentions of:

- Lack of 3D support out of the box on nVidia chipsets: [0]

- Need to use the command line for certain administrative tasks (including the above) [0] [5]

- Lack of out-of-the-box support for Java, Flash, MP3, DVD, etc. (RestrictedFormats) [0] [4]

- Lack of 3D accelerated desktop effects and other eye candy (e.g. Xgl/AIGLX, prettier usplash) [1] [5]

- Lack of support for a particular hardware component (e.g., wireless card or printer) [1] [2] [4] [6]

- Ubuntu not being easy enough for the typical user [0]

- Lack of availability of development tools in the default install [0] [2]

- Manual partitioning is clunky [0] [3]

None of these are new problems, but they are pointed out as examples of major shortcomings by these reviews. It's notable that in some cases, we're being compared with Windows, rather than other Linux distributions, which is a much higher bar, but overall my impression is that there has been a disconnect between the expectations of the community and what we delivered with Dapper. In particular, I see indications that users expected Dapper:

- to be better-looking ("polished")
- to have more long-standing feature wishes implemented ("polished")
- to have no regressions from Breezy ("polished")
- to have fewer bugs than a typical Ubuntu release ("polished")

(important part bolded for emphasis)

Now, is there anything surprising about the fact that Ubuntu users want "more long-standing feature wishes implemented"?

When I first started using Ubuntu, I was extremely pleased by the number of things that it "got right". Applications that it shipped with it worked out of the box (I had terrible experiences with older versions of Mandrake), and it's hardware support was among the best of the Linux distributions.

Now, it seems that Ubuntu's pace of continuing to "do things right" has slowed down. The reason why people keeping commenting about Flash/MP3/Multimedia/Nvidia/ATI/etc. support being major negative points is because:
A) Simply put, they are major flaws. (I don't think anyone would deny this.)
B) They haven't been fixed in any Ubuntu release to date.

The community's expectation is for the Ubuntu team to take these problems seriously and to address them (that means fix them). These were major problems two years ago, and they're still major problems now. If the Ubuntu team doesn't move to fix these problems soon, it's going to start wearing down the morale of the community. (Nobody likes developers who ignore the complaints of their end-users.)

So, what have we learned? Perhaps that even if we meet our goals in our own eyes, we may be considered a failure by some if they have a different interpretation of our intentions.

I'm going to agree with Matt on this one, as it's a very important lesson for any developers who have a fair amount of contact with their users. Game developers often make the classic mistake of mentioning planned features that never end up seeing the light of day, which only leaves gamers disappointed.

Lastly,

...of the five specific examples, it's quite likely that no more than one or two will actually be implemented in Edgy.

If Edgy fails to include at least some of the "next-generation" features originally mentioned by Mark Shuttleworth and fails to fix some of the major missing pieces that the community keeps complaining about (Flash, multimedia support, etc.), then there's going to be an excellent opportunity for a new Linux distribution to come along and dethrone Ubuntu.

C'est la vie.

Stop NetworkManager from Harassing You

2006-08-05T21:03:00.000-07:00

Back in May, I began using a wireless network connection on my home (Ubuntu 6.06) computer. I decided to install the futuristic (in a usability sense, at least) NetworkManager, which makes networking "pain-free".

The first time I rebooted after I installed NetworkManager, I was prompted to enter my "keyring" password after login, so that NetworkManager could connect to my wireless network. The wireless network I have is encrypted and requires a WPA key to logon. Since the WPA key is essentially a password, it's stored in GNOME's Keyring and thus requires authentication to let an application (in this case, NetworkManager) to access it.

The problem is that if you power down your computer at night to save energy, you'll be prompted to enter your keyring password every time you power it back up. After you punch in your login password, you get another prompt asking you for your keyring password, which seems redundant. This annoyance is compounded by the fact that for some reason unbeknownst to me, I sometimes get asked to enter my keyring password up to 3 times, simply to connect to my wireless network.

I finally found the solution to this problem over at the Ubuntu Forums, in this thread. To make it even easier, there's a .DEB on page 3 in this post with some quick instructions that are very easy to follow. If anyone else has been annoyed by the constant barrage of password entering they have to do, this should ease the pain somewhat. Enjoy!

Fake USB Drives Sleuthing

2006-08-03T09:47:00.000-07:00

I was shopping for a new USB key two days ago, and my local Factory Direct store was advertising a pretty good deal: A 2 gigabyte USB stick for $50 CAD. Great price, great size, you can't go wrong - or can you?

After returning to work with my new toy in hand, I plugged the USB stick into my iMac. It appeared on the desktop as a 2 gigabyte removable drive, and I started amassing an arsenal of portable apps to put on the device. After starting to copy some files over, I noticed the USB key was pretty slow. I had been using my Creative Muvo NX (USB 1.1) as my USB key for a while, and I was hoping that my new drive would be significantly faster. It didn't seem any faster at all. I thought to myself, maybe it's just slow because I'm copy lots of little files, so I tried copying the Ubuntu 6.06 desktop CD image over.

This is when the fun started. After about 100 megabytes, Finder locked up on my Mac. I couldn't kill it nor "relaunch" it. I tried to cancel the file transfer, but Finder was still locked hard. The only way out was a reboot. Once the Mac was back, I took a look at the contents of the USB drive. The Ubuntu image was partly there, but I couldn't read it back. I created a new directory, "untitled folder", on the USB key and started copying the CD image over to this directory once again. The file copy eventually stalled completely, but Finder didn't lock this time. However, I did get the nice treat of my "untitled folder" getting turned into a 0-byte file, which had the added bonus of not freeing the space that the half-copied CD image took up.

At this point, I knew something was terribly wrong. I quickly remembered coming across an eBay guide outlining how to spot fake USB drives that have been flooding eBay. After looking at the list of fake brands, I gulped:
"No Name or Unpopular Brand"

I had most definitely bought an unbranded USB key. I scrolled down to the images of the fake USB drives, and the red fake Sony USB key caught my eye:

It's exactly the same as the one I had bought, albeit in grey and without the Sony name on it:

I immediately emailed Factory Direct, and they told me:

They are not fake USB memory sticks but that particular one may be a defective one.

I was told they would replace it with a "good" one if I returned it to the store. (If I can't get a refund, at least I can try to get a different brand, something that's less likely to be fake.)

After some more sleuthing on the net, I came across this interesting thread over on everythingusb.com. It looks like the USB drives have some funky partitioning to fool the OS into thinking they're larger than they are. If you crack open your USB key and punch the model number of the memory chip that's inside into Google, you'll find out how small the USB drive actually is. From the thread, people have even reported their drives having turned out to have just 16 MB of space. Thanks China!
(There's even been some reports of these fake USB drives containing trojans out-of-the-box. For the record, when I tried plugging mine into an XP box, I do think I saw something fishy flash up on the screen for a second like a command prompt...)

As you can probably guess, I'm a little bit ticked off about this. Because I got ripped off? Yes, but moreso because I bought it from a local retailer in Canada, not some sketchy eBay seller in China. Itching for some consumer action, I contacted the RCMP, who informed me that I should contact Cosumer Affairs to handle this (because in my case, there was no Sony logo, so no copyright infringement).
I'm going to try to head back to the Factory Direct store today and try to press them to give me a refund. Either way, I'll still probably end up reporting this to Consumer Affairs (it's still false advertising/branding(?), and tons of other people are going to get screwed by this.)

Last words of wisdom: If you're buying stuff from a shady liquidation store, watch what you get. Hell, if you're buying stuff from any shady store, be it online or locally, be careful. (I suppose this isn't news to anyone, but I learnt it the hard way.)

Update: There's absolutely no brand markings on the packaging that came with the USB key (just the words "FLASH DRIVE" and a bunch of flags), but I did find a warranty card that must have fallen out of it. The warranty card reads:

MANUFACTURER WARRANTY
This product is under manufacturer warrarnty.
1. This Flash Drive can be exchanged within 30 days from the day of purchase.
2. If you experience difficulties within the 30 days of purchase, please send the productto:
Customer service
8335 Winnetka Ave. Suite #238
Winnetka, Ca 91306

Please allow three to six week for the exchange.
For more information or to download Driver pelase visit our web site:
WWW.FLASHDRIVEMEMORY.COM

3. This warranty card must be marked by sakes.

It's interesting that there's no contact information at all besides the address written on the warranty card. I google mapped the address, and yes, it does exist. (If anyone lives near there and they want to go and see is there's actually someone selling/making USB flash drives there, please do and report back. According to the WHOIS for that site, you're looking for an "Appliance Service Co.")
If you go to their website (who's address I'm not actually linking to so that Google won't up their PageRank), the only contact information you'll find is axm@earthlink.net. (Edit: I've just found another one: info@flashdrivememory.com I've sent them an email asking them about their USB drives, so we'll see what they send back. (Wait a second - They have both www.flashdrivememory.com AND www.flashdriveSmemory.com, under the same no-name label...)
Lastly, the third point in the warranty is pure engrish.

Front of fake USB flash drive packaging

Back of fake USB flash drive packaging

Update #2: Factory Direct took the USB key back and gave me a store credit. They refused to give me a refund, and they didn't appreciate me telling them they might have a shipment of fakes on their hands. The guy said they had sold "hundreds" and only had 3 or 4 returned. I wonder what percentage of people actually tried using more than 256 MB of space (and what percentage tried reading the data back)? 3 or 4 percent? Hmmm....
I received an email back from "FlashDriveMemory" support, and they told me to send the USB key back to them for a replacement.
Did I really just have bad luck and end up with a faulty drive?
I highly doubt it due to the similarity between my experience and others with verified fake USB sticks.
(But that being said, I wonder what would have happened if I had sent it back to the FlashDriveMemory people... )
Oh yeah, and if you WHOIS their domain, you get some more interesting info, but I think I'll stop there. If anyone has anything they'd like to contribute, please leave a comment!

Istanbul receives overhaul

2006-07-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

Istanbul is a simple "desktop session recorder" that allows you to create screencasts. It sits in your notification area, and to use it, you simple click its icon. Its simplicity gave it the potential to become a very useful tool.

However, over the past year it had fallen out of date and contained many bugs, pretty much making it unusable in Ubuntu 6.06 - until now. The creator, Zaheer Abbas Merali, has blogged that Istanbul has just received a UI overhaul and can now record 3D applications as well as composited environments (eg. XGL). For now, if you'd like to try out these updates, you'll have to use the bleeding-edge CVS version, but you can look forward to them in the next release.

Update: That's what I get for writing this article a week ago, but only posting it now - Istanbul 2.0 has been released.

GTK 2.10 - Progress

2006-07-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

Ars Technica has an interesting article up on the latest and greatest version of GTK.
Here's the interesting bit:

A new function has been added that will enable GTK applications to detect the presence of a compositing manager like XGL, possibly a prelude to more extensive integration of translucency in various GNOME applications, like real transparency in the GNOME terminal.

Perhaps we'll see something beyond better translucency effects in applications though. Compiz provides some very slick desktop effects, and it'd be neat if applications could trigger some special effects and interact with the window manager in a cool way.
Progress.

Novell's GNOME Menu in Ubuntu

2006-07-18T06:47:00.000-07:00

One of the features that sets Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 apart from the pack is it's unique menu replacement for the gnome-panel.
Well, you can now install the new "gnome-main-menu" in Ubuntu.
I had actually tried this a few days ago, but I was pretty turned off by how ugly it looks with the default Ubuntu theme:

Compare with:

Moral to the story: If you install the new gnome-main-menu, change your GNOME theme.
(I'm going to change my theme and give the new menu another shot this week, we'll see how useful it is.)

Full NTFS Support... Again

2006-07-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

It looks like the ability to read/write to NTFS partitions in Linux has arrived.... again...

Originally, we had captive-ntfs, which was the first real contender that brought read/write support for NTFS. It worked by wrapping the "NTFS.SYS" driver from Windows, and required a valid Windows license to use (legally, that is). Unfortunately, captive-ntfs wasn't compatible with the 2.6 kernel for a very long time. However, earlier this year, a new version was released that does work with the 2.6 kernel (most modern Linux distributions use the 2.6 kernel, making this a pretty important feature).

Unfortunately, captive-ntfs isn't quite the end-all-be-all solution to the NTFS problem. It's not the speediest method ever conceived and it does require a Windows license to legally use. For most people though, neither of these problems are an issue. Lastly, there are reports that the driver is still rough around the edges.

Meanwhile, the Linux-NTFS project has continued their "slowly but surely" approach to the problem, and it appears that the project may just have reached fruition. The ntfs-3g driver provides a decently fast, completely open-source (and Microsoft-free) approach to the NTFS read/write problem. It's also in active development, unlike the former solution.

If you're dying to be able to write to your NTFS partition, check out the announcement (complete with installation instructions. If you're an Ubuntu user, you can snag some slightly different instructions over here.
(Edit: Or if you're into broken english, here's another easier (aside from the engrish) ntfs-3g Ubuntu HOWTO.)

Read/write support is one of those problems that just hasn't gone away over the years, but it seems like many peoples' hard work is finally paying off. It'll be nice to finally be able to read/write to NTFS drives "out of the box" in Linux.

Last-exit Player and Last.fm

2006-07-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

Last-exit is an audio player for the handy last.fm music service. If you have a free Last.fm profile, the player will stream music from artists that it thinks you will like based on your past listening history.

The website for Last-exit gave me a good chuckle when I saw it the first time. If you click the "magic stuff", you'll see some nice screenshots as well. That brings me to my next point: The user interface on this application absolutely kicks ass. It's simple, organized, functional, and looks great.

So what's Last.fm?
Last.fm is a useful website/service for finding artists similar to those that you already listen to. If you use an audio player that has last.fm support, last.fm will automatically build up a profile of what music you listen to. If you login to the last.fm website, it'll show you stats on what you've been listening to, and it'll help you find similar artists. Banshee takes it a step further by integrating some of these stats directly into the player's UI.
Sometimes it tells you about artists that you already know about, but it's usually a great way to expand your taste in music. Personally, I've found it pretty useful in my experience with it, but there's always some interesting bias in the statistics it gives you. For instance, the first few songs that appear in Banshee or Rhythmbox for me get played disproportionately more than other songs in my collection simply because they're at the top and more accessible - not because I like them more. If you keep these sorts of things in mind, it's pretty interesting to see if the music you listen to the most is actually the music you like the most.

Give it a shot!

Edit: A .deb for Ubuntu Dapper is available here. (.DEB updated to version 2, but if you want to run the newer version 3, download the sources.)

Banshee 0.11 Preview

2006-07-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

Update: Banshee 0.11 has been released! I've posted instructions on how to install Banshee 0.11 as well.

Music players in Linux have been undergoing a sort of renaissance over the past year. Older programs such as Rhythmbox and Quod Libet have undergone serious active development adding useful new features. Newer contenders like Banshee and Listen have continued to add features in a friendly competition to create the best desktop music player.

In keeping with this competition, the next release of Banshee (version 0.11) is going to have some spiffy new (and long awaited) features.

The change is the new splash screen, which has a nice little progress bar on it:

Once Banshee's done loading, you'll recognize the usual simple layout, but it's got a few new additions on the left-hand side:

That's right: Banshee's going to have podcast support, internet radio support, and iTunes Music Store (ITMS) support all in one go!

Each of these new features is integrated via plugins, but thanks to the clever design of the plugin architecture, each plugin's features are integrated seamlessly into the user interface:

Podcast support in Banshee

Streaming internet radio in Banshee

ITMS support in Banshee

I haven't personally tested buying anything through ITMS in Banshee, but it looks like it "just works".

This is the Banshee I've been waiting for. With the upcoming 0.11 release of Banshee, I think the project has finally have started to reach maturity, as it's now flush with tons of unique features that are seamlessly integrated into the beautiful user interface.

Lastly, here's a list of all of the major features that'll be included in Banshee's next release:

Audioscrobbler/Last.FM support
Music sharing (DAAP)
Metadata Searching (Automatic covert art and metadata downloading)
Multimedia Keys support
Podcast support
Music Recommendations (through Last.FM)
Smart Playlists
Streaming Internet Radio
iTunes Music Store (ITMS) support
Wikipedia/Lyrics support (lookup artist info and lyrics)
Full iPod sync support with transcoding
CD Playback and Ripping

Drooling yet?
I most certainly am.
:)

Novell's SLED 10, Gimmie, Evolution

2006-06-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

Watch out Ubuntu: SLED 10's in town

Novell has been creating buzz with their new SUSE Linux Enterprise 10.
Why all the buzz?
Watch these videos and you'll find out. Pretty nifty stuff going on there - SUSE 10 has the potential to do very well in the business desktop market.
OS News was pretty impressed by the prerelease, and Nat Friedman has some links to and quotes from SLED 10 reviews that are very interesting as well.
Check them out!
I'd be willing to install SUSE 10 on my home PC, but I'm not sure what the package situation is like for SUSE. I really like having 19,000 packages available to me through Synaptic - It'd be hard to give that up. Maybe SUSE 10 at work, Ubuntu at home?

First release of Gimmie

Gimmie (aka. Gimmebar) got its first release recently. It's a replacement for GNOME's panels which people seem to be fairly interested in. There's a great presentation (PDF) summarizing where the development is headed and explaining the concepts behind it. I haven't personally tried Gimmie yet, but its coolness factor is steadily increasing. One day, Gimmie, one day.

Evolution evolution?

Dave Richards has a plugin architecture in mind for Evolution that would "[make] evolution cool". If the ability to download and display movie showtimes in Evolution isn't cool, then I don't know what is. The architecture is still early in development, so we'll just have to hope that this one matures.

HOWTO: Scream "I know nothing about Linux"

2006-06-29T07:12:00.000-07:00

I'm sure this happens to other people on a regular basis too, so I guess it just goes to show that there's tons of "computer experts" out there who don't have a clue when it comes to Linux (or maybe just haven't read ANY tech news site on the net in the past 8 years):

Yesterday someone asked me at work what version of Linux we were running on one of our servers.
I told him, "Ubuntu 6.06".
He replied, "Why don't you run Redhat? Why are you using such an obscure version??? I've never heard of that..."

*sigh*

I love people who know absolutely nothing about Linux, but like to throw the term "Redhat" out there just to look cool, but end up looking like an ass anyways.

The revolution's got a ways to go yet. ;)

Ubuntu 6.06 and NTP: The revelation of suggesting packages

2006-06-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

I was playing around with my system the other day, and I stumbled across the "Adjust Date & Time" dialog in Ubuntu/GNOME:

At first glance, this was a beautifully designed dialog. Every button has an icon, and the layout is very clean.
I noticed the option to "Periodically synchronize clock with Internet servers", which is something that I thought my Ubuntu machine did already. After checking off the box beside it, I was presented with something that I made my jaw drop:

That's right - Ubuntu knew I didn't have the right package(s) installed, explained to me what I needed to do, and gave me an option right there to do it.
After clicking "Install NTP support", I got exactly what I had hoped for:

Granted, after it installed the NTP packages, I did have to close the date/time dialog and open it again for it to detect the packages (it's a small bug), but the functionality was there nonetheless.

Why did I get excited by this?

An intelligent package suggestion mechanism ("suggest/install a package") should be the next killer feature for Ubuntu on the desktop. Imagine for a moment, you've just installed Ubuntu on your friend's computer. They try to download and play an MP3, but are given a cryptic error message whenever they try to play an MP3 file. They don't know what package to install, or even know that there is a package to install to fix this. Now imagine that they were given a suggest/install a package message instead. They would know exactly how to fix their problem, and could do it with the click of a button.

Why hasn't this been worked on before?

The importance and scope of this concept are huge. For example, if a user tries to open a 3d model file and doesn't have a program installed that can view it, they could be presented with a suggest/install a package dialog that allows them to install a viewer immediately.
Taking things a step further, if someone plugs in a piece of hardware that is supported by some extra modules that need installing, they could be presented with the same dialog, but would instead help them download the required package(s).
Lastly, imagine a new out-of-the-box user cracks open the Apple Trailers site in Firefox. They try to view a movie trailer, and Firefox pops up a suggest/install a package dialog that helps the user download the Totem plugin and/or the required gstreamer packages to playback Quicktime trailers properly.

What are all these situations like right now?

When a user clicks a file that doesn't have a viewer/handler installed, they get a message saying "Couldn't display....". To view the file, they'll have to know beforehand which package to install, or they'll have to consult the web.

When someone plugs in a piece of hardware that isn't recognized, and just needs some packages installed for it to work, they'll have to consult the web to figure it out.
When someone tries to view a trailer from the Apple Trailers site in Firefox, they are prompted by the "Plugin Finder Service" dialog, which tells them that "No suitable plugins were found." You can, in fact, watch a trailer from this site with the "totem-gstreamer-firefox-plugin" package installed (you might need the win32 codecs installed too, but I don't remember).

But there is hope:

There is a feature specification in Ubuntu Edgy to "Suggest packages to support unknown filetypes". Read more.
There is also a different specification in Edgy that "aims to provide an interface for unknown file extensions to automatically install a certain packages [sic] when it's called."
This specification is also known as the "Ubuntu Common Hooker". (includes pictures)

There's another specification, "Firefox Updates/Firefox plugins" that aims to tie Firefox's update and plugin suggestion mechanism into apt, so that they'll both work properly. Read more.
Lastly, there's a feature spec. to "Suggest the needed packages to support a new device". Currently, the status of this one is just a "braindump" (ie. just an idea), but I certainly think it's a good one that's worth developing.

What can you do to help?

Contribute to these Ubuntu specifications, and help bring them to the attention of developers.
Better yet, if you have the time and the skills, write some code!

News Tidbits: New kernel, Edgy Stuff, Alky

2006-06-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

Here's some interesting articles I've found over the past few days:

Jorge Castro mentions some possible features that are being worked on for Edgy.
Linux Watch gives an overview of the new 2.6.17 kernel, which include a nice speed boost for EXT3 filesystems (that's most people), the groundwork for better WiFi support (don't we keep hearing that?), and a cool SMP detection feature...

... and here's a piece of software to keep an eye on:

Alky

Alky is "is a tool that allows you to convert a Windows executable to a Mac OS X or Linux binary." It's an alternate approach of getting software to run on another platform (as opposed to the WINE approach, which they make clear on their site.) I was a bit skeptical at first, since they say they're "focused on high-end gaming at the moment". High-end gaming is the area where it's hardest to do any cross-platform chicanery because games often use a bunch of different advanced APIs (think DirectX, OpenGL, OpenAL, EAX, etc.), which can be tough to reimplement or work around.
However, later down their page I noticed:

Although it's a very new project, it will already convert (nearly) any Windows executable into a Mac OS X executable and attempt to run it, with some success and a fair amount more debug data.

Pretty good. I'm keeping an eye on this one.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

2006-06-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not if this is a good thing or a bad thing... There were a lot of new upstream releases in those updates, but, uhh... Dapper's supposed to be done!

Free bug fixes never hurt though...

Dapper a disapointment?

2006-06-15T12:52:00.000-07:00

In in this week's DistroWatch.com's newsletter, I spotted a nice opinion piece about why you should give Fedora Core 5 a shot.
The interesting part to me was in the second paragraph though:

Despite having been delayed by six weeks for "polish" and carrying a "Long Term Support" tag, the Ubuntu 6.06 release was a disappointment.

I think that's the first time I've read of anyone just flat out calling Ubuntu 6.06 a disappointment. Interesting? Definitely. Accurate? Probably more so than I'd like...
I can't really put my finger on it, but Dapper definitely has some rough edges. (I've been struggling this week on a new system with Dapper's installer, which seems to mess up installing GRUB in any configuration but the simplest one...)