August 2010 Archives

Is Twitter's new oauth feature responsible for this annoying login box when I go to Twitter.com?

I ignore Twitter and Identi.ca for weeks at a time. Sure I have feeds from my blog going from one to the other, but I pretty much stay away from Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook (the latter of which I also feed automatically).

So today I figure I'll look in on Twitter and Identi.ca via the Pino microblogging client that I installed in my Fedora 13 Xfce system. Pino is in the default GNOME desktop but not in the Xfce spin.

Anyway, Pino just hangs there when I start it. So I go to Twitter and do a search, eventually learning that it's something called "oauth" that is breaking Pino.

On the Pino site, a message says the app will have oauth support in 0.3, so I'm not terribly worried. I can live without a microblogging client until then. (We still have HootSuite, which is about to start charging all but the most casual user, and which due to its extreme usefulness we might just pay for at the shop here.)

Also ... I've heard Gwibber is affected as well.

Here's the important part of this entry, which I've wisely saved for the bottom: Is this oauth thing responsible for the annoying password box that keeps popping up at http://twitter.com? (see picture above)

When I discovered after uploading a couple dozen breaking-news JPGs I had written captions for in gThumb 2.11 that those captions weren't being recognized by my IPTC-capable content-management system, I worried that my go-to Linux/BSD application for photo editing would be useless to me. I even went so far as to install Wine so I could get my work done with IrfanView.

Well, not even two weeks have passed, and everything is working right once again.

The whole process gives me a great feeling about the people behind gThumb, GNOME, Fedora and the free, open-source software world in general.

When I discovered the gThumb 2.11 problem, I found users in the Fedora Forums with other gThumb issues and saw the suggestion that we file bugs upstream. I immediately figured out how to file a bug in GNOME Bugzilla,started an account and filed a bug.

As detailed in my last post on gThumb's broken IPTC metadata capability, the prompt answer to the bug I filed suggested that I try gThumb 2.11.90, in which this bug should have been fixed.

In Fedora 13 right now, gThumb is at 2.11.5, and while there was a 2.11.90 package for Fedora 14, I was reluctant (and not so knowledgeable as to exactly how) to update the dependencies that went with gThumb 2.11.90. I also was unable to build 2.11.90 from source (although I've since installed the necessary compiliers in an effort — not quite completed or successful — to fix my Conexant sound problem with another source package).

It's been barely a week since that last entry, and I checked the gThumb area of the Fedora Build System today and found a gThumb 2.11.90 package for Fedora 13.

I downloaded and installed the RPM. I immediately did a test on the IPTC metadata, and gThumb is now writing that data in the proper way, which means captions written via IPTC (in gThumb's Comments) will now show up in other IPTC-capable image editors (IrfanView, Photoshop, PhotoMechanic) as well as in Web-based applications that tap into the IPTC data fields in JPGs.

My participation in this is in no way a big deal. I found a bug, filed a bug report, got helpful advice from a GNOME developer (thanks, Paolo!), installed a newer version of the package and am now back in my go-to image-editing application in Linux/BSD.

So in this case, the free, open-source development model is working perfectly. If you're running Fedora 13, grab the new gThumb from the page linked to above.

Installing this RPM went without a hitch. And gThumb will be in great shape when Fedora 14 is released. I'm not sure if/when gThumb 2.11.90 will be pushed to all users of the app in Fedora 13 — I'm still too new of a Fedora user to have a handle on these things. But I bet it's coming, given that there's an FC13 package in the Build Service.

Ubuntu 10.04 rolled back from gThumb 2.11 to 2.10, which is also in Debian Lenny. The Ubuntu package situation right now has 2.11.3 in Maverick, and I have a pretty good feeling that they'll get to 2.11.90, so when the next Ubuntu release comes around, users will have no idea there was ever IPTC trouble in gThumb 2.11.

Debian Squeeze currently has gThumb 2.11.5 (same as stock Fedora 13). Looking at Debian's gThumb situation, 2.11.90 is in Experimental and should be at least percolating into Sid soon.

I'm not sure what the freeze in Debian Squeeze means for gThumb, but it would be a problem for users if 2.11.90 is held back from Squeeze.

Do any Debian people out there know if Debian policy will prevent gThumb 2.11.90 from being included in Squeeze?

I'd like to thank the GNOME/gThumb developers who made all this possible, plus the Fedora developers who put together the gThumb 2.11.90 RPM for FC13. You've done a great job in making my Linux installation more productive.

Britain's BBC has its own Click, it turns out.

The Abiword 2.8.4 on my Fedora 13 Xfce system just got an update to 2.8.6. It's not a major upgrade, and some bugs are addressed, but I don't expect an application like this to get even a bug-fix update in a distribution that's been out there for awhile. A security patch, yes, but a new package because upstream has a new release (even though the distro itself isn't so new anymore)?

I like it. Very much. I've seen quite a few updates roll by over my last month or so in Fedora, and a lot of these things have been bug fixes, not security updates.

First Midori was fixed, now Abiword gets new features (and fewer bugs). I feel like the Fedora developers are really looking out for users and making sure that if the release can be made a little better, that actually can and does happen.

Overall I've been extremely happy with Fedora 13. I'm not happy with either Conexant or the whole of Linux/BSD for making a laptop soundcard that refuses to mute the speakers when a headphone jack is plugged in, but as I say — it's not Fedora. All of Linux and BSD appears affected by this Conexant problem, and I don't see any fix in sight.

I haven't had a lot of time on the laptop I upgraded — seemingly successfully — from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 (LTS to LTS).

Everything seemed to go OK, and the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop rebooted into a nice Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid desktop.

Wireless networking didn't work, and the NetworkManager icon was missing (and Networking is no longer a menu choice in Ubuntu). I haven't yet had time to hook it up to a wired Ethernet port so I can see if DHCP remains that way.

If I can get networking into the machine (and I can manually configure if I have to), maybe a reinstall of NetworkManager will bring the icon back to the upper GNOME panel.

Other than that I haven't noticed anything amiss, but I haven't done much beyond wonder why I can't seem to get the WiFi working.

Once I do get some time with the laptop, I'll evaluate further.

I have a pretty good feeling that I can fix the NetworkManager situation, and if I can't it's an easy reinstall of 10.04 ...

So rest easy, Ubuntu people, this one looks like it's going your way.

This Bruce Byfield piece from Linux Magazine looks like it's going to go negative but instead offers a reasoned argument for why Debian GNU/Linux remains relevant and useful in the Ubuntu era.

Just last night I pulled out my Compaq Armada 7770dmt — the 1999-era laptop that refuses to quit working and sports a 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU, 144 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive.

I once wrote a multipart series centered on which OS I should run on this laptop.

For just about a year now I've had Debian Lenny with a "custom" Xfce desktop — custom because I built it up from the "standard" install to keep it as lean as possible in the 2 GB I have set aside for /root and /swap.

With Debian, it just rolls down the track and keeps running. How many of today's distributions will even load up on a Pentium II?

Even though I'm running Fedora 13 right now (Fedora 14's not looking so good as far as video on this Lenovo G555, so I may be back to Debian sooner rather than later), I've tried Debian Squeeze, most recently with the Alpha 2 live image, and it's another solid system for what amounts to new hardware. Yep, machines spaced over 10 years apart can run the same distro.

As I've said many a time, if you can manage to avoid ill-time dist-upgrades (killed my Lenny-to-Squeeze plan about six months ago ... but I pulled the trigger at the wrong time), it's hard to do better security-, performance- or usability-wise than Debian. Sure some things are harder to configure than in Ubuntu. But nothing is that much harder, much less impossible. And you will see a performance bump.

I stray from Debian because I get itchy, but I often regret it. I've never run Testing for any length of time, or Sid/Unstable at all, and I probably should. But Debian Stable? It runs better on more machines than anything I've ever tried.

Can I see myself running Ubuntu again? Sure. But I can't see a time when I won't have a use for more than one instance of Debian.

I haven't run the AbiWord word processor in an age. I barely ever run OpenOffice, or MS Office, or any office software outside of Google Docs.

But this Fedora 13 Xfce desktop included AbiWord and Gnumeric instead of the heavier OpenOffice, and I decided to give AbiWord a try again.

AbiWord is pretty great. It's super fast, and version 2.8.4 in Fedora includes the spell-checker (I often had trouble getting spell-checking to work in other distros). If you just want to do word-processing and do it quickly, there's nothing better than AbiWord.

I was looking for the word-wrap settings (still don't know if these exist ...) and instead learned that AbiWord now offers SMART QUOTES. Now if you read entries from this blog in 2007, you could glean that I was somewhat obsessed with smart quotes in word-processing documents.

I had an editor at the time who took Word documents and basically plowed them into print. If you had "smart quotes" in your document — you know, with the open-quotes curving one way, the close-quotes the other — your printed output would look great. Otherwise it would look ... not so good.

So I was on a mission to find word-processing software that was a) free b) fast and c) handled smart quotes well.

And now AbiWord includes smart quotes. I probably complained 80 separate times in this blog, and the feature is here.

This almost makes me want to go back to Abiword. Thanks to the entire Abiword team who put in a feature that geeks sneer at but regular people pretty much expect.

From the Abiword home page, here's the announcement for version 2.8:

Oct 27, 2009
AbiWord 2.8 has been released! This milestone supports annotations, or "comments", smart quotes and native SVGs. Furthermore it includes powerful collaboration capabilities allowing multiple people to work on one document at the same time. These features are tightly integrated with a new online web service called AbiCollab.net, which lets you store documents online, allows easy document sharing with your friends, and performs format conversions on the fly.
Read the release announcement here.

With all these new features, I'm just about to update the Abiword on my Windows XP box, and enjoy the extreme quickness it offers over OpenOffice (again ... like I've actually even fired up OO over the past 6 months).

Chromium — the community build of the Google Chrome browser (is that even the right way to refer to the project?) — isn't in the Fedora repositories, but you can get it.

I'm still feeling my way around Fedora 13, and while I've added the RPM Fusion and Adobe repositories, I'm still proceeding slowly with a great many things.

One thing I finally did do was add Chromium. I did it with the Spot repository for Chromium from Fedorapeople. I added the fedora-chromium.repo file to my /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory, as instructed in the file itself. Then I used PackageKit to add Chromium. Easy as heat-and-serve pie.

So what if you already have Flash installed for Firefox and want it to work in Chromium, too? The instructions on how to make that happen aren't exactly compatible with the way this particular Chromium package is installed in Fedora 13. I'll have to look into this further to fine-tune the suggested symbolic link.

A look at the roadmap for Ubuntu One reveals the following feature planned for Maverick:

Windows file sync

* Addresses the needs of the many Ubuntu users who operate in a mixed platform environment of Ubuntu + Windows
* Will support syncing files between Windows desktops and your Ubuntu One personal cloud

You can't argue that Windows is the world's most popular operating system and that it's, in one sense, the proverbial "no-brainer" for Ubuntu One to sync with Windows, but this is free, open-source Linux we're talking about.

What about a free, open-source Ubuntu One client that could be used in any Linux distribution?

Will this Windows code be open source? I have no idea. If you know, please leave a comment on this post.

I realize that one of the main reasons for Ubuntu One's existence is to draw users to Ubuntu, but allowing Windows users a degree of functionality that users of other Linux distributions will not have — that just seems wrong.

After filing a bug on the IPTC metadata issue in gThumb 2.11, namely that the application doesn't put the data entered in the "comment" area into the right format for IPTC, I heard from one of the developers that my bug was similar to another bug that was fixed in version 2.11.90, and he suggested I try that version.

My Fedora 13 skills are rudimentary, and I haven't yet been able to build gThumb 2.11.90 from source, and I haven't yet had the time to grab the required dependencies to install the RPM for Fedora 14 (and I do have that RPM). I'll get around to it, I'm sure.

What I'd like to do is thank the gThumb team for being so responsive. The developers did a lot of overhauling to gThumb between 2.10 and 2.11, and I can understand there being a few glitches. I'm just glad the process seems to be working, and I hope that gThumb will be back in my workflow very soon.

All I really need to make gThumb the ultimate photo-editing app for my purposes is the ability to sharpen images in the app. As it is, gThumb allows me to edit an image with another program, say the GIMP, and then return to gThumb. If I do this just right, gThumb returns the IPTC metadata to my JPG image file after the GIMP zaps it out. A GIMP that also recognized, edited and didn't obliterate IPTC data would solve many a problem. I've brought this up before maybe a dozen times, and I'm not expecting anything to happen regarding the GIMP and IPTC. I continue to be thankful that gThumb and digiKam handle IPTC.

I've tried Mapivi, which does handle IPTC data, but it didn't work particularly well for me.
Fotoxx also didn't work well for me, but I'm open to trying both of these applications again. I'd also love to see IPTC capability in Krita; that alone would push me into KDE (a desktop environment that I tried recently in Fedora 13 but didn't much like).

I'll close by saying that gThumb remains my No. 1 image editor.

I decided to go ahead with the in-place upgrade of the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 LTS.

After some initial bumps along the road, everything today has gone extremely smoothly. I've already addressed the fact that the 10.04 upgrade is only presented to 8.04 users when update-manager is run with the --devel-release switch. It's hacky, in no way self-evident, but once you find the information is easy enough to act upon.

Thus far the process has been long but uneventful. I know in a few short minutes whether or not this Celeron-based laptop will boot into 10.04 with or without incident.

If you use or follow Ubuntu, a great way to see what's happening somewhat behind the scenes is the Canonical Design Team site/blog.

I assumed this was a fairly new thing (and I think I'm right in this assumption), but it has posts going back to 2005. Where did those posts come from? I didn't know there was a design team in 2005 ...

One thing that holds my interest is that Canonical in general, and the design team in particular, are doing usability testing on the user interface and such applications as Rhythmbox.

As somebody said in the comments to the Rhythmbox entry, this is a great way of "giving back" to open source that just happens to be something besides hacking at code.

For free, open-source software to really break out of its geeky box, we really need to celebrate and encourage contributions that go beyond coding, and I'm glad to see Canonical putting resources into areas such as design and the user experience.

Fedora 13 has been working out very well over the past couple of weeks. Let me bullet-point the good and bad:

• As I wrote a few days ago, the Midori browser is working again. I've been amazed over the few weeks I've run Fedora that even though the release of the distro is already out there, some bugs have actually been fixed in applications. Another app that improved during the course of my use of F13 is the gPodder podcast client, which had an issue with selecting the type of audio player in its UI. That's been fixed, and I'm using gPodder pretty regularly.

• The gThumb image editor's IPTC-data capabilities are pretty much broken in version 2.11 (with Ubuntu's decision to revert to 2.10 in Lucid, initially criticized by me, looking now like an excellent move and huge point in Ubuntu's favor). I couldn't figure out how to install 2.10 in Fedora 13 (I'm not that good yet), so to keep my workflow going, I decided to install IrfanView under Wine. I initially tried ot use Bordeaux with the .sh script, but once it installed the Bordeaux front-end refused to install IrfanView. I ripped Bordeaux out of there and instead used the Wine package provided in Fedora. I still couldn't get Wine to run the IrfanView install .exe, even with the required .dll file moved into the Wine install from my XP box. Somewhere on the Web I saw that somebody with the same problem just took the IrfanView directory from Windows and moved it into their Wine system, so I got a USB stick and did just that. It worked. I then made a desktop shortcut for IrfanView as well as a panel icon, and now I have IrfanView with which to edit images and their IPTC data — a must for my Web production duties.

• And yes, I did open a bug on the gThumb 2.11 IPTC problem with the upstream project.

• While on the subject of Wine, I don't know if my aborted install of Bordeaux had anything to do with this, but I did bring the wine-desktop package into this Fedora installation, and while it initially appeared in the Xfce menu, it now only does so sporadically. I really don't need any of those things in the menu (and since I didn't install IrfanView the "regular" way it never appeared in the application menu, which is seemingly impossible to edit manually or any other way, a weakness of Xfce, especially in Fedora). But a yum reinstall of wine-desktop does bring all those Wine items back into the menu, albeit temporarily. Not a deal-breaker; I'm just noting it.

• Xfce's Thunar file manager doesn't have the direct capability of opening network shares or FTP sites but somehow can do so with the Gigolo package, which I've used successfully in Xubuntu. However, on most of the FTP sites I've tried to connect to in Fedora 13, Gigolo crashes. I'm a heavy enough user of FTP that I needed FileZilla anyway, and that app has been working great ever since I installed it.

• I commented recently on one of the Xfce features I like, that being the ability to "roll up" a window. Somebody said you can do the same thing in GNOME, but I recently tried to do it in a couple of GNOME-running installations, including Ubuntu 8.04, and I couldn't figure out how to "roll up" a window. So once again I'm declaring this feature a reason to run Xfce; until futher notice anyway.

• I really like yum. It's powerful, well-documented and easy to use. I don't miss apt or Aptitude at all. I'm not so in love with PackageKit. It's less than intuitive and makes Synaptic look good. Yum is easier.

• I still like the Xfce Terminal a whole lot.

• I had to do some work on my network configuration on the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop, and it makes me extremely thankful for all the improvements made in NetworkManager since that release.

• The way Fedora (and pretty much all distros except Ubuntu) notifies me of software updates is better than the way Ubuntu does it now.

• I haven't installed OpenOffice on this Fedora 13 Xfce laptop. It came with Abiword and Gnumeric, and I haven't used them either. I pretty much use text editors (Geany is part of this build) and Google Docs.

• GNOME's Totem seems to work "better" than Xfce's Parole media player, at least on this newer hardware, but Parole uses less CPU. That could be a factor for older hardware.

• While I've pretty much abandoned traditional mail clients, I've been using the Fedora 13 Xfce's default app Claws Mail to run a couple of accounts via IMAP. I really like Claws - it's fast, light and easy to configure. I really felt the heaviness of Thunderbird 3 in the brief time I ran it, and this looks like a really great alternative. I still have something like 4 GB of mail in Thunderbird format parked on a USB stick and I guess I'll have to deal with it at some point, but for my day-to-day mail, I'm using Gmail; it's just too convenient and useful to ignore.

• This Lenovo G555 laptop is good enough hardware-wise that I really don't need to go through the trouble of installing Google Chrome or Chromium. Firefox, which I need for a few critical tasks, runs so fast that I'm pretty much using it all the time.

• While the Pino microblogging client is in the F13 GNOME default, it isn't part of the Xfce spin. I installed it, and I really like it. It's way, way, way, way, way lighter than Gwibber, which really dragged down my last Ubuntu 10.04 system with its database issues. The one thing I miss from Gwibber is the ability to update any number of microblogging accounts with a single post. But overall Pino, which hooks up to both Twitter and Identi.ca, is a great microblogging client and nowhere near the resource hog that Gwibber is (at least in Ubuntu Lucid).

I use Audacity for podcast audio capture and production on a variety of platforms, and the speed with which my new Lenovo G555 (AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz) mixes down to MP3. I can't remember adding the LAME package from RPMFusion, but I must have done that because I tested that feature before I needed to edit a podcast and all was working fine.

What I forgot to test was the ability of Audacity in Fedora 13 to import MP3 audio, the format in which I get interview segments from my JV Show host Jon Gold.

Audacity wouldn't import the MP3, throwing off a message saying something close to "this version of Audacity is not compiled with MP3 support."

Now I'm all about freedom and free formats, but the rest of the world pretty much speaks MP3, and while I choose Ogg, Flac and other free formats when possible, the rest of the world doesn't know such formats exist. I like the choice of whether or not to use MP3 or any restricted format.

So it's Friday evening and I have to put the podcast together. So what do I do?

A quick Google search yielded the following from the Audacity Forum, with this post focusing on solving the problem in Fedora:

I had the same issue and found that the audacity-freeworld package solves the problem instantly!

I just had to remove the other version:

# yum remove audacity

Then install the new one:

# yum install audacity-freeworld

That did it. Now I can import MP3 audio into Audacity. Like I said, I fully support choosing to use non-encumbered formats, but I like the flexibility of using them if I want or need to. And this "freeworld" package allows me to do that.

Now ... if only the Linux world could help me and the rest of the Conexant 5069 sound-chip sufferers figure out how to have the internal speakers actually mute when headphones are plugged in, we'd really be getting somewhere. I wouldn't mind the internal microphone muting when a mic is plugged in, but both the internal and external mics are controllable through ALSA, so I have the internal mic muted that way.

I've been a bit disappointed in the Midori browser, which worked great on the Fedora 13 Xfce install but broke with a subsequent update. I went so far as to remove Midori from the system.

Seeing this post on Planet Fedora on the new Midori got me thinking. Midori 0.2.7 isn't in Fedora 13, but I figured I'd give 0.2.6 another try.

I used yum to install it, and I'm running it now — no crashing.

And yes, it's blazing fast.

Don't get me wrong, Midori is still a bit buggy. In Movable Type I can't properly use the "chain" tool to create links in posts. The linked text is unselected and the link code appears next to instead of around the desired text. And the cursor seems to stick on the little hand instead of reverting to a usual cursor.

But it's fast. And it appears to be getting better all the time.

I like so many things about this Fedora 13 environment (despite my sound issues across every Linux distro and BSD project with the Conexant 5069 chip in this Lenovo G555 laptop) that I'm going to do a post about it tomorrow just to gush about how great it's been overall.

A check over at Planet Debian revealed a lot of chatter about Debian's 17th birthday.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in the Debian Project, past and present for providing a distribution that has been invaluable to me since I began using Linux in 2007.

Debian consistently runs on more machines — and runs better — than just about anything else out there.

As I've written dozens of times, the six months or so that I ran Debian Lenny as my main desktop OS were the most trouble-free and productive six months I've ever had in FOSS operating systems.

I'm running Fedora 13 right now on my "main" machine, and I really like it, but I still have machines running Debian and don't see any reason for that to change.

I consider Debian an essential resource for the computing community worldwide.

When people talk about how Ubuntu is for newbies and Debian and Slackware are only for hard-core geeks, don't listen to them. As pillars of the Linux and overall free, open-source software ecosystem, both Debian and Slackware are more than graspable by anyone willing to read, listen and learn.

Sooner than later, you're going to run into trouble in Ubuntu, and your efforts to figure out what's wrong and fix it will pretty much mirror what you'd be doing in Debian. By that I mean the skills you learn (and you WILL need to learn them) to keep Ubuntu running are directly applicable to Debian (and to some extent Slackware, but it isn't Slackware's birthday today).

What I'm trying to say is that Debian is not an in any way exclusively an expert's distro, though many so-called experts use it.

I'm not knocking Ubuntu or the Ubuntu community. I consider myself part of the Ubuntu community as a user, I have a Launchpad account, yadda, yadda ... I have Ubuntu running on one machine now, and had another until a few weeks ago (which I'm now using to experiment with a GNOME OpenBSD desktop), and you can't and shouldn't ignore the enormous interest in and community around Ubuntu. More times than I can remember, I've solved problems in my Debian installations with advice from the Ubuntu Forums.

Think of Debian as a tool, a resource and an example of what FOSS can and should be. Sure it's not perfect. Nothing is. But I'd hate to live in a world without Debian.

Happy birthday, big D.

Writing about Ubuntu even a little critically brings out two types of people: those who get their fanboy bat out to beat the crap out of me and those who actually have solutions to the problems I present.

Truthfully, I don't mind the fanboy factor; at least you're reading.

But I did get help with my Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 upgrade problem. Here's the comment I made on that post:

JJ, thanks for your comment. The page I was using, which gave the --proposed switch, is different from the page you provided:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/upgrade

That page calls for typing Alt-F2 and then entering:

update-manager --devel-release

That actually worked. I didn't go all the way through with the upgrade because the download was going to take 3 hours. I'll start earlier in the day next time.

But thanks for giving me the better page.

Why this is still a fail for Ubuntu:

• The upgrade from 8.04 to 10.10 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS should just show up as a choice in the Update Manager; the user shouldn't have to search for help pages, have one give an incorrect command, find the "correct" help page through happenstance (or users smarter than I, which is most of you).

  With every Ubuntu release the upgrades should be delivered via the Update Manager without command-line switches or interference. My machine was configured to update when a new LTS came out — why didn't it "just work" that way?

• If Ubuntu is going to offer an upgrade from LTS to LTS and not just from six-month release to six-month release, they'd better put some work into it to make sure it is a foolproof upgrade. Whether Linux in general is designed for this sort of thing or not, the lack of an easy upgrade path without a full reinstall is a fail.

I love the fact that I can sort of follow along as Debian Squeeze makes its way from Testing to Stable with the excellent images from the Debian Live project.

As I've written somewhat recently, one of the great things about the Debian Live images for Squeeze is that there's one for PowerPC. Too bad I've already dumped my Apple G4 ...

For i386, I was impressed with the Alpha 1 system, and today I just burned and tried the Debian Live Alpha 2 image for i386 on the Lenovo G555 laptop.

The vanilla GNOME looks great. I can confirm that the way Debian configures the fonts is exactly the way I like them. Under System - Appearance - Fonts:

Rendering: Best Shapes

Then under Details:

Resolution: 96 dots per inch
Smoothing: Greyscale
Hinting: Medium
Subpixel order: RGB

This makes the way fonts look exactly how I like them to look in such GNOME applications as Gedit and the GNOME Terminal.

Unlike in the Alpha 1 image, both wired and wireless networking work perfectly (as they do in Fedora 13) on the Lenovo. I've been using NetworkManager since Debian Etch and Ubuntu Dapper, and this little piece of software (thanks to Red Hat, I believe, for funding the coding of it) has improved immensely over that time.

As those who read this blog regularly know, I've been running Fedora 13 x86_64 with Xfce for the past couple of weeks or so. As those who've read this blog over the past couple of years may know, I have a soft spot for Debian despite the upgrade troubles I've suffered recently.

In my experience, nothing runs GNOME faster than Debian, and with the help of Debian Multimedia it's fairly easy to get everything working from an audio and video standpoint.

Given the long time between releases, Debian Stable can be boring. Some have suggested a base of Debian Stable (currently Lenny and soon to be Squeeze) with newer apps either from Debian Backports, installed locally, from other repositories, or from the Testing or Unstable repositories.

All I know is that until that ill-fated Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade on the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I had my longest trouble-free stint of free, open-source computing ever.

Had that upgrade been successful (and I still can't believe it wasn't, but the Lenny kernel sunk the udev portion of the upgrade; a newer kernel from Backports would've saved it, or so the theory goes) ... as I say, had that upgrade been successful, you wouldn't have been able to stop me from calling Debian the greatest operating system of all time.

As it is, I like very much what I'm seeing in Squeeze Alpha 2, and I could very well be running Debian Squeeze on more than one machine in the near future.

Squeeze notes

• The Debian Squeeze Alpha 2 live image ships with Gnash, the open-source implementation of Flash. YouTube videos will not play (kind of a deal-breaker, don't you think?), but some Flash content will. For instance, the SWF-based podcast player I use for the JV Show and the Daily News Podcast does work (though I'd much rather use HTML 5 tags for this audio and in the future expect that I will).

• Right now about a dozen Gnash processes are pegging my CPUs at 100 percent. Fail for Gnash.

• I was able to mount and write a file to the NTFS Windows 7 partition on this laptop. I'll see later how Windows feels about that.

• I was not able to mount my Fedora 13-created encrypted-LVM volume. I got the following error message: Error starting job: Failed to execute child process "cryptsetup" (No such file or directory)
  

Our daughter's Gateway Solo 1450 has been running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for a very, very long time. Overdue for the upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04, I decided to give it a try.

I looked up the upgrade instructions:

You can easily upgrade over the network with the following procedure.

1. Press Alt-F2 and type update-manager --proposed
2. Click the Check button to check for new updates.
3. If there are any updates to install, use the Install Updates button to install them, and press Check again after that is complete.
4. A message will appear informing you of the availability of the new release.
5. Click Upgrade.
6. Follow the on-screen instructions.

If only it were that easy. I did as instructed, and after a while ran into this error:

Could not calculate the upgrade

An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade:

The package 'ubuntu-desktop' is marked for removal but it is in the removal blacklist.

This can be caused by:

* Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu

* Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu

* Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu

If none of this applies, then please report this bug against the 'update-manager' package and include the files in /var/log/dist-upgrade/ in the bug report."

Fixes offered for this problem include:

• Forget about upgrading and just do a complete reinstall of 10.04
• Remove the ubuntu-desktop package, do the upgrade, then reinstall ubuntu-desktop
• Install ubuntu-desktop, then do the upgrade

Keeping in mind that my not-so-recent attempt to upgrade Debian Lenny to Squeeze sent me straight to udev hell, I expect way more from Ubuntu, especially for an LTS-to-LTS upgrade. It should be easy, complete and non-hackish.

Call this what you will. I call it a fail.

It's not like this is breaking news or anything, but I was at EZ Lube today getting an oil change and noticed the tell-tale brown GNOME windows of the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS era.

From looking at the screen while I was paying the bill, One of the windows on the Ubuntu desktop said "LubeSoft," which indeed is software for oil-change places — and which proudly runs in a Linux environment.

I say "proudly because here's how LubeSoft's owner, the Portland, Oregon-based Integrated Services Inc., sells users on the product's Linux base:

Weather the harsh environment of a fast lube with a progressive, stable platform used by computer powerhouses IBM, Dell and Compaq. LubeSoft® runs on Linux, the fastest growing operating system because of its multi-user, multi-tasking capabilities.

Linux allows your greeter, your bay techs, your cashiers and your managers to work at the same time without affecting the speed of the system. And, terminals in each bay allow techs to enter services as they are performed to speed up the invoicing process. Best of all, you have the ability to dial into stores from a remote location at any time without affecting your business.

LubeSoft also includes OpenOffice, something ISI seems to want customers to know:

OpenOffice.org Software included!

OpenOffice.org provides everything most people need in an office productivity suite . It is stable, reliable, and robust, built up over twenty years' development. Unlike its major competitor, it was designed from the start as a single piece of software, which makes for higher quality software and a more consistent user experience. It is actively developed, with several releases every year. The main components of the OpenOffice.org Suite are the Writer wordprocessor (screenshot) ; the Calc spreadsheet (screenshot) ; Impress for presentations (screenshot) ; Draw for graphics (screenshot) ; and the Base database (screenshot).

OpenOffice.org is both easy to use and easy to migrate to , for both experienced and beginners alike. It has a familiar user interface, and is able to read and write the vast majority of legacy file formats (including common Microsoft Office formats). It is supported in over seventy languages, with active support both Community based (free) and from commercial organisations (paid-for).

All I know is that oil-change workers all around the country are using Linux (in the case of EZ Lube, Ubuntu). Nice!

Above: A screenshot of the Movable Type 5.x test environment from http://www.movabletypedemo.org.

I found this site where you can give the Movable Type 5.x environment a try.

Right now we're running these blogs on MT 4.x, and while there are certainly things you can do with Movable Type that you can't do with WordPress, there are more things — by many orders of magnitude — that can be done in WordPress that can't be done in MT.

And most of the things that are possible to do in MT — again, by many orders of magnitude — are easier to set up and use in WordPress.

I poked around in the MT 5.x interface. It looks different, but neither looks nor works differently enough to make me think that Movable Type is in any way trying to compete.

MT is still plugin-poor, and needs extensive, original coding to do anything out of the ordinary — with almost no community help or code to build on.

It's just so much harder to use than WordPress with very little payoff.

And now that multiblog capability, previously available in WordPress MU, is being brought into the main WP codebase, there's another thing that Movable Type does very well that is now (or soon will be) probably easier to do in WordPress. (Note: I really can't confirm how good/bad the multiblog capability in WP is because I've never used it.)

The massive community that has grown around WordPress (and all the plugins and themes that come with it) is just too big an asset to ignore if you want to create feature-rich, flexible blogs without a dedicated development team that has somehow managed to figure out MT in the absence of almost any meaningful documentation or shared code.

Sure I've benefited from a few third-party MT plugins, but the ease with which WordPress can be re-themed, and the fact that most WP plugins are a) not at all alone in what they do and compete with many others for prominence and b) are often updated (when the comparatively very few MT plugins are not) pretty much kills any claim by MT to be approaching what WP can do.

Credit where it's overdue: The Movable Type 5.x test installation is provided by the Romania-based PRO IT Service, which offers MT consulting/development among its many services.

We use HootSuite at the Los Angeles Daily News to manage a growing herd of social-networking accounts across Twitter and Facebook.

Even though we use HootSuite as a matter of company policy, it's not like there are any other social-networking client applications out there that I'm itching to use instead — and I've tried a great many of them, both traditional desktop-based and Web-based.

But the one thing that HootSuite doesn't do is update Identi.ca, the free, open-source microblogging service powered by Status.Net that many FOSS advocates, including myself use in addition to (or in some cases instead of) Twitter. I keep hearing that such functionality is at least on the table at HootSuite, but it's not here yet.

(Side note: You can implement your own microblogging site with Status.net's open technology on your server or theirs; try doing that with Twitter — you can't.)

And while Identi.ca will update your Twitter feed, as far as I know you can't update an Identi.ca feed from a Twitter feed (which in all truth would probably solve this problem a bit more elegantly ... and which in some way makes Identi.ca part of the problem).

There is a solution, which Paul Frields of the Fedora Project outlined for members of the Fedora marketing team.

Basically here it is:

HootSuite can't update Identi.ca accounts, but it can update Ping.fm accounts, which you can use in turn to update Identi.ca (and Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and a whole bunch of others).

So I set up a Ping.fm account that will update my Identi.ca feed, which in turn updates my Twitter feed.

And I added the Ping.fm account to my HootSuite account, with HootSuite feeding RSS from this blog into Ping.fm (to Identi.ca and then to Twitter).

Problem solved, if in a roundabout way.

There's been a lot of heat on AdamW on Linux and More at http://www.happyassassin.net/. Right now it's "Controversial Crap Week," which ended with a critical look at Canonical and upstream and included an entry asking what happened with Linux netbooks.

AdamW works for Red Hat, and this dovetails nicely with my now using Fedora.

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I was able to download an ISO and burn a Windows 7 installation DVD to use with the existing, legitimate Win 7 product key included with my Lenovo laptop. I originally found the links here, and now I'm presenting them below for those who want/need them.

The advantages and disadvantages of using these ISOs instead of the installation/recover discs that either came with your PC, or which you generated (or not) and burned after setting it up are:

I used a 64-bit image instead of the 32-bit Home Premium that came with my Lenovo. My product key allows for this.

No crapware. These images are, as far as I can tell, bereft of the mountains of crapware that ship with most computers.

No hardware-specific drivers. Like most computers preloaded with Windows, mine came with preinstalled drivers for every hunk of hardware. After installing from one of these "clean" ISOs, I had to get the drivers (about 9 of them) from the Lenovo site for everything from the ATI video card and Atheros wired and wireless network interfaces to the touchpad, power management, Web cam and sound chip. It's a pain, but not undoable. It shows how poor Windows is relative to the average Linux distribution in autoconfiguring hardware out of the box.

Anyhow, here are the links:

Windows 7 ISO Direct Download Links

32-bit Windows 7 Ultimate x86 ISO

Amazon.com: http://174.129.85.117/data/Windows7Ultimate32bit.iso

64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate x64 ISO

Amazon.com: http://174.129.85.117/data/Windows7Ultimate64bit.iso

32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium x86 ISO

Digital River: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65732/X15-65732.iso

64-bit Windows 7 Home Premium x64 ISO

Digital River: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65733/X15-65733.iso

32-bit Windows 7 Professional x86 ISO

Digital River: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65804/X15-65804.iso

64-bit Windows 7 Professional x64 ISO

Digital River: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msvista/pub/X15-65805/X15-65805.iso

I've done between 60 and 200 (who can remember?) installations of Linux and the various BSD operating systems over the past few years, and while there's plenty of discussion about how hard it is to install a Linux distribution, nobody talks much about how easy/hard/frustrating it is to install Windows.

I've never done it myself — install Windows, that is. Over the years I've upgraded a few boxes from Windows 98 or Me to Windows 2000, I've put a few Service Packs into 2000 and XP, but I've never done the whole thing — put Windows on a bare drive.

On my new Lenovo G555, which shipped with 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium, I first wanted to install a new, larger drive just for Linux. That drive, a Western Digital Caviar black 320 GB SATA, made audible clicks from the start and eventually stopped working altogether.

Since then I've decided to dual-boot Windows 7 and Linux (starting with Fedora 13). I'm having a few sound issues with the Conexant chip in the Lenovo, primarily that neither the speakers nor the internal mic will mute when headphones or an external microphone are plugged into their respective inputs. I can probably work around it in Linux, but the problem does not present itself in Windows, where I've already successfully done some audio capture and editing in Audacity.

And I also have my USB Headphone Set external sound card (cost: less than $2), which does work in Linux. But I figured it couldn't hurt to keep Windows on the laptop, if only for testing/things-to-write-about purposes.

Anyhow, I needed to wait for my dead WD drive to be replaced. I RMA'd the drive through Western Digital, a process that was quick and mostly painless and which took less than a week, including UPS transport time both ways. Thanks WD — the new drive works perfectly.

In the interim I learned that there are Windows 7 ISO images floating around out there — and that meant a clean, crapware-free installation ... except for all the drivers.

Accustomed to downloading and burning ISOs, and also learning that my Windows 7 Home Premium product key would allow for the installation of either the 64-bit or 32-bit versions of Home Premium (even though the Lenovo shipped with 32-bit), I decided to give 64-bit Windows a try.

Once I had my DVD ready to go, I popped it into the Lenovo, hit F12 to boot from CD/DVD and started the installation.

Things went smoothly enough with the requisite reboots until it was time to actually use the system. I knew I needed drivers for just about anything — and until I got the drivers installed I wouldn't have anywhere near the functionality I would have with most modern Linux systems, which include all this stuff either somewhere in the installation or in the kernel itself.

I finally found the drivers (somewhat hidden) on the Lenovo site and was able to get maybe three of the eight I needed before Lenovo's Web site crapped out on me.

So thus far I have the video and sound drives installed, with networking (wired and wireless), Bluetooth, Web cam, touchpad, power management and maybe a couple others to go. When the Lenovo site feels like giving them up. (Note: I finally got the drivers, all of which add up to about 450 MB.)

Right now I have very little "invested" in this particular installation, meaning I can replicate it without compromising any data. I really didn't have to move the Windows partitions from the front of the drive to the back, but I did need to shrink them to make (ample) room for Fedora.

I used PartedMagic 4.9. I have a feeling a newer version would be more "compatible" with Windows 7, but I managed to make it work.

Windows 7 makes two partitions on the drive, an initial partition that's 100 MB in size and a second partition for the rest of the drive.

I decided to shrink the "big" partition from about 300 GB to 100 GB and move both to the "end" of the drive. I probably didn't have to do that, but I decided to try it anyway.

It took about an hour for gParted to shrink and move the partitions. Then I tried to boot into Windows 7, which I couldn't do. I was prompted to insert the Windows 7 DVD to repair the system. I did that, the system was indeed repaired, the partitions were where I placed them in gParted, and all was good.

I've been experimenting with the Fedora Live USB Creator (I used the Windows version) since the Lenovo does boot from a USB-connected drive, and I used a 1 GB USB drive I got at Target for $5 to create a bootable Fedora 13 x86_64 Xfce image.

I used that USB key to boot into Fedora and install the Xfce spin.

I've done maybe six Fedora installs in the past month, so I knew the steps pretty well. I used the available space on the drive for an encrypted LVM installation of Fedora with Xfce, making sure to rename the "other" OS as it was about to be called in GRUB with the name "Windows 7" just to make it look good.

I did my Fedora install, ran through the many updates with yum (a tool I've grown to like very much, if you're wondering) and rebooted into the Fedora Xfce desktop, which looks great and works great.

Like Xubuntu, there's enough GNOME in Fedora's Xfce spin to make it workable (NetworkManager, the graphical PackageKit application and probably a lot more I don't know about). I'm OK with that. Why? Because I'm not so much using Xfce for any speed advantage over GNOME but because at this point I prefer the Xfce tools over those in GNOME. I like the Thunar file manager, the way you can "minimize" a window but keep it visible on the desktop (note: a reader pointed out that this can be done in GNOME by clicking on the app's taskbar), I like the look, speed and functionality of the Xfce terminal and Mousepad text editor. The Xfce configuration apps all work great, and there are plenty of them.

The thing about Fedora 13 in general and the Xfce spin in particular is that they are surprisingly stable, look absolutely gorgeous, include most of the apps I need (the Xfce spin seems to have way more apps out of the box than the standard GNOME version of Fedora) and offer a lot of polish in terms of the user experience, all the way from the boot screens through shutdown.

The Fedora documentation is very clear, and there's lots of it. It's not too hard to add multimedia support via the RPM Fusion and Adobe repositories, and I like having the latest versions of my most-used applications, including the gThumb image editor — which is one crucial version ahead of the gThumb that ships with Ubuntu 10.04 (for some reason Ubuntu downgraded gThumb from 2.11 to 2.10 during the beta phase of Lucid).

I did use Ubuntu 10.04 and later the Xubuntu desktop layered over it for at least a couple of months, and the thing I enjoyed most about the distro was the concept of the PPA (personal package archive) with which users can add newer or absent packages to their existing systems. The whole "backports" concept in traditional Linux distributions is — for me anyway — a bit difficult to understand and implement, and I felt that PPAs really address that, making it easier for less-expert users to try newer and different packages than what's in their distros' current repositories.

But the other "noise" in Ubuntu 10.04, including the not-nearly ready "social desktop," the GNOME-bound Ubuntu One and the ever-moving window buttons (and the resulting controversy and the way it was handled by Canonical), made me think it was time to try something else.

Right now Fedora is that "something else." I've been meaning to try it for quite a while, and finally getting some new hardware in the form of this Lenovo laptop was a further incentive to try a "cutting-edge" distro that might have better support for the newer hardware bits in the G555. In my experience, I get the feeling that Fedora is especially suited to new hardware, and since that's what I've got for a change, I like the fit.

I also wanted an Xfce desktop, and after looking at quite a few offerings from various distributions, the Fedora Xfce spin looked better in my eyes than anything else I'd seen.

Fedora also offers easy-to-implement encryption in the install, something most of the "hobbyist"-type distributions don't include in their install processes. (And yes, I know that Debian and Ubuntu offer encryption in their installers; I've used that option with both systems.)

So now I have my first dual-boot system in some time (I really try not to dual-boot if I can help it). At least my Windows 7 installation is crapware-free. Not that I've had any occasion to boot into anything but Fedora.

Next on my agenda: Taking the kid's dual-boot Ubuntu 8.04/CentOS 5 Gateway Solo 1450 laptop to a single-boot Ubuntu 10.04 system ... and assessing where to go with it from there.

I've been running OpenBSD off and on since the 4.2 release, but I've never taken the leap to following -stable (aka "the patch branch").

But with this OpenBSD 4.7 installation on the Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop, I decided to give it a try. After so much building from source in FreeBSD 7.3/8.0, I figured a little patching in OpenBSD couldn't kill me.

I'm now running OpenBSD 4.7-stable, and everything worked perfectly.

First I downloaded the source, not from CVS but from the regular release, grabbing the sys and src files (here's the mirror I used) and then used the guide in the AnonCVS portion of the documentation to untar them (modified for the location of the files on my system):

# cd /usr/src
# tar xzf /home/steven/src.tar.gz
# tar xzf /home/steven/sys.tar.gz

Then I went to the errata page, where there have been six patches so far for OpenBSD 4.7. I couldn've downloaded all the patches in a single tar.gz file, but I instead downloaded each individually.

I already had my sources unpacked and in /usr/src, and once I had the patches downloaded, I followed the instructions in the patches themselves (they are very clear) and ran all of them. When the patches called for rebuilding smaller parts of the system, I did those builds in order, but since most of the patches called for rebuilding the kernel, I did that at the end after all patches were applied.

Again, the "Following -stable" page tells you how to rebuild the kernel.

I did it, my box still works, and for the first time I'm running -stable in OpenBSD. It might not be a big deal to the hard-core OpenBSD users out there, but to me it's huge ...

Commenter Peter Ljung, who has a nice OpenBSD-related site of his own, answered the question I could've answered myself had I known that pkg_info was the command for which I needed to look at the man page.

My question was: How do you look at the messages (generally configuration hints) that output in the terminal after using pkg_add to add a package to your OpenBSD system?

The answer (with the example here being the gnome-session package):

$ pkg_info -M gnome-session

And if you want to see all of the messages for your installed packages:

$ pkg_info -aM

Thanks, Peter!