February 2011 Archives

You want a kerfuffle? Here it is.

Canonical makes "affiliate" revenue from sales via its Ubuntu One music store, which works through the Rhythmbox music player/manager.

Now that Ubuntu is changing to Banshee as its default music-management application — and Banshee happens to have a plugin for the Amazon music store, things have gotten a little messy. From the upstream developers, Banshee gives all of its Amazon "affiliate" revenue to the GNOME Foundation (Banshee being a GNOME-friendly project).

But Canonical wanted to change the code and keep most of the money for itself. After much angst, the way things look now, it'll be a 75%/25% split of both the Amazon store and Ubuntu One, with 75% going to Canonical, 25% to the GNOME Foundation.

I've been investigating tiny blog software — mini CMSes if you will.

I already have a blog running on Flatpress:

Life, the Universe and Debian

I'm trying to use systems that are simple, radically small and efficient.

I'm anxious to look into Blosxom, PyBlosxom, NanoBlogger and Ode.

Nostalgia ensued when I saw this gallery on Tech Republic showing a teardown of a Sinclair ZX81 they bought on eBay. They didn't even fire it up.

This was my first computer. I had the 16 KB RAM pack, and I even had a few "commercial" applications that loaded from the dodgy cassette-tape interface the Sinclair had for saving and loading BASIC programs.

Picked up from The H: Work stalls on Unity ports for Fedora and openSUSE

Also from The H: Ubuntu and the Price of Unity

Call me crazy, but it appears as it the "jumping cursor" problem with the Alps touchpad in the Lenovo G555 laptop is what I'd call "nearly solved," by which I mean "much, much better than in Windows 7 or any current Linux distribution," at least for now, in what will become Fedora 15 in May 2011.

(Click for a 1366x768 image of my desktop while running the live environment from the 2/17/11 nightly build of the pre-alpha Fedora 15)

After a commenter on my entry about the Ubuntu Natty alpha called me "pathetic" for expecting basic functionality from an alpha release, I decided to go deep and look at a pre-alpha for Fedora 15 in the form of a nightly build of the distribution that won't have its official alpha release for another 12 days, nor its official release as F15 until May 10 (a full 12 days after Ubuntu Natty's scheduled April 28 release date and a week shy of three months from now).

Despite this live image of what will become Fedora 15 being a nightly build of a pre-alpha, I found it surprisingly functional and fast on the desktop, if a little homely design-wise. But work, it does.

I know you all care deeply about which text editors I'm using at any given time.

Generally I use Geany in Unix/Linux, but today I decided to use gEdit (or Gedit, or gedit, depending on your capitalization preferences), the default text editor in the GNOME environment, which I happen to be running (version 2.30) in Debian Squeeze.

Things that Geany allows me to do (that I want to do, that is) include search and replace (with regular expressions) across all open files (I tend to have between five and 10 similar items open that need similar search/replaces). I can change upper case to lower case by highlighting text and hitting CTRL-ALT-u.

I turned to Geany in GNOME and Xfce because I need more than a bare-bones text editor. I like syntax highlighting (gedit does this; I don't think Xfce's Mousepad does), easily changing the case of letters (gedit does it with a plugin and either via the mouse, or the awkward keyboard sequence ALT-e, then h-i), doing the aforementioned search/replace over multiple files (not available in gedit or Mousepad).

However, Geany can be quirky. It doesn't remember my search/replaces the way Notepad++ does in Windows. Yep, the best text editor I've found thus far is a GPL-licensed application, but it's coded for Windows.

Both Geany and Notepad++ have trouble when selecting a large block of text from top to bottom, at least on my machines. You start dragging below the visible screen, and the type doesn't scroll, so you don't know when to stop dragging.

Gedit doesn't have this problem. It does well with regular expressions in search/replace. While its changing-case function is awkward, it does work.

Mousepad doesn't allow multiple tabbed files like Geany and gedit, so it's kind of a nonstarter for my workflow.

in Gedit, I miss the search/replace across multiple files, and I should probably be using shell scripts or Perl scripts to do the text processing I've been relying on text editors to do for me.

But gedit is fast. It has a lot of features in its own right. And I'm comfortable in GNOME right now.

It's been awhile since I've "auditioned" other text editors, and I may do so again. I know I'm not partial to Bluefish, and while I like Kate, I don't want to bring all that KDE into my system. I have run Scite and Nedit but didn't stick with them for one reason or other (mostly that Geany is easier for me to use).

I've always been able to hack around in Vim (or vi, even as nvi in the BSDs), but I've never really gone the extra-geeky mile to do heavy text manipulation like I do in GUI editors. And no, I've never used Emacs.

I'll probably continue running Geany, but let's just say I'm open to new editors at the moment.

Readers of this blog are no doubt very familiar with my video drama/issues over the ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD chip in my Lenovo G555 laptop.

Things have been blurry and wavy, sometimes fixable with the fglrx/Catalyst proprietary driver (Ubuntu 10.04), sometimes not (Fedora 14).

In Debian Squeeze, I can run the open-source ati/radeon driver with no problems. And that's what I've been doing.

I'm in a renaming mood, and I, Debian is now called Life, the Universe and Debian.

Now that we have OpenJDK, I thought that Java was automatically part of the Debian Squeeze default install. But here I was running Iceweasel and needing the Java browser plugin to ... do some Java stuff.

No go.

I looked in Edit-Preferences, and the Java box was checked.

Then I went to the Java Tester page I always use to check on my browser's Java status. I got nothing in the pink box.

I opened up the Synaptic Package Manager, did a bit of a search, added icetea6-pluginicedtea6-plugin, quit Iceweasel, restarted it, checked my Java status.

It's good! I have Java in the browser.

Addendum (Feb. 8, 2011): It looks like icedtea6-plugin is no longer part of Debian Squeeze. The Debian Wiki page on Java didn't provide much help.

The list of web-related packages for Squeeze still includes icedtea6-plugin, but the link turns up empty.

So now that Squeeze is stable, what do users need to do to get Java support in their web browsers? I see a package in Sid.

I actually paid for this book. Even though I'm fairly adept in the GNOME desktop, what intrigued me about "Ubuntu: Up and Running," by Robin Nixon (O'Reilly, April 2010) was that it was the first "how-to" book on running Linux to come out on the O'Reilly imprint in a very long time.

(I'm not counting Rickford Grant's excellent "Ubuntu for Non-Geeks" from No Starch Press, one of my very favorite publishers, one that happens to be connected somehow to O'Reilly. The O'Reilly imprint still means something, and a lack of Linux-user guides is something that has puzzled me to a great extent.)

Why? What's so terrible about Linux-distro how-to books that O'Reilly hadn't done one since ... wait for it ... "Fedora Linux," by Chris Tyler (October 2006). Five years ago. That's eons and eons in "Linux time." Before that, "Suse Linux," by Chris Brown came out in July 2006, and the fifth (and seemingly final) edition of "Running Linux," By Matthias Kalle Dalheimer and Matt Welsh was released by O'Reilly in December 2005.

It turns out there were plenty of Linux releases from O'Reilly in 2005 and 2004 — look here for yourself to see everything O'Reilly classifies under "Linux" from 1986-present (which includes a lot of Unix, as Linux itself didn't begin until the 1990s.

What happened between 2005/6 and 2010? That was a good four years (again, eons — EONS!!) ago.

I can't begin to answer the question. Linux didn't get "too easy" during that time. The OSes built around the kernel certainly got many millions' more users during that time. A passel of good books from probably the best tech publisher out there would have been welcomed.

Now there's "Ubuntu: Up and Running." Thankfully it's an excellent book. Better than many I've seen. It's almost easy enough for beginners yet worthy of a seasoned user's attention. Even though I've been using Linux since 2007, I learned quite a few tips from Nixon's well-done volume.

Looking at O'Reilly's list of upcoming titles, it looks like there are no Linux how-to books from any of O'Reilly's affiliated imprints, or from O'Reilly itself, through May 2011.

I had hope — and still hope — to see a new version of "Ubuntu: Up and Running," that takes into account all the changes in the upcoming 11.04 and 11.10 releases of Ubuntu, which will be moving away from the GNOME desktop to Unity. Ubuntu moves very fast, and there are likely hundreds of additional changes since Nixon's book, which was targeted at 10.04 but was seemingly written in the 9.10 era.

I suppose that Nixon had some reason to think that Ubuntu 10.04, as a long-term-support release, wouldn't be the radical departure from Ubuntu 9.10 that it turned out to be. Things like a whole new design, the "social from the start" concept, Ubuntu One, the mysteriously moving menu buttons and more things I'm already forgetting, made the 10.04 LTS more of a development release than a stable one, albeit a development release set to receive 3 years' of security patches on the desktop (and 5 years on the server, which luckily isn't affected by just about any of the distro's UI changes).

If you're like me, you find out about a cool open-source software project that's totally in line with what you're already doing (in my case that would be blogging and messing around with the Internet) and you have to try it out right away.

I did just that with FlatPress, with which I created the I, Debian blog. It helps that I already have a hosting provider. If you have either a shared hosting account (it's a very cheap way to provide yourself with free entertainment, if your definition of "free entertainment" includes creating and modifying web sites) or access to a full-fledged web server, you can download the FlatPress files, unpack them, upload them to your server and have a running site in a matter of minutes.

Since I already have a shared hosting account, I used its admin tools to create a new subdomain for the blog, which could just have easily been placed in a subdirectory of an existing domain. Knowing your way around your hosting provider's tools is helpful, but you can always create the subdirectory with your FTP client, upload the files and get your FlatPress blog going.

(Note: It's not like you can't do this with WordPress (and most hosting providers have a one-click WordPress install via tools such as Fantastico, but FlatPress is quicker, much more simple, surprisingly feature-packed and ... it's just fun to do this kind of thing.)

For a quick and dirty (or clean) web site/blog, FlatPress does the job very well.

If you are unfamiliar with the HeliOS Project, I can tell you that Ken and Co. are doing a great thing — they get old computer systems, put Linux on them and then give the machines to kids who need them for school and to families who need of a computer but are unable to afford one.

To get up to speed on HeliOS, start at the group's official site.

Ken Starks is tireless in his effort to make HeliOS fly — and fly it does. He's out there, every day, getting donated machines, rolling a new Linux distribution onto them, then going out in the community to place those machines with people who need them.

Being able to get online, do schoolwork, write a resume, find a new job — the amount of good that HeliOS does is amazing. And they're using Linux to do it.

It's a win-win-win.

Ken contacted me about an event called "Rock a Charity." It sounds complicated (and Jeff Hoogland explains it better than I can), but the idea is that the three nominated groups that gets the most "likes" on Facebook between 7 a.m. PST Feb. 1 and 7 a.m. PST Feb. 3 will be eligible to get some much-needed funding from Austin's Rock A Charity.

In order to make this work, you need to "like" the HeliOS project on Facebook, which you can do by Going to the HeliOS Facebook page, signing in and clicking the "Like" button.

Like I just did.

To make it super-easy, you can "Like" HeliOS from this handy box: