Some ubuntu wallpapers

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="461" caption="Pirate Bay"][/caption]

Pirate Bay

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="461" caption="Ubuntu Robot"][/caption]

Open Your Mind

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="461" caption="Ubuntu Light"][/caption]

Ubuntu Light

Link of the week

Conky Hardcore

Sheldon's favourite operating system & blog

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1-Q_8EbB8A&feature=player_embedded

The price of plymouth progress, advice goes mainstream

As Ubuntu becomes more mainstream, and development decisions reflect the new populist as opposed to humanitarian goals of the project, we find our problems resembling problems in other mainstream software.

An example is Plymouth, which has presented all sorts of troubles for the community. Fresh installs tend to do well, while upgrades vary in the kind of problem experienced.

Being one of the people affected by Plymouth's tendency to load with black screen, blinking curser and low resolution, I found it slightly disheartening that the solution at Ubuntuforums was incomplete. A page set up by the community providing known workarounds and solutions provided part of the puzzle, but the actual fix was sitting at Softpedia.

This meant, while Softpedia was winning readers, those who were relying on the forums and ubuntu wiki were losing. Surely there is an obligation to report a bug fix or workaround to the community which produces the software before using the information to drive advertising and revenue on a site which probably paid the person who provided the solution?

Then again, maybe this is just a wake-up call. As Ubuntu becomes more mainstream, so do its problems. Softpedia is therefore doing us a sterling service by catering to those users affected by an incomplete Plymouth which has yet to mature.

Rhythmbox Coverflow Rock 'n Roll

NB UPDATE Manuw2009 appears to be the coder running ahead with the latest Coverflow plugin, and needs help from U8UNTU users to implement the icons in the plugin. Join the discussion on Ubuntu Forums remember, Freedom = Participation.

Benevolent prodding about the lack of Rhythmbox plugins is paying off. Development of the much vaunted "Rhyming Cvrflw" has resumed and lo and behold, a test version of the plugin was released by manuw2009 yesterday.

You can try it out right now

Download the plugin

untar and place folder in ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/

(.gnome2 for those who don't already know is a hidden directory in your home folder. Cntrl H will reveal it in nautilus)

restart Rhythmbox

Go to Edit > Plugins

Click on Art Flow

You should see a Coverflow window with generic icons

Future versions should have album art and ability to play music.

For some weirdness with one of the stranger words in the English dictionary, Try Rhyming with Rythmblox, Rythmfox, Rythmflox ...

You can now check out the latest version via subversion

svn checkout http://rhythmbox-coverflow-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ rhythmbox-coverflow-plugin

Rhythmbox Coverflow Rock 'n Roll

NB UPDATE Manuw2009 appears to be the coder running ahead with the latest Coverflow plugin, and needs help from U8UNTU users to implement the icons in the plugin. Join the discussion on Ubuntu Forums remember, Freedom = Participation.

Benevolent prodding about the lack of Rhythmbox plugins is paying off. Development of the much vaunted "Rhyming Cvrflw" has resumed and lo and behold, a test version of the plugin was released by manuw2009 yesterday.

You can try it out right now

Download the plugin

untar and place folder in ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/

(.gnome2 for those who don't already know is a hidden directory in your home folder. Cntrl H will reveal it in nautilus)

restart Rhythmbox

Go to Edit > Plugins

Click on Art Flow

You should see a Coverflow window with generic icons

Future versions should have album art and ability to play music.

For some weirdness with one of the stranger words in the English dictionary, Try Rhyming with Rythmblox, Rythmfox, Rythmflox ...

Clean your registry with gconf-cleaner

This is a neat way of cleaning the gnome registry, useful after an upgrade or if you simply want to speed up the machine.

apt-get install gconf-cleaner

Remember to first back up in case anything goes wrong:

cp -av ~/.gconf ~/.gconf-backup

run gconf-cleaner

It showed about 1200 keys in my system that could be cleaned.

Yes to all.

Check this tutorial out, great visuals:

http://www.linuxinsight.com/how-to-cleanup-your-gnome-registry.html

Girls embracing Ubuntu

[caption id="attachment_1658" align="alignleft" width="212" caption="Girls for Ubuntu"][/caption]

It may be too late to enter the competition, but you can always participate.

Customising notifications

To make notify-osd customizable, you need to add Roman Sukochev’s PPA to your Software Sources, do a system update, and then restart notify-osd.

MORE

UPDATE: A great utility

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:amandeepgrewal/notifyosdconfig

Then

sudo aptitude install notifyosdconfig

Taking Ubuntu community to the next level

Ubuntu Linux is an example of Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and the Linux community which has congregated around the distribution sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth's Canonical company has made enormous strides in improving the user experience. With Launchpad and the Debian package management system, Ubuntu has one of the best software development environments around. It is a shame therefore to see all this energy wasted on fasionable design statements (the latest aurbergine and naartjie look) while productivity and improvement in the problem-solving capabilities of the community have all taken a back seat. (How does dumping legacy support for Python 2.5 and 2.6 improve productivity?)

Here are few suggestions and thoughts on how we can take Ubuntu to the next level.

First there is the problem of communication within the community. Relying on forums, mailing lists and general sites to fix problems is becoming increasingly difficult the more the community expands. In other words, a lot of the improvements in the code base are simply getting lost in the woodwork. Knowledge is therefore getting mislaid, buried under heaps of extraneous data and the result we see in regressions and the opposite of evolution.

I have often compared the great project which is the Internet to Franz Kafka's short story, The Great Wall of China. In Kafka's story, entire generations grow up beside the wall, forgetting in the process exactly which dynasty is responsible for the planning and the exact reason why so many people are spending time building the wall, brick by brick.

How we talk back to ourselves as a community is incredibily important -- unfortunately a lot of the feedback seems to get the standard Linux snobbery, which translates into, if you want a better, more tailored OS, look elsewhere in the Linux world.

Ubuntu may have the better metaphor, precisely because it involves community and common goals around humanity, but does it have the most turned on community in terms of development? Lets' not loose the plot as we move forward into eye-candy discussions about the next wallpaper or window button.

A system of tagging solutions in a way that important code is not lost to the community as a whole could do wonders to our progress.

How can we as a community make real sense of the chaos which is mad tux?

All too often, we embrace the new, while forgetting about projects which feed the community which in turn drives progress but without much energy from Ubuntu users going back. When was the last time you contributed to Mozilla for instance? Can we really complain when most of the Ubuntu OS is really a congregation of upstream software packaged for our platform? Shouldn't Ubuntu be the force for progress in Linux instead of the other way around?

Where are the secondary sites tackling evolution of particular parts of the OS in a way which expresses our collective humanity and aspirations for FOSS? Are there no solutions tackling specific hardware for instance that need specialist sites geared towards Ubuntu on a particular platform?

Again, the problem of getting the kind of next generation software which only comes with considerable investment of time and energy.

Are we developing efficient methods of rewarding the very people capable of producing truly amazing software? I can think of several solutions such as the Ransom Model and other fair exchange models. An Ubuntu Hour as a complimentary currency unit?

Here is a vision I have for the next generation FOSS environment -- It is a world in which the community literally creates Ubuntu on a per user basis, via online software factories, with software which produces the kind of software we need and so on. Machines which build machines, In this world, users draw up the specifications for the exact kind of application they need, and by simply placing these specs in the system, the ubuntu tux factory produces the code and the result is Ubuntu.

Ubuntu may have moved its design aeasthetic to the next level, but conceptually, the OS if very much in the last century. How do we generate true progress without making demands on the machines which are being manufactured, the standards which come into play in designing CPUs and graphics cards?

It is surely time that Ubuntu started looking at the problems associated with open hardware and the computer industry in the same way the big guns, Microsoft and Apple have dictated progress in this field. Ubuntu users are beginning to represent a sizable portion of the economy surrounding hardware, it is time we got the kind of attention we deserved.

I therefore look forward to the day when I can buy hardware that is Ubuntu ready, which carries the kind of blessing from the community, (so what if Ubuntu isn't a massive corporation?)  attention by manufactureres, which is more than simply a repackaging of the OS onto hardware. Ubuntu hardware should surely carry a different outlook, it should be built with human beings in mind, it should be appropriate, eco-friendly, and, to use Ivan Illich's phrase,  a tool for conviviality.

David Robert Lewis,
Woodstock, Cape Town,
Sunday, May 16 2 PM

U8UNTU eLXER hits top 30 ZA blogs

Thanks to our readers, U8UNTU eLXER made the top 30 list of South Africa blogs this week as measured by myScoop. Admittedly this is a questionable statistic -- like being one of the top chewing gum practitioners in the world, but making it to number 30 on the sites top 100 blog list in a country which practically worships Ubuntu as the predominant philosophy about the way the world works, really has warmed the cockles of my heart. I am because I ubuntu! Here's to all my fellow compatriots - time to grok the world's number one Linux distro.

Please help this blog grow

[caption id="attachment_1623" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="a recent post generated 1000 hits"][/caption]

Wouldn't it be great if this blog had its own domain name and custom style sheet? In order to break out of the Wordpress ransom of features like the ability to save edits to CSS we have to cough up some cash. U8UNTU eLXR is looking for a kind donor willing to sponsor the $14.95 pa for a custom domain, and another $14.95 for CSS. If you one of the 500+ people generating in the region of 10 000 unique page impressions per month, then you might want to consider sponsoring this blog. Your name will receive acknowledgement on our About page and your karma will increase in the Ubuntu community. So please help out one of the more entertaining reads amongst Ubuntu users. Every bit helps, even if you donate just a couple of dollars, it will assist in the upgrade.

--DRL

PS: I you are able to become a supporting subscriber please send me a private message to ubuntupunk@gmail.com

China LoCo T-shirt

[caption id="attachment_1617" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Can't wait to see the Lucid version"][/caption]

Application alternatives with zero-install and update-alternatives

Having one of the best package-management systems (apt-get, synaptic and aptitude) in Ubuntu is the distributions crowning achievement. It is also an Achilles heel.  Since the packages supplied via repository often result in unwanted changes. An individual user may require a particular interface for instance, but since the package is upgraded automatically for all users on the system, there is no way of keeping the interface on the system without locking the version in Synaptic, which then prejudices those users who may want to progress to the next version.

There are solutions available. The debian community has long known about update-alternatives which allows one to run multiple versions of the same programme. Here is how to run multiple versions of ruby for instance. Since so much about Ubuntu seems to happen inside the terminal, is it any wonder opportunistic development hasn't provide us yet with a GUI interface for what is really an extremely useful command-line application?  I am also surprised update-alternatives hasn't found itself woven in to the Synaptic fabric as part of the very rich ecosystem that is constantly evolving and which must surely provide alternatives to common software installed via the official repos?

Another solution is to take the kind of approach which has already created independent Adobe Air applications and an environment surrounding AIR on my system. (As we speak I am wondering why there isn't a quick and easy method of injecting an early version of VLC in order to power a piece of software developed upon a poor Asian man's framework.!!!)

Oinstall for instance, is an application installer which practically injects software.

A rather frigtening thought at first, but it has an extremely well-developed interface even though it is bound to offend those who believe one Database of applications via aptitude should rule over them all.

It really is worth taking zeroinstall out for a spin, but be warned, you will probably be written off as a "bitjunkie" while risking the purity of your Ubuntu system in the same way running any Adobe AIR application, or heaven forbid, playing with Mono, puts ones at the feet of a marketplace over which one may not have as much control as one would wish. Here is a tutorial

sudo apt-get install zeroinstall-injector

So keep in mind, not all development is vertical, some happens horizontally between applications. The ecosystem cannot afford to simply reboot itself every time a new version of Ubuntu pops out of the Tux factory. Parallel paths are therefore needed so that we may evolve with freedom.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16btFQGWoJM&feature=player_embedded