We Should See Other Blogs

I know Amarok and Deluge and Firefox are the glamourous children of the packaging world, but there are a few packages I’d like to see added to Hardy. Packages that would make my professional life just a little bit easier.

1. Zimbra: PHPgroupware and OpenGroupWare don’t cut it. Zimbra — I’ve seen a functioning system! — is nice, and has risen almost to the point of competing with MS Exchange. It would be simply wonderful to be able to apt-get this sucker.
2. OpenBravo: Such an impressive piece of software. One of the few OS ERP projects with a nice website, a nice interface, and a lot of great features.
3. VMWare Server: It was in the repos, then it disappeared. I have exactly two programs I need Windows to run, and I’d like to host one of our ageing Win 2000 servers as a virtual machine running in an actually stable environment.
4. Bugzilla: Okay, this one is in the repos, but I simply can’t set it up properly. Maybe it’s just me.
5. ERP5: Apparently pretty powerful, I bet there’re quite a few people who’d want to give this a whirl.

That’s it for now. But I will be back with more…

Hey, remember when I blogged about Samba GUI tools? Didn’t think so. But guess what they’re planning on fixing?

Even though this was suggested for Gutsy, they’ve been discussing it at the Ubuntu Developers Conference; here’s to hoping those changes make their way into Hardy. Networking in Ubuntu is, right now, hopelessly more complicated than it should be.

Getting the perfect PulseAudio setup in Ubuntu 7.10 isn’t hard. It’s basically installing a bunch of packages and editing a config file, then making sure ALSA is using PulseAudio instead of ESD.

The problems are these: there’s no metapackage that installs all the needed utilities, modules, and libs; the GUI tools pretty much suck; and there is no usable documentation that I could find for the base install or the GUI tools. The metapackage should be easy enough to implement, but the GUI tools need lot of work. The documentation needs to be created.

PulseAudio is a great idea. It’s well-implemented (afaict) at the system level. It enables the user to do a lot of pretty cool things, like sending audio to different computers. I would very much like to see it replace ESD, but before it can really do that, it needs a lot of usability tweaks.

For instance, “sinks” may be a nice technical name for where the daemon sends the sound, but the difference between sources, server, and sinks will probably be lost on the target audience of the Ubuntu distribution. These differences should either be elaborated with end-user oriented language, or the less-accesed hidden from view in a less visible part of the interface.

Ideally, I’d like to see a graphical representation of the possible output locations, much like the graphical representation of filesystems and available drives in the “Computer” dialogue. I could select “Send sound to” with a check box, and select multiple locations if I wanted to, something that’s difficult to do with the available user tools. Or alternately I could select, “Get sound from”, which would pick up the sound on an available server. Volume controls, server management, RTP multicast, default servers, all these things could be placed in an options dialogue. Much like, for instance, when a user is selecting a Metacity theme. Padevchooser is too technical, t0o complicated, and it lives in the tray: stop making things too technical, too complicated, and for the love of all that is holy, stop making things live in the tray! I already have a volume control there: that’s enough, thank you very much.

With these usability tweaks, I think PulseAudio would be ready for prime-time. Maybe even for Hardy Heron + 1.

I used to use Ktorrent for downloading Linux ISOs and getting free music from Jamendo. It worked well, but suffered from a lot of overhead, as was a KDE application and had to load a whole bunch of extra components. Plus (and I’m being charitable here) DHT didn’t work quite as well as one might expect.

Now, changing software is a bit of a big deal. I had a lot of settings tweaked in Ktorrent to get it right to where I wanted. Yet, when I typed aptitude install deluge-torrent and ran the thing, I was P2P-ing in literally a minute or so.

From a functionality standpoint, Ktorrent had always been all right, but not amazing. It lacked certain things, one of which was a simple layout and a nice skin. Frankly, it looked like a KDE application, and that’s not a compliment. And while it got the job done, I was always looking out something more like uTorrent, which is the gold standard in Torrent apps.

Or was. Deluge has most of the features of Azureus (that bloated hunk of crap), is free and open source, runs on Unix and Apple and has an alpha build on Windows, has a plug-in architecture, is functional, lightweight, and pleasing on the eyes.

Deluge is, in my opinion, the new gold standard in Bittorrent software.

No longer three days! Now it’s just two. The breathless anticipation. There are release parties being set up all over the world, even one in Cairo.

Ubuntu 7.10 is almost here.

In the meantime Lifehacker has a nice look at the upcoming release. I found a few gems in here I hadn’t know about before, either. Such as automatic NTFS read/write, and the ability to change resolutions without using a terminal or restarting X.

Only three more days until Ubuntu Gutsy! That means integrated desktop effects with Compiz (spinning cube yay!), a graphical configuration tool for X (desperately needed), integrated desktop search (for that little search box in my SLED), and fast user switching (not useful for me).

I’m excited!

Most of us who use Ubuntu and its variants are aware of the best-of-breed software that comes installed with it, or that a majority of the Ubuntu user-base is fans of. Things like OpenOffice, AbiWord, kTorrent, Amarok, Compiz, VLC… the list goes on. But what about those neat applications hovering around the periphery of your awareness? Here are a few good programs I’ve tried. Give them a shot.

1) Hyrdrogen – Even if you don’t like music, Hydrogen is a fun drum simulator. Hydrogen is, as an added bonus, dead simple to use. I’ve seen people with no musical training figure it out in under three minutes.

2) Tilda – If you’re one of those people who likes to have a terminal open at all times, give Tilda a shot. Hit whatever key you’ve mapped, and boom, there it is. Though the default fonts are a little wonky — oversize, ugly — once you change that, it’s magic. And useful!

3) Easytag – If you’re managing your music collection with MusicBrainz Picard and you’re wondering why nothing’s working right, why Picard is perpetually stuck at version 0.7, and why it can’t pass valid URLs to your browser (Python 2.5, by the way), why not use a different tagger? Or maybe you have a lot of music that isn’t in the MusicBrainz database and you understand that they have no good way to submit file-based metadata (even if you’ve confirmed it!): why not use another tagger. Easytag is exactly what its name means. Easy. Tag. It allows you to tag things easily.

4) PDFedit – On Windows, there’s a real lack of free, useful PDF editing and viewing programs. I can count the viewers on two fingers; I can’t find a free editor. Ubuntu, however, doesn’t suffer from that problem. Want to view a PDF? Built in. Want to print to a PDF? In the repos (and built-in to Gutsy, apparently). Want to edit a PDF? One quick Synaptic search or Aptitude command, and you’re on your way.

5) View Your Mind – Want to organise your thoughts? Have a messy mind? Here you go. One on many mind mapping applications, VYM has the added benefit of being able to export to OO.o Impress presentations (and of course from there, to MSOffice Powerpoint, if you absolutely must).

A nice front-end for Samba/CIFS included in the default install. I really don’t like having to alter a config file, and I’m pretty sure that’s a lot of people feel this way. This front-end could, for instance, manage Samba users, SMB/CIFS shares, configuration options, mountable network shares: the whole nine yards. It would be nice. I don’t really like having to open a shell and type in commands; I know, power user, whatever.

For me, a GUI is better. It is. It’s quicker, it’s easier to understand, it’s all in one place instead of two different places and three different commands, and it allows those who enjoy CLI work to continue using their computers the way they want.

I love watching the patch stream for Ubuntu’s upcoming releases. I mean, I only know what maybe 10% of them actually do, but it’s fun to see. Most of the year, for instance, there’s just the occasional maintenance patch, with maintainers releasing new versions, and of course security patches. Then you get to the Debian Import Freeze where, iirc, there’s a flurry of patches and modifications.

But the real storm comes at Upstream Version Freeze, and Feature Freeze. After that patches and package revisions come flooding down the pipe. I think I remember something like 50 a day for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t keep up with all the changes with my small simian mind.

So yeah, this is what I do for fun, eh. I’m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, whatever the case, as I hear there’s a good chance that desktop effects will finally be integrated into the system. Nice, because the bolt-on and backports don’t always work very well, and I fondly remember running Beryl in all its buggy glory. And while Compiz Fusion is nice, the packages I’ve used are backports and don’t necessarily always work that well.

I just realised that on my home computer–internetless as it is right now, curse Bell–Windows has been relegated to a sort of seldom-used shared library sort of deal. I boot it up in virtualisation every once in a while when I want to compose something in Notion or… I can’t think of anything else right now.

Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Skype, etc, are all exactly the same in Ubuntu. Compiz beats the pants off any other windowing system, period.

And Windows XP is that appliance I put in a box in a closet and don’t pay much attention to except when I need it, which is rarely.

It’s a beautiful thing really. The simplest of simple technologies gives me back the choice I want. As a fanboy might put it, I no longer bow before the golden calf of Redmond.