Monogenea

To remove Mono from your shiny new desktop installation of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx enter the following command (after taking the usual precautions like backups of your data etc):

sudo apt-get purge libmono* libgdiplus cli-common libglitz-glx1 libglitz1

[UPDATE: Many thanks to Directhex who pointed out my error regarding the need to remove libsqlite0. I've removed it from the command above. He also requested (you can see in his comment below), that I mention that the mononono package is no longer particularly effective at preventing Mono from being installed. Thanks for the prompt Jo, I was going to but I just forgot.]

This is almost the same one as used for the Karmic Koala release (9.10), and for me the result of the above command was as follows:

The following packages will be REMOVED
cli-common* f-spot* gbrainy* libart2.0-cil* libflickrnet2.2-cil* libgconf2.0-cil* libgdiplus* libglade2.0-cil* libglib2.0-cil* libglitz-glx1* libglitz1* libgmime2.4-cil* libgnome-keyring1.0-cil* libgnome-vfs2.0-cil*
libgnome2.24-cil* libgnomepanel2.24-cil* libgtk2.0-cil* liblaunchpad-integration1.0-cil* libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil* libmono-addins0.2-cil* libmono-cairo2.0-cil* libmono-corlib2.0-cil* libmono-data-tds2.0-cil* libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil* libmono-posix2.0-cil* libmono-security2.0-cil* libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil* libmono-sqlite2.0-cil* libmono-system-data2.0-cil* libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil* libmono-system-web2.0-cil* libmono-system2.0-cil* libmono2.0-cil* libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil* libndesk-dbus1.0-cil* libnunit2.4-cil* mono-2.0-gac* mono-gac* mono-runtime* tomboy*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 40 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 49.8MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

I chose to accept this and proceeded. Of course YMMV so please check carefully before hitting that enter key. The purge switch of this command removes any configuration files as well as the packages themselves.

Compared to Ubuntu 9.10, in 10.04 there appears to be just one new Mono dependant application called gbrainy (in the Games menu) which is described thus: “a platform to train memory, arithmetical and logical capabilities with many sorts of different exercises of different difficulty levels”.

Unfortunately it appears as though the “training” objective of gbrainy might not be realised…

Over the last year or so, the BBC have carried out an experiment which examined “brain trainer” games. Subsequent analysis of the data found that these brain trainers are an empty promise as reported here in The Guardian:

Practising brain-training games will improve your performance on brain-training games, but that effect will not transfer to other aspects of brain function. They will not make you brainier, so you may as well just pootle around on the internet.

It seems that not much grey matter will be lost by removing the gbrainy package then

Gnote and Getting Things Gnome

For a very similar alternative to Tomboy try Gnote, and as I like task-related management too I also recommend the excellent GTG [Getting Things Gnome] application. To install these two simply type: sudo apt-get install gnote gtg.

The alternative for F-Spot I usually use is a combination of gthumb and Gimp, the latter of which has been removed from the default Lucid desktop install to make space for other things. Both of these applications can be easily installed by a simple sudo apt-get install gthumb gimp command. However there is now a new kid on the block which looks quite exciting called shotwell. Shotwell will be the default camera/image app in the forthcoming Fedora 13 distribution replacing gthumb (as it has no dependencies on Mono in the default desktop installation). It is also, I was pleased to discover, available in the main Lucid repository so can be installed using either the command line: sudo apt-get install shotwell or you can use the very easy and graphically attractive Ubuntu Software Centre (as you can for the other applications listed above also). This is how Fedora describe Shotwell in the preliminary release notes:

Shotwell is an open source photo organizer designed for the GNOME desktop environment and has replaced Gthumb by default in Fedora 13. It supports the following features:

• import photos from any digital camera supported by gPhoto
• automatically organize events containing photos taken at the same time
• use tags to organize your photo collection
• edit non-destructively when altering photos, without ruining originals or using disk space for each copy
• publish photos to Facebook, Flickr or Picasa
• one-click auto-enhancement
• rotate, mirror, and crop photos
• reduce red-eye and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of your photos
• edit any photo, even if it’s not imported to the Shotwell library

I haven’t used Shotwell yet but it sounds like a good one to try out.

There you have it and hopefully that will be it for another 6 months on this subject.

Tell Someone Else!

So now I have a nearly finished Oggcamp theme which adapts when it sees you searching for #oggcamp, #ubuntu, #lo, #shotofjaq or #uupc. If I missed out any interesting hashtags then do let me know. Screenshot below is it running fullscreen on my 2048×1152 monitor. In reality it would be tracking two of them on a 1024×768 projector, but this shows all the hash pipe themes together, click to go large.

I will be pushing up a bzr branch of all this so you can play with it in the comfort of your own home or your own conference. If you have further suggestions, or want to help tweak it a bit more, then give me a shout in the comments.

Tell Someone Else!

So what colour is that exactly? I copied the logo into the Gimp and used the eye dropper tool to pick out the orange from the circle of friends. The top set of three sliders show the hue as a location round the colour wheel in degrees, saturation and value are basically the amount of white and black added to it. So this orange lives at 23 degrees.

Now lets take a look at the aubergine that makes an appearance as a solid colour on the startup screen.

Using the same trick in the Gimp we can see that the aubergine is a dark shade of the hue at 323 degrees, exactly 60 degrees apart from the orange. Relationships between colours on the wheel tell you whether colours will go together or clash. I have to admit to not actually understanding this aesthetically, but I like the numbers behind it all. I expect 60 degrees mean they go together jolly well.

So what does this branding mean for us? Well it is aiming to provide a more professional and enterprise feel to Ubuntu, which is exactly what we want. It also means we have rather a lot of printed leaflets with an Ubuntu solution provider logo that is going out of fashion soon, we will have to get them out in front of customers as soon as possible!

Tell Someone Else!

The Zimbra story is interesting. It isn’t in the list below, but as Jef Spaleta points out, the Zimbra desktop package for Hardy is in the pool. I, for one, am puzzled by this.

Dapper 6.06
db2exc
desktopsecure
realplay
sugarcrm
Edgy 6.10
nothing at all
Feisty 7.04
nothing at all
Gutsy 7.10
nothing at all
Hardy 8.04
wasce-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-19-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-19-generic
parallels-modules-2.6.24-18-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-18-generic
adobe-flashplugin
informix-csdk
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-plugins-wmv-doc
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-plugins-doc
pdvd-doc
parallels-modules-2.6.24-25-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-25-generic
parallels-modules
parallels
symphony
skype-mid
parallels-modules-2.6.24-24-server
parallels-modules-2.6.24-24-generic
informix-oat
informix-ids
informix-license
informix-pdo
ibm-gsk7bas
db2exc
informix-ids-demo
arkwui
arkppostgres
arkpmysql
arkpldap
arkobk
acroread
zarafa-webaccess-muc
zarafa-webaccess-mobile
zarafa-webaccess
zarafa-licensed
zarafa-libs
zarafa-dev
zarafa-dbg
zarafa
Intrepid 8.10
adobe-flashplugin
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-plugins-wmv-doc
gstreamer0.10-fluendo-plugins-doc
pdvd-doc
symphony
skype-mid
acroread
Jaunty 9.04
accountz-baz
adobe-flashplugin
symphony
alfresco-pdf2swf
alfresco-community
openbravo-erp
skype-mid
acroread
Karmic 9.10
adobe-flashplugin
uex
symphony
accountz-baz
acroread
Lucid 10.04
adobe-flashplugin
acroread

Tell Someone Else!

• First up you need to set a facebook username up. Log on to facebook and go to your account settings page. Set your username if you haven’t already. I chose alanbelltolc, to match my twitter and identi.ca names. Now I think you have to log out of facebook and back in – this might not be appears to be a necessary step.
• Now run Empathy, Applications-Internet-Empathy Instant Messenger.
• Press F4 or go to Edit-Accounts in the Empathy menu.
• Press the Add button and choose Jabber from the dropdown list of account types.
• Press the Create button.
• Your login ID is username@chat.facebook.com – we think it prefers all lower case
• Your password is your facebook password
• Now make sure the account is enabled (checkbox next to the account name on the left)
• It may ask you if you want to let it save your password in the gnome keyring at this point.
• Make yourself available and the names and pictures of both of your friends should appear!

The account setting dialog as you go through the setup:

You can chat with your friends

You even get lovely libnotify popups like this one >>

Update
If you want to try it out on someone please feel free to find me on Facebook and . . . um what is the verb? XMPP me? Jab me? Next up I will have to take Debian off my OLPC, put Sugar back on and try and get Sugar to use Facebook as a back end.

Tell Someone Else!

Whoah! Hold on everyone. Let me don my asbestos suit first will you.

Thanks.

Right then. I have been thinking about this post for some time and I think the time is probably right for pressing the old “publish” button.

I am not trying to incite riots or wars in the halls of residence or corridors of power but Canonical/Ubuntu is starting to catch more “bad karma” than is healthy for it IMHO.

• Let’s start with Mono. Yep. It’s been a prickly thorn for many and the concerns expressed are not going away. There’s no point in raking over the old ground; it is just one of the bad-karma attractants in a growing list.
• Then we have Ubuntu One. Proprietary, closed, caused much debate and friction when announced and now the possibility of a Windows version too.
• Next comes dumping GIMP, OOo and other much-loved applications from the default installation of versions of the forthcoming distribution.
• Then the discussion about what closed/proprietary applications should be made available in the Ubuntu repositories.
• Then we have the change of the default search engine from Google to Microsoft Yahoo.
• Then Matt Asay joins as COO which should be, and probably is, good news. Matt is well known, respected and experienced, yet some of his prodigious public commentary tugs at the heartstrings of many a Freedom Fighter.

I don’t really want to comment on the individual points above; the point is that this list is growing…

I really like Ubuntu. I use it everywhere, I help in the Ubuntu-uk irc channel when I can and we [our company] promote Ubuntu to our customers and I [as an individual] to friends and family.

What concerns me is not any particular item in the list above: some I care about, others I do not; as I am sure many of you will do too. It is the increasing volume of criticism and vitriol as a whole. It is getting louder. This, I believe, is indicative of a turning tide that, if we are not careful, will result in Ubuntu losing popularity and more of the FOSS community exercising it’s freedom.

I’m pretty thick-skinned (I think I will need to be with this post!) so if you think I am barking up the wrong tree, or just plain barking, then say so. But I am noticing increasing criticism and anti-Ubuntu rhetoric which is not just because it is becoming more popular, although that is certainly one factor.

Something is changing and I am not sure it is for the good of Ubuntu or our community.

Tell Someone Else!

Thunderbird Preferences

I’ve never really got on with Gnome‘s Evolution (the default mail client in Ubuntu) and so always install Thunderbird, Lightning and other great extensions for the Mozilla family of products on my Ubuntu desktops and laptops. Since the new notification tool (9.04?) and then the Indicator Applet (9.10) were introduced however, Thunderbird hasn’t been able to avail itself of these useful tools. Until now.

Ruben Verweij has created a small Thunderbird extension that seems to fix this limitation. Simply follow the very clear and easy instructions on his blog post to create the .xpi package and then install it in the usual manner. I had to install the Ubuntu package libnotify-bin to get the notifications working but that was easy: sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin.

You can then turn off Thunderbird’s internal notification tool as shown here. This stops the old-fashioned opaque pop ups that usually appear in the bottom right of the screen.

As Ruben is clear to point out this is still experimental so all the usual rules apply and YMMV.

Libnotify Preferences

Thanks Ruben, this is a great addition.

Tell Someone Else!

I know my new look will take some getting used to and I just have to get familiar but it definitely feels quite different. The icons look more home-made and the whole thing seems less slick. I keep repeating “Kill Bill” and “It’s Free”. I know I will get used to it but at the mo I could almost say I felt sad although probably remembering the “helpful” paperclip will remedy that – Yes, that’s done it – I will give it a chance.

=============================================================

This is an excerpt from my ramblings on going over to Open Source Software. My husband (The Open Sourcerer) has persuaded me to put it on here but I’ve really no idea why. He said “people will be interested, you’ll be surprised.”

….surely they have better things to do??? I’d be interested in the work/chore that is so bad you’d rather read this than do it.

Tell Someone Else!

One of my actions from the recent Ubuntu UK team meeting was to organise a evening out on the Real Ale Train.

The Watercress Line is a small steam powered railway line in Hampshire. It runs from Alton Station to Alresford. Alton is the end of the line for scheduled services from Waterloo. Every few weeks or so they run an evening special, the Real Ale Train, or RAT.

Basically the train turns into a very very long bar for the evening. There are several converted bar carriages and plenty of seating (comfy old seating in groups of 4). Steam, Beer and Software Freedom seems an irresistible combination so it sounds like an ideal evening out for the Ubuntu UK community.

Firstly we need to decide on a date, we have created a poll to find the most popular date from the dates far enough ahead to be organised, and skipping the date when the next Ubuntu Developer Summit is likely to be happening. Please vote on the poll and we will announce the most popular date on IRC, the wiki page and on the Ubuntu UK mailing list on January 24th. When the date is announced you will need to book your ticket, tickets can be booked online and cost £10 each. This includes a voucher for your first pint. Beer is not “Free as in Beer”, but it is just £2/pint. Don’t hang about and try to book late, they sell out months in advance.

Beards are strictly optional – it may sound like a male dominated event (and to be fair, it is) but it has a very friendly atmosphere and all are welcome.

Other alcoholic and soft drinks as well as snacks are on sale at the on-board buffet. Hot food can be purchased on board the train with vegetarian alternatives available. You have to be 18+ to buy beer, but there is no age limit (at either end of the scale) for joining in.

The RAT starts from Alton at 19.20 and tootles gently up and down the line a couple of times, returning to Alton in time for the 22:44 train back to Waterloo. (This is a connecting service, if the RAT is late, the mainline train will wait for it)

Dress – something Ubuntu related.

Tell Someone Else!

WordPress MU 2.8 Beginner's Guide

If you didn’t know, WordPress MU is the “Multi User” version of the very popular free and open source blogging software. MU allows you build a site where users can create and run their own individual blogs themselves. One of the best known examples is probably the WordPress.com site itself which serves tens of millions of hits on millions of blogs each day.

That’s a little background, now on with the book review itself.

Firstly, I was a bit confused by the title: “Beginner’s” and “WordPress MU” aren’t two words I would normally associate together. After all, a multi-user blogging farm capable of hosting literally millions of blogs doesn’t strike me as something a beginner would be doing. You can’t however judge a book by it’s cover as they say…

At approximately 250 pages the book is a reasonable size unlike some of those 1000+ page tomes that are too heavy to carry and won’t stay open due to the effects of gravity.

The book has a clearly stated objective:

This book will take you through the setup of a WordPress MU-powered blogging network, using a real, working blog network as an example, so that you can follow the creation process step-by-step. Your blogging network will be complete with professional features such as friends lists, status feeds, groups, forums, photo galleries, and more, to build your own WordPress.com – a place where users can quickly come and create a blog for themselves.

The book is written by Lesley A. Harrison:

Lesley Harrison has more than ten years of experience working in the world of IT. She has served as a web developer for various local organizations, a systems administrator for a multinational IT outsourcing company, and later a database administrator for a British utility company. Today, Lesley runs her own video gaming site, Myth-Games.com, and works as a freelance web developer. She works with clients all over the world to develop Joomla! and WordPress/WordPress MU web sites.

When I first thumbed through it I was a bit put-off by the style and layout – it felt like it might be one of those “books for stupid people”. Each short piece is wrapped in the same set of three headings:

• A Title,
• the main content called “Time for action“,
• and a short review headed “What just happened?“.

After a couple of these you also get:

• a “Pop Quiz” with some fairly simple questions,
• and something entitled “Have a go hero” that gives the reader some guidance to exploring the subject further.

In one way, I’m somewhat confused by this book; the styling and layout feels, to me at least, rather condescending and childish, and yet the actual breadth and depth of content is really very good. You can get a feel for the style in this short excerpt from chapter 7.

Over 12 chapters the author leads the reader from a brief overview of WordPress MU itself and some discussion about the choices you will need to make with regards to hosting etc. through installation of the basic system, installing and customising themes, user management, security, adding features through plugins and extensions, getting money from your site, and finishes off with some optimisation and troubleshooting advice.

There is a huge amount of information in this book. The shear quantity of extensions selected, described, setup and configured makes this well worth the money, just for the time it would take to find them yourself. Lesley uses a fictitious site for Vampire Slayers as the theme and builds a highly functional and comprehensive WordPress MU installation that delivers not just a blog network but also tightly integrated forums and social networking features. It’s obvious she knows her stuff and there are some real nuggets in the book that I wasn’t familiar with myself. There are plenty of screenshots showing what needs clicking and configuring and lots of code snippets where the editing of various WordPress php files is required.

As well as the breadth of information, it’s surprising just how much detail there is in between the covers of WordPress MU 2.8 Beginner’s Guide too. I wouldn’t think of a “Beginner’s” book covering things like Apache’s mod_rewrite and writing your own rewrite rules in .htaccess for example. On the flip-side there were one or two items that felt like they had finished half way, leaving the reader to go and do their own research. So again I question the title and styling of the book against the kind of reader I would expect that would want to buy and use it.

It’s a quick book to read, and is fast-paced which I like. There is minimal waffle or superfluous language – something I’ve noticed with other Packt books in the past too. Perhaps this is part of their editorial design? It certainly helps if it is “by design”. I’ve other technology books that are a real chore to read, requiring the reader to fish the information out of a vast sea of irrelevant language. You can easily read the whole book through in a few hours. It then becomes a great reference device (another benefit of succinctness) when you start to build your MU blog network.

To summarise then, I thought this book has great content, lots of information, good detail in most places and does what it set out to do with regards to the quote at the top of the page. In other ways I found the book a paradox; I thought the layout and style was too infantile for the subject matter and I think the title really doesn’t do the book justice. The saving grace is that these shortcomings don’t really get in the way of the content.

Had I picked up this book and thumbed through it in a bookshop I’m not sure I’d have bought it. By dropping the “Beginner’s Guide” from the cover and making the style a little more adult I probably would have. Of course in this case, Packt sent the book to me so I didn’t have to make that choice and my “job” was to read it and comment. It’s a good book. I enjoyed it, and it has really good content, but I’m not sure it’s being targeted at the right potential buyer. In this case, don’t be put off by the cover.

[Please Note: If you use the links from here to Packt's website and decide to buy any book from their site, we will get a small commission that we can use towards the upkeep of our servers etc.]

Tell Someone Else!