gThumb Drivers, No Menu Editor, Deer Park Alpha

So, continuing my adventures with Ubuntu today, I tried plugging in my digital camera. This would be a Nikon Coolpix 5900 plugging in through USB. Linux picked up and mounted it, and Gnome recognized that it was a picture holding device without requiring any braincells on my part. Gnome's default option was to import the images in a photo viewer (gThumb). gThumb, however, could not properly import the photos. It could browse the camera's memory just fine (it is a basic mass storage device, after all), but the import wizard doesn't have my model of camera, so the automation stopped there. Maybe I will try filing something over at bugzilla.gnome.org, but there is only one guy working on gThumb, and I don't have good technical documents on my camera. Supporting the zillions of cameras out there must be difficult.

I also installed ScummVM (to play those old games that are so awesome), and wanted to add it to the Gnome Applications menu. Gnome (after versions 2.8) doesn't have a menu editor! There are absolutely no official programs for doing menu editing! There is one over at gnomefiles, but it is for gnome 2,11, and I'm on 2,10 (there was a huge change in vfs structures between the two, so I don't think it would work). Luckily for me, the other major gnome menu editor is smeg, which the guy is developing with Ubuntu in mind. Lucky me! Had to use a script to install it (smeg isn't in the hoary repositories), but I got ScummVM added to the games section in my menu. Gnome developers should seriously get a menu editor out there!

Also out today is the alpha test 1 for Firefox 1.1 (codename "Deer Park"). One thing that I'm looking forward to testing out is the native SVG support. They're still missing some of the specs for SVG, but it's nice to see this stuff finally being supported and built natively.

Ubuntu, Guadec Videos

Well, on Friday Babbage (500MHz, was the machine I used in residence) decided to choke on me. I was in the process of updating packages (many packages had been released since I last updated it before final exams), did a reboot to fire up a new kernel, and I got caught in a fsck loop. Everytime it booted, it said that it had errors on disk, would try to repair, then restart. Figuring that the filesystem had been hosed in some way, I decided to give up, and do a reinstall. At least this happened over summer, and not while I was in school! Up to that point, I had been running Mandrake 10.1 (kinda fuzzy because I was all over the place in what packages I had installed, so some of it would be closer to 10.2), and decided it was time for another change. So far I have run Red Hat 7.3, RH 8.0, Mandrake 9.something through Mandrake 10.2. So I figured I'd try my hand at Ubuntu. Burned Hoary Live using the WinXP machine, backed up some files, then burned off Hoary Install, and proceeded. I must say that Ubuntu's installer is not pretty (compared to RH/Mandrake, which beat out even WinXP's installer), but it still manages to be slick and easy. One cool part was the keyboard selection. Seeing as how I use Dvorak for my keyboard, I had to select a non-Qwerty format. Ubuntu gives you a list of about 10 international characters, any one of which you are supposed to type. Based on what you type, Ubuntu tries to guess your keyboard layout. Type a 'y' ('t' if you're looking at a Qwerty keyboard), and it automagically guesses Dvorak, type something else, and it gives you 5 more characters to help narrow it down. You can pick any international keyboard using this method. Much easier than picking my keyboard from a list, and ten times cooler. I really rushed through the install, and I am experienced in Linux, so I can say at would or wouldn't be suitable for a Windows user. The most difficult part was the partitioning (though memory has it that it was easier than the WinXP partitioning and formatting dialogues).

I've just gotta say that this Ubuntu stuff is pretty damn slick. Package management is really well done, so far it seems about one notch above Mandrake's urpmi. Stuff like this makes me wonder how I found software for Windows. I was disappointed in one thing: Ubuntu didn't automatically mount my second hard drive (ext3) into /mnt. I looked around in other directories, and looked at system configuration utilities, and saw nothing that let me managed mounted disks. In the end I had to hit up the terminal and did the old mkdir /mnt/hd followed by mount -t auto /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hd. This is one thing that an end user shouldn't have to do in command line, and having a nice utility for managing disks might be included. It isn't that common a task, however, so perhaps having it automagically detected, added to the /mnt directory, then let the user click on it to have it mount on user demand. Knoppix does something like this, where they have disk drives unmounted by default, and a click is all you need.

Back to the package management, it was interesting to see how few packages are available by default. "Music Player" (actually Rhythmbox) and "XMMS" are the only available music players. "Totem" is the only movie player on the list (Totem sucks - by personal experience and many times given it another chance). I don't actually know if such restrictions are a good thing or a bad thing for the average end user. Getting access to more packages is somewhat simple, as you just have to change one line is your repository preferences to include "universe". For now, I will leave it without universe, and will add that in as a package comes up that I want. I will probably still end up compiling MPlayer myself, as I look forward to all the latest in forbidden codecs ;)

I will keep this place up to date as to my experience with Ubuntu, but so far it looks like a pretty darn good desktop for human beings (as opposed to BOFHs).

GUADEC 2K5 started yesterday, and many Gnome developers have converged upon it. Fluendo, one of the sponsors, speakers, and developers of GStreamer, is hosting live video feeds from the three main conference halls. They also have up the video archive of yesterday's presentations. All media are Vorbis audio, Theora video, with Ogg for a wrapper, so you might need to break out the VLC if you normally use Windows Media Crap (TM). At least these media don't have patent restrictions ;) I'm enjoying the Cairo presentation from Day 1 archives. The Dirac presentation had some audio problems, and didn't really present much for new information to me. I plan on watching the PiTiVi video after supper.

A short anecdote: one of the things I pulled off of Hoary Universe repository today was Liferea, the news feed syndicator I use. Imported my list of feeds (that I haven't checked since before exams) and had to skim through over 700 new items. Gah!

Term Paper

I know it's been a while since I blogged, but I'll try to ease myself back into it. For today's post, I'm throwing up my term paper for English 112. This particular piece won me a nice shiny A+. (This abstract was actually the cover page, and was formatted better, for those of you familiar with University discourse).

Pre-Print Archive Access for the Underprivileged

Adam Dunn

Abstract: A new method of releasing scholarly articles, the pre-print archive, is changing the face of academic publishing, and those who stand to most benefit from this phenomenon are the researchers who live in developing countries. How can these under-funded scholars benefit, and thrive in the elite world of academic publishing, and how can the well-developed countries benefit from the newcomers? By embracing the pre-print archive.

Professor Osinubi
English 112
Section 07P
4 April 2005

PDF Download

Don't Hotswap PS/2

When my parents brought home my school computer, my brother hooked it up to the Internet, and this became the server for http://roadtrip05.dyndns.org. When I came home last yesterday, I noticed that he had neglected to plug in a keyboard, so i had no way of locally logging on to the server. I know that it is a big no-no to plug in a PS/2 keyboard while the computer is running, but I decided to risk it anyway. Needless to say, kernel panicked (first time I've experienced an actual kernel panic), and the server crashed. Luckily, no hardware was damaged, but Shaw did manage to change the server's IP address in the time that it was down. I've updated the IP address in DynDNS's records, but it may take a while to replicate through DNS hierarchy.

ClearTyping?

Yes, the first topic on today's agenda is that I am back at home, and I should practice my typing a bit more. The whole exams/roadtrip/staying a week at Auntie's threw off my computer usage for quite some time. I come back to find much spyware on the house computer, slowing a 1.4GHz/WinXP down to slower performance than my 500MHz/Mandrake. I will have to redo this computer, as it is more than due.

Another interesting point is that most of the goodies I had hooked up to my 500MHz in res is now hooked up to the 1.4, these namely being the optical mouse, and the LCD flatpanel monitor. Because LCD monitors are so crisp and clear, I do find them to be easier on the eyes, as I deal with large amounts of text in my computing day. With these ultra-defined pixels comes the ability to redifine the way that anti-aliasing is done, and Microsoft has tried to do "sub pixel hinting" on text, and called it "ClearType". While this is a valiant effort, now that I return home, I find that they have just done a half-assed job of it, and it still doesn't look right. If you have an LCD monitor (laptop or flatpanel, the fat CRTs can't do sub-pixel hinting), you can go visit the ClearType Tuner in Internet Explorer only (if you're like me, and have deleted IE from your desktop, you can still run it with Start>Run>iexplore). Turn it on and watch your text be anti-aliased! Oooh, no more jaggy edges. Instead of jaggy edges, we see something else, in the form of reds and blues that edge our text! Is this the way that ClearType is supposed to work? Personally, I hate it. KDE has a little option to turn on sub-pixel hinting as well. When it comes to KDE's sub-pixel hinting, I find it is hit or miss. If the fonts are hinted improperly, you get ugly edge colours which are on par or worse than that in Windows. If the fonts are done properly, you get something that actually looks better than in Windows. Could I possibly be mistaken? With the millions that MS spends on research, am I supposed to believe that proper sub-pixel hinting should reduce jaggies at the cost of introducing some bad edge colours? Do these edge colours actually reduce eye strain and increase readability? Is it possible that the jag-less, edge colour-less fonts in KDE are actually the ones that are hinted improperly? This isn't just on my monitor, as two other people on Nootka 4th turned on their ClearType and watched their fonts go from jagged black to smoothed turqoise.

Keep in mind that I have been using Linux for the past six months, then I come home to a slower performing computer (despite being faster in specs), and had to wipe spyware/adware off my Aunt's two computers. She has a 2.6GHz and it took ~5 minutes to kill off all the popups and get IE at the Google home page (5 minutes is not an exaggeration, I'm serious, I should have taken a video, because it really was 5 minutes, I swear). I'm really learning to hate Microsoft.