I’ve recently upgraded my Lenovo Y510 from Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy, which I’ve been running since around May 2008, to Linux Mint 8, Helena (which is based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10). I used to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu every 6 months, but it got a bit tiring keeping up on the upgrade treadmill, running around fixing things, especially things that worked before. I decided to stick to the Long-Term Support version (LTS), as the intermediate versions tend to have more regressions.

With Hardy, there were ongoing annoyances I’d learnt to live with. My screen brightness modifier worked the wrong way around (brighter was dimmer). Flash in the browser caused problems with sound (Flash 9 didn’t work well with PulseAudio), and I’d have to close the browser to get it working again. My webcam image was upside down. Firefox would eventually consume all available memory and need to be restarted. The system was unresponsive for a few seconds after booting up. When wireless was off, it would be on, and I’d need to flip the switch to on and then off again to really switch it off.

I’ve been meaning to try Linux Mint for a while, to see whether I could recommend it to complete beginners. Ubuntu was fine, but for beginners, especially if I just gave them the CD and they installed it themselves, installing all the extra codecs to get music and DVD’s playing properly was often problematic.

At first glance, Helena looked great. Based on Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10, it’s more polished, booted faster, and was more responsive. Little touches such as the volume control not taking up a huge chunk in the middle of the screen – rather appearing neatly in the corner, the consolidated menu bars freeing up a few extra pixels, or the improved menu, all add up to a noticeable improvement. Most of the little Hardy annoyances seemed to be taken care of (except for the webcam and the off-on-off wireless).

It didn’t last long though. Sound was a complete mess, breaking seemingly at random at some point in the session. Lennart Poettering, a lead developer of PulseAudio has been ranting about Ubuntu’s implementation of PulseAudio since they first implemented it in Hardy. He also blamed application developers, in particular Skype and Flash. He was equally displeased in the buildup to Karmic.

The blame-game goes back and forth, with criticism of PulseAudio equally vociferous, and all sorts of contrary advice floating around (much of it around uninstalling PulseAudio).

Next, the system, although starting off more responsively, degraded very quickly. Whereas beforehand I’d have Firefox open with 30 tabs for most of the day before running into trouble, things fell apart much quicker. Even worse, once the browser hung, I couldn’t just click “X” to close it, and have to manually kill it to close it down. The disease spread to other applications, all needing to be killed manually.

So, in short, lots of little improvements, but two rather large regressions.

Fixing these though proved trivial. For me, two little fixes seem to have helped – installing libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio (over libsdl1.2debian-alsa), and instead o using the buggy version 2.0.x of Skype, which doesn’t work well with PulseAudio, rather installing the beta 2.1.x. Thankfully at least Flash 10 works with PulseAudio (Flash 9 didn’t, causing the sound problems mentioned above). Now, both the sound and the related memory problems have gone away.

So although I seem to have a stable system now, and am personally happy with Helena, it still took a bit of fiddling around, beyond what the average user would be comfortable doing. It’s getting closer though and, hopefully, with Lucid Lynx 10.04 being a LTS release, sound will finally be a painless experience for most people.

First published on Neverness.

The ONE thing M$ is very good at is propaganda, more commonly know as FUD. People like belonging to things and the Windows 7 launch parties make it cool so that people want to belong. Certain sections of the media also take this so that M$ now does not even have to pay for their marketing.

If we have a Linux release party and “Two techies from the area teamed up to highlight ******* *’* key features and answer questions”, people will most likely say or at least think that is because nobody else understands Linux. Insert Linux distro of choice in the appropriate space.

To promote Linux and in this writers case, UBUNTU, we have to give it a cool factor so that general users WANT to belong to the group of Linux users. Make it a cool, fun, easy “club”  to belong to.

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Apologies to all here and at Ubuntu-ZA for not being active the last 3 weeks.

So the thing with developing in Linux is that you’re going to use the shell a lot. And the other thing with Linux is that most things are in a deep directory hierarchy. I find myself changing to different directories with long names a lot.

Even with tab-completion, it becomes really tiresome, and slows me down.

I know about pushd and popd which allows you to make a kind of directory “stack”. And it helps, but I don’t necessarily always go back in reverse order.

I’ve found this little utility called autojump. What it does is learn the directories that you use most often, assigning weights to the ones you use more frequently. So after a while of using the normal cd command, it has a pretty good idea of where you usually go.

Now you can jump to the directory you want, by issuing a very short command. For example:

cd ~/projects/MyProject/app/view/users

becomes

j users

And if there are a few directories you jump to with “users”, it will automatically go to the most-frequently used one. Or you can type j users and press Tab, which will give you a numbered list of all “users” directories in it’s list.

And the other kicker is that it’s case-insensitive.

Go, and be productive!

So they guy from Quirkey Blog created a new way to run web apps. It’s based on sammy.js. Sammy.js, in turn, is based on Sinatra. Sinatra is a very light weight web framework for Ruby. Sammy uses CouchDB for back-end storage.

The idea behind Sammys is that the web browser talks directly to the data store. It doesn’t have to go through a web server (or application server) to get things done. So all the routing is done in Javascript, in the browser.

It amuses me to see the industry vacillate between thick clients and thin clients. I mean in the beginning there was the thin client, with the mainframe as the server. Everything was good.

Then the PC revolution happened, and the thick client became fashionable. I think it happened because the wire protocols at the time could not handle the rich experience that the PC offered.

Then the Web 2.0 revolution happened, and we went back to thin clients. The browser was a fairly simple display front-end to the app that sat on the web servers.

But slowly the web browsers are becoming more and more powerful. With HTML 5 and ever faster Javascript engines, the browsers is becoming the new platform-independent GUI toolkit.

And once again we can do richer things in the browser than the wire protocal allows, so the client is becoming thick again.

So I guess in a few years time we’ll going thin client again. I wonder what the technology shift will be to make it happen?

The gNewSense project has released version 2.3 of its 100% FSF Free GNU/Linux distribution, in the form of a point update to the release codenamed ‘deltah’.

Changes in this release include a number of “freedom bugs” fixed, three newly-freed packages, 15 packages removed and 20 sourceless files removed. gNewSense is a fully-free GNU/Linux distribution endorsed by the Free Software Foundation and one of just nine distributions considered fully free. Among those is the South African Kongoni release.

See the announcement for other changes in gNewSense 2.3.

The KOffice team today announced the second beta of the upcoming 2.1 release. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to only fix the remaining bugs, and that is obvious from this release. The first beta of 2.1 was released without any fanfares, but it marked the transition into the bugfixing stage.

Something that is not obvious from the changelog is that there has been much activity in the MS office import filters, especially for MS Word and Powerpoint. Many new formatting features have been implemented in both these filters. We expect KOffice 2.1 to be better at reading MS file formats than any previous KOffice version.

See the announcement and changelog.

Gnome 2.28 beta 2, KDE 4.3.1 and RPM 4.7.1 are the main highlights of the seventh milestone release of OpenSUSE 11.2. The release, announced yesterday by the OpenSUSE team, is one of several beta releases before the final November release.

Other major changes since Milestone 6 include an initial version of the YaST2 installer theme, new KDE theming and everything built using the new RPM 4.7.1. Other updated packages include (among others) Linux kernel 2.6.31-rc9, Valgrind 3.5, Samba 3.4.0, Evolution 2.27.91, OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 RC 1 and Gwibber 1.2.

A range of screenshots can be found on the OpenSUSE website.

More on this in the release announcement.

Formerly known as Ubuntu EEE, Easy Peasy Linux is a lightweight Linux distribution for netbooks and now version 1.5 has been released. Easy Peasy 1.5 is based on Ubuntu 9.04 and features the ever-improving Ubuntu Remix interface which is customised for the smaller screens that are common in ultra-portable netbooks. Easy Peasy was originally designed to work on the Asus EEE PC range of netbooks but now runs on most popular netbooks.

Major changes in Easy Peasy 1.5 include a 2.6.30 kernel optimised for netbooks, Ext4 filesystem is the default and UXA graphics acceleration by default.

Easy Peasy Linux can be downloaded from the Easy Peasy website.

AJ Venter has announced the release of Kongoni version 1.12.2. Codenamed Nietzsche, this is the first official and stable release of the Kongoni GNU/Linux distribution after several development releases. Kongoni is a fully free African GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware with significant inspiration from the BSD-Unix architectures. The operating system is primarily designed for desktop power users and aims to provide a powerful, customizable system that puts the user in control of his own environment while nonetheless being easy to work with and not get in your way.