A few months ago I wrote about a feature-rich open source application for monitoring your Gmail inbox - CheckGmail.

I know a few of you, like me, have been continuing to use it since. Unfortunately, a few days ago CheckGmail stopped working with a Error: Incorrect username or password dialog. I’ve found a solution for this. Skip down this post if you’ve already installed CheckGmail.

Installing CheckGmail in Ubuntu 8.04

Install CheckGmail from the package checkgmail (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install checkgmail

CheckGmail has an optional dependency that adds password encryption. Install the package libcrypt-simple-perl (click the link to install) or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install libcrypt-simple-perl

Start CheckGmail for the first time from Applications->Internet->CheckGmail. You can get started by entering your Gmail credentials and clicking OK. Note that unless you installed the optional dependency, using the password saving option will store your Gmail password on your disk in plain text. The CheckGmail icon will appear in your notification area.

You can start CheckGmail automatically when you log in. Open System->Preferences->Sessions and click Add. In the Add Startup Program dialog, set the name value to CheckGmail and the command to checkgmail.

CheckGmail fails to log in - three options for fixing the authentication bug

1. The quick fix is to run CheckGmail with the -no_cookies command line option. The downside is that you lose some functionality (actions such as mark as spam and archive). You’ll need to update your startup or menu item to start CheckGmail using this option.
   checkgmail -no_cookies
2. The latest development version of CheckGmail includes a real fix. The CheckGmail developer wisely included an update feature for just a case like this. Simply open a terminal and run:
   checkgmail -update

However, SourceForge.net has been having performance issues lately and has disabled their ViewVC interface which is required for the CheckGmail update function to work. In the meantime, here’s another alternative.

Run CheckGmail normally and it should log in successfully.

Mental note, don’t try to install the windows version of the vmware server console under wine it b0rks your system.  Well it did mine :(  Always try and go with the native install no matter how rubbish the installer is.

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

When people ask me what I like about Ubuntu, the first thing I’m going to mention is the avid community, the second thing is the ease of getting a complete desktop experience.

But people are different and so are their needs. One person may need fonts for illustrations, another person looks for applications to record and cut pod casts and yet another person may be trying to install all games of Kenta Cho. The Add/Remove Applications dialog being well-sorted, easy and ready to use for anyone, is definitely helping a lot not getting lost in the huge amount of software the repositories offer, waiting to be installed. The number of applications accessible this way grew steadily, and this led to one of the problems especially new users face: The overwhelming amount of software, not knowing what they need or want, precise but confusing descriptions and no signs of the usually omnipresent community besides those almost meaningless stars. This cries for change, this cries for community involvement.

My idea would be to create an easy way for users to create and submit meta packages in order to share them with other people on a digg-like website. KDE already got a somewhat similar feature where applications can download themes, emoticons or scripts from kde-look.org and kde-apps.org.

Other than the feature of KDE, this kind of meta package marketplace would enable users to create meta packages only linking software available in the official repositories. Downloading and installing those packages should be possible for anyone (as in person, not account, still requires sudo/root),  Submitting meta packages and participating in the voting and discussions would however require people to register an Account, maybe on Launchpad.

While the creation of, and discussion about those packages would require to go to a website, the installation and the browsing of the same should not. An Application replacing the classic Add/Remove application would fill the gap, maybe featuring tabs to change from the classic lists to the meta package marketplace. Entries of the meta packages should contain an description, the number of positive votes or rating, what packages are part of it and a link pointing to the respective entry on the website.

I’m not sure about the quality of this idea, but I just felt like writing it down.

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Update RE: ‘Miro + Hardy = Fail’ (23:09 22/07)

I have been politely informed by some, that my previous post may come across not as it was intended. I am not trying to flame, or belittle anyone, far from it in fact. Perhaps my manner of expressing discontent with applications and packages not working as intended is a little brash in this particular case.

I must point out I am actively trying to report any bugs with Miro, and also contributing to existing bugs with a view to improve it for the future as it is an application I feel, when the bugs are ironed out, I will get countless usage from. I stress that the question mark was placed in the post subject for a good reason.

Steve

Adobe has released Flash Player 10 Beta 2 (10.0.0.525) for Linux. On top of features from Beta 1, this Flash 10 release adds windowless mode (transparency and page elements on top of a Flash applet), better Linux webcam support, new languages, and speed/stability improvements.

Previously I tested the first beta of Flash 10 and was impressed by the new 3D features and performance. Here’s an even easier way to test out Flash Player 10 Beta 2 in Ubuntu 8.04:

1. Remove any previous versions of Flash. If you installed it from the repositories, this is not necessary because the package you will be installing is a newer version.

   If you know you installed Flash manually, see Adobe’s instructions for manual removal on Linux.

2. Flash 10 will be included in the upcoming Ubuntu 8.10 release, and has already been packaged. You can install this DEB package in Ubuntu 8.04 by downloading it manually.

   Download and install the DEB package from the page below; scroll down to the downloads section and select your CPU architecture and a mirror:
   http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/flashplugin-nonfree

3. Restart Firefox to load the new version of Flash.

Flash 10 Beta 1 worked great, so I was surprised that this version is unusable for me. With Compiz desktop effects turned on, applets freeze up or slow down Firefox. With Compiz off, some graphical effects still stutter and Firefox will occasionally crash. I’ve also noticed some applets display blurry and with other visual bugs. Also, Flash 10 also is now unusably slow in my Ubuntu virtual machine.

Having problems and want to downgrade to Flash 9? Remove the new package, and install it again from the normal repository:
sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

How’s Flash 10 Beta 2 working for you?

A short, blunt, but to the point post before I go to work. Will Miro EVER work properly running under Ubuntu. 7.10 it crashed, 8.04 it still crashes or flickers, and the same can be said for 8.04.1!

No matter what version of Miro, however up to date, coupled with all the gstreamer or xine plugins I apparently could ever need, it still fails epically on video playback. Xine internally playing the videos flickers beyond belief and trying to hit the play externally button when using gstreamer manages to crash Miro.

I know I can just browse to the data folder and open the videos manually in VLC or some such, but this surely defeats the entire purpose of Miro?

</rant>

Discovered this today, thanks to John M Anderson for the heads up

©2008 paulmellors.net | Paul Mellors. All Rights Reserved.

Maybe I'm late to the scene, or maybe I just need to leave hacking in my closet more... whichever it is I just came across that Linux Hater blog thing. I see where he's coming with a lot of the points he brings up. I'm not upset by the blogger at all. I honestly admire the way he objectively defines his angst with Linux.

I think a blog like this is something that will come with mixed feelings in the Linux community. What most proponents of the FLOSS community forget is that -- just as LH points out -- most computer users just want their computer to work. Computers are as mysterious to most people as vehicle maintenance, and users want the same thing simple thing from both items: to just work.

This is where I get upset with some Linux people, the pushers and zealots. People will disagree with me on this next comment, but that's ok: Linux is not a desktop replacement yet. Ubuntu is the closest thing we have to a complete replacement -- and I acknowledge that it does in fact work as a perfect replacement for some people, but the people pushing it on everyone need to chill out. They're giving us bad names.

I'm not a Linux hater, I'm a lover <3. I like the Linux haters blog. If taken as a Jonathan Swift like satire I think it will be enormously helpful to the developers and contributors of the FLOSS communities.

After writing this I'm not sure what the point of it was, I just wanted to get that off my chest for a while now.

Up here in good ol' Morgantown, West Virginia a group of students with focuses spanning the entire campus of WVU have just come together to start a free software advocacy group. Our mission statement (Launchpad Team) reads: "Raise Awareness, distribute, and encourage the adoption and installation of free software to the Student Body, Morgantown Community, and in Campus Computing Facilities."

We're proud to announce that our first meeting is scheduled to take place tomorrow at 7pm. The meeting will take place at the West Virginia Brew Pub [MAP] and all are encouraged to come to the meeting (members or not)!

We'll be discussing the club in general, coming to a common understanding of what our mission is, and possibly plan out some future awareness events we could hold. In addition there will be plenty of generally geeky chat, and locally brewed beer!

I’m sure many of you heard of Twitter, and if you’re using Twitter and you’re a Gnome user you probably heard of Twitux.

Twitux is pretty nifty little GTK client for the popular micro blogging service developed by Daniel Morales

Help to translate Twitux, the community needs you!

https://translations.launchpad.net/twitux

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Working on Rapache, it’s been a while I wanted to add syntax highlightining, but I didn’t dare too loose time on a “side feature” like that. Last night though, Jason came in chat, and pasted me the code to do that straight away. That was nice, I only needed to paste that code in the source and make little adjustments.

Some little glitches arose though, so I eventually had to work a little more on it. I just thought I’d share what I had to do with other people.

My problems:

• I had to put together a language definition for Apache config files, since no one currently exists
• I had to find out how to read if from a non system dir (ie. from my program data directory)

This is the Apache .lang file (needs more love, but that’s a start) ended up with.

Here’s the code:

import gtksourceview2

custom_langs_path = '/home/myuser/mydir/datafiles'
bufferS = gtksourceview2.Buffer()
manager = gtksourceview2.LanguageManager()
manager.set_search_path( [ custom_langs_path ] + manager.get_search_path() )
language = manager.get_language(’apache’)
bufferS.set_language(language)
bufferS.set_highlight_syntax(True)
sourceview = gtksourceview2.View(bufferS)
sourceview.set_show_line_numbers(True)
#TODO sniff gnome default monospace font
sourceview.modify_font(pango.FontDescription(”monospace 10″))

This is how the final result looks like:

Everything looks nicer now !

The 7z (7-Zip) archive format offers good compression ratios and is an open source format. This and the favored 7-Zip graphical file archive tool for Windows have popularized the format.

A default Ubuntu installation can’t extract or create 7z files. A package is available in the universe repositories that makes working for these files seamless with Ubuntu’s existing archive tools.

Install 7z file archive support from the package p7zip (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install p7zip

You can now create 7z archives by right-clicking a file or folder and selecting Create Archive, and selecting the 7z option. Open a 7z archive by double clicking it.

Occasionally I’ll get an E_NOTIMPL error compressing a large number of files using Create Archive. This error should be safe to ignore.

p7zip is easy to use on the command line. To compress a file, mystuff to mystuff.7z:
p7zip mystuff

To decompress the archive:
p7zip -d mystuff.7z

I did a quick test of some available compression formats in Ubuntu. I archived 97.9 MB of source code in four formats.

The 7z format clearly compressed the source code far better than other formats, but it took significantly longer to do so.

You may also be interested in adding similar support for RAR archives.

After my two week break from blogging for school work last month, I wasn’t expecting to be torn away again so soon and for so long. Thank you for staying subscribed even while Tombuntu seemed to be frozen in time.

A lot has happened in the Ubuntu world since my unexpected hiatus, but now I’m caught up again. Regular posts every weekday should resume this week.

Let’s catch up on some of the recent news in Ubuntu that I’ve missed:

Ubuntu MID Edition 8.04 Released (June 24)
Ubuntu MID Edition 8.04 is a special distribution based on Ubuntu for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), small-screen handheld computers running Intel’s Atom processor. Similarly to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Ubuntu MID is based on the standard Ubuntu desktop and includes many familiar applications optimized for MIDs and a touch interface.

You’ll have a hard time finding a device capable of running Ubuntu MID right now, but you can run it in a virtual machine using the available KVM image.

Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 1 and 2 Released (June 27, July 11)
The first two alpha testing releases of Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”, Alpha 1 and Alpha 2, have been released. Alpha 1 was released behind schedule, and neither release includes a live CD. The largest changes so far include updated and new packages from Debian, an updated Linux kernel, and the latest version of Xorg with updated graphics drivers.

A new theme is planned for Ubuntu 8.10. Alpha 1 also introduced a radical new dark look (screenshots). It’s expected that several new themes will be tested in the alpha releases. However, there were no changes in the look between Alpha 1 and Alpha 2.

These are very early releases, don’t use them on production systems! I haven’t even been able to boot them in a virtual machine. The next alpha is expected on July 24.

Ubuntu 8.04.1 Released (July 3)
As a long term support release, Ubuntu 8.04 will receive four maintenance releases. Ubuntu 8.04.1 is simply a roll-up of updates since the initial release.

If you’ve been installing updates normally on Ubuntu 8.04 then you have already been updated. If you’re doing a new installation you’ll want to download a new CD.

These point releases are excellent to avoid downloading hundreds of updates on new Ubuntu machines. Among these updates is the final release of Firefox 3. Other important issues that are fixed are listed in the announcement.

Linux Kernel 2.6.26 Released (July 13)
Linux 2.6.26, the final version of the kernel included in Ubuntu 8.10, has been released.

2.6.26 adds support for read-only bind mounts, x86 PAT (Page Attribute Tables), PCI Express ASPM (Active State Power Management), ports of KVM to IA64, S390 and PPC, other KVM improvements including basic paravirtualization support, preliminary support of the future 802.11s wireless mesh standard, much improved webcam support thanks to a driver for UVC devices, a built-in memory tester, a kernel debugger, BDI statistics and parameters exposure in /sys/class/bdi, a new /proc/PID/mountinfo file for more accurate information about mounts, per-process securebits, device white-list for containers users, support for the OLPC, some new drivers and many small improvements

Ubuntu 8.04 uses the 2.6.24 kernel, unless you’re an advanced user you should stay with the kernel supported by your version of Ubuntu.

Dell Updates to Ubuntu 8.04 (July 18)
It took Dell two months after the release of Ubuntu 7.10 to start shipping the new release. After a four month delay behind the release, they’re now offering Ubuntu 8.04 on their open source line of systems.

Dell has added improved peripheral support, multimedia codecs, and support for ATI graphics options. This is all on top of the previous enhancements, including Adobe’s Flash player and DVD playback software.

I took this picture with my crappy cam and now I’m looking for a away to reduce some of the noise in this picture. I’m looking for an easy way, for a non-professional like me, to enhance this picture on Linux.

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This is a quick command to get the disk usage information on mount points for different devices:

Code:

The above command gives the following output on my box:

Code:

After I read an maillist entry from dholbach and the blog post it was pointing to(The Harvest Season has begun!) I thought again of an idea I already wanted to add to Brainstorm before, but never did. The idea was to integrate the program ohcount used at Ohloh to analyse projects.

Keeping your project in good shape is vital for the results. But in order to do that, you have to be able to keep track of the shape. Currently Launchpad doesn’t provide a tool to do so. The Ubuntu QA team uses several homebrew tools to do so, but it would be beter if this would be integrated within Launchpad and be available to projects outside Ubuntu. When Harvest would be added next to ohloh, keeping track of bugs and patches would be made a lot easier, so submitted patches won’t lie around for decades before someone has a look at them.

The functionality of both projects could help project managers and contributors a lot when they need information and I think that the quality of code could really improve.

I will be helping with the ubuntu-ar stand at the 8vas Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre in Buenos Aires, , and maybe (if they are approved) giving a couple of talks.

What is “Jornadas Regionales de Software Libre”?

JSRL is a regional, international & roving event where many people work to integrate proyects, launch new ideas and overcome the hurdles of the software they use.

2008 will be the 8th. edition of the event that already was held at Argentina and Uruguay. For the 2009 edition Chile is planning to host it.

During the event programmers, developers, strategists, technology experts and entrepeneurs involved with Free software will meet to exchange ideas, share techniques, discuss and explore free technologies such as Perl, MySQL, JAVA, PHP, Python, Linux, Apache and many more.

Who hosts this year’s?

The organization of the workshop this year (2008) rests upon CaFeLUG, Capital Federal Free Software Users Group and has the support and participation of organizations alike. Since its beginnings, back to 2000, CaFeLUG has been building up a thriving task force of Free Software philosophy advocates, being one of the most numerous and active groups of the country.

CaFeLUG does regular work activities, among whose you can find monthly meetings, Charlas Técnicas Trimestrales (Quarterly Technical Speeches) and its Conferencia Anual (Anual Conference), CaFeCONF.

Who are the spetial guests this year?

• Mark Shuttleworth
• Chris Hoffman
• Rik van Riel
• Jon ‘maddog’ Hall
• Christoph Hellwig
• Dag Wieers

If you would like to attend you can find some usefull information here

[edit] I forget about putting the dates which are August 20, 21 and 22

[/edit]

Has anyone ever noticed the lack of good blog writing software for linux? I know that ‘good’ is a relative term and some may be happy with the way it is now. I am not.
Right now there are two applications doing a somehow more or less good job: ScribeFire and BlogGTK.

I already mentioned ScribeFire in my post about my favourite Firefox addons and it’s actually the application I use. I love cross platform applications and although this one needs Firefox to run it is what comes closest to what I need right now. Bad about it is that since Firefox mimics GTK the tabs look distorted in some weird way, and I’m not sure if this is related but the close buttons doesn’t work. There are other smaller bugs as well, but in the end it still does its job.

BlogGTK is as the name suggests using GTK, I’d prefer something using QT4 but hey, I’m not a toolkit nazi. If it works I couldn’t care less about the toolkit. The problem is that it doesn’t work very well, at least not any more. The project has been dead for about 3 years and as it seems the Metablog or Wordpress API changed. Some functions don’t work, I can’t edit older posts, they just get published a second time, and I can’t access my categories.
The project just got resurrected recently and I’m waiting for the first snap shot of 2.0.

Still both applications in their current state are absolutely no match to applications like the Windows Live Writer.

I hope this will change in the future. *lookingoveratbloggtkdevelopment*

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Huzzah, is all I can say, first impressions are good. The new design, albeit very ‘Web 2.0′ is a lot more fluid, easier on the eye. As far as the plan that was setout on the homepage for a long time, it seems that the wait has allowed them to pretty much hit most points right on the head. I must say the navigation is now much improved, I feel newcomers will now find using Launchpad far easier than in the past.

The only niggle I have, is I preffered the old rocket favicon ;)

http://news.launchpad.net/cool-new-stuff/launchpads-new-look