Archive for August, 2007

Weather wallpaper on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon

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Posted 31 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

I tried the weather wallpaper in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. They have a deb package for Ubuntu, so the installation went fine. The instructions though were not clear on how to use it. Once I installed it, I tried starting the weather wallpaper. It didn’t start. I had to reboot the system to get it started. The .weather-wallpaper directory gets created only after you run the weather wallpaper first time. You won’t find the folder if you want to change the conf file before you start it the first time. Another issue is, the weather is being displayed in Celsius. I couldn’t find any option to set it to Fahrenheit. The wallpaper worked fine once I rebooted the system and modified the conf file.

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Microsoft admits bribing partners to vote for OOXML

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Posted 30 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category News

You might have already read my blog post titled One more proof of Microsoft’s ugly face where I quoted the news report that Microsoft gathered a bunch of partners to vote for OOXML in Sweden. Microsoft now admitted openly that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format’s approval as an ISO standard.

When the blogging community and newspapers broke the news, Microsoft blamed an employee saying the offer, when discovered, was quickly retracted and that its Sweden managers voluntarily notified the SIS, the national standards body. Funny…

Source: PC World.

Update: The Swedish Standards Institute has issued a press release yesterday where they declared this weeks earlier vote regarding OOXML as invalid and by that Sweden don’t have any official position regarding OOXML any more.

According to the press release issued by SIS, the SIS board has declared this weeks earlier OOXML vote as invalid due to that one of the participating companies has voted two times where the SIS rules clearly says that each company can only cast one vote each.

Microsoft had 3 persons to represent them at the SIS meeting and it looks like that Microsoft was the one to voted two times. A slap in the face of Microsoft!!!

Source: OS/2 World.

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BulletProofX – It’s about time

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Posted 30 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

I wrote many times about X server failed to start properly while using the Live CD and I blogged yesterday about X server failure in Gutsy Gibbon using Live CD and also using alternate CD. Live CD failed to start X server in both normal mode and safe graphics mode.

I came across this article in Ars Technica today. It’s about BulletProofX. BulletProofX projects aims at creating a new failsafe mode that will be used if the X server fails to start. It will be in a reduced (VESA 800×600/256 or VGA 640×480/16) graphics environment running a single application (displayconfig-gtk) for configuring the graphics devices.

The aim of the project is to eliminate the need to use dpkg-reconfigure command to reconfigure the X server. It’s a pain doing that (though it’s easy if you are a technical person) and that’s not going to go well with non tech users. The failsafe mode will launch if X server fails to start. You can also start it manually by specifying ‘xforcevesa’ via grub’s kernel cmdline option, by setting the XORG_FAILSAFE_MODE environment variable to a non-empty string, or by selecting the Failsafe option from the Greeter.

BulletProofX will initially be used in Ubuntu (GNOME) only since KDM (KDE windows manager) doesn’t support this capability. It’ll be ported to Kubuntu once KDM is fixed.

The sad part is, the failsafe mode won’t be used with Gutsy Live CD. If there is an Xorg startup failure when running the live-cd, then it should directly go to vesa mode without requiring any configuration step. That’s not the case for me. I hope they add it to the live CD in future.

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German universities embrace Linux

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Posted 29 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category News

North Rhine-Westphalia, a German state has selected Novell for the supply of its IT infrastructure. Novell already supports 300,000 students in the states of Bavaria and
Thuringia; the new deal will add another 560,000 students and thousands
of employees.

Forty percent of all German students now use Linux systems, according to Novell.

Source: CNet news.

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Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 5 in my laptop

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Posted 29 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

I installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 3 in my Acer Travelmate laptop few weeks back. The X server stopped working couple of weeks back after the regular updates. I reinstalled Tribe 5 last weekend.

The combination of ATI and Ubuntu really sucks. The Live CD GUI was always scrambled whenever I booted my laptop with it. I had to manually change the resolutions in the xorg configuration file and restart the GUI. The GUI part of the live CD of Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 3 and Tribe 5 didn’t work at all. The X server crashed each time I started using the Live CD. I couldn’t get it to work even after reconfiguring the xserver. It worked in the Safe Graphics Mode with Tribe 3, but that too stopped working with Tribe 5.

I then downloaded the alternate CD and installed Tribe 5 using that. Once the installation was completed, the X server still failed to start. I then tried reconfiguring the X server and that too didn’t work. I then used the text mode and installed the ATI fglrx driver and reconfigured the X server again using the ATI driver. Just reconfiguring the X server didn’t work. I then had to follow the steps given here. I rebooted the system after I did as mentioned in that link and it started working. What a pain!!!

Ubuntu has come a long way in getting the OS more user friendly. Gutsy Gibbon is no exception. It’s more user friendlier than Feisty. There are lot of things I like in Gutsy (some are carried over from the previous versions). Here are few things I tried. Most of them worked and some didn’t.

  • My laptops webcam started working in Ubuntu. I already blogged about that. The quality of the video output was not great compared to Windows, but then it was not Ubuntu’s fault. Logitech’s lack of support for Linux was the reason.
  • I liked the new GUI for X server. It makes managing multiple displays easier, but I didn’t try it yet. I’m doubtful if it’ll work with ATI.
  • xserver.JPG
  • I liked the idea of creating PDF printer by default. I had to manually create that in previous versions of Ubuntu.
  • The automatic printer configuration when you plug the printers, was a wonderful addition. It didn’t work for my Dell All-in-photo Printer A962 since there was no Linux driver for it. It did detect the printer and presented me with an option to select the generic driver, but it didn’t work. I tried generic driver with post script and text mode and neither of them worked.
  • Another good feature was the fast user switching, but it was buggy in my laptop. My Ubuntu installation had 2 users and the applet displayed both users. I tried switching to the second user. It did switch me, but the keyboard and mouse pad didn’t work. I couldn’t do anything. I had to use CTL-ALT-DELETE to reboot the system. It would be a nice feature if they could fix this bug.
  • Tracker desktop search indexing was enabled by default, but I didn’t see the search box in the menu bar. The menu bar had the deskbar applet, but that didn’t support tracker. I had to manually add tracker from the application menu. It indexes only certain file types. It’s not as versatile as Beagle. I might switch back to Beagle if it doesn’t appease me.
  • Compiz Fusion didn’t work for me. It didn’t work after I installed the fglrx driver. I then modified the xorg file to include DRI mode and set composite to enable. I could then select the extra effects from the appearance window, but it didn’t do anything. I had installed Compiz configuration and some of the effects I wanted were enabled, but it didn’t work still.
  • I got errors each time I booted my laptop, regarding the windows partition and few other things, but it didn’t stop the system from booting.
  • I liked the way system monitor showed the system information. I’m not sure if it was changed in Feisty or Gutsy, but it mentioned both processors now. It used to show only one processor even though my laptop had 2 processors.
  • systemmonitor.JPG
  • I had another problem when the display went to sleep. When it woke up, everything appeared darker, the icons, letters, the brown color etc. The menus were highlighted in florescent red. I wasn’t sure if it was due to the compiz effect.

I’ll update more if I find more problems or if I fix anything. Ubuntu is slowly reaching moms and pops!!!

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Ubuntu’s next release – Hardy Heron

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Posted 29 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category Announcement, Ubuntu

Ubuntu has named the next release (after Gutsy Gibbon) Hardy Heron. This will be released as Long Term Support (LTS) release after Ubuntu Dapper and will be supported for 5 years on servers and 3 years on desktops. 

Source: Jonobacon.

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One more proof of Microsoft’s ugly face?

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Posted 28 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category News

OS/2 World reports that 23 new companies applied yesterday to Swedish Standard Institute to take part in the voting on OOXML and as expected, most of them voted in favor of OOXML. What happened was that Microsoft gathered together a bunch of loyal partners that would vote yes to their standard without any questions.

To be able to vote all you need is to pay the membership fee to SIS and the total cost for this was 17.000 SEK (2444 USD). Of the 23 new companies that showed up this last minute and where the majority hasn’t shown any earlier interest, only Google has a clear agenda regarding OOXML and they are against it. Following companies showed just before the meeting started:

Camako Data AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), Connecta AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), Cornerstone Sweden AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), Cybernetics (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), Emric AB, Exor AB (Microsoft Certified Partner), Fishbone Systems AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), Formpipe Software (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), FS System AB, Google, HP (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), IBizkit AB (Microsoft Certified Partner), IDE Nätverkskonsulterna (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), IT-Vision AB, Know IT (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), Modul1 (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), Nordic Station AB (Microsoft Certified Partner), ReadSoft AB (Microsoft Certified Partner), Sogeti (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), Solid Park AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner), SourceTech AB, Strand Interconnect AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner) and TietoEnator (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)

The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs.

This is another proof of how Microsoft does business…

Thanks to my brother for the info.

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Wordpress 2.3 Beta 1 released

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Posted 28 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category Announcement

Wordpress team has released their first beta of Wordpress 2.3. Some of the features of 2.3 include plugin and core update
notification, built-in tags support, faster javascript, and
SEO-friendly URL redirection. It’s still in beta, so it might be little rough. If you want to test the beta, you can download it from here.

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Acer to acquire Gateway

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Posted 27 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category News

Acer computers is planning to buy Gateway in a $710 million deal. This deal, if it goes through, will make Acer the world’s third largest PC vendor.

Under terms of the agreement announced Monday, Acer will purchase all
of Gateway’s outstanding shares for $1.90 per share. The deal has
already been approved by the boards of directors at both companies and
should be completed by the end of this year, subject to government
approval.

News Source: PC World.

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Yahoo Mail to drop beta tag and add SMS

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Posted 27 Aug 2007 — by Arun
Category News

Yahoo Mail is coming out of beta today and sports some new features like free SMS from Yahoo Mail to cell phones. According to CNet, It’s supposed to show a button on top of the page with an option to send email or chat or send SMS. I logged into Yahoo Mail today and the beta tag was still there. I have only Email and Chat option in the menu. I couldn’t find the SMS option, but Yahoo said they are rolling this feature out for the next six weeks, so I might get that option sometime in the future.

News Source: CNet.

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