Unity and the Software Center

A few months have now passed since the deployment of ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, and we have had ample opportunity to test, use and think about the new shell it premiered. So here’s our two pence.

First off, Unity we likey likey. Although first shocked about the idea to completely revamp the shell and NOT take Gnome 3.0, but instead built upon it and make a new GUI, we kept our faith, bolstered by the thought that one could always switch desktop environments. You quickly adapt to the new panel and the app-starter on the left, and it’s one of the few instances where moving/disappearing starter bars don’t seem to be standing in the way. All in all, you have fast access to the few apps you use all the time, with a scaled degree of quick access to the more remote or obscure ones. So we happily adopted the new view.

Some inconsistencies need to be ironed out for a perfect experience though. Most of them are part of the way windowing is handled.

1) When opening a new window of a running instance, the new window will often appear partly beneath the panel. This requires you to carefully reposition said window each time – and defeats the supposed quality of the top panel of being “untouchable”.

2) Similarly to point 1), there needs to be more usability with opening new windows, or managing new windows, in respect to the different desktops. Often you want to open a new window of a running process, eg. nautilus, but are doing this on a different desktop than the first instance in running on. So you need to first switch back to the original desktop, open the new window, send this one to the aforementioned desktop, switch back to that desktop, and you’re good to go. We’d like to see this being done by once right-clicking on the icon on the app starter bar on the side, saving you from this hassle.

3) The top panel is supposed to change accordingly to the program you’re running as to display the drop down menues of that app. Of course, not all apps have this functionality, as in Libre Office, but most genuine Natty apps do. This one needs to be taken on by the developers rather than Canonical, but it’s not a big inconsistency either.

4) Last but not least, this would have been a good opportunity to tackle the behaviour of the starting windows of apps you’re opening. We need a simple evironment where to define on which desktop a window will be opening, the size and position it will have by default, and whether it will remember its last parameters or start to a default. You can in theory do this by accessing the system preferences and then take on the “Window Rules” in the CompizConfig entry. But that’s a highly technical process, you need to be able to learn the exact position of your window, as in y-axis and x-axis. And, least for us, it does not work. Once having set the Window Rules, the windows then do all kinds of positioning, but not the required one – or they disappear partly under the panel (see point 1)). So, please, give us a simple positioning tool, and we’re never looking back (although we don’t even at this point). Oneiric Ocelot? Oneiric Ocelot we say.

Concerning the software center, it’s a beautiful development of the older one. One of the most compelling points even in the earliest versions of ubuntu have always been that instead of using apt-get install or even synaptic, you could just click yourself through a menu with many applications and install from there – as if you were carrying around an invisible giant disk with petabytes of programs on it at your disposal, all the time. This of course has been expanded, and there’s even a marketplace now. The whole launcher bar of Unity is inspired by the “app store” of the iPhone, with little equally sized icons each representing an app. This standardized view of things helps accessing quicker the things you want to do (and looks quite sexy). It’s also logical to expand on the software center, just like Mac OS Lion embraces the digital-only concept of the Mac OS app store. But Apple wasn’t there first. The really big step was the gui for browsing and quickly installing most apps, and ubuntu has had that for many, many years now, even if they didn’t have the standardized icons and the would-be trademarked name “app store”, both of which the iPhone introduced in 2007 and 2008 respectively.

So, we’re looking forward to our next update in october – and watch our little counter on the right sidebar of this site daily. : )

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Go on and head over to http://www.ubuntu.com/download to dip into Unity.

Power regression in Nux kernel versions 2.6.38 and 2.6.39

Bummer.

 

Power regression in Nux kernel versions 2.6.38 and 2.6.39

 

 

 

…and I was just wondering how. On my previous laptops, ubuntu always had a good 10% more battery than the side running Win XP. Don’t know about the HTC Sensation, but the Desire HD is running version 2.6.35. So, no battery boost via OTA update for this little baby.

 

Natty Narwhal: Likes and dislikes

Two days ago, the freshest version of operating system ubuntu 11.04 codename “natty narwhal” hit the shelves hit the pipes. Alongside the usual updates and switched programs (firefox, shotwell for photos, etc.) it ditches the gnome GUI for ubuntu’s own version of the graphical user interface. It goes by the name of unity and has been in use since 2010 primarily on netbooks.

Instead of the two standard gnome panels that display notifications, app starters, applets, and the ubuntu-menues alongside open windows, it features just one panel on the upper side with notifications, one ubuntu logo button, and context menu (the taskbar) depending on your open program. Then, on your left side, the unity launch bar resides. It is home to app starters and open programs at the same time, with special launch icons for switching workspaces, files and folders, and applications. Its position cannot be changed.

I was looking forward to this update with mixed feelings. I like the distinctive quality of unity, as I like bold approaches in general, and Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth have shown that they possess the rare quality of actually handling an open source project with all its eternal naysayers and dissenting opinions while moving forward with each update. Generally, I want to go with the flow and see what’s new.

On the other hand, the gnome panels were really comfortable in their perfect simplicity, the interface became intuitive almost instantly. And unity to me seemed really geared towards netbooks and small screens (“it’s all about preserving vertical screenspace, or vertical pixels”), or even touchscreens with the relatively huge launcher icons on the left side. All this is irrelevant for the desktop and laptop versions (typing this on a 15,5 inch screen) and I have difficulty wrapping my head around the “preserving screen space” argument – the big launcher bar on the left felt obstrusive, more like letterboxes than the gnome-panels, because it seemed to me like more of an image or picture frame than the quiet panels of gnome from christmas past.

First step for anybody feeling like this should be to download

ccsm

which is the compizconfig-settings-manager from synaptic. Under the folder “Desktop” it contains the “Ubuntu Unity Plugin” which, among other things, lets you downsize the launcher-/appicon size to 32×32 pixels, which fits the bill a bit more. I still find myself undocking more and more apps from the launchbar, as I like to jam dozens and dozens of the little thingies in my panels, but that’s evolution for ya.

As of now, I’m still trying to figure out some smaller things, like where go the little apps that lived in the panel, like tomboy notes, remote notifier for android, etc. and just where’s the main menu? Boeuf.

Ah, and apparently gone are the days of Lucid Lynx and Maverick Meerkat where, at least on my laptop, you had to constantly update your sound server or my own Wifi, of all things, wouldn’t let my system onto teh internets. I’m already feeling more comfortable with the strange up-and-left frame of unity, and at the very least it is recognizable from miles away.

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The shoulders of the giants

As always, get ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal at ubuntu.com

Unity star picture by campopoly.com

and ubuntu-tan by PIRO.

Join the green and gold android crowd.

Lord knows, it’s been a while since I’ve been hungering that much for a single device. Maybe it’s getting worse.

Following my own personal smartphone holocaust however, and after venturing through some rather strange places on the ecommercing web, I walked into Saturn am Alexanderplatz and ordered the HTC Desire HD. That got me waiting for many weeks of course, since this badboy has been sold out completely and utterly since day one if one is to judge by some tweets we saw out there.

Anyway. First impressions in this case last.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way.

I thought I just just briefly mentioned the things I don’t like on this fella, to then pass on to indulging you with the good things. First for android itself, I am missing two very very little things. You can’t name the device as of version 2.2 Froyo, so in a WLAN you will have to look for a thing that calls himself a12341717#a12 etc. No prob if you got only one android in your home, but with two or more, well…good luck guessing. Also, you can’t do screenshots. There are several applications in the marketplace, but you’d need to root first.

HTC’s overlay, called HTC Sense, is a very good one for that, but some of the promised features can’t be used, eg. it should be possible to log on to the website and locate your cell phone in your apartment or elsewhere, but the site just won’t let you do that. So, until further notice, no hatemail to your phone’s thief.

The handset itself has got the one flaw that is really worth mentioning, as in “this shouldn’t be this way”. The parts of the device apart from the giant screen itself are of a rather lesser quality build. This means that you can push the bottom and side covers in when holding the Desire HD, and you can even hear little crunching noises. It may even break off when trying to insert a new micro SD or SIM card.

We will just have to wait and see what lifetime we can expect, but right now I’ll have to state that I really loved the build and finishing of my first iPhone 2G compared to this. Well, at least the exterior.
With a monster like this, you’d think that you would keep it in your hand all the time and play around with it. And this sorta thing drains your battery. So the first step in order was to buy another two chargers and place them anywhere I would happen to dwell. But a bigger battery would have been very cute there.

Kingdom come

With those issues out of the way, I could write 300 posts just about how smart, cool, and beautiful the system and the whole device is. All things I didn’t like or that were kinda dealbreakers with the iPhone are gone now with #android. Sorry, twitter and all. Anyway, your don’t need iTunes or any other dumbed down bloatware. You mount your phone with a finger tip and put on your media, docs and other files, also without decoding it. To sum it up, it is smartphonewise just as ubuntu is an experience OS-wise: I start it up the first time with a certain idea of how it should look like, the look and feel etc., and either it delivers right from the start or you can tune it with a few tips/mouseclicks. This I like, this I wantwant. Even though the locked up, dumbed down, making you pay for everything experience on an iPhone is said to have the advantage that each piece relates beautifully to every other part of the system, that is exactly what Froyo with HTC Sense does. There may be some apps on the marketplace that try to add some usabilily you already have, but my overal impression is just that everything just falls into place and feels right. To sum the whole experience up, I would say “android is about being nice to you.”

(o_O)

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On the shoulders of giants

Look up the specs of this badboy on HTCs official site, here (although, beware – the test praises the build and the battery life, the two major shortcomings of the Desire HD, and we don’t know what exactly they be smoking when doing a test at their “lab”), and here.

Browse a few apps on the official site, or on the imperative appbrain. Check the market stats here.

Put your CD cover where your desktop is.

We all desperately need to display the cover of the CD we’re listening to at the moment on our desktops. It’s true! And that’s why Mathias Nedreb* (can’t seem to find the o with a slash on it…wait…here it is: ø) has come up with a little plug-in for ubuntu’s standard music player rhythmbox. I’ve seen it on many sites and blogs, and it’s been around for a while, but it never worked for me until now.

First, punch in the following commands to install the plug-in, taken from Mathias’ site:

mkdir -p $HOME/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/
cd $HOME/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/
svn co http://nedrebo.org/svn/rhythmbox/desktop-art

. Now, look if you have got the other packages the plug-in requires.

When starting Rhythmbox and looking through the plug-ins, check “Desktop Art” and you can start configuring the bad boy. For me however, it was “Desktop Art cannot be activated.” The reason behind this was another missing package and hence a missing dependency.

sudo apt-get install python-rsvg

should get you fixed up (Thanks, baumgard).

When configuring, just press Alt and move the cover around your desktop.

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On the shoulders of giants

The original code – http://www.nedrebo.org/code/rhythmbox/desktop_art

What-if episode, but without science fiction

You remember when Apple overtook MS in terms of market value, a few weeks ago? While I was dumb struck reading something like that at the time, it kept me wondering what could be the possible outcomes if a development like this continues. So here’s our little list, futureproof and all -

1. Nothing really happens. Too often one fails to set the variables right, and the utmost part of speculation remains just that. But it might just give you an opportunity to be funny.
2. The IT world as a whole continues to shift, and up to a third of all things digital could be done on smartphones and all sort of handsets, where we would be seeing Android (160 000 new activations A DAY? Still can’t believe it) and Apple as market leaders.
3. Microsoft discontinues Windows. That would make Mac OS n the dominant “you’ll have to pay for that, my son”-OS out there. Every other manufacturer would need to adapt by either making Mac OS its native system like this

or, go ahead and try to delevop its own operating system, which is quite hard and costly. So why not take a long established standard, that costs nothing, while you may even claim money for it? Case in point, a little CD from South Africa? That would also mean the end of dual booting…like this.

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On the shoulders of giants

Cupcake by Adam Powell on the Android Developer’s Blog.

Mac OS on a tiny VAIO by daharder via boingboing.

Fused logo by dedoimedo.com.

Die Flügel der Freiheit

Vor einigen Tagen war nebenan, neben den phantommemory.com-HQs, der Mitternachts-Verkaufsstart von Blizzards Starcraft II Wings of Liberty. Humpaah, das hatte ich ja gar nicht mitgekriegt nicht gar nicht…schön aber, wenn wir langsam Verhältnisse wie in zumindest amerikanischen Vorstädten kriegen, wenn die Geeks die Malls stürmen.

Eigentlich suchte ich nur einen Vorwand, kurz noch was über SCII zu posten. Einen kleinen Videoeindruck hatte man ja durch den inzwischen legendären Trailer vor einiger Zeit bekommen.

…und für alle, die in sanften Erinnerungen schwelgen wollen, und irgendwo noch eine alte originale Starcraft-CD rumliegen haben, ist definitiv WINE das richtige, da das alte Starcraft als eines der Vorzeigebeispiele gilt, was funktionierende Emulation angeht.

und hier noch fix der Link.

Sony VAIO VPC EB1M1E and ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx

So, I’ve gone out and put my hands on one of the last Sony VAIO VPC E Series (white) available out there. Funny enough, I ended up buying it at the Galeria Kaufhof (Berlin Alexanderplatz), which normally is the last place on earth you would look for tech stuff at decent prices. They even let an extra 20€ off of the price, because it had been previously returned. I booted it up, and a Windows 7 screen asked for credentials for its first bootup – the guy before me apparently just got the wrong machine or needed a different present.

Let’s go for the innerspace.

The VPC EB1M1E features an Intel Core i3 330M CPU@2,13 GHz residing on an Intel H55 Express chipset. For its wireless capabilities Sony chose Atheros’ AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express), and for the grafics ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD 5650 (1024 MB of GDDR3 SDRAM) on a 1366×768 display (15,5 inch which makes for a 16:9 display).

The 4 gigs of RAM are laid out over two SODIMMs of DDR3 SDRAM, the HDD on the other side is manufactured by Western Digital, a WDC WD5000BEVT-2 ATA Disk with 465GiB (500GB) of storage. I should mention the four USB ports alongside the SD Memory Card, Memory Stick Pro and Memory Stick Duo slots.

As a downside, hardwarewise, I’d mention the unusually short battery life. It says around three hours on the Sony www, but of course with your wi-fi running, 15 open browser tabs, email, chat clients, videostills, and music blasting, you can end up with less than 2 hours.

Of course, the big question around was, how will you perform under ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx, my new friend? I should find out soon enough.

While I really like to tinker with stuff I didn’t know before, I couldn’t be bothered to create the “rescue disks” for the preinstalled Windows 7. After those many years of rocking especially ‘buntu and ‘nux, burning those DVDs looked like work and I think that between the two of us, the laptop is the one who will have to do the work, and not me. So I skipped that specific step, and ended up not being able to properly partition the drive, especially with those three Windows 7 partition shenanigans, and just created one giant ext4-partition, where VAIO’s new spouse may take its residence. By the way, that was also my first time I did a single boot install.

Now for the part I was so excited about: Everything works just fine out of the box. Bummer. Nothing more to do. Especially the strange resolution set at 1366×768 points worked like a charm, and for additional details I was able to get the proprietary driver from ATI’s labs – the “ATI Catalyst Control Center”. So, ubuntu’s early mantra really came true, except for the one thing:

Needed to upgrade the ALSA driver

While I started to feel at home just nicely on the new machine, there was no sound at all. When I put in a pair of good headphones, I was able to hear a faint, distant noise, which could have been the song I was using to test. Now the last time I started off fresh with a new laptop and ubuntu, the sound was also hidden, as it was muted by default with the mute button hidden away in a secret menu. But that wasn’t it this time. Luckily enough, a kid on the official ubuntu forums had the exact same problem, and after a few tries they worked everything out. Just download the newest version of ALSA (alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-utils) and install it, restart your system and you’re all set. Many thanks go to Stéphane Gaudreault, who did a pretty good outline of what to do, if you do not compile your code for yourself every other day. Also, quite useful if you’re having a hard time with your sound, a script for asking the right questions can be found at http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-driver.git;a=blob_plain;f=utils/alsa-info.sh.

Using this specific setup for a few weeks, I noticed that seemingly random actions shut out sound altogheter. Running, for example, KlamAV and punching in ctrl-alt-del, which prompts the locked screen on 10.04, may freeze the system, and upon rebooting the sound is wiped out for good. The system doesn’t recognize the soundcard(s) anymore. A quick

cat /proc/asound/cards

tells you “no soundcards”. ALSA is still version 1.0.23. However, just reinstalling this ALSA version re-institutes your sound capabilities, so it’s not much of a problem. Slightly ugly workaround though.

Also, a classic concerning sound problems on your first few run throughs under ‘buntu, is flash and your music excluding each other, as in you are unable to hear the sound of a youtube-clip if you started your music player previously, and couldn’t start your music player’s playback if you have just watched a flash clip of sorts. Solution, as always, is to install libflashsupport and the newest complete Pulseaudio software. Et voilà.

Last but not least, one thing keeps me wondering ’til this day. The system specs list two audio devices – “internal audio” at analog stereo duplex and a “Redwood HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5600 Series]” as a digital stereo HDMI output. Maybe the latter gets used when connecting to an external device via said HDMI.

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On the shoulders of giants

A truthful review of the hardware-side of things in german – http://tinyurl.com/3ad8vho

Some neat sites to learn a bit about the ubuntu/Windows 7 dual boot – https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiOSBoot on the official sites, http://lifehacker.com/5403100/dual+boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-in-perfect-harmony over at Lifehacker, and http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/dual-boot-windows-7-ubuntu.html for a few different approaches.

Käfer No. 1

Nachdem Mark Shuttleworth nach einer längeren Pause das Bloggen wieder aufgenommen hat, ist klar, dass die Weltanschauung des Mannes gleichgeblieben ist. Also weiter so, unser jutester, mit dem Mädchen No.1 …ähm. Dem Bug Nr. 1.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

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Die Schultern der Giganten

https://launchpad.net/

und Markens Blog – http://www.markshuttleworth.com/

Decisions decisions to make

For many and many of the guys out there, and more and more gals, choosing your primary playing and working setup as in laptop is all but deciding about the holiest of the holiest. You can ponder and think about it endlessly. You can deploy some of the tactics described in your favorite nonsense blog. But you will have to choose ultimately. So, here’s our musings respectively, as of july 2010.

We really appreciate the technical environment of these days – 15 years ago you had to constantly upgrade your PC, spend money to no end, and even if you did, two weeks afterwards your little machine was out of date. You could then go on and read about the shiny new software out there, but you couldn’t run it at home. This way, one was left in a constant state of playing outdated games of wanting, and not having. Il y a a couple of years now, and we coulnd’t help but noticing that times have changed dramatically, and as is often the case in the tech world, in a good way. If one were to buy a new laptop, of course it would be around twenty times as fast as his 5 years old machine, and it would run the newest 3D FPS shoot’em up, but it would not do anything really different. You can upgrade if you want to, if you need something specifically, but you’re not forced to. This is paradise. You really get to choose here. Thank you so much world.

Furthering this, prices have dropped further, while the laptop industry sported pitifully razorthin margins even before. Apple’s flagship 15″ Powerbook was around 3000€ around the millenium, while it is around 1500€ these days. So have at it. Sony, on the other end, for some reason has always been charging insanely stupid fantasy prices on their computer products, which also have been constantly toned down in the past years. So, the current basic all around doitall, Sony’s VAIO E-series, is about 700€ and that is it. Beautiful thing, and it makes your pondering much easier, because if you were wrong and end up unhappy with your new hardware, you didn’t kill 3000€ there, but just like… a really big night out? You know what I mean.

So, moving on along all lightly, because of the light pricetag, Sony’s VAIOS always had their staple of annoying and uncalled for disadvantages. They still persist to these days. First off, they come with an incredible amount of bloatware. Useless shite. Dozens of trial versions to put on the sticker out there on the packaging. A VAIO starting center, where you can be all… vaioy? Not even they themselves know. But it adds to a slightly broken overall feeling. Also, you may hear about really strange things going on with the Sony support, which may get mad evil on your ass occasionally. Like telling you to simply go and buy a new piece of hardware. And third point here, the finishing, the look and feel, while being beautiful to look at, feels cheap, as you can push the chassis in with your finger, and me myself I leave marks on the parts beside the touchpad because of the heavy usage. When I take a look at a friend’s Macbook standing half a meter away, this gets painfully real.

But if you manage to overcome these obstacles, you get a i3-330M @2,13 GHz (you know, the kind of Intel that we’re a slave to), 3MB cache, 4 Gigs of RAM, and a 500 GB harddrive. The one caveat is running your favorite OS, ubuntu. As always, there is no guarantee here, as the VAIOs still come with some version of outdated Windows – one of the many reasons, by the way, why people jolting around randomly made up percentages of computers running windows are very, very wrong (my old VAIO had a Win preinstalled, of course without the CDs, and I’ve never even used it once. Still counts as a Windows-PC in use). And considering the screen’s 16:9 build, and native 1366×768 resolution by its ATI Mobility RADEON 5650 grafics card, one might run into serious problems. Strangely enough, all a thorough google search brought up was somebody reporting problems with his audio setting. We will have to see.

So, after all, the VAIOs wouldn’t be one’s first choice, and we’ve constantly told people asking which laptop to buy to go for an Apple or maybe Lenovo Thinkpad. But if you’re eating scripts of code for breakfast and enjoy talking about USB 2.0 for hours without noticing that you’re not furthering any great worldwide causes, philosophically speaking, you’ve got to admit that choosing your window to the world here, it is an emotional decision, and not one made by rationals. And Sony, evil as they may be, and as big a let down their Ginza flagship store really is, just nails it with us with their confusingly gargantuan array of models to choose from.