Tag Archives: Ubuntu

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Widescreen

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The end of the tax year encouraged me to get a new 24″ 1920×1600 widescreen monitor (HP W2408H) for the sake of my back and eyes.

Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) didn’t work with it automatically, even after a restart. The monitor complained that the input was “out of range”. It seemed to be using too high a sync rate. Doing “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” fixed it, though I naturally had to use a second PC to do that via ssh.

I was using a 17″ before, so the hugeness and brightness is disorientating. It can rotate too, so I can have a tall thin screen instead, should I ever want that. I’ve seen desks at Google (through the windows) that have two of these side by side – that would be truly useful. Weirdly, drawing of windows is noticeably slow when the screen is rotated. I wonder what that’s about. (Via System/Screen Resolution in Ubuntu. I guess that’s XRandR.)

My graphics card only has VGA output (integrated Intel 915G), so I’m probably not seeing the clearest picture. I should get a separate card with a HDMI or DVI output, but I don’t look forward to the driver problems. It looks like life will be good with AMD/ATI Radeon cards in the near future, but not until the next version of Ubuntu, I guess.

Horrible Compiz in Ubuntu betas

General,

The October 18th release date for Ubuntu “Gutsy” approaches fast. It currently defaults to using desktop effects (the Compiz window manager instead of Metacity). But compiz is still appalling. In particular, it behaves terribly together with the GNOME Panel, with windows appearing under the panels or over the panels, and sometimes drawing its shadows over the panels while otherwise being in the correct position. In the past I experienced various focus problems, leading, for instance, to unclickable foreground windows. I don’t know whether those focus problems have been fixed – it’s hard to have the patience to test it completely.

Window managers are meant to be irrelevant to users, just doing obvious things so you don’t have to think about them. But Compiz generally makes Ubuntu feel so utterly broken that some average non-technical users may suspect intermittent hardware failure or a malicious virus. I wonder if this is likely to improve before the release.

screenshot_compiz_window_and_shadow_over_panel.png

Linux-compatible wireless USB adaptor: Slightly better in Ubuntu Gutsy

General

Every now and then I retest my collection of wireless USB adaptors, hoping that another one will start working thanks to an Ubuntu update. Today I noticed that the Zyxel G-220 v2 now works perfectly in Ubuntu Gutsy (zd1211b chipset, using the zd1211rw driver, I think). So there is now at least one wireless USB adaptor that’s easily available in both the US and Germany that works out of the box in up-to-date Ubuntu. One is much much better than zero.

I’ve updated my Wireless USB test results, and my (small) Ubuntu Hardware page. I wonder if the newer Zyxel adaptors work too, such as the Zyxel G-270S.

VMWare Workstation 6.0

General

I’m now happily using VMWare Workstation 6.0 to check some build errors in Ubuntu Gutsy without risking an upgrade of my actual system.

I have used VMWare Workstation 5.5 lots, but the need to rebuild the kernel module with vmware-config.pl every few weeks (when the Ubuntu kernel was updated automatically) tended to break my habit, particularly when there are build errors due to changed Linux kernel headers. And I couldn’t get either Ubuntu Feisty or Ubuntu Gutsy to boot in Workstation 5.5 after installing them inside a virtual machine. Maybe that’s something to do with the hack that’s needed to build the vmware kernel module on an up-to-date Ubuntu Feisty. There was no such problem with 6.0, at least for now.

I noticed that Ubuntu has vmware kernel modules available via Synaptic/apt-get, but I couldn’t get them to install without errors, maybe because I already had them installed manually. I don’t know if vmware’s installation script has any way of using or getting them from the Ubuntu repository instead of building them.

Ubuntu on Thinkpad X61s?

General,

After a couple of weeks of working away from home, I have a renewed hatred for the back-twisting weight of my cheap Acer laptop. I’m thinking of getting a Thinkpad X61s with Intel on-board graphics. But the X61 models are quite new, and I can’t find reports from people who have installed Ubuntu on them.

Or is there anything even lighter that’s easy to find? It’s rather annoying that there’s no IBM/Lenova online shop in Germany, and that the dealer prices seem to be twice the U.S. dollar price for the same models.

Nautilus 2.18 bug whine: Name column still annoying

General,

The fix to the incredibly-small-name-column bug in nautilus has introduced a new bug. The name columns are often still too small, and they have to be resized even when reopening the same folder. At the moment it looks like this is going to be in Ubuntu Feisty to annoy me for the next six months.

I feel sure that the column sizes were remembered before. If not, I guess they just had better defaults before, and I guess that the name column resized with the window before so it was enough to just increase the window size, which was remembered.

Glom 1.4

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Glom 1.4.0 is out. Glom is an easy-to-use database system, which is gradually becoming more useful. It’s already available in Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty, not yet final) [1] thanks to Daniel Holbach and Martin Pitt.

New features in Glom 1.4

  • Self-hosting: Databases can now be created in a local directory, without the pain of configuring a central PostgreSQL server. PostreSQL is still used to host the database on your local computer. You may, for instance, send an archive of this directory in an email. PostgreSQL is therefore now a non-optional dependency.
    In future, a client-only version of Glom might be available for embedded devices.
  • Details view:
    • Related Records: Allow viewing of doubly-related records.
    • A vertical scrollbar now allows the window to be smaller when necessary on your screen.
  • List View: Now supports static text items, static pictures, and script buttons, as the Details view already did.
  • Field Formatting: Allow the user to remove a previously-chosen Also Show field.
  • Translations: Added Import and Export buttons, so you can use the standard .po format.
  • Calculated Fields and Button Scripts: Now uses Python syntax highlighting, via GtkSourceView.
  • Added a Script Library to the Developer menu, for Python code that should be reused (via Import) in several scripts.
  • Added –debug_sql commmand-line option, which prints out the generated SQL commands.

Thanks to Johannes Schmid, Armin Burgmeier, Dodji Seketeli, L Davison, bugzilla, Openismus, and me.

Features planned for Glom 1.6

If they are finished in the next six months:

  • Drag-and-drop layout editing.
  • Relationships Overview.
  • Locking, when multiple users access the same record.
  • Port to libgda 3.0.

More details of the development plans are online.

[1] Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) has Glom 1.0, and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) has Glom 1.2. Both should be updated to their latest upstream Glom 1.0.x or 1.2.x versions to fix crashes, but there is still no way for me, a fully-FOSS-compliant software vendor, to deploy bug fix updates to my software on Ubuntu. Using a different .deb repository does not seem to be an acceptable solution.

Really no software patents in EU?

General

I often hear, mostly from comments in online forums, that there are no software patents (yet) in the EU.

I wish it was so, but I am not convinced of this. I thought that, though the EU has not yet decided on a software patent policy, that left various country-specific software patent policies in place. So isn’t it true that there currently are software patents in some EU countries?

If there are no software patents in the EU, why does Thompson list several EU country-specific MP3 patents, and what’s the explanation for cases such as this:

Polizei sucht auf der CeBIT Produktpiraten: Apparently, a couple of days ago, German police raided 10 stands at CeBIT, confiscating digital cameras, navigation devices, mobile phones, and music players, on behalf of a company called Sisvel who claim that their MP3 patents are being violated. They did the same thing to SanDisk at IFA. Presumably this will show up on English-speaking sites soon.