This post is a bit late but I wanted to make sure I was settled in my decision on Unity, Ubuntu’s new desktop. I had been running Ubuntu Natty Narwhal on my test box since before the first alpha so I was quite familiar with Unity and its quirks and initially I wasn’t a fan at all. It seemed ugly, feature lacking and buggy and throughout the alpha and beta period it seemed that it was just being rushed out to meet the 11.04 release regardless of whether it was ready or not. I didn’t think I would be using it and had even given serious consideration to going back to Debian testing for my main desktop box.
Anyway, with the final release of 11.04 I duly upgraded my main desktop machine and thought I would give it a go as my day to day desktop for a while, fully expecting to switch back to the “classic desktop” (ie. Gnome 2.x) before long but it didn’t happen and I have to say that Unity has grown on me. I’m not missing any of the things I thought I would and so far I’m even managing to live with the one thing about Unity that annoyed me the most during testing, namely the Global Menu.
For those not aware the Global Menu is the Apple style feature where each applications menu appears in the top panel instead of within the application itself. I understand Apple’s original reasoning behind this feature, ie. the menu is always in a consistent place and slamming the mouse to the top of the screen puts you in the right place but in a modern multiple monitor environment it just doesn’t stand up, that and it is currently inconsistent as it requires every app to support it. App support will get better over time I’m sure but I still think it is irrepairably broken on multiple monitors. Fortunately for those that really can’t stand it, the global menu can be disabled without too much effort but I am still trying to live with it for now to see if I can get used to it.
The other niggle with Unity that hadn’t really bothered me until I started to use it properly is the scroll bars. With a traditional scroll bar you can move your mouse to the right of the window and click to jump up/down at any point along the permenantly visible bar whereas with the new hidden scroll bar you have to look for the thin indicator and hover your mouse over that before you can access the scroll controls. It’s definitely slower and harder to use and as with the global menu it is inconsistent at the moment as not all applications use it.
The new dock on the left I wasn’t keen on initially and I missed the old task list panel at the bottom but now I’ve got used to it I actually prefer the dock, it seems quicker and gets less cluttered. The only change I’ve made is to make it narrower with smaller icons as it is a bit large by default.
In summary Unity is a mixed bag, it’s far from the disaster I thought it would be but it’s not the second coming either. There is still a lot that could be improved but I think it will get there, the issue of the duplication of effort between Unity and the very similar Gnome 3 is a completely different topic though.
I’ve been trying a new Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) image out on my O2 Joggler this week and it is a big improvement over the 9.04 images I’ve been using previously and everything works out of the box without any fiddling.
The image includes all the software normally shipped with the base Ubuntu distribution with the addition of the Chromium browser and Florence on-screen keyboard (see screenshot) which is a huge improvement to the CellWriter keyboard I had been using before. It also includes fixes to the brightness applet so it is usable from the touchscreen and fully working sound through external jack and speakers although this is currently only switchable after a reboot.
Use of the new btrfs filesystem with compression enabled means the install only takes 1.1GB of space as opposed to 2.5GB without compression and it includes EMGD drivers v1.5 and working Compiz and OpenGL however anyone running XBMC should note that it currently doesn’t work with the EMGD driver, nor does the new Ubuntu Unity desktop intended for netbooks.
I succumbed to temptation and bought another Joggler for playing around with as the first is serving so well as a bedside media player using Rhythmbox for streaming radio and podcasts and the odd bit of iPlayer.
I thought I would update with a few small things I’ve done recently that others might find useful:
Fixing the XBMC Skin When freshly installed from the XBMC PPA there is some graphical corruption of the skin due to packed textures that the Joggler GPU can’t handle. This is fixed in the svn version, I’ve also uploaded a copy of the svn version of the Confluence skin here so you can install it in the PPA version. This also includes the resized backgrounds specifically for Joggler (from here).
To install either ssh into the Joggler or do the following from Terminal on the Joggler itself:
cd /home/joggler/.xbmc/skin/ wget http://zorg.org/6w tar zxvf xbmc_confluence-stable_skin.tar.gz rm xbmc_confluence-stable_skin.tar.gz
Then just change the skin to Confluence_stable in Settings->Appearance->Skin
XBMC full screen switch Another issue with XBMC is that the touchscreen doesn’t work in XBMCs fullscreen mode, I’ve seen a fix mentioned here that works by using the openbox window manager but I’ve done it by installing wmctrl and adding a menu item to switch XBMC to full screen once started. Just create a menu item with the command: wmctrl -x -r xbmc.bin.xbmc.bin -b toggle,fullscreen
XBMC with gesture control I’ve uploaded a short video of XBMC running on the O2 Joggler with easystroke providing gesture control which you can see below. This is the first time I’ve used easystroke and I’m pretty impressed, it could be useful with other apps as well I think.
Turning the screen off I also decided to turn the screensaver off altogether and have added a menu item and desktop icon to switch the screen and backlight off with xset when desired. To do this install the xutils package and add and menu item/launcher for: xset dpms force off To turn the screen back on just touch it. This just works better for me for the way I’ve been using it, of course YMMV.
GMail iPad interface I also tried the GMail iPad interface in Chrome, click the image on the left for a full size screenshot. You can do this by spoofing the iPad user agent string so that Google thinks the Joggler is an iPad. Just add the following to the command to start Chrome: –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10“
so it reads: /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome –user-agent=”Mozilla/5.0(iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B314 Safari/531.21.10” %U
Whilst it looks great, scrolling doesn’t work so it’s not particularly useful unfortunately. Would be nice if this could be fixed somehow.
O2 have got the Joggler on offer at £50 again until the end of May so if you missed out last time now is your chance. This is a cracking deal for a nice hackable bit of hardware, I’m very tempted to get another.
See my previous post on the Joggler for more info. Things have moved on a bit since then too and most of the niggles with running Ubuntu have been sorted. I’m actually using a different Ubuntu image now which works “out of the box”.
Android is also running on the Joggler but isn’t really usable yet do a lack of graphics drivers but it’s only a matter of time before that is sorted.
When the window control buttons were moved to the left of the window in Ubuntu 10.04 there were a lot of complaints, Mark Shuttleworth would only say that the move was necessary to free the space on the right for something else; Well here is that something else: Window Indicators, or Windicators. “Windicators are indicators displayed in the window title bar that behave just like the indicators in the panel: they have an icon which shows state, and clicking on the icon brings up a menu.”
Part of the idea is to allow the status bar to be removed from most applications, instead using a Google Chrome like status overlay for transitory messages and moving things like Online/Offline status, progress indicators and so on to the new windicator panel. The windicator panel could also allow for things like application specific volume controls, something which is currently buried in the sound preferences.
This sounds like an excellent idea to me with lots of potential for future development. Hopefully it will placate some of those moaning about the button position too!
I’ve been running the betas of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx release for a few weeks now and it has been rock solid so it looks like the final release will be on target on or around the 29th April.
Visually, Ubuntu has never looked so good, the new ambience and radiance themes are a huge improvement over the old default brown and orange look, I’m using the dark ambience theme and it looks great out of the box.
Under the hood things are improved too, as well as all the usual updates to the latest versions of most packages Lucid also has a much faster boot time which will be great for laptops and the like and comes with Gnome 2.30 which has a lot of useful updates including a handy split view mode for the Nautilus file manager. There is also a new panel notification system and a new “Me Menu” to control instant messaging and social networking status. One big feature that is getting a lot of attention is the addition of libimobiledevice to provide easy interfacing with the iPhone and iPod devices. Watch the video here for a demonstration of what is possible with this and a few other tools. The most surprising thing about this to my mind is that it doesn’t require the iPhone/iPod to be jailbroken, an impressive feat and a most welcome update.
Control buttons on Ubuntu 10.04
One somewhat controversial change has been the decision to move the window control buttons to the left hand side, the reason for this has been said to free up the space on the right for “something else” in the future, vague as that might be at the moment the reaction from a lot of people seems to have been a bit extreme; I found that I got used to it very quickly and it is only that way in the new themes and can be changed easily enough using gconf if it really bothers you that much. I’ve decided to leave them on the left.
The upgrade from 9.10 went smoothly as usual, I love how the upgrade procedure on Ubuntu is so robust now, I’ve been using Linux for a long time (since 1995) so I can remember when an full distribution upgrade was the over optimistic attempt you made before giving up and doing a fresh install! This system has been continually upgraded from a 8.04 KDE4 Remix installation right through 8.10, 9.04, 9.10 and finally 10.04 with all but zero issues along the way.
Lucid is an LTS (Long Term Support) release that will be supported until April 2013 on the desktop and April 2015 for the server edition so this is going to be a good one to upgrade to if you don’t do so regularly.
I grabbed one of the O2 Jogglers last week while they were on special offer at £49.99. The Joggler is a rebranded version of the OpenPeak OpenFrame and is touted by O2 as a “replacement for your fridge door” it is intended to be a sort of home messaging hub with calendar, weather, news headlines, streaming radio, photo viewer, music player and 50 free text message per month. Physically it looks like a fairly standard 7″ digital photo frame but underneath it hides a lot more. Powered by a 1.3GHz Z520 Atom CPU and with 512Mb RAM, 1Gb storage, WiFi and wired ethernet, 800×480 capacitive touch screen, audio out and USB it has a lot more potential than either the default O2 or OpenPeak software offers.
With the possibilities such hardware offers O2 really are doing themselves a disservice by crippling it with the rubbish default software, it’s no wonder it got such rotten reviews when launched last year at £149.99. Fortunately it is very hackable. It’s a doddle to enable telnet so that you can install extra apps using the default OS. Someone has even made a script called “Pimp My Joggler” to automatically install many of the OpenPeak apps, streaming of BBC TV channels, games and more, although it does install a lot of rubbish so you might want to stick to doing it manually.
As it uses an EFI bootloader booting other operating systems on it is also relatively straightforward and due to the amount of people who have got one of these in their hands since the £49.99 offer the hacking community around it has really taken off in the last couple of weeks. There are people working on various alternate OS options including Linux, Android, MER and MeeGo.
Ubuntu Netbook Edition on the O2 Joggler
I’ve put the Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Edition on mine using this image which has support for the touchscreen, WiFi and sound (with a couple of tweaks required to get the sound working). It’s just a case of writing the image to a suitably sized USB device (I used an 8Gb SDHC card in a USB adapter) and turning the Joggler on with it inserted in the USB socket, it will then boot from the USB device leaving the default OS untouched. The Joggler only has the one USB socket so a hub will be required to connect a mouse and keyboard.
Initially I had to log in at the console (login: joggler, password: joggler) and type startx to get X running but strangely once I had fixed the sound it automatically boots straight to the Ubuntu NE desktop, not sure why that would be the case but that is all that was changed.
To fix the sound you need to rename the file /lib/modules/2.6.31.6/kernel/drivers/acpi/processor.ko (eg. to processor.ko.old) and comment out the last line of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add options snd-hda-intel model=basic to the bottom of the file. Reboot and sound should work.
I’ve been hearing a lot of dissent in the Firefox-using ranks lately and have to say that I have been feeling some pain myself, on multiple machines and different operating systems. Once heralded as the lightweight, reliable, alternative browser, Firefox seems to be becoming slower and more bloated with each release.
As a multi-platform user I was a big fan of the Mozilla Suite for years and was quite a late convert to Firefox, hanging onto Mozilla for a long time after the main development focus had switched to Firefox. Eventually it was the breadth of extensions available for Firefox that finally swung it for me and if I’m honest that is the only thing that is making me cling on now.
I’m finding myself using Google Chrome more and more often, the dev channel version for Linux is now completely functional and is extremely fast, possibly more so than the Windows version. If I can wean myself off a couple of Firefox extensions I will be on Chrome full time and there are more extensions becoming available for Chrome all the time. The latest development version of Chromium (the open source version of Chrome) being able to convert Greasemonkey user scripts into extensions can only speed this process up.
How are Firefox and Chrome shaping up for you, or do you use something different?
I’ve just put Version 0.6 of vsound up. This rolls in the very handy autostop patch from Richard Taylor which kills the player after a set number of seconds of inactivity (defined as the time that the /dev/dsp device is closed). This is ideal when recording BBC Radio programmes for example as realplayer closes /dev/dsp once a programme has finished. This saves having to find out the length of the programme before starting a recording as vsound can now stop recording automatically. The only other change is a fix for the non-functional –resample switch.Get vsound 0.6 here. If you have bug reports (or even better, bug fixes!) or ideas for improvements then please email me.
I’ve added some screenshots of Ed’s Xbox Debian Linux 0.1.0 with KDE3 installed to the Xbox Linux page. It makes a reasonably fast PC with the only drawback being the low resolution available on televisions, connect a monitor up to it and it could be used as a desktop PC with no problems. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it yet if anything, I would use it to play DivX files etc but the Xbox Media Player already does such a good job of that. It’s an intersting curiosity if nothing else I suppose.
Expanding my bread machine horizons with the aid of this great book I was given. Have got chilli bread on the go. http://t.co/rJNDg0qWabout 15 hours ago
This post is a bit late but I wanted to make sure I was settled in my decision on Unity, Ubuntu’s new desktop. I had been running Ubuntu Natty Narwhal on my test box since before the first alpha so I was quite familiar with Unity and its quirks and initially I wasn’t a fan at all. It seemed ugly, feature lacking and buggy and throughout the alpha and beta period it seemed that it was just being rushed out to meet the 11.04 release regardless of whether it was ready or not. I didn’t think I would be using it and had even given serious consideration to going back to Debian testing for my main desktop box.
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