A new ubuntu release, hardy heron, is out, lifehacker review.

I know I’ve said this before but synaptic, and apt-get, is the coolest piece of software I’ve come across in years. Finding, installing and maintaining software is a magnitude simpler on ubuntu than any other os. An example is this recent release. I’m about to download, install etc with one click of a button while on a wireless network. A dream.

I have a new favourite, and one of my most used, applications. First, a quick history. I don’t like using a mouse and I don’t like menus, especially start menus. To avoid start menus I used to start most apps from a shell by creating a multitude of alias that I’d have to remember.

After that I moved onto using katapult which was better but flaky, likely because it was built for kde not gnome.

After that I moved onto deskbar-applet which I still use a bit today. I believe it comes on the ubuntu base install so you usually have it from the start.

I’m now using gnome-do for all this and it’s the slickest one yet…

“GNOME Do allows you to quickly search for many items present in your GNOME desktop environment (applications, Evolution contacts, Firefox bookmarks, files, artists and albums in Rhythmbox, Pidgin buddies) and perform commonly used actions on those objects (Run, Open, Email, Chat, Play, etc.).”

It’s inspired by, which all the above are, Quicksilver. Gnome-do has done the best of them all. If you’re on a linux OS and haven’t yet, give it a try.

SOLD! One of the few reasons I’ve jumped to my vmware windows instance over the past few months has been to watch tsn highlights. The have a new slick looking beta video player that gives me nothing but “Sorry, there was an error
We are experiencing temporary difficulties downloading your lineup. Please wait another few seconds then try again. Thanks for your patience.”

I expected nothing but the same from epiphany but gave it a shot anyway and it works!! Finally, hockey highlights at my finger tips. I’m guessing this is somehow related to being a tighter integration with gnome? It’s a tricky balance. On one hand, it makes sense to build something like firefox to work across platforms but in other cases I just want something that works on my machine and I don’t care how tightly coupled it is.

I’m starting to figure out that I’m flighty when it comes to browsers. I just installed and started playing with epiphany…

“Welcome to the Epiphany wiki! Epiphany is the easy-to-use GNOME web browser. With Epiphany, you can Search by typing in the location bar and organize Bookmarks by category. Its clean Preferences window makes finding and changing useful options a breeze.”

So far I really like it. It’s just simpler and works better which is a rare combination in software. I was able to immediately integrate my delicious bookmarks and through the location field only I’m able to quickly navigate my bookmarks, search the web, goto a url etc. Currently in firefox I needed two fields, location bar and search box, to accomplish that.

This part’s cool if you like python. One extension is a python console that allows you to start messing with the browser itself through the epiphany api. There’s an example here that has you editing the browser title bar, browsing to a page, etc in one liners.

This entry was posted using the gnome based blogging client Drivel. More details here.

Why bother with a blogging client? The main reason for me is drafting posts offline and then being able to easily post them. Typically I write up basic txt files for that purpose, however, that means I have to copy, paste, and edit when I want to actually post. With drivel I can save locally and then post anytime I’m connected.

Just to test it out, this is me editing this existing post with drivel. I was going to add that drivel is clean and simple which are attributes I like in my software. Another nice feature is that if you post to multiple blogs running on varied blog engines then you have a consistent interface for posting.

I arrived at my sister’s in LA yesterday. Due to how silly cheap it was to ship it to a US address, I had my new thinkpad x61 shipped to her place. I cracked it open last night. The x61 is one of the smallest, lightest laptops you’ll find these days. In order to achieve those attributes they abandoned an optical drive. Without a DVD drive, how to you ditch vista and install ubuntu?

The answer was alarming painless to pull off. You follow these instructions and create a bootable USB flash drive with the latest version of ubuntu on it. Yes, this is a nerd post so move on or be prepared.

Maybe I’m new to this but this is cool. I now have a 2GB USB drive with a complete live version of ubuntu that can save it’s state. What’s that mean? It means I can plug that into any pc with a USB port and a BIOS that can boot from USB, restart, and I’m up and running in a full instance of linux running on that flash drive.

The one thing I did differently from those instructions is that I didn’t have a cd copy of ubuntu. Instead I simply downloaded the ISO, extracted it locally and copied the files from there.

Why would you ever do that? Well in my case it allowed me to click the install icon and install ubuntu without a DVD drive. Other things? Get in and retrieve data off corrupt OS’s before you blow them away. Allow people to test drive linux on their machines.

Will I ever make use of this? Actually I have no idea. It’s still cool that you can even do it. Maybe something to demo at the next DemoCampGuelph?

When I recently moved back to a *nix environment, I started where I was most familiar. That was Fedora Core since I was previously a Red Hat user. I found it a tad painful and quickly gave ubuntu a test run and I’ve been happily using it for a while now. My original plan, however, was to get onto a bsd variant. I’ve only dabbled with pc-bsd and haven’t had much time for more.

I’m not really in the mood to make another OS change and this article comparing ubuntu to pc-bsd isn’t helping. I have to agree with everything in here from my limited trials, especially the responsiveness. Lately I’m finding my windows image on vmware painfully slow as well.

Crap, time for another change?

I just read Lifehacker’s top 10 ubuntu applications and discovered two lovely applications I hadn’t tried:

• Katapult, similar to Mac’s quicksilver.
• CheckGmail

I agree with their take on Amarok and may give Kopete a try someday but Gaim works fine right now.

I just upgraded to the new version of ubuntu. Not only did I not purchase a DVD, I didn’t even use one. I simply opened the package manager and selected ‘upgrade’. The new release then downloaded itself over the wireless network I’m on, installed itself and rebooted. No glitches, no extra drivers to install, and so far nothing’s stopped working.

To date, that’s the most painless major release OS upgrade I’ve experienced. By a landslide.

PS…The OS seems noticeably more responsive.

I’ve heard of, but had yet to get around to taking beagle for a walk.

“Beagle is a search system for Linux and other modern Unix-like systems, enabling the user to search documents, chat logs, email and contact lists in a similar way to Spotlight in Mac OS X, or Google Desktop under Microsoft Windows.”

Wow, you can colour me impressed. That little puppy indexes everything, including my IM conversations and my web browsing history. The mac crowd has spotlight but I certainly haven’t seen anything this slick on windows. Unless of course you’re brave enough to hand over the keys to the boys at google.

The searching and indexing in beagle is built on Lucene. We’re assessing using the .net port on a current project.