Archive for the ‘Ubuntu’ Category

Day Planner 0.9, and looking forward

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Day Planner 0.9 has been released. It is available for download as a Mandriva RPM, Ubuntu deb, Debian deb, generic installer and source tarball.

The release focused primarily on fixes and cleanups. A bunch of minor bugs were fixed, and I rewrote most of the iCalendar back-end. It should be faster now and preserves files better than it used to.

This release includes a dummy maemo interface. It can currently fully display a Day Planner calendar, and has a UI quite similar to the desktop edition. However, it can not edit or add any events, and is as such not as useful as it might have been. The plan is for the maemo port to be ready for 0.11.

0.10 will (among other things) feature a new HTML exporting module (which has been in the works for quite a while), a cleaner, object-oriented version of the add/edit event windows (to simplify their use and maintainance. The current code that handles it is a bit ugly).

The major user-facing change will be the addition of a GUI for calendar subscriptions. 0.9 includes support for them (though it isn’t really announced because the feature isn’t ready), but one has to manually edit the config file.

Posted in Day Planner, Debian, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Maemo, Mandriva, Ubuntu, gtk2, perl | No Comments »

Microdia (0c45:624f) webcam on Linux

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

(Re: Proprietary Webcam driver wonders).

I recently discovered a free driver for my GF’s builtin Microdia webcam. It works very nicely (better than the crappy proprietary one did when I tested the “trial”). So if you’ve got a Microdia webcam, at least the 0c45:624f one, now you can have it working properly, with good quality without paying a load of money for a one-time one-kernel one-arch license for a proprietary one.

git clone http://repo.or.cz/r/microdia.git
cd microdia
make
sudo insmod ./microdia.ko

Then just launch Cheese or your favourite webcam program and off you go.

Thanks a lot to those that took the time to develop a proper driver. If you’ve got a paypal account, I’ll donate some money for your hard work.

Update: the module is now named sn9c20x.ko, so the last line becomes sudo insmod ./sn9c20x.ko

Update 2: According to brandon in the comments, the kernel module is in the upstream kernel as of 2.6.31.6

Posted in Debian, GNOME, GNU/Linux, Mandriva, Ubuntu | 24 Comments »

Proprietary webcam driver wonders

Monday, December 10th, 2007

My girlfriend has a builtin webcam on her new x86_64 laptop.
The webcam has no free drivers, but there is a proprietary one available on linux-projects.org.

Pay 10EUR and you get the driver. Okay, doesn’t sound /so/ bad. But the driver is only available for x86 ubuntu gutsy, no other arch, no other distro, no other kernel. If you want it for /your/ kernel you have to pay 100EUR. Wonderful. There’s no way I’m paying 100EUR for a proprietary webcam driver. Buying a new, working, webcam would even be cheaper! She runs x86_64 so there’s no way to get that driver working there, without paying that 100EUR. The camera is Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0c45:624f Microdia.

If someone does decide to write a free GPLd driver for it, I’ll donate some money to that person (I don’t have 100EUR to give away, but I can do at least 30-50EUR).

This again goes to show the pain of proprietary drivers. I don’t mind *paying* for drivers, but when the drivers cost more than the device did, and a device working equally well would be cheaper than buying the drivers it has gone too far. I would have easily donated money if the page said “here’s the driver, it’s GPL so do what you want, but please donate 10EUR if you can” (and I have donated to FOSS projects before).

Update, see: http://blog.zerodogg.org/2008/04/27/microdia-0c45624f-webcam-on-linux/

Posted in Bugs :(, Debian, GNU/Linux, Mandriva, Ubuntu | 4 Comments »

Day Planner packages available for Debian and Ubuntu

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

Day Planner debs are now available on http://www.day-planner.org/. Both for Debian and Ubuntu (in addition to the already available Mandriva RPM and generic installer).

Creating a deb was interesting, as I had never done that before – used to rpm packaging, though I got a lot of help by Morten Werner Olsen.

The packaging also uncovered quite a few limitations in both the default tarball and the Makefile, which should not only make the deb possible, but also improve the RPM.

I’m hoping to get Day Planner into Debian too, but I’ll have to write a proper deb for Date::HolidayParser first. Debian, like Mandriva, wants to have modules available as seperate packages, and as Date::HolidayParser isn’t *really* Day Planner-specific it makes sense distributing it seperately. The current debs has it bundled, and I might be inclined to continue to have the ones on the website bundle the module (the RPMs on the website does this, even though the package in Mandriva does not), so that there is only one package to install to get Day Planner installed.

In other (somewhat) related news, I’ve changed the URL structure on the Day Planner website. It previously used ugly looking index.php?page=foo&type=bar URLs. It now uses clean index.php/foo/bar URLs, which incidentally was rather simple to implement once I found which variables to parse and PHP functions to do it with.

Posted in Day Planner, Debian, Packaging, Projects, Ubuntu, php | No Comments »

Ubuntu/Mandriva comparison

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

I know you’re probably sick and tired of these comparisions. If so, don’t continue to read, and definetely don’t troll in the comments :).

I had so many various problems with 2008.0 that I felt it might be prudent to try some alternatives (I’ve upgraded to 2008.0 on 4 boxes so far, with not a single one going smoothly without issues). My choice fell on Ubuntu. Was considering to try out Debian too, but I know Debian is good – but not quite end-user desktop-friendly.

I live on the commandline. So just about all I do is identical on all distros since I just carry my configs with me. However I still see hw-detection and general usability and integration. So, I’m going to just start with a little comparison, and we’ll see where we go from here. The comparison is seperated into positive (+) and negative (-) comments.

This is all my personal opinions.

Ubuntu (7.10):
+ Live installer works very well. Especially nice that it removes unneeded locales and downloads missing ones during installation.
+ GNOME default desktop
+ sudo-only actually works quite well
+ Very well integrated into GNOME (ie. 3d-effects can be set up in the appearance applet in GNOME)
+ Clean, empty GNOME desktop by default
+ apt-get is great and shows how much it needs to download
+ aptitude looks good
+ integrated distribution-upgrade system
+ detected all the HW and worked nicely
+ Quite polished
+ Appears quite stable
+ gnome-app-install is pretty
+ Firefox patched to use native package manager to find plugins
+ Totem automatically finds missing plugins
+ More progress shared with other distros (ie. networkManager)
+ Progressbars when installing software (always in the GUI)
+ Ability to see verbose installation messages in the GUI
- Missing some translations
- Some of the translations isn’t of the best quality
- Synaptic is very ugly
- For some reason when I removed evolution, the menu item didn’t get removed (not even when using apt-get purge)
- Uses a white mouse pointer by default (I don’t like it, but luckily that can be easily changed)
- No profile.d
- Told me it needed to reboot after installing the nvidia driver

Mandriva (2008.0):
+ urpmi is also good
+ Well translated
+ Good hw detection
+ Has a tool for /everything/
+ PLF
+ RPMDrake is good (better than synaptic, not close to gnome-app-install)
+ Great perl module packaging
+ MP3 playback by default
- GNOME Live CD not published along with the rest of the distro
- GNOME Live CD not advertised for new users, they only get the option of KDE
- No beta of the GNOME Live CD
- Not as well integrated into the DE
- The tools aren’t as “polished”. Ie. when a drak* tool needs to install something it pops ups 3-4 small windows informing about what it’s doing – none of them has a progressbar, and sometimes they say the same. Also the windows aren’t refreshed as often, but block and become unresponsive.
- Although urpmi got improved it still doesn’t say how much it needs to download. Something other distros have had for ages, and that I opened a wishlist bug for in 2005
- I haven’t installed one 2008.0 machine without various issues (sound stopping to work, performance bad, sound not working properly, X driver not set up properly)
- Live CD set up autologin by default without asking about it
- No Mandriva Flash GNOME (except GUADEC edition)

Trolls and flames in the comments will be deleted.

Update:
Note that I made no conclusion on which distro was better. I’m simply attempting to write a simple and incomplete comparison. The comparison is also mostly based upon first impressions, and should be treated as such.

I’m also not saying I’m switching camps for those wondering ;).

Concerning GNOME Flash. Well, maybe that isn’t really fair. Flash is good, and GUADEC flash is good. However I did get annoyed that only a KDE was made available.
Also, no, the point isn’t /really/ that Mandriva prefers KDE for LiveCDs – it so happens I prefer GNOME and thus see GNOME as a plus.

When I talk about “better” integration, what I mean is basically that Ubuntu is more centered around the desktop environment than Mandriva is (which can be good and bad I guess).
In Mandriva to configure stuff you would use drakconf, in Ubuntu most is in the GNOME System menu. Granted, some stuff from Mandriva is available there too, but Ubuntu has everything.
However, Mandriva has, like stated, tools for just about everything. Ubuntu does not. They’re quite differently structured. The Ubuntu tools look like they are /made/ for GNOME and part of GNOME (which I guess they are). The Mandriva tools look like a seperate app, which they are, and is probably also good considering the wealth of tools available. It just feels a bit easier to just System -> Administration and select whatever you want to do there. Don’t get me wrong, Mandrivas GNOME is good. Kudos goes to Mandriva for giving a GNOME LiveCD, I’d just like to see it better marketed (not like on mandriva.com right now where you only get the option of KDE. KDE is good but imho you should be able to chose, as Mandriva One now appears to be the preferred version to download).

Concerning autologin, if I recall correctly, the previous versions of Mandriva One did not activate autologin by default, which is why I reacted negatively to that this time.

Update 2:
Yes, urpmi displays how much it needs to /install/. But it doesn’t (and can’t, since the information isn’t available in the current hdlist formats) display how much it needs to download. Which is often a good deal less than what it will take when installed.

Posted in Mandriva, Personal, Ubuntu | 15 Comments »