Big Fat Ostrich

Maybe they’re not officially dead, but it’s starting to feel that way.

The guitar tab plugins that I’m talking about are the add ons that you would use in applications like Rhythmbox or Amarok (that piece of crap), Songbird, Banshee, or even Exaile (which is cool, but based on Amarok, so therefore it’s a piece of crap).

Or maybe it’s all Ubuntu 11.10′s fault.

I don’t know anymore. I once wrote about guitar tabs in Rhythmbox and how they no longer work in Ubuntu 11.10. Banshee doesn’t seem to have the extension, and Songbird is no longer maintained and is basically dead in the water. I tried Exaile which CLAIMED to have a guitar tablature plugin (in the search results), but when you go on their website, there’s absolutely no mention of it. Nada.

I think what this all points to is that developers are starting to care less and less about applications that you need to install. The focus is now leaning heavily on cloud based software, and music apps are no different with iCloud and Google Music. But what are your options if you want to play your music locally and display guitar tabs?

Maybe Canary has the answer. (Yes, another animal named software!) Canary.fm is so freaking new I don’t think anyone knows about them. And hell, they only have 4 Twitter followers. But, they’re doing something interesting which is cloud based guitar tabs. And the tabs look super slick. Now, if you can display guitar tabs WHILE I listen to my music (locally or in the cloud) I may be sold.

Here’s a vid:

Yes, today was the day of the upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.10, so let’s talk about that.

Ubuntu 11.10′s friendly alliterated animal name is Oneiric Ocelot. Oneiric is defined as dreamy, which brings me to the riddle I just made up:

Q. Why is Ubuntu 11.10 called ‘Oneiric Ocelot’?
A. Because they were asleep when they made it!

Stop laughing. I’m not joking.

The Upgrade
First of all, the upgrade took over 2 hours! Why? Because we all know that Ubuntu is not known for it’s slim girlish figure anymore. A few nicknames came to mind while watching some of the many packages get installed: Bloatbuntu, Ubun Too Goddamn Fat, and Moo-buntu. Yes, this is one fat OS.

The upgrade itself was smooth. After all, you can’t do anything but make dinner or watch T.V. while the packages are installed and downloaded. Why? Because networking is disabled throughout the whole process. Well done.

Ubuntu 11.10 boasts a hideous new login screen
I noticed two things once the upgrade was complete and I logged in for the first time: Oneiric Ocelot is incredibly sluggish when launching apps. 4 gigs of RAM should be more than enough on a linux system, but not here. Ubuntu has become the Windows of linux distros. Fat, bloated and with way too many processes eating up your cpu.

2nd thing: NO WIRELESS.

Well done Canonical/Ubuntu. Maybe I’m being harsh, but can you have everything work out of the box for once? Least of all the wireless. I’m pretty sure that in 2011, wireless technology is kinda a requirement. Jesus. I kind of expected to have to re-configure the desktop environment after upgrading, but the network settings? You’re kidding, right?

As I write this, I can connect to my wireless network so the driver seems to be fine, but I can’t ping anything. Yep. I get an ip address from DHCP, but no ping and no internet. Yes, it’s back to wired for now. Slow clap.

3.0 Kernel
Oneiric Ocelot uses kernel 3.0. In honor of the 20th anniversary of Linux. It was Linus Torvalds‘ idea or something like that. It’s kind of cool to see 3.0 after seeing 2.6 for so long, but it’s not making much of a difference, yet. We’ll get a better idea after some testing.

Desktop environments and Unity
Unity is “cute” but not something I’ll be adopting anytime soon. It’s clean but not necessarily optimal. It’s just sluggish. Gnome 3 is not much better, so I switched to Gnome with no effects. Decent, but not great. It should be faster once I tweak the performance. Again. Like after every upgrade. Probably should have forced it to leave my previous settings.

The Verdict: Oneiric Ocelot is a lazy cow. Arch Linux is starting to look more attractive. Or maybe a clean Debian install.

P.S. After using Ubuntu 11.10 for awhile I’ve come to really hate the Ubuntu Software Center. It’s ok and does the job eventually, but I feel that Synaptic Package Manager was cleaner, faster and more robust overall. It feels like aesthetics were the main reason that they replaced  the old Synaptic Package Manager with the Ubuntu Software Center.

Well it took a day, but I fixed the monitor problems on Ubuntu 11.04!

After experiencing THE most unstable Ubuntu upgrade yet, my external display resolution was basically a sea of Technicolor vomit. The display on my Dell 1564 i3 was fine, but attaching an external VGA monitor resulted in an unusable display of flickering madness. I also figured out why they called the distro Natty Narwhal: because it acts like a beached whale with a spike in its brain! Fucking Natty.

Anyway, this is how I fixed the garbled external display problem:

1) The Easy Way

a – Open System > Administration > System Testing
b – After entering your admin password, click next. You’ll have a list of many items to test.
c – Chose Monitor Tests and Video Tests

Run the tests with your external monitor detached.

When the tests are complete, run them again with the external monitor attached. You may have to position your mouse on the ‘Test” button before you attach the monitor, since the display resolution will still be garbled once the monitor is attached. When you’re ready, click “Test”. When the tests complete, you should have your external display back. If all looks good, you’ll just have to configure your display settings. And that’s it!

2) The Hard Way
a – Open a terminal and type xrandr
b – You’ll see something similar to this:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 640×480+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
1366×768       59.6 +
1360×768       59.8     60.0
1024×768       60.0
800×600        60.3     56.2
640×480        59.9*
VGA1 connected 1680×1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 434mm x 270mm
1680×1050      59.9*+   60.0
1280×1024      75.0     60.0
1440×900       75.0     59.9
1280×960       60.0
1152×864       75.0
1024×768       75.1     60.0
832×624        74.6
800×600        75.0     60.3     56.2
640×480        75.0     60.0
720×400        70.1
HDMI1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

Choose which display you want to be your primary and form your command like so: xrandr –output VGA1 –primary

Honestly, this isn’t the best method if you want to fix it visually. Running the Monitor Tests from the System Testing menu uses xrandr anyway and should get your second external monitor up and running. Hopefully things will run better in 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot which will be out in October 2011.

Next up: How to Uninstal Unity

Hey Natty! Less time drinking tea, more time fixing bugs!

Did you upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 aka Natty Narwhal? I did, and for the first time since using Ubuntu (I’ve been loyal since 6.10), I’m very disappointed. There are some major issues with this upgrade. What we’ve come to expect from Canonical is a solid operating system, and most importantly, smooth upgrades. In fact, the last few times I wrote about upgrading Ubuntu, I almost had nothing to say because the upgrades were so smooth, they could have been unattended upgrades.

So let’s get down to it.

1. Crashing at first boot (external monitor support): This is open to interpretation. I’m using an external monitor with my Dell Inspiron 1564 and Ubuntu 11.04 didn’t exactly crash. The problem is that there’s a major bug when using an external monitor with Ubuntu 11.04 on various laptop makes and models. So after first boot, both monitors went black. After I unplugged the external monitor, I saw the Unity interface (more on Unity later). I logged out of Unity and into Gnome. When I attached the external (analog) monitor, the image resolution was completely corrupted and unusable. This is a problem with the VGA driver. Read about the bug here.
Note: My display was fine when I connected it to my Samsung via the HDMI port.

2. Unity: Fine, using Unity instead of Gnome 3 might take some getting used to, but could the menu bar have some options? It would be really nice to have some control over its orientation, and at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any. Isn’t Linux about having control? Freedom? Remember that word?
Unity looks like it’s trying to be an iPhone. Or an iPad. Or like it has a hard-on for Apple. It refers to “Apps”, which are just its regular programs and this just makes it sound like it’s trying to be something it’s not. Basically, Unity makes me feel the way I felt about Amarok when Amarok 2.0 was released, and it wasn’t a positive experience,

3. Flash: After logging into Gnome, I tried browsing and watching videos. You Tube was a mess with videos playing, but with the control buttons flashing and intermittent flickering. Very nice. I ended up fixing that issue by installing Flash Aid which is a Firefox plugin that figures out which version of Flash you need. My question: Why couldn’t the people behind Ubuntu do that?

4. Firefox 4: I haven’t tested Firefox 4 on any other system besides my unstable Natty Narwhal, so you can call me biased, but Firefox 4 has been crashing like Firefox 2 did awhile back. Are we back to the memory leaks from 4 years ago? I’ve been blaming Ubuntu 11.04 and its 2.6.38-8 kernel. Flash is also very choppy on Firefox 4, where flash is fine on Chrome. The test: try playing some Facebook game like Mafia Wars (check the property pages) on Firefox 4 and then try playing it on Chrome.

5. Everything Else: Ok, not everything is bad. When things work, they’re snappy and quick. Even Firefox seems to be as fast as Chrome normally is. I do think that there’s potential here, just that Natty appears to have been rushed for release, and that’s never a good thing. They compromised stability in favor of bling that’s less than impressive. Just give us an OS that works. Remember what happened with KDE 4.0? DO YOU?

1 Amazing thing that actually DOES work: ssh freezing problem: Yep. ssh no longer freezes when authenticating via wireless to my LAN or any external network. The freezing ssh session issue was an annoying bug last year (which I thought was the fault of my crap D-Link DIR-615), but it now works and my wireless ssh sessions are stable. Bonus.

Pro Tip: Touchpad Control: Did you install Natty narwhal on a laptop and found that you lost control of your touchpad? Yeah, me too. Fix it like this:

gconftool-2 –set –type boolean /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/touchpad_enabled true

By the way, what’s the deal with Byobu? Is it necessary? I’ll be trying out this enhanced terminal soon.

Hey remember when VirtualBox came out and everyone thought that the VBoxGina module (for automated logons) name was so hilarious? Well me neither.

Still, it got me thinking about some of the weirdest linux packages out there. You know the ones. The ones that, if you’re Googling them while at work, you make damn sure to include the word Linux or Ubuntu in your search. Because surprising results can happen when you Google for ‘man beef’. Ok, it wasn’t surprising at all.

Anyway, here’s a short list of some of the weirdest linux/Ubuntu packages out there in repository land:

scrot – Which is a command line screen capture utility, i.e., SCReen shOT. That means if you have to look at the man page, you’ll be forced to type “man scrot”. Fine. You don’t think that’s so bad? How about:

scrotwm – This is a dynamic tiling window manager. And yes, this means that you’ll eventually be typing “man scrotwm”. I doesn’t get more obvious than that. Oh wait it does:

liboobs-1-4 – Which I was surprised was installed on my machine. No, there’s no man page for liboobs-1-4, but it does provide a GObject based interface for system-tools-backends. Yay.

beef – That’s right.Open up a shell and type ‘man beef’ and you’ll get the man page for ‘beef’ aka the flexible Brainfuck interpreter. Brainfuck has its own Wikipedia entry cause it has such an awesome name. Brainfuck is basically a programming language written in C that’s so minimalist that it’s basically unreadable. If your colleague is using it, you probably need to pie them in the face with a textbook. Still, beef is pretty damn efficient. Bastards.

And that’s all I got. I could go on about ‘tar‘ and the hilariousness of typing ‘man tar‘ 20 times a day, but that one’s been over done to death.Either way, let us know if you’ve come across some crazily named packages yourself. Do it.

* This isn’t related to that old Man Beef Hoax. Or maybe it is. I don’t care either way.

I don’t know how it happened, but I got totally obsessed with fonts and typesetting this weekend. There I was, writing some documentation, when I remembered the LaTex system of formatting text. Back in college, I was completely confused by LaTex because the whole idea seemed more like a concept than anything.

Now that I’m all grown up, I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND A DAMN THING ABOUT IT.

So I installed the whole package on my Ubuntu machine like so. Just to see what would happen:

sudo apt-get install texlive-metapost

Yep, after letting that command rip, 209M of vague and obscure packages are now installed on my system, and you know what? It made absolutely no difference in my life, or yours. I will still be writing the same documents, without the benefit of TeX or Metafont(s)??. Yep. With TeX installed, preparing documents has never been more like it ever was. At least for me.

But man, there were a lot of packages. The Metapost and Metafont drawing packages in particular, are extensive.

For example, there’s:

metauml, which is a MetaPost typesetting library for UML diagrams.
mp3d, for 3D animations.
piechartmp, which uses MetaPost to draw pie-charts. And everybody likes pie.
garrigues: These are MetaPost macros to reproduce Garrigues’ Easter nomogram. I was actually really happy about this one, cause like, you know, Garrigues!
bbcard: Bullshit bingo, calendar and baseball-score cards.

I kid you not. That was a direct quote from the package listing. Does anyone remember Bullshit Bingo? This isn’t like your traditional bingo. Bullshit Bingo is also referred to as Buzzword Bingo, which is a game that fellow colleagues used to (maybe still do) play at insufferable meetings. This is how you play: You make up a bingo style card. Populate it with buzzwords and catchphrases. Then, you check them off as the words are spoken by the buzzword spewing buffoon, aka, the meeting presenter/your boss/a colleague/Al Gore.

So now that I’ve gone through the exercise of installing TeXlive, here’s how to remove it:

sudo apt-get remove texlive-metapost –purge

And that’s how you use LaTex.

Nice going Pidgin. Seriously, what the hell?

When I logged into my MSN profile from Pidgin, I got this:

Unable to validate certificate

Looked like an SSL error, which I confirmed with Goggles. I mean Googles. I mean Google.

Here’s how to fix it:
1. Open Pidgin. Go to Tools / Certificates and you should see omega.contacts.msn.com. Delete it.
2. Then go to https://omega.contacts.msn.com . You’ll get an error on the page, but don’t worry. Just double click on the certificate icon and export the file to your Desktop or wherever.
3. Then go back into Pidgin and go to Tools / Certificates and Add it via the Certificate Manager.

It should work now. Yay.

Anyway, it’s a known bug and you can find it here: http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/12906

I’ve been wanting to write about my last upgrade for weeks and weeks, but we got all freaky with a bunch of Bobbipins posts instead!

So finally, after weeks of anticipation, here it is: My extensive review about upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10 aka Maverick Meerkat.

It went real smooth.

Seriously. That’s all I got. Each subsequent upgrade with Ubuntu becomes easier and easier, which really translates into boringer and boringer! I don’t know…it’s like the whole OS is so stable at this point, it just makes me want to yawn. Maybe I need to install Beryl or Compiz or something.

Anyway. Don’t you feel like punting that meerkat up there?