A beerless hack session learning svn, deb packaging, and working in inkscape a little bit gives us a new version of Gitso.

Changes:

• debianized tree structure
• added icon & .desktop file
• made about dialog work again
• remove deprecated menus and replace as ui manager

For those unfamliar, Gitso allows you to remotely connect to someone else’s computer if they run gitso and reach out to you.  It’s all based on reverse vnc connections.

Nuff said, get the .deb!

Update: anyone who downloaded within the first 5 minutes, redownload it

Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon. I tested it back in 2006, since I was quite surprised that Amazon offered such an innovative product.

I found JungleDisk to be a nice and free utility to access your storage space, since Amazon doesn't offer standardized WebDAV access. While I was still hoping that Jungle Tools would release their software as free and open source, they decided to charge a (reasonable) fee of $20 for this software. I lost interest in continuing testing, since I intended to use S3 as backup space and still prefer open source software for critical tasks.

There were some open source projects trying to replace JungleDisk, but I couldn't get one to work reliable enough for a backup solution.

I was really pleased when I read that Steven Harms reviewed s3fs, a FUSE file system for Amazon S3.

Assumed you already own a Amazon Web Service Account, just make sure you've got Git and Python bindings for fuse installed:

Since there is no Ubuntu package of s3fs available, checkout the source code:

To play around with s3fs, just start it up with:

Finally you're able to use your S3 space with GUI-tools.

The s3fs project still considers the software as quite beta, so be warned:

"WARNING You should not yet store any data that you do not have otherwise backed up on s3fs! development on this filesystem is early enough that data loss/corruption may occur!! "

It works quite nice for me. I just wished s3fs could provide some visual feedback when it finishes copying. An integration with gvfs would be great, so I could get an simple progress bar for the copy process.

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I’ve found that loading a Flash applet in Firefox will cause Firefox to lock my whole system’s audio playback. Audio and video in Totem don’t even start to play when this happens. Until Firefox is closed, the only application that can play audio is Flash.

The libflashsupport package will fix this by forcing Flash to work properly with PulseAudio, which is new to Ubuntu 8.04. However, this package not installed by default because it has been know to cause stability problems.

Installing libflashsupport makes things work as expected; I can play Flash and audio from other applications at the same time. I haven’t had any stability problems so far, but your mileage may vary.

Install it from the package libflashsupport (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install libflashsupport

You’ll need to restart Firefox for the change to take effect.

I’ve files a bug at freedesktop: #15877

“Oh really? How speciall…”

It’s indeed a bit more special than a not working device. I suggested to move to Launchpad. Why? Because I think Launchpad is much better than Bugzilla. One of the main reasons is Launchpads(or actually Malones) Bug Watches. A project like freedesktop.org is used in almost every Linux distro and beyond. There are a lot of different bug reports in a lot of different bug trackers filed against packages maintained by this wonderful(yes, it’s an amazing project). Launchpad is capable of keeping track of all those reports. And I’ve always found that Bugzilla isn’t a very good set out bug tracker. It’s just not very clear and you press very easily the wrong button. Anyway, I’ve explained myself detailed enough in the bug report.

One thing I did find that Launchpad misses is the option to add different programs and versions to the bug tracker, something Bugzilla does have. So I submitted an idea to Brainstorm:
. Please vote for it.

And yes, maybe I am lazy. I just find it much easier if I can just add a freedesktop task to a bugreport instead of filing it upstream. But I also think that Freedesktop and its users can profite a lot from moving to Launchpad. So I really hope they’ll do it.

(Forgive the use of the ‘ubuntu’ tag. I know it doesn’t have much to do with Ubuntu, but I just wanted to reach the readers of Planet Ubuntu Users. ;) It can have a lot of positive effects on Ubuntu, so it will surely affect it.)

After being called out on their deviousness at the FCC hearings, you’d think Comcast would try to keep a low profile. Blocking torrent traffic and challenging the idea of net neutrality is definitely a big issue, but we didn’t hear an outcry from the general public. Geeks and freedom lovers were generally leading the charge.

With the recent news of Comcast talking about download caps and overage charges, I wonder if more people will be paying attention or if they’ll only realize too late. Comcast looks to be playing it sneaky yet again here. By proposing a cap at 250GB per month, most of us say, “Who cares? Most people never use that much.” To this, I reply, “…yet.”

In all the years of the internet, you don’t ever hear about people’s bandwidth usage decreasing. While better compression helps, we just manage to push more stuff along this pipe. We’re buying VoIP phones. We download audio and video. We stream audio and even HD video. We “apt-get” in loads every 6 months! You give us more bandwidth and we find ways to utilize that bandwidth! Heck, even our mobile phones can use wifi and voip. All this is wonderful. It is what we’ve all imagined and created the internet to be. Download caps, however high, threaten the great things that the internet becomes. Do no fear clogging the series of tubes. It’s ok if you’ve been fooled by big media. Even South Park was fooled by the fear of the mythical exaflood and I always find them clever.

So as we use all this wonderful bandwidth for more and more utility, that 250GB download cap seems easily within reach. Do you think a corporate entity, such as Comcast, will feel compelled to raise that bar as we all get closer and closer to using that 250GB/month?

If this download cap happens, switch ISPs. Switch in droves. Send a message. I realize many people don’t have an option with such little competition in high speed internet and a 250gb cap is better than dial up, but this is all the more reason that we should switch if we can.

OpenOffice 3 Beta has been released. Some of the new features that caught my eye include: support for new features in the ODF file format, support for opening (but not saving) Microsoft’s new Office file formats, charting enhancements, a cool-looking start center, improved notes in writer, and better picture cropping. Mac users will be glad to hear that OpenOffice now has a native UI on the Mac.

The final version should be out in September, in time for Ubuntu 8.10.

You can try out the Beta in Ubuntu 8.04 without disturbing your existing version of OpenOffice. There are a lot of packages to install, so the easiest way is using the terminal. Here are the instructions:

1. Head to the download page and select the Linux (deb) download. (I’d provide a command to do this from the terminal, but OpenOffice’s page will automatically select the fastest server for you.) The rest of these commands will assume the download is on your desktop.
2. Extract the tar.gz archive:
   tar xzf ~/Desktop/OOo_3.0.0beta_20080429_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz -C ~/Desktop/
3. Install all of the packages in the DEBS subdirectory:
   sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/BEA300_m2_native_packed-2_en-US.9301/DEBS/*.deb
4. Clean up the downloaded files:
   rm -r ~/Desktop/BEA300_m2_native_packed-2_en-US.9301/rm -r ~/Desktop/OOo_3.0.0beta_20080429_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz

OpenOffice 3 doesn’t add any menu items to the Applications menu. You can create one yourself using the menu editor (System->Preferences->Main Menu). Launch OpenOffice with this command:
/opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice

The first time it’s launched, OpenOffice will ask you to register. Clicking Cancel will exit the application, so you’ll need to go through the steps. You’ll be greeted by the new welcome area:

Inside the writing component, it looks and works much like 2.4, in this screenshot I am testing the new notes feature:

I wouldn’t yet do any serious work with this beta release, but I haven’t had any issues with it so far. OpenOffice 3 is looking good!

Today, the Finnish Linux User Group[1] announced their yearly Linux Contributor Award. The Winner: Ubuntu Suomi! Translating from the press release (Finnish PDF).

The volunteer community has taken care of translations, arranged events around the country, promoted Linux and Free Software to legislators and, above all, provided user support through its web forum.

Mirv accepting the prize.
(Photo from the ubuntu-fi blog)

Congratulations to our most excellent LoCo Team!

Two honorable mentions were awarded as well. One was given to the Linux.fi wiki. The choice further emphasizes the great importance that peer-provided support and documentation has for the success of Free Software. The other one went to Monty Widenius, the founder of MySQL. Yes, in case you didn’t know, he is yet another Finn helping build the tools for our road to software freedom. :) Altough MySQL is not directly related to LInux, as one of the pillars of the near-ubiqutuous LAMP stack, its success is very much tied to that of Linux.

Cheers to these Honored Ones too!

[1] Yes, there is only one. It is a small country :)

For a few days I've been fighting with what appeared on the outside to be libc6 halting my ability to make a pbuilder build environment. The bug post is over at Debian (#479202). Turns out that something was wrong in perl and a patch has since been released. As of 12:08 yesterday (Ubuntu archive time) the beautiful 5.10.0-9.1 version has been released and synced into Ubuntu Intrepid repos. Mmmmmm, I can finally make Intrepid environments!

I wasn't initially able to create Intrepid environments once libc6 was working, I had to update to them from gutsy's. The fix to this is to use the hardy backported debootstrap package. There is a few ways you can do this yourself.

Method 1 (Easier): Download the package from your favorite archive and use dpkg to install it:

$ wget http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/d/debootstrap/debootstrap_...
$ sudo dpkg -i debootstrap_1.0.9~hardy1.deb

Method 2 (More involved): Enable the backports mirrors in your /etc/apt/sources.list file (optionally set up pinning). This method enables the entire backports repository and may not be preferred behavior.

Start by adding an entry to the backports repository at your favorite mirror and then update your package database

$ sudo su -c "echo 'deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-backports main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
$ sudo apt-get update

You should now see 1.0.9~hardy1 as a candidate when you run apt-cache policy debootstrap. As per usual sudo apt-get install debootstrap will bring it up to the latest and greatest version possible. And that's what we want -- it will install a pbuilder script into /usr/share/debootstrap/scripts which can then let you specify intrepid create targets from the command line.

$ sudo pbuilder --create --distribution intrepid

See the official Ubuntu Help Site for a more detailed description of backports and enabling pinning such that packages are installed from the main/universe/etc repository over the backports unless specified, or check out the official Ubuntu Wiki on pbuilder for a howto on building packages in a clean test environment.

Last Saturday I received a telephone call from the Ubuntu UK podcast team. We had a chat, it was fun. Parts of our conversation can be heard in their latest podcast, S01E05 - Everybody Come Aboard. I have just listened to the podcast myself and apart from the feature with me, it's another great show :)

I would like to say thank you to the guys for allowing me on the podcast. I can now place a tick next to the item, "Appear on a podcast" on my list of things to do before I die :) Oh, and thanks also for using a picture of Daisy, an unexpected, but pleasant bonus — Daisy will no doubt grin from ear to ear when I show it to her :)

URL: http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2008/05/07/s01e05-everybody-come-aboard/

Tags: podcast, ubuntu

I was thinking the other day about Brainstorm and upstream interaction. The fact is, lots of ideas belongs to upstream projects, so how should we help them to use these ideas?

Adding a new “software” field, and making something like [project_name].brainstorm.ubuntu.com would not require too much effort, but we can’t expect upstream projects to use one distro’s brainstorm website as their idea tracker.

So I had a crazy idea. What about a decentralized Brainstorm?

A Brainstorm website would be able to “connect” to another: both would have to validate the “connection”. Once the “connection” is established, the Brainstorm website would regularly update a given subset of its data from the other. New ideas would be downloaded. New votes would be added. Globally, data is synchronized: a same idea will have the same nb of votes, comments, on all Brainstorms.

Example: Let’s say we have the Firefox project Brainstorm, the Ubuntu Brainstorm and the Red Hat Brainstorm. The Firefox Brainstorm have quite some success, but quite a lot of Firefox-related ideas are voted/discussed on the others Brainstorm. Also, the firefox folks want the input of both average users (Ubuntu) and enterprise user (Red hat). So the FF Brainstorm “connects” to the two others Brainstorm. The two distro Brainstorms download the current FF ideas, and display them. They get votes, comments. Then the FF Brainstorm regularly get the “results” from the distro Brainstorms and cumulate the results. The FF Brainstorm as well send its results to the others ones. In the end, the same idea on different Brainstorms are identical.

On the security side, you would keep the control of your Brainstorm website: you would only connect to others Brainstorm instances you trust.

Quite crazy idea, I agree. Lots of changes needed, I agree. I wonder if it’s worth the work involved. Anyone would be interested by this?

At the moment, for an average user, it’s pretty hard to install third party software. Why?

• The software is not shipped with the distribution package format : E.g. the software is bundled in tar.gz archives with custom command line installation scripts (such as the very new VIA Linux drivers).
• When it is shipped with the distribution package format, it can still be unfriendly: When you are asked to enter cryptic commands in a console as root to add a repository, you know something is wrong.
• When it is shipped with the distribution package format as a direct package download, you don’t get updates like you do with repositories.

While we can’t do much for the first problem, I’ve seen several projects trying to fix the two last problems: AptURL, AptThirdParty and one-click-installer. (I will not talk here of PackageKit, which does not seem to specifically cover the third party install issue). Some people are against those projects, citing security concerns : but I don’t think the statu quo where users are asked to run commands they don’t understand as root is any better!

But first, let’s see this from a user point of view. What are the use cases involved here?

1. Patou see a great software on a website. He clicks on the “install now” button. The software was not installed: It gets installed.
2. Patou see a great software on a website. He clicks on the “install now” button. An old version of the software was installed: It gets upgraded.
3. Patou see a great software on a website. He clicks on the “install now” button. An newer version of the software was installed: It gets downgraded, after a warning.
4. Fred want to uninstall a software. He goes to the software manager and remove it.
5. An update of one of Bébert’s installed software is installed. Bébert gets notified and can launch the upgrade.

Abstracting from all the packaging system mechanisms, that’s the basic level of freedom I’d like to have as a user (5. is a plus).

1) and 2), and consequently 5) and 4) are the use cases trying to be solved by the above projects: optionally a repository gets transparently added, and the software is installed. Software updates are tracked, and it’s easy to uninstall the soft.

The 3) use case seems to be forgotten in all the above projects, and that bothers me. Please don’t put artificial constraints! The common dogme is that new versions are always better. That’s unfortunately not always true.

AptThirdParty seems the most promising project to me. Unfortunately there is no trace of its current status. Now let’s hope one of these projects get mature and cover all these use cases soon enough, for a much better third party software installation experience… (I know I am oversimplifying things, but I didn’t want to knock out with a long dissertation)

Randomly while browsing Firefox will stop responding for a few seconds and recover. This can happen a few times in a row while my hard drive works so furiously that other applications also slow down. I haven’t found a reliable way to reproduce the problem, but today I did get around to finding the bug report.

An update should be arriving soon that will fix this problem. In the meantime, if you’re affected you can try a workaround. [update] The update has arrived this morning.

In Firefox, click Edit->Preferences. In the Security section, uncheck the two boxes for attack site and forgery warnings. Close Firefox. Open your file browser to ~/.mozilla/firefox/[profile], where [profile] will be a short random string of characters. Delete any files with names starting with urlclassifier.

Be advised that this workaround will disable Firefox’s warnings for phishing and malicious websites. Re-enable the warnings when the update to the package xulrunner-1.9 arrives, which should fix the issue.

The problem is caused by Firefox’s urlclassifier database, which can get very large. Because the cache for this database is too small, there’s a lot of disk and CPU usage at certain times when accessing it.

I’ve done the workaround, but it’s hard to say whether it’s working because the problem comes and goes randomly.

[update] The update hasn’t fixed the problem for me. However, I’ve had only one brief random freeze, so maybe the issue has been minimized.

Some interesting thoughts about Launchpad by Martin F. Krafft. Martin is basically saying that Canonical got it wrong with Launchpad, not because of its closed source nature, but because they missed an opportunity to create a decentralised system:

What we need is something as slick as Launchpad, and thousands of instances thereof, which all peer with each other, automatically. The information would automatically be mirrored wherever it’s referenced, so the entire cloud would be highly-available and failure-proof.

I agree that this would be great, in theory, and I look forward to testing the system soon, not :) Seriously though, being a member of the Launchpad Beta Testers team and having used many of Launchpad's features, I am not sure that Martin's proposal is even remotely possible — is it possible to maintain a complex project such as Ubuntu without a centralised project management system?

Tags: launchpad, rants, ubuntu

The last few days I noticed a massive slowdown of Firefox 3.0b5 on Ubuntu Hardy. I even started using Opera, since I thought it might be bigger problem.

As it turns out, my history kept data from the last 90 days. Combined with Firefox' new history search feature, it was nearly impossible to use the browser at all. I'm unsure whether I did change this value, or if it's a default setting for Firefox on Ubuntu. Fortunately, this issue is really easy to solve.

While searching for the reason of this behavior, I found a really good entry in Mozilla's knowledgebase. If you experience similar slowdowns, just have a look at this page.

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Get your feeds via Jabber, Ubuntu ones, at least.

USAGE

First of all, add it to your contact list: bot@ubuntuweblogs.org

From this point on, you're an anonymous user, with the following available commands:

rss-list - lists all available feeds
rss-additem - here you can add links (to the original post) on your notifications
rss-delitem - deletes the link from the notifications
rss-start - starts 'watching' the feed you specify for updates
rss-stop - do you really need a descripion?

Example:

After adding the bot, you want to monitor UbuntuWeblogs.org, and receive links on all notifications.

rss-list, this gives you the name of the feed you want
rss-start ubuntuweblogs.org, starts 'watching' the Planet
rss-additem ubuntuweblogs.org link, receive the notifications with links

The bot will check for updates every 10 minutes.

Available Feeds:

To get a complete list of available feeds: rss-list

SOFTWARE

The bot is powered by Gozerbot.org; a great piece of software with excellent people developing it. Thanks dunk_ and Knorrie!

With the Fonty Python font manager, you can organize your fonts into groups (called “pogs”), and install and uninstall these groups when you need them. When a pog is not installed, you won’t have the fonts it contains filling up your menus.

I’ve written previously on installing fonts in Ubuntu.

The latest version of Fonty Python is available in Ubuntu 8.04. Install it from the package fontypython (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install fontypython

First, you’ll need some font files to test out. There’s a list of sources on this page, and I also like dafont.com. Store your font files in any directory, but keep them in one place so Fonty Python can find them. Don’t install the fonts, the application will take care of that for you.

Start Fonty Python from Applications->Graphics->Fonty Python. I get an error message starting the program, but it seems to work fine.

On the rightmost pane of the window, you can select font sources. Under the Folders tab, select the folder you put your fonts in. The fonts found in the selected folder should be listed in the center.

On the leftmost pane, click New Pog, give your first pog a name, and select it. Click on fonts to select them, and click the Put fonts into [pog name] button to add them to the selected pog. Click Install Pog when you are finished, and the fonts should show up in applications after they are restarted. You’ll need to uninstall a pog to edit it.

Wondering how Fonty Python works? If you look in your ~/.fonts directory, which is used for loading fonts for the current user, you’ll see that links are put there pointing to your installed fonts.

Hello everybody! This will be my first post syndicated on Planet Ubuntu and I thought I should take this opportunity and use it to introduce myself.

My name is Tim Bielawa (though to most I'm just 'Shaggy'), I'm a student at West Virginia University (seriously, it is a state, I promise!) and I'm majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics. My day job is working for the Computer Science Department as a Systems administrator (amongst other things) supporting our workstations and ever growing infrastructure. Oh, by the way, all of which (servers included) runs Ubuntu :). We're in the process of migrating all the workstations to Hardy now and by July first (mark that date to come and party in Morgantown, WVU for our release party!) rolling out with Hardy on the entire infrastructure.

I started with Slackware (9 through 11), and jumped between Debian (briefly), and Gentoo up until last Fall/Winter 2007 when I started this new job. Using Ubuntu everyday got me hooked, I rather like it :). I must admit, it took a while to get over my guilt issues of not having to ./configure && make && make install anymore -- it felt like cheating -- as if Linux was suddenly too easy and no longer a challenge to use.

I wonder how many new Ubuntu Linux users even know what that means (./configure && make && make install), or even better -- will ever roll their own kernels by hand? The less the better I think, because it means we're doing a good job of making Ubuntu the most user friendly community driven Linux distro out there.

Getting into this new position, working towards being a MOTU, has put the challenge and joy back into my Linux experience. Instead of compiling software for my box I'll be packaging it so it can work on anyones box, which if you ask me, is far more stimulating and most of all -- rewarding.

Before my introduction post gets too long I'll finish up. My goal for a job outside of college is to develop modeling software and/or graphics rendering engines. Basically if I don't turn into another John Carmack I'll be making a better MATLAB or Mathematica. To facilitate this goal I thought that joining the MOTU Science Team (though I wouldn't dare call myself a MOTU yet) would be the most logical decision. This way I'll be focusing around the kind of software I'll be writing one day.

I put this blog together to document my steps towards being a full fledged official MOTU and to maybe even help encourage others pursuing the same goal. I've got a patch submitted already for slocate (#155061) which has gotten great comments so far (Thanks to James Calver for his kind words. I'm glad my efforts helped you figure out bug fixing better!) and a new package (Bibus) up on REVU for inclusion in Intrepid.

After I read the post about the release of VirtualBox 1.6.0 I suddenly combined it with my desire to test Ubuntu’s upcoming release(already in Octobre!): Interpid Ibex. If I would install it in VirtualBox I could test it without screwing up anything at my system, for which I was afraid because I remembered a bug report a while ago about a pre-aplha release screwing the partition table. So I installed virtualbox-ose and the kernel modules which are in the repositories of hardy, restarted and tried to install 7.10, which I wanted to use as a start system from which I could update to intrepid. But I got an error message that it couldn’t find /dev/vboxdrv. I didn’t know what had caused that, since I did install the module and even restarted(which shouldn’t be necessary, actually).
After searching for the solution for a while, including several failed tries to compile the kernel module from the source provided by the repositories I found out that it was caused by a difference in kernel version. The kernel I was using was version 2.6.24-17, but the VirtualBox modules were 2.6.24-16. Confused I asked at #ubuntu-kernel @ freenode why they didn’t update the VB modules, because this could cause a lot of trouble for business users. I was asked if I had enabled ubuntu-proposed, which I have to test new versions early, and was told that that was the problem. It turned out that the modules were in the building queu at Launchpad and should be available within a few hours.
So I’m going to check tomorrow and tell you about my first impressions of intrepid! :P

Well, if I have time. I shouldn’t forget that I’m turning 15 tomorrow. It would be a bit sad for the guests if I’d sit behind my computer all the time. ;)

Maybe you’ve already seen three Brainstorm buttons in the sidebar at the left, but maybe not, when you’re reading my blog using another tool. They’re from my three latest ideas I placed at Brainstorm and I thought that they deserved a little bit more attention. Here they come:

idea #7931: Merge configuration tools

When you open the System menu from your GNOME panel you’ll see a lot of configuration utilities. There are two subcategories: Preferences and Manage. The first one is mainly for settings a user can do and the second is mainly for settings that require root permissions. A lot of those applications are tiny, don’t provide a lot of options and cover the same subject as other configuration utilities do, but of course provide other options. This can be confusing for new users and it can be tricky to find the right program.
What I suggest is to merge all tools that cover the same thing into one application, like they did with Appearance. And since GNOME 2.22 introduced the Unlock buttons it doesn’t matter if the options require root permissions or not, they can all be put together.

idea #7930: Graphical driver selection

In the previous release of Ubuntu there was a nice tool called displayconfig-gtk. It still exists, but isn’t in the menus anymore, since a lot of its functionality is only needed for people whose monitor isn’t recognized good or have other problems with their screen. One of the functions was a tab where you could select the display driver.
I suggest to execute this idea with the previous idea and include in the program that manages the Screen an option to select the right driver. Drivers that are recommended will be marked e.g. green, drivers that will work too marked e.g. yellow and drivers that don’t work e.g. red. When you choose a driver the things that are required to be executed(config file changes, commands needed to be run, modules needed to be enabled, drivers needed to be installed) to use that driver will be automatically done.

idea #8113: Overview of all teams

When you want to help with Ubuntu you’ll probably start at the Get Involved page at www.ubuntu.com. There you can find an overview of different sections in Ubuntu. But it doesn’t show how complex and large the Ubuntu Community actually is. There are a lot of teams working on producing a great release twice a year and supporting users. It’s hard to find a good overview of what teams exist. To make it easier for new people to see I suggest to create a page where all teams(LoCo teams, dev teams, support teams, maintaining teams, Ubuntu Members/Council/Technical Board, etc) are listed with their task and joining requirements(if you can join at all). This way people can understand the community much better and look for something they like to do.

I hope all of these ideas will be implemented of course, but I would also be happy if only one would be used. I ask you to vote at them in order to make my dreams come true! But provide also feedback!

(Aren’t you a bit pathetic when your dreams consist of three ideas for an OS? :P)

One of the major new features for OpenOffice 2.4 on Linux is the 3D capabilities for Impress, the presentation component. The new transitions are not part of the default install, but as an extension. If you’re an Impress user, you may be interested in installing it.

The 3D transitions extension is available in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories. Click this link to install openoffice.org-ogltrans, or run the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-ogltrans

The package will add 14 new 3D transitions to OpenOffice Impress. The two I find the most impressive are Rochade and Turn around, which both look like something out of Compiz Fusion.

Other than Ubuntu, Puppy Linux is probably the only Linux distribution I follow. I have been a Puppy fanboy [yeah, I do not mind admitting it!] for a long time, so I was thrilled to read about the latest release, version 4.00. From the release notes:

Finally it has happened! The last 'official' release of Puppy was version 3.01, released October 15, 2007. Version 4.00 is happening 6 months later, which is an incredibly long time considering the previous frenetic schedule of releases. Anyway, here it is: the live-CD file is 'puppy-4.00-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso' and is just 87.1MB. Download from http://puppylinux.com/download/.

Also from the release notes, and something that I am particularly pleased with:

GTK1 and Tcl/Tk abandoned. The decision was made to go for a totally GTK2-based system. This meant that there could be a consistent user-interface throughout and further reduced the size.

I am downloading the live-CD as I type. I will give the system a run tomorrow night, and if I get time, I will post with my initial thoughts/feedback.

Tags: linux, puppy, ubuntu