Moving title bar buttons to the left

I always liked the Mac style of the buttons in the window title bar: LEFT.

Gnome (as well as KDE or XFCE) show them on the right of the window title by default.

Historically, Microsoft could not simply copy all of Macitoshs interface so they "invented something new". Buttons to minimize, maximize and close the window are shown on the right of the title bar.

OK, it's different, but on second thought, it is stupid as well. On a Mac (as on my Linux box) everything having to do with commands is in the top left corner (general menus, window menues, etc.). So why move the mouse to the far left of a page to manpulate window controls?

Cut a long monologue short: How to get the buttons from right to left?

gconf-editor

Search for the key:

/apps/metacity/general/button_layout

Replace the colon right to menu with a comma and place the colon at the end of the line. You can place the colon any place you want to separate left from right buttons.

I have done this on my machines and the theme now looks perfect.

Could Canonical care less?

Happy new year,

I ask myself, is it happy really? After installing 9.10 on most of my machines last year, I run into every little error that one can imagine:

• Left mouse button constantly not recognized (requires restart of GNOME)
• Fan operates at full speed (acpi reports hot components even though machine is quite cool)
• Suspend to RAM takes for ages (3 minutes fan runs on full speed, machines does ... what exactly does it?)
• Resume from suspend brings the machine to sleep (have to wake it up again) every second sleep
• scanning with xsane does not work (scanner still not recognized)
• printing large documents sends garbage to the printer (large documents being 1 page documents with one picture on it) which terminates with CRC errors
• CUPS does not allow canceling and restart of print jobs. Requeue does not work either
• burning CD images is not possible. Brasero eats raw CDs
• OpenOffice does not honor screen settings (like font size). Every other launch, my menus and fonts are microscopic
• OpenOffice screen updates provide spurious artefacts (some lines are drawn only half in height, tables are squeezed, images are cut in half). Page down and up usually resolves this
  
• Launchpad does not accept errors being reported the conventional way. It requires to send error reports from the help menu
• Evolution terminates when sending mails to distribution lists that contain members with quotation marks and without in the same list (no kidding you). Distribution lists cannot be edited if there are similar entries in the address book.
• SD cards are not recognized or automounted on most notebooks
• Screen resolution cannot be changed on notebook screens. External connectors do not allow to choose between screen duplication or extension any more
• Battery charge lasts for less than two hours on my major notebook. The same notebook with an 8.10 image reports 4h36 minutes on a full power pack
  

What annoys me most is that all these issues used to work in previous versions. Some stopped working as early as 6.10, sime as late as 9.10.

Were they reported? YES

Were they fixed? NO

Linux a franchise system

In a franchise system you have an idea about a business. You buy into it, get the proceedings, marketing material and the right to pretend to be part of something bigger. Franchise systems are more or less stringent. In the end, you save on preparing the market and can start the business right away.

A Linux distribution is similar. You decide which distribution you want, install it and live with whatever you got. Take SuSE, get a green GUI and KDE as the engine. You get a load of applications, need it or not. Take Fedore, you get blue and can choose between desktop engine and apps. Take Ubuntu and you can be sure to end up in the brown.

Initially Ubuntu claimed to provide well selected best in breed applications.

I'm not sure this is the case anymore. Telepathy follows Pidgin, PiTiVi follows GIMP, ...

Does Canonical care?

I have read about initiatives at Canonical to reduce the number of open errors. At the time, I was delighted.

Today, I look back at times when errors where treated as what they are: ERRORS.

All of the above mentioned errors (name it issues, problems, shortcomings, what ever) where not there in previous releases. They were introduced as part of system upgrades.

I reported these errors only to have them change from new error to either incomplete (at best), triaged (whatever that means, usually an acronym for: we wont fix it), fixed (interesting, no new version issued), wishlist (printing is more a requirement than a wish for some of us) or next release (which usually comes with recomendations to install e.g. 10.4 pre-alpha).

Frankly: I do not think that Canonical cares any more.
Frankly: I think Canonical lost focus
Frankly: I think we should seriously evaluate alternatives

Could Canonical care less?

I don't think they could care less than they do right now. I wished some executives had the insight that this is neither going to help the open source community nor Linux nor Ubuntu nor Canonical in the long run.

Install HTC Sync on Windows

OK, this is not a Ubuntu issue but I thought it was worth sharing as it touches on Android usage.

If you have trouble installing HTC Sync on a Windows machine (specifically non English system language), here is a fix:

1. Launch the MSI installer. You will run into a dialog that claims DPInst.exe can't find the drivers. In my case the system was a German Windows XP. Drivers were on the hard disk in the program folder path. Due to some hard coding of the access path in the installer, the MSI installer looks under

   C:\Program Files\HTC Sync\Drivers

2. If this path is not available (as was on mine C:\Programme\HTC Sync\Drivers) you can temporarily create a folder

   C:\Program Files\HTC Sync\Drivers

   and copy the drivers into this path.
3. Repeat the installation and be patient. The procedure will execute without errors.
4. You can delete the temporary folder after the installation.
   

Alternatively you can create a link to the driver directory.

Hope this helps.

VMware Workstation 7.0 works

Dedicated followers of this blog will remember my complaints about VMware never being able to provide a working installation.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 I had to reinstall VMware. 6.5.2 did not work, 6.5.3 required a trick to circumvent the hangup in the installation procedure.

Two days after getting 6.5.3 installed, my VMware Workstation informed me that there was a new update out. Should I bother going through another hour of nightmare? I read release notes, nothing special: Windows 7 gaming support at the most. Who needs that?

I was reluctant to install. Finally I got myself up to get it over and done with:

Surprise, surprise.

VMware Workstation took longer than any other installation before but it worked out of the box (or installer bundle).

One gets modest over times: Thank you VMware for providing a software that installs, works and performs. (in fact, this is how it should have been all along).

MSI X320 9.10 installation

I tried Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the MSI X320. It boots.

There are some things that do not work as of today:

1. SD-Card still provide error lists (card driver reports card insert-remove cycle permanently, effectively using 80-90% CPU). Disabling is mandatory in 9.10

2. Wireless does not work. There are no drivers in the media

3. Graphics adapter (or screen) not recognized. There is no poulsbo driver in the media.

This is specifically sad as Canonical announced support for Intels new ATOM processors.

I read some rumors about Intel sublicensing the driver code from RALink (which sounds reasonable because RALink provides source code on their website).

The annoying part: Nothing works out of the box.

HTC Hero with Android

During summer 2009 I had the chance to compare Apple's iPhone side by side to the then new HTC Hero runing Android. After reading so many positive articles I was curious.

Disappointing at first

The HTC Hero comes with a refurbished Android theme. Compared to the rather clumsy looking original, HTC's Sense theme is looks decent. But this is where my first impression left the enthusiastic path. Compared to the iPhone the HTC was no hero at all. It was slow, text entry was cumbersome and full of recognition errors. So I did not buy it then.

Coverage in the media suggested, this was just a problem with preliminary models.

10.000 apps available .. where?

I read this article comparing AppStore to the Android Market. Apple was supposed to offer well around 100.000 apps. Google claims to have more than 10.000's of apps in it's Market Place.

Let's face it: Neither has Apple any more than say 300+ apps that are worth mentioning nore has Google anything more than around 100. You get easily overwhelmed by round robin lists, betas, free evaluation copies and some me2 development templates. But this is nothing I would call a usefull app (please refrain from flaming me on this, I would hate to censor your comments. I do look forward to discussion though).

Second looks

So, why do I comment on Android, HTC and mobile Phones here?

I do see a huge potential in mobile communication. The iPhone currently is the linea ultima in mobile communication and personal assistance. Windows mobile never was a direct competitor but Google's Android has the potential to be a serious contender.

While Apple uses a strict policy of control, Google offers a more open approach. Developers are encouraged to develope for Android, there are several SDK's, plugins for IDE's (ok, I have my personal opinion about Eclipse) and offers lots of documentation and sample code.

All this makes it an opportunity for innovative solutions and development.

Where we are

While it is easy to geting started, most of this sample code enters Market Place by just being renamed (there are approximately 8 notepad apps derived from Googles Notepad app and only Googles version syncs with GDocs). This is unfortunate and tends to scare people away.

To prevent poor apps to be swamping the market place, Google offers a rating system from 0 to 5 stars. It might sound like a good idea, only the fittest apps will survive. Unfortunately the rating is slightly missleading. Personally I could not relate attributed stars to the quality of the program. I found some apps that were rated 5 stars and the comments suggested that the app crashes (which it did on my phone as well).

True Lies

Here are some myths about the HTC Hero:

• The HTC Hero has a specially coated touch screen, that makes it look less smeared as other touch screens:
  The HTC Hero will have a special coating after 5 minutes of use. Before that, I can see nothing special about it.
• The HTC Hero has a scrath proof screen:
  Mine hasn't. Mine had some scratches after 2 days of use (my Motorola RAZR v3 does not have any scratches after 3 years of use)
  
• The HTC Hero comes with its own Interface, HTC Sense. It is vastly improved performance-wise:
  HTC Sense is a theme. It improves the looks of the shabby Android Interface a lot. Other than that, it does nothing.
• The HTC Hero's battery can last more than a week:
  I presume it will if you don't operate it. I have to reload it every other day

Here are some nice features (and immediately remedied):

• The interface lets you operate the phone with intuitive on screen operations:
  However, not all apps support widget presses to open option menus. Sometimes you have to use the menu key. This might be anoying, because some usefull apps only have keyed menus.
• Sense has a beatiful, iPhone like date and time selector:
  Well, Sense does, Android does not. I do not know, why some apps have the nice scroll selector, others you have to type + and - signs.
• I like the Market Place. One can easily purchase apps:
  This was quite a surprise and is a definite positive: I purchased Scan2PDF which I had a free version that embeds watermarks in the PDF. Purchase was straightforward. Entered my credit card, accepted the fee and download started.
  (OK I even found something here: the free version was not removed from the phone, I had to do that manually. There is no security to prevent you from deleting what you just purchased. I also don't know, how to redownload the app in case I reset my phone).
• The phone comes with headset, a nice box and small power supply.
• The phone can be charged with a universal USB cable (with micro USB connector at the phone end).
• The headset jack is a standard jack. One can use any headset they want.
• ROM 1.6 is significantly faster and more accurate than 1.5. I look forward to 2.0:
  (the original ROM from Google cannot be installed, one is required to get a ROM from HTC).

Do I regret?

Giving the potential that lies within Android, I do not regret having purchased the Hero (speech quality is clear, reception good, quality of mp3 acceptable). Some functionality is still not as one would expect. The phone app cannot be adjusted to personal preferences (which I would actually expect on a mobile phone). Mail services are not integrated (there are seperate apps for GMail, IMAP and SMS).

I still think that the tight integration in Googles online services is something to be aware of (I found my contacts in my Google calendar which I never used before). I still have not decided whether to use Google Docs, calendar and other services more intensly. It would make the phone more versatile.

My recommendation: Have a look, take a test drive and don't believe what most people say about Android (or the Hero). It's pretty beta out there.

Ubuntu 9.10 client installation

This refers to Ubuntu 9.10 rc1.

I installed 9.10rc1 on a HP510 (2GHz, 1GB, 1280x800 i945), HPnx8220 (2GHz, 1GB, 1650x1080 ati), HP 8510w (2,4GHz, 2GB, 1920x1200 nvidia).

Installation of the core system went fine. Compiz works on all machines, the Intel chipset being the easiest, NVidia requires proprietary drivers.

Switched from Thunderbird to Evolution.

I don't know why this program gets all the hype. Its buggy (and I mean, it is hardly usable). It's a pain to configure offline synchronization (you have to set this in the Edit -> Preferences -> Mail Account -> Edit -> Receiving Options -> Automatically synchronize remote mail locally and the manually right-click the folder -> Property -> Copy folder content locally for offline operation). It's a pain to configure spam protection (in the above mentioned Account Editor you have to set Check new messages for junk content). It does not read news, it is slow and auto filtering does not work all the time.

Why did I swap: Its default, it has Exchange connectivity (not that I need it) and it syncs my Palm pilot and hopefully my Andriod phone.

Network manager still does not work correctly.

Using a mobile broadband internet connection does not work with wireless access points in reach. If wireless is turned off, the connection works fine the first time, consecutive connections do not adjust the resolver settings.

Used a manual override to fix this.

Another issue is purely annoying: Setting the mobile connection to be available system wide will lock you out of editing the settings. One can delete the connection and set it up afresh. As soon as you set system wide availability, the game starts new. Sometimes I would not even get an error message, the network manager applet would simply terminate.

Canon FB363u still does not work.

It's a shame that this used to work in 6.06 but never after. Several attempts to issue bugs failed. Canonical does not react but still provides drivers for the scanner in it's repositories.

Power management?

In 9.04 the battery on my 8510w lasted nearly 4 hours (3.57). This was ok. I remeber having heard the fan twice.

With 9.10 the battery lasts 2h20mins. Worse, ever since the upgrade the fan spins permanently and really loudly. acpi -t tells me that some device has a temperature of over 75° C. It was never that hot before.

Sound issues.

I installed additional gstreamer libraries (bad and ugly). After that I installed VLC. This seemed to render sound output dead on all my machines. Reinstalling gstreamer bad and ugly libraries solved the problem (don't know why)

VMWare ... the usual ...

I didn't expect VMWare to work out of the box. And VMware did not disappoint me.

Cut a long story short, here is the fix. There is another hint out. I did not find the problems described about mouse grabing problems on any of my machines. As I like simple solutions I followed the one on the vmware community site. It works fine.

CUPSpdf.

I used CUPSpdf a lot to print PDFs out any size. In 9.10 CUPSpdf offers adjustment of the paper size. To the application only A4 or Letter is available. I don't know what the use of bigger paper size is if one can't use it.

So where are the good news?

ext4 works fine. It's fast (boot time about 15 secs, used to be 47 secs with 9.04).
Grub2 is fine. It does what it should and stays out of your way.
firefox 3.5 is snappy.
avant window manager is a pretty add-on that makes my life pleasant and easy.

Pretty little if you ask me.

Worth your while?

If neither Windows nor Mac are an option, then the answer would be: yes.

However the pain and frustration (I still can't connect to my campus network via VPN) accumulates.