Need to work on focusing? Try out the Tea Time timer on Launchpad. You can set up set periods of time. Depending on your work style that might include a timer for when you need to look away from your display, how long you should be in ‘flow’ time hacking on your code (vs. answering emails). Neat, clean app. Love it.


$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:teatime/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install teatime-unity


If you’d like to get some nice thumbnails of your OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents, follow these instructions from Webupd8:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:flimm/ooo-thumbnailer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ooo-thumbnailer

Once installed, restart Nautilus:

nautilus -q

Nice and simple!

I know how to mess with fstab and get this new internal backup drive to mount automatically, but I’d like to do it with a GUI. Why? Maybe I’m sick but I like using GUI software. But nothing that ships in Ubuntu can help me there. Instead simply install Storage Device Manager from the Software Center (pysdm). It’s free and has what you need to get this done.

Install via Ubuntu Software CenterStorage Device Manager

After installing, open the tool.

One big design flaw, is that you either have to already know everything about the drive to find it in the Partition List, or else, like me, you hunt around for it. When you select the drive in question you’ll be asked if you want to configure the drive now. Click OK.

If you’re just starting with a drive, here’s a tip I found earlier- if you want the drive to show up in the Devices list in Nautilus, mount it at /media, otherwise use /mnt. I chose /mnt/Backup and clicked Apply. All set! I’m hopeful that this type of functionality will eventually be built into the stock Disk Utility app that ships with Ubuntu, but this works for now.

When I started with Linux everything seemed to mount at /mnt in the filesystem. Later I started noticing everything seemed to be at /media. I took this to be a difference in the way different distributions were choosing to mount drives.

But I just came across this answer on askubuntu where nitsoft explains that /mnt is used for internal drives while /media is intended for removable media. Drives mounted at /media will show up in the launcher and on the desktop. That makes a lot more sense- thanks for the top nitsoft.

Errors- they’re everywhere. No matter how well you coded your app, there will be problems you just can’t foresee. But in some cases you’re bound to realize in advance that there could be a problem. Here are the ways, in order of helpfulness, in which you can handle errors in your app and make it kinder to users:

1. Absolutely Nothing. Don’t even tell the user something happened. After all, if there’s nothing they can do, why worry them about it? Please don’t do this.
2. Hidden Error Console. This makes sense in a web browser for all the messy JavaScript or browser specific code out there that won’t validate. But in just about every other case a hidden console that the user can discover and activate is the coward’s way out.
3. Dialog Window. Pop up a little window that says ‘Sorry, had some trouble.’ This is unhelpful, although at least the user knows not to trust your app anymore.
4. Suggest an Action. In addition to mentioning the error, your app suggests a specific course of action. An example might be that your app expects an image but can only accept one up to a certain size. Someday you plan to add a way to do that within the app, but this is 1.0! So your dialog says ‘Can you try that again with an image that’s only 32 x 32 pixels?’ It’s not perfect but the user knows exactly how to get around the problem.
5. Launch their Next Action. You can see that the Gimp is installed on their computer. Ask them if they want to launch it to resize their image. Even better, give them instructions on resizing it in the Gimp.
6. Ask If You Can Help. You ask them in the dialog if they want you to attempt to resize it for them. If they click yes, use ImageMagick or similar to resize and show them the results to see if they accept the changes. Now obviously them not ever knowing there was a problem because you handled it so smoothly is ideal most of the time. But in some cases, you may be stepping on the user’s creative toes if you assume too much. The other benefit to asking them if you can help is that the user recognizes you’ve helped. So they pay attention to how you do and if it’s done well, they’ll be grateful and trust your app a bit more. If they don’t know you helped, you just don’t get credit.

I recently experienced a few of these in Ubuntu. I had gotten used to MySQL Workbench’s specific error messages without realizing I had. Since installing the Oneiric Ocelot release candidate, Workbench loads so slowly that I fired up the aging (yet generally more usable) MySQL Query Browser. I noticed right away that about the only feedback it gave was that I had run a query. It didn’t mention that it failed and ideas about why, which Workbench does.

An even better example: a few weeks ago, after downloading a compressed file I tried to extract the files and got a little warning dialog. But instead of jut saying ‘Invalid’ or ‘Unsupported File Type’ it asked if I’d like to install the needed files in the Ubuntu Software Center. Yes please! Problem solved.

Where are the problem points in your app? Anything you can do to make it a little kinder?

People that know me well know that switching operating systems is something I enjoy the same way others like to take cruises. I love kicking the tires on a new operating system or desktop environment. Since starting Tuxrocket I’ve see-sawed back and forth between openSUSE and Ubuntu. My first (successful) use of Linux was with Red Hat about a dozen years ago. BeOS was a definite favorite and someday I hope Haiku will be stable (and have apps) for daily use.

Every operating system has good and bad, some having in general more bad than good- I try to avoid that. Despite liking to fiddle around, I do need to actually work on the computer, so I’m pretty careful.

So with that in mind, when I say I’m back to Ubuntu as of about two months ago, you’re probably not surprised. But this time it might stick.

Maybe I’m just getting older, or maybe I see the bar getting raised by available operating systems out there, but I’m unwilling to settle for a set of workarounds or a poorly thought out interface. At the same time, in terms of applications, more than any time in the past, your OS itself doesn’t have to do much- you’ve got the cloud to fill in any gaps.

78 of the 313 active Linux distributions on distrowatch.com right now are Ubuntu derivatives. That’s 25%! It’s hard to tell how much of the Linux user base that is, but Ubuntu has been considered the most popular Linux distribution for some time, with many of the runner-ups being based on Ubuntu. It’s certainly the easiest for which to find software. In some instances when you go to download the ‘Linux’ version, it’s a .deb package meant for Ubuntu. Yes it leaves some distros out in the cold. But for the most part, there’s nothing stopping those distros from packaging the software for their own platform.

So it’s easy to find software in packaged form, so what? Well, it’s one less thing I have to worry about. The same is true for other users that just want to use their system. As a minimum, a Linux software developer needs to provide a DEB package.

But add to that Canonical’s drive to make Ubuntu better. I don’t think they necessarily intended it, but some of the painful choices and stances they’ve taken also mean that they’ve differentiated themselves from other distros in significant ways. Aside from several lesser known desktop environments for Linux, you’ve basically got Gnome and KDE. They’re both great with tons of talented people behind them. Ubuntu wanted to do something different and made Unity. Everyone else jeered or got angry, but Ubuntu stuck to it. I love that.

Not just how Unity works or looks, but that Canonical is doing it. If I install Fedora with Gnome or openSUSE with Gnome, the differences in daily use will be fairly minor. Same thing goes if you install the KDE desktop on them. Yes, some things are tweaked differently, but Gnome and KDE both seem to be out to provide the entire desktop environment (meaning all needed apps) for their users. Which means that more and more, distros are coating their base system with one of those desktop environments and they’re done. I know I’m simplifying.

Ubuntu on the other hand is it’s own creature. Just like an app developer needs something to make his app special, Ubuntu has made choices that make it special. Yes you can put other desktop environments onto it, but by default you get a system and a desktop environment that was made to work together. I think there are a couple of distros you can say that about, but it’s rare. For the most part you have to qualify things. Fedora 15 with KDE or openSUSE 11 with Gnome 3. It’s such a mishmash. I’m using Ubuntu.

If you head over to https://www.mupromo.com/macfonts you can take part in a promotion they’re doing and get over 2000 font files free. Note that I said files. There’s a separate file for each style (e.g. bold, italic) so I don’t think it’s actually 2000 fonts. Here’s what you do- you do not need a Mac. I checked the license in the download file.

1. Go to https://www.mupromo.com/macfonts
2. Create a sign in or use an exiting one to log into MacUpdate’s servers
3. Use the Twitter or Facebook method to advertise their promotion. I opted for the Twitter method, but I dislike that I basically gave them access to publish to my feed, not that I use it much.
4. MacUpdate will automatically add MacFonts to your digital downloads page
5. Download the DMG file to your Ubuntu desktop
6. Go to http://www.catacombae.org/dmgx.html and run DMGExtractor from Web Start
7. Select the DMG file and opt to save the output as an ISO
8. Right click the ISO file and choose ‘Open with Archive Manager’
9. Find the ‘MacFonts’ folder and within that select the ‘Fonts’ folder and extract it
10. You now have 2000+ font files.

I highly recommend that you not install them all. For one thing they’re probably not all that different from some you already have. But also, having a million fonts does incur a performance penalty. When you want to install one, double click the file and it will open a preview of all the glyphs in the file. If you’re sure, click the ‘Install’ button in the right hand corner. Fire up LibreOffice Writer or another app and get publishing!

At the office we have a file server for staff to move files like presentations and documents around. I haven’t used it much since I’m the only web guy and people usually e-mail things straight to me when I need them. But starting next Monday, I’ll have a coworker to help with the websites so I delved into setting up the Windows share.

I’m increasingly frustrated by openSUSE. It seems like so many things that should be simple just aren’t. I know I’ve done this in Ubuntu. Nautilus was unable to browse the network shares at all. mount.cifs is the program that actually ties the Windows® share to your filesystem and doesn’t allow anyone but root to run it.

So I decided to add it to my permanent shares in /etc/fstab. But I don’t want it to be mounted automatically because a) I don’t want the overhead and b) I won’t need it all the time.

After consulting several websites, I found clues here but the breakthrough was when I found this “Cool Solution”. Thanks to that article, the share is now as it should be. Except… I want it to show up in Nautilus in the sidebar to mount at will without even entering a terminal. Anyone?

My instructions from Intrepid turned out to be unnecessarily complex in Jaunty (probably was in Intrepid too). I just had to copy the firmware files from the original CD (still have it), moved them now to my home partition, and add the file reference to the /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf file.

firmware /home/dave/.scanner/prisa/u96v057.bin

All the other instruction seem unnecessary! Yay!

If you don’t know what these are, GNOME and KDE are a bunch of pieces that represent your computer. Things like the buttons you click are provided by these two desktop environments. There are others too. Both GNOME and KDE are acronyms whose meanings mean nothing to normal humans and they are basically two efforts to accomplish the same thing. Efforts have been made to work together a bit better, but they can’t get over their fixations with the letters G and K. Anything GNOME builds has to have a G at the front (they’ve been getting better) and KDE stuff must start with K.

Now, I’ve been a GNOME fan for years. There’s something I can’t quite express that I don’t like about the KDE. Seriously, I just don’t like it. A little while ago, they decided they needed to make some major changes, kind of like Microsoft and Vista except that KDE developers actually made changes. So many changes that they knew some people would have a bad experience but they pressed on. I appreciate that a lot. And KDE is looking fabulous. Enough that when 4.2 came out a couple months back I had to try it.

I added the KDE experimental PPA in Ubuntu and installed. It actually was pretty slick. But I still didn’t want to use it. Still unquantifiable, but I like where they’re going (I think). But installing those packages ruined my normal GNOME desktop. Sound didn’t work and all my pommed provided Mac shortcut keys were broken too. X, the visual display, kept crashing too I believe. Lots of problems.

In the end, I opened the file /var/log/dpkg.log and went through that list to remove everything that KDE had done to my system. There was no malice in this. I will be keeping my eye on KDE going forward, but if it keeps my laptop from running, well, it has to go. One problem I ran into was that I needed to downgrade several packages to the version my desktop needed rather than a later version that KDE needed. In the end it led me to aptitude which is a command line tool similar to Synaptic. Aptitude let me search through installed packages and I was able to select a previous version of a package and mark it for installation. That was perfect since Synaptic would have made me uninstall the package (and it’s dependencies) completely and install it again later. Thank you aptitude.