Tag Archives: Ubuntu

Upgrades

Posted on by
3

Lots of upgrades for me over the past 24 hours. The most relevant one is that WordPress 2.5 was officially released today, so my blog is now running on 2.5. What does this mean? Well not a whole lot for you readers unfortunately, given that the big changes occurred on the back-end (where I write my posts from). Two things you may notice are the introduction of galleries and Gravatars. I’ll try posting a bunch of photos in a gallery later.

Gravatars are “Globally Recognized Avatars”. To use them, you need to sign up for an account with Gravatar.com. Once you do that, you will need to upload an image that you’d like to use as your avatar (you can trim the image down after you upload it). Your image will be linked to your email address. A lot of websites (like this one), forums and other online services use email addresses to identify you. If they use Gravatars on their site, they’ll be able to display your image just by using your email address. Want to see it in action? Check the comments. A nice feature of Gravatar is that you can manage multiple email addresses and pictures all from 1 account, so there’s no worries if you get a new email address. Plus, if you ever want to change your picture, it gets instantly changed all over the web. Gravatars can also be integrated into email clients and more. Expect this service to take off considerably over the next few months.

The next upgrade probably won’t concern anyone, but I realized that my fonts on the new website weren’t displaying correctly on all browsers. Apparently I’ve been doing font sizes in CSS wrong for a long time. You should use pixels instead of points unless you’re designing something for print. So I changed a bunch of stuff, but hopefully for most people you won’t even notice a difference.

Finally, my big upgrade was installing Ubuntu Hardy Heron (beta) on my new Thinkpad T61 last night. Everything seems to be running super-smoothly so far; I’m really liking it. The “official” release is not scheduled to come out until April 24th, but considering how much I like Ubuntu, I thought it would be good for me to test it out and report any bugs I can find. Yeah right. This was just my excuse to install it a month early :)

Amazon MP3 now officially for Linux

Posted on by
1

I just saw that Amazon MP3 now officially supports Linux. Packages are available for the latest versions of Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE. Sweet! Even though it’s not an ideal free software solution, it’s still exciting to see a service selling DRM-free music to the free software community. Seems like a step in the right direction. I submitted a brainstorm idea about it:


Update: No 64-bit client available (yet?). :(

GetDeb

Posted on by
Reply

Have you ever read about a cool new linux application, but it’s not available out-of-the-box with your current version of Ubuntu? You can go searching online only to find a bunch of instructions telling you how to compile the program yourself. That’s not very helpful if you’re unfamiliar with Linux. I’m leery to compile anything, and I have had this problem with 2 applications so far. Both of these are things that will be available in the next release of Ubuntu, but I want to try them out now. GetDeb is a site that hosts pre-compiled versions of popular applications, which you can download as a .deb file (Debian installer file). You can read more about GetDeb here. The 2 things were pidgin-musictracker and Avant Window Manager.

Free to apply

Posted on by
1

I need to renew my FAFSA for next year so that I am eligible for federal loans for school. I attempted to log in to the FAFSA website to do this, and I was greeted with the following message: “We have detected that you are using a non-certified browser.”

They proceeded to give me a long list of browsers they do support, including Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Mozilla Firefox (my browser). What’s the problem then? Oh, they only support Firefox on Microsoft and Macintosh operating systems. What the hell?! What kind of age are we living in that websites are still placing these kinds of silly browser restrictions on its users, especially a government one? I proceeded to send their Customer Support folks a nice message:

I really feel that it is unacceptable that the FAFSA website only supports browsers in proprietary operating systems (Microsoft and Macintosh). You choose to support Firefox on Mac and Windows, so why not in GNU/Linux? I think as a government website, you should allow users to choose free software if they want to and not lock them into proprietary systems that cost hundreds of dollars. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

Now that I re-read this, I feel like I focused too much on cost, although this is a concern for some using free software. It inherently seems un-American to restrict the public’s freedoms in such a way. In fact, it even seems against the philosophy of FAFSA. After all, how can it be a “Free” Application for Federal Student Aid, in any sense of the word “free,” if you’re required to purchase a proprietary operating system to use it?

Fortunately, their contact form did not have browser restrictions. If you’re offended by this, feel free to let them know.

Free “Powered by Ubuntu” stickers

Posted on by
3

So I’ve been looking into picking up a little decorative art for the new rig since the outside design is kinda plain. I saw today that you can get 4 free “Powered by Ubuntu” stickers by sending them a SASE (hat tip ubuntu.wordpress.com). If you prefer a wider variety and don’t mind DIY, there’s always the Free Software Sticker Book. Or you could buy them at CafePress.