First of all if you don’t know what Microblogging is, and you’re lazy to type Wikipedia into you’re location bar here’s the link to the the entry about it. Long story short, it’s basically some sort of online community where you can post public and private messages usually of 140 characters, the size of an SMS. It depends on your encoding, and responses on services like jaiku can be much longer, but that’s just to get you sort of an idea what it’s about.

This cap of characters your able to use is already the first problem you’ll probably face using Pidgin as you have absolutely no idea how many characters you already typed into the input field while the web sites of the services themselves usually show some sort of counter next to the input area or field. This brings us to our first plugin:

ConvCharCount

It’s kind of a no brainer to guess what it does. It counts the characters contained within the input area of Pidgin and shows the count on the right side of the bar where the emoticons, formatting and the like are located. Get it here

Pidgin identi.ca/Twitter Status

These two plugins set your status message to whatever your last dent on identi.ca or tweet on twitter was, only use one at the same time. Installation is quite easy, on Linux and you should already have everything you need to run them, on Windows however you’ll probably need to install ActivePerl. Which isn’t uncommon and you need for a lot of Pidgin plugins. Anyway here’s the like for the identi.ca plugin and here’s the one for the Twitter one.

Twitter in your profile

It puts your last tweet inside your protocol’s profile at a position you defined. You can put all your usual stuff in there and tell the plugin where it has to put the text of your last tweet. Personally, I don’t see a use for this. Is there anyone who even pays attention let alone looks at profiles on instant message services? Well, if your part of such a group this is probably for you. It works and it does what it promises. Link

Microblog-Purple

This is the one plugin you should probably keep an eye on or maybe even start using it today. I currently only supports Twitter, but other services like Jaiku and identi.ca are planned for the future. When Twitter dropped it’s xmpp support a lot of people were sort of pissed as they couldn’t use pidgin anymore to post tweets. Ping.fm already existed at this point which some did not want to use following their Stallmanian ways. Microblog-Purple, when activated adds another protocol to your account management: TwitterIM. After you gave it your password and account name you can start writing and reading tweets. Link

I know that there are a lot of desktop application like Twitux, Twhirl and Gwibber out there which do an amazing job and which I used for a while and appreciate all the work that was put into them but I prefer to not run one gazillion applications at the same time, and if Pidgin does the job. Why not?

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Preparation

For your first try you should get a picture with one spot that you want to be coloured, and with a not too complex outline. A simple blossom for example. It is very important that the picture is converted to PNG and that it isn’t JPG. Why? Because JPG won’t work with transparency which we’ll use for the effect. So if the picture is JPG you can use the GIMP itself to convert it. Just open it and save it as a PNG file, easy.

Let’s get started

Open the picture, or yet better a copy of it in the GIMP. Backups are priceless.

Go to the layer dialog and duplicate the layer containing the image. In case you can’t find it, it’s one of the small buttons at the bottom of the dialog. This new layer will be our grey part of the picture.

Go to: Colors –> Colorify, select white and press OK

You should now have a grey layer in front of you coloured one, you can probably can guess what’s our next step by now: Cutting the front layer, so the coloured behind it is visible. Turn the opacity to 90%, so it’s easier to see where the edges are but remember to turn it back to 100% once we’re done.

Cutting

We’re doing this in two steps, first one is using the path tool to get most of the layer cut roughly inside the objects form. Just click around the edges with the path tool, and use create a lot of nodes so you can already get a lot of the work done before we move to the next step. When you covered the outline and press <ENTER> to create a selection from the path, now press <DELETE>.

Now the last step. Select the erase tool, zoom in <+> and erase the grey layer on the edges, not outside of them and that’s it. Quite easy, wasn’t it?

Picture Wild Rosa gallica Romania by Bogdan

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#1 Wait for the release before praising it

It seems there is some kind of mass hypnosis going on, every single tech site seems to be exited about what Redmond will bring to live a few months from now, forgotten is the Vista disaster, forgotten all broken promises of the Past. The OS isn’t released, it’s not done and has never been used in productive Environments by the average user. You don’t know yet how users will react, if adaption will increase compared to Vista and if users forgot about all the bad publicity it brought with it.

#2 Independence

Companies choose Linux because they want to be independent of one supplier, no longer be forced to change the way the work depending on how their OS wants them to but to make your OS work the way you want. While home users probably never touch the source code of any application they use on their PC, this is something larger companies can effectively use to create their own slick application and operating system for their own needs. Windows 7 will bring some modularity, but you will still have to use Microsoft’s choice of components not your own. More and more public institutions, especially outside of the United States don’t want to depend on foreign controlled infrastructure any longer and are slowly but steadily making progress adapting Linux systems. The German foreign ministry and the French Gendarmerie are good, prominent examples of this.

#3 cost of transition

One of the killer arguments against the use of Linux has always been the cost of transition to Linux powered solutions from the ones from Redmond. You had to train your employees, buy new service contracts with Linux companies, maybe get some new hardware and so on. Nonetheless a lot of companies and even home users made the switch, got used to the new environment and build upon in. The cost of transition works both ways, reverting back to solutions from Redmond will cost a lot of money in form of licenses, re-development of your own applications, training employees etc and of course your loss of independence as mentioned in #2 which will lead to even more cost.

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I’ve never seen selling shrink-wrapped packages of free software as a workable idea.

An idea was born

In the late 90s and early years of this millennium there were a couple of Linux distributions like Mandrake (now Mandriva) that created the first Linux distribution primarily for home desktop users, while not much of anything worked back then they still had this idea of a business model. A business model that wasn’t producing much of a revenue but at least, they didn’t stop trying. The Linux Desktop was born back then, and people started to realise that there is the possibility that one day people might actually consider using Linux for non-server, or non-scientific tasks.

One who had this vision of a Desktop for everyone, a Linux for human beings was of course South African Entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth. In 2004 he formed canonical, a company to finance, promote and support Free Software and like we all know created Ubuntu Linux, a distribution with the goal to bring Linux to your home based on Debian.

The new kid on the block

So, there was another distro in the wild that no one would care about, so what made Ubuntu as popular as it is today, the most popular Linux distribution?

Marketing, and some good ideas. Using Debian and with it vast repositories of software was one of those good ideas Debian at this point was the  epitome of software freedom and Ubuntu inherited this brand along many of its users that liked the idea of a distribution centred around the desktop, me being one of them.

Selling the cow

But the most brilliant move that was made was shipping Ubuntu for free around the world, right at your doorstep. People didn’t have to download the ISO-images, they got a nice looking pair of CDs and they were completely sold to this idea of Linux for humans, for everyone and getting it for free.

What followed was an uproar in the geeky, techy parts of the Internet, people heard about this new kid on the block. Blogs, news sites and forums talked about it, and soon everyone knew about Ubuntu, a new brand was born.

This huge resonance was something that other desktop distribution could not reproduce, perceived as old and boring, without a millionaire behind the scenes paying for the shipping, and offering everything they offered for free. They just could not compete with that.

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Where do I open the Internet?

When you think about the buyers, there are three different kinds of them like those who know it is Linux and they’re buying it because of this, those that are buying it because they have no idea what Linux is and lof course those people who don’t even know what Windows is. I think that especially the last group is part of those people who would be the most favourable target for  the deployment of one, familiar looking interface but they are also those who’re most likely not returning the device once they figured out how to use those pretty neat interfaces like the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

The Linux community should in my opinion focus on making the experience using one of those netbooks as easy as possible but not by copying others simply for the reason to create the illusion of running a familiar OS.

No choice without knowledge

Spreading Linux shouldn’t only be about, spreading Linux, it should be about increasing the size of the Community, increasing the awareness about why we are not Windows, why we are not OSX and because people should be able to make an educated decision about whether to use it or not. Their is no real choice when people do not know what they are using and there will not be any choice if we fool them.

The Ubuntu Netbook Remix is one step in the right direction, giving users an easy, minimalistic yet powerful interface for the small screen real estate netbooks have to offer without giving up its Linux identity. We are not there yet, and the next year won’t be the the year of the Linux netbook and it certainly won’t be the year of the Linux desktop, but always try to remember: It’s not the point.

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This might seem a little over the top but in my experience it’s really the only way that really works most of the time without using non or bad working wrappers.

The Reason

TeamSpeak2 uses the Open Sound System “OSS” which got, let’s just say some issues with mixing, and people have to use workarounds to get it working together with games, audio players, wine. Most of them using ALSA or even OSS themselves. Those workarounds are using so called wrappers like alsa-oss “aoss”, or padsp and tweaking configuration files.

The Result

In the end, you get it working only to get to listen to the stuttering voices of your fellow TeamSpeak users or  greeting them with crackling noises or echo sounds in the background of your own audio input. If, big if, you get it to work at all.

The Solution

Do yourself a favour, don’t spend hours looking for solutions that won’t work, and don’t cause yourself or others headaches:

• Spend 15€ on a second sound card or 40€ on a decent USB headset
• Run TeamSpeak without a wrapper and do without any other sounds
• TeamSpeak is proprietary, get your buddies to use Mumble/Murmur (it’s better anyway)

Or wait for the overdue release of TeamSpeak3, which will use ALSA. It will still be proprietary, so you should really try getting your buddies to use Mumble.

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Using apt-url Appnr gives you, and especially newcomers to the Ubuntu world the opportunity the opportunity to find what you’re looking for quickly in all of it’s AJAX-y glory. Appnr requires no sign-up and you don’t need to install software not featured in the Ubuntu repositories for it to work.

It shows screenshots and videos of some of the packages and even fetches reviews about the package or application in question from blogs or websites.

It does remind me a little of my own old idea of the meta packaga marketplace, tracking the popularity of packages in a web2.0 way, but for this little piece of usefulness credit goes to Akira Ohgaki

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It is of utmost importance to rise people’s awareness of these issues, in the end it’s their choice but without knowledge, there is no choice. Richard Stallman might often seem radical in his ideas, compared to other ideological leaders of the Free Software movement but he has a point and he’s being consistent. The Movement needs vocal people like him to point in a direction and to rise awareness of ongoing issues in a non free world. However leading us there is the job of pragmatics, like Torvalds, Shuttleworth or De Icaza.

Stallman might not be someone doing great in front of Cameras, looking like the cliche of a geek living in his mother’s basement, but people do listen to what he says and people respond loudly to controversial statements he makes, proving his importance to the movement.  Arguing about whether or not software, or wisdom should be free is almost impossible without mentioning his name or what he believes in.

A Free Software world may be out of reach at this point and in a time when cost reduction has become the driving force behind spreading Free Software instead of ideology in one man stands up to point at the right direction, so the movement doesn’t forget about its goals and its responsibilitto the people.

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original picture by Elke Wetzig, CC-SA-BY 2.0 Germany

As it turns out Stallman doesn’t like web applications, he doesn’t like them at all and says that using GMail and its kind is “worse than stupidity” and just as bad as proprietary software.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control … It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenceless. You’re putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

The FSF itself created a license for web applications called AGPL which is used by projects like identi.ca, so this little rant really surprised me. Why do you create a license for some kind of software if it is evil anyway?

I could agree with Stallman on many issues but clearly not on this one. While it is true that we don’t have control over our data, applications aren’t available on every PC, obviously not everyone is able to set up his own server and/or build personal web applications. I run a couple of applications namely irssi, mutt, ejabberd and my webdev environment on my personal server right next to me and Ubuntu does a great job helping you to set all of those things up, but you simply can not expect all people to learn how to set up servers, bother with ports and ips and dynamic dns. This isn’t Sparta but it still is madness.

What’s next? Should I produce my own electricity, drill for water and get some cows living in my flat? I really don’t think so.

Anyway, if now you’re concerned about your data and think about hosting your own services and apps you may take a look at Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Jeos

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As Lifehacker is reporting CodeWeavers ported Chromium, the OpenSource project behind Google Chrome to Mac and Linux. I’m not too surprised as it was already known to run in Wine and I’ve know idea why CrossOver as a tweaked, proprietary version of Wine shouldn’t be able to run it as well. They probably just ported it for the sake of it.

Long story short, they offer some debs for Debian/Ubuntu, so people who didn’t try to install Chromium via wine because they were afraid of some little terminal action before now have the chance to get a look at what the Windows world was so excited about without any hassle.
It doesn’t run very well, not well at all when compared to a natively running version of Chromium on Windows. It’s enough for you to get a short glimpse of it and you really should not use it as your default browser anyway as it isn’t updated automatically which isn’t because of CrossOver but because Chromium simply lacks this functionality right now.

It should be noted that while this port is free as in beer it is not free as in speech as proprietary code of CrossOver is used.

Link:CrossOver Chromium

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