Category Archives: Ubuntu

Spreading free software in Windows environments

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When you think about free software you probably think about Linux and other open source operating systems but free software isn’t limited to free operating systems.

Free software applications on Windows are on the rise, most prominent examples being Firefox and OpenOffice.org and everyone can tell they’re not the only ones. Other applications like Pidgin, VLC Player and FileZilla are getting more popular as well. Reasons for this may different and functionality is an important factor but probably not the most important for many of their users

The most important factor are word-of-mouth recommendations by friends and colleagues. Average Joe does not read tech related blogs, he does not browse the depths of SourceForge and he does not care or know about the difference of licenses and open or closed source software. Average Joe’s going to use the software that either came with his PC, or what friends or other people he knows tell him about.

People who want to spread free software may find themselves in an ethical dilemma: Is an Average Joe who’s using free software without knowing what free software actually is, just as valuable as a user who does know what it is and uses it? Is it alright to tell people to use free software, when they don’t understand what it is and there may be better closed proprietary alternatives?

Tango-like rss-feed icon

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The other day a friend of mine asked me to make a RSS-icon following the tango icon design guidelines.
He really much likes the look and feel of the original tango icon set but they got a major flaw. They are released under a GPL-incompatible CC-license.

Personally I think it’s a little odd that the probably most used icon set in the open source world isn’t compatible with the most used license. At least the colour-palette is public domain and therefore GPL-compatible and everyone is free to follow the naming and design guidelines.

Anyway, here’s the icon I made.

tango_rss.tar.gz

problem using okular

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Today, while using Okular I found something which really annoyed me. While not being a showstopper it is definitely something which isn’t working as it should be. For those of you who don’t know Okular. It’s KDEs document viewer, used to display pdf-files for example.

About the problem: Okular has a sidebar with the option to show all pages of a document in thumbnail view. This thumbnail view features a box which represents the field of view in the main area of the application and which you can drag around. Now here’s the problem, you can’t drag this box onto another page in the thumbnail view because every thumbnail has a border which acts as a barrier for you dragging pointer. These barriers however do not restrict the box itself in its movement. You can drag the box ‘into’ the barrier and grab it from the other side.

I made a short video and put it on Youtube in order to help illustrating the problem.

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Ubuntu 16.04, 128-bit

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I just read this blog post on ZDNet, where someone is running Ubuntu 16.04 in 2016 which features OpenOffice 6.2 and Firefox 8.

2016: “You’re watching the Linux Channel.” by ZDNet‘s Jason Perlow — July 24th, 2016. Josef Konsumer, a home-based employee and portfolio manager for ICBC/CiticorpChase, a Chinese-owned multinational investment bank, wakes up to hear his alarm clock go off at 8am, and gets out of bed, his 47-year old body aching from an aggressive personal trainer session from the day before. His morning double espresso with frothed skim [...]

Meta Package Marketplace

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When people ask me what I like about Ubuntu, the first thing I’m going to mention is the avid community, the second thing is the ease of getting a complete desktop experience.


But people are different and so are their needs. One person may need fonts for illustrations, another person looks for applications to record and cut pod casts and yet another person may be trying to install all games of Kenta Cho. The Add/Remove Applications dialog being well-sorted, easy and ready to use for anyone, is definitely helping a lot not getting lost in the huge amount of software the repositories offer, waiting to be installed. The number of applications accessible this way grew steadily, and this led to one of the problems especially new users face: The overwhelming amount of software, not knowing what they need or want, precise but confusing descriptions and no signs of the usually omnipresent community besides those almost meaningless stars. This cries for change, this cries for community involvement.


My idea would be to create an easy way for users to create and submit meta packages in order to share them with other people on a digg-like website. KDE already got a somewhat similar feature where applications can download themes, emoticons or scripts from kde-look.org and kde-apps.org.

Other than the feature of KDE, this kind of meta package marketplace would enable users to create meta packages only linking software available in the official repositories. Downloading and installing those packages should be possible for anyone (as in person, not account, still requires sudo/root),  Submitting meta packages and participating in the voting and discussions would however require people to register an Account, maybe on Launchpad.


While the creation of, and discussion about those packages would require to go to a website, the installation and the browsing of the same should not. An Application replacing the classic Add/Remove application would fill the gap, maybe featuring tabs to change from the classic lists to the meta package marketplace. Entries of the meta packages should contain an description, the number of positive votes or rating, what packages are part of it and a link pointing to the respective entry on the website.

I’m not sure about the quality of this idea, but I just felt like writing it down.