Last night I went to the Berlin Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) release party at Danial Holbach‘s (dholbach) place. It was nice to meet other ubuntu lovers. I arrived at 8pm and left at ~4:30am. By then the sun was already on the rise and by the time I arrived home it had already become completely light out. I finally woke up at 12:30pm with a sore throat from all the talking I did.

It seems as if Daniel and I share a love for a certian british band from the 80′s and the singer of said band. I met Ellen, a kde usability contributer. I envy her persistence with such a thankless task. I also met Daniel Elstner, co-maintainer of gtkmm as well as a very easy-going and likable guy. Furthermore, Matthias Klose, Nina Feyh and about 20-30 others including a couple people from Frankfurt were there.

So it seems as if the Berlin Ubuntu community is pretty strong. Too bad I’ll be leaving in a few months. Of course, the wonderfull thing about the open source community is that it really doesn’t matter were you are. The community is global.

“I have a hard time caring about “KDE vs. Gnome”. It’s like watching your two best friends fighting. I’m not going to take part.” – Chris DiBona

While reading up on google co-op, I was pleasently surprised to see that the screenshots used to show previews of the ‘co-op’ed search results are of firefox running on Linux. From the Gnome theme, it looks like it’s a redhat-based distro.

Let the google linux rumor mill start again!

I’m still working on understanding co-op, though.

Late last night (or early this morning), I submitted my first ever patch. Hopefully this is the start of a long line of contributions. It fixes a problem in Monodevelop with the Code Template drop-down in the options panel. It’s bug #78082.

Every day I work on my soon-to-be-announced project I get more confident in C#. For anybody learning C# on linux with Mono, I recommend you look at Banshee for an example to help you along. The ActionManager class is very helpfull. Here is another good resource for tutorials. And lastly, You can go to the Mono Project sight for a good intro to the Gtk Treeview widget. Treeview is a beast at first but is really nice once you get the hang of it.

I just got finished installing Ubuntu 6.04 (Dapper Drake). It’s becoming ever-more polished although it is a beta and there are quite a few things that just don’t work yet.

I really like the cleaned up menu layout. The search function in Nautilus is also nice.

I’ve been having problems with quite a few Mono apps, though. Banshee, which I love, keeps seg faulting after a random amount of time (Bug #29957), Monodevelop needs to have a environment variable set before it’ll start (Bug #29958), Blam just refuses to start and Beagle can’t be installed because of a missing dependancy. Also, after the install, X wouldn’t start and I had to “sudo apt-get update”, “sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg” and finally “sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” and choose the defalt selections when prompted. After that everything was fine. The /etc/X11/xorg.conf file was completely empty before the reconfig.

So, there is still quite a few broken things but that’s why I’m using a test release. With about 3 months to go I think the project is coming along great. I’m now administering about 10 Hoary desktops and am looking forward to getting Dapper on those in May.

I’ve kinda officially joined the Ubuntu Laptop Testing Team today. I’ll be testing my IBM Thinkpad T43, Model# 266875U. I haven’t got tons of time for it but another guy has a Canonical-supplied T43 that is about 90% the same hardware so I’ll just copy his stuff where appropriate.

If you’d like to help just get in touch.

For those who hate ubuntu spatial and never want to see it again, you can issue this command WITHOUT any users logged into Gnome (GConf can’t be running.).

sudo gconftool-2 --direct --config-source xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/no_ubuntu_spatial true

The same is true for other settings as well. Also, if you want to make a setting mandetory then just change “defaults” to “mandatory” and users will be restricted to that setting. For other settings you’d probably need to change the type after “–type” and the value at the end.

After a little searching, I found out how to import Evolution 1.4 settings and data in /home/$USER/evolution into 2.2.

All you have to do is go into the Gconf Configuration Tool and change the keys “version” and “last_version” under /app/evolution to 1.4.6. When you start Evolution it will find the folder ~/evolution and ask you if you’d like to import the old data and settings. I believe it over-writes the current settings.

Today I’m updating one of the computers at Sprachenatelier Berlin e.V. from Suse 9.2 using KDE to Ubuntu Hoary 5.04. Hopefully I won’t run into any problems I’ve tested everything i can think of. I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, though.