DoctorMo's Blog

Today was the second Inner City Ubuntu Hour, myself, Dave Hunt and Ralph DeGenero met at Winter Street and Tremont on this beautiful july forth weekend to talk geek about Ubuntu.

First stop we went to Starbucks to get some drinks and use up Rio’s free drink card. Then onwards to have some food at Pho Pasture in Boston’s China Town. We talked about the etymology of language and lots of various geeky subjects. The main event followed:

We took the T (train) to Andrew Sq. and walked over to the Mary Ellen Community Center. I showed off the computer lab with full Ubuntu machines and how the network was administered and kept in sync. Particularly interesting was the way the package syncing worked and the new user registration gdm. You can see a video of me demonstrating the user registration system here.

I also have a set of scripts to notify users and track their session times using libnotify and app-indicators. You can check out the client and server scripts here and the session manager here (unfinished).

We tested the Orca screen reader and attempted to upgrade it for the lab to 3.1, but the new versions are having trouble with Maverick at the moment. So they were quickly downgraded.

With that, we ended to Ubuntu Hour which was extended into over time to show off some really cool stuff.

Slogan thanks to meson1007 on deviantArt.

Not much happening here in Boston, it’s all good.

Have you ever wanted a stable release of your favourite application in Ubuntu but find that there are only ever nightly build ppas? I found that last year when inkscape 0.47 was released and Ubuntu 10.04 would never really have the ability to download and install it without using the sources.

So I asked on the Inkscape mailing list for a stable PPA. Now thanks to Alex Valavanis and Cafuego for putting in the hard work, there is now a stable PPA for new inkscape releases:

One is for the current stable/supported release of Inkscape (not populated yet).

https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/+archive/stable

The other is a nightly/trunk PPA for our testers and those who just want the newest features right away.

https://launchpad.net/~inkscape.dev/+archive/trunk

Thanks to everyone for sorting this out, this means a lot to the ease of use of Ubuntu with applications that support Ubuntu with their new releases. Thoughts?

By Tkensum

Ubuntu based manga originally written in Japanese for ASCII magazine company and released as Creative Commons. Many years ago I set up a project to translate the work into english. since that time the group has translated each edition that’s come out. A few people would transcribe, others would translate and I would edit them into English pages and publish online. Read more about Ubunchu here.

Seotch-san (the author) has just released two new editions in Japanese and I’m busy editing pages, and others are busy transcribing and translating in the google group. We could do with some help doing either translation or transcription of the Japanese intot he google spreadsheets. Information is available here if you can help us.

Also needed are two artworks which go on the Stop pages, to explain to English readers how to read Manga right to left instead of the western left to right. In the last edition I personally did the work taking over from the fabulous ~c-quel who did all the previous editions. You can see the past stop/go pages here.

So if you’d like to be involved in drawing some Manga art for Ubuntu, this is your opportunity. The work needs to be related to the chapter it’ll go into, and either be vector svg or high resolution raster png file format. Please comment below to get involved!

P.S. These are the last two chapters of Ubunchu, after this, I don’t think there will be any more.

I’ve been really wanting to show all you lovely internet based friends the exciting and totally awesome Ubuntu based community center I’m setting up. So I created a video where I show off the login/registration greeter and the rest of the physical space.

Check out the video, it’s only about 4 minutes long: To play this video see the source mpeg or go here for flash player.

Post your comments below.

Hey guys, you might remember that a few days ago I was asked to build the lucid netbook launcher functionality for maverick; enough people asked me for a natty version that I wanted to make sure you guys got access to the clutter based netbook-launcher too. So here you go!

Of course this repackaging can’t go on forever, the packages I’ve sent to my PPA have no maintainer and sooner or later there is going to be major api failure as gnome3 moves on and ubuntu doesn’t ship the libraries this interface needs.

With that caveat out of the way, you can install the netbook launcher (3D) like this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/netbook-launcher
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install yeold-netbook-launcher

If you would like the 2D version of netbook-launcher, then the best thing to do is to install the netbook-launcher-efl which is shipped in natty (and meverick), true it’s a daft package which sucks in unity by mistake, but it still works and unlike the 3D code, the 2D code is still being developed (if only in small ways) by mterry.

Thoughts, comments and problems, please post below…

I’m please to announce that version 1.0 of the deviantArt stash plugins for Inkscape and Gimp are released.

It’s a Big Deal

This is a BIG deal my friends and I’m very excited because not only do we have this functionality, but we have it FIRST, before ANY proprietary software package. That’s right, the stash API was only announced last week and here I am giving you the keys to brand spanking new functionality right from within your favourite art creation applications!

We can do something with art that no other software can do today… send your artwork (with or without sources) directly to your deviantArt account… then once uploaded it can (at your option) open up the web browser so you can look at the artwork, send your friends a link or publish it further in your main galleries.

Oh and you can submit from the command line using the da-submit command.

Where do I get it!?

You can get the goodness from the source tarball or from my ppa if you’re using Ubuntu 10.04/10.10/11.04 by following these steps:


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/deviantart-plugins
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp-plugin-dastash inkscape-extension-dastash


Please report bugs in launchpad, if you would like to make these plugins available for other platforms, please do let me know. If you know someone who will sponsor these packages into Debian, also get in touch. Because this is the sort of functionality that should be available directly from the software center.

How do I use it?

Simply go into either Inkscape or Gimp…

Open up an XCF gimp file and from the Image menu, select ‘Publish to’ > ‘deviantArt Stash’:

Open up an SVG file and from the Extensions menu, select ‘Publish to’ > ‘deviantArt’:

A small window will appear, fill in the title and maybe a few keywords and press ok… If this is your first time uploading you will get a pop-up asking you to authenticate:

Log in and now wait as your image is saved as a png, and then the png and source files as sent to deivnatArt. Inkscape might give you a warning that the extension returns (saying you weren’t authenticated) you can safely ignore it. You should still get the webpage pop up in your web browser showing your your new devination:

Now you can edit the piece in the browser and publish it to one of your galleries and give it a good CC license too. Don’t forget that the sources are made available by default, so be sure that’s what you want to do.

With Thanks To

A big shout out to Gilles Dubuc and Mike Halpert from deviantArt who made sure that bugs were fixed and I was given help trying to fix some of the problems with OAuth. Thanks LGM for hosting an awesome event that allowed the project to happen.

If you have any questions or thoughts, please add a comment to this blog entry…

OK so yes, this looks a bit weird but hear me out. The netbook-launcher package was the old clutter based user interface for the Intrepid to Lucid netbook editions of Ubuntu, which was supplemented by the netbook-launcher-efl package that used enlightenment for anyone who didn’t have 3D. After Lucid, the code for the non-efl hasn’t been development and now everything from Maverick onwards is Unity only.

The efl package is still available, but that has it’s own problems…

I always liked the netbook-launcher, I always put it on other people’s computers (especially for the elderly who need big icons) because it filled the screen and everything was right there on the desktop. Perfect.

Screenshot of Netbook-launcher working on Maverick

It wasn’t really available in maverick until tonight, when prompted by a friend who is delivering 10 new Ubuntu computers to the local working-class community. The plan had always been to use the netbook interface and the machines won’t run Unity. So here’s where I step in, I downloaded the Lucid code for liblauncher and netbook-launcher and have fixed the gtk bitrot errors and published the results on a new PPA.

I had to change the name of the clutter package because of the hatchet job done on the netbook-launcher package to upgrade people from Lucid to Unity/Maverick. This means that when you try to install netbook-launcher, you get unity instead. That aside packages are available here:

https://launchpad.net/~doctormo/+archive/netbook-launcher/+packages

My friend probably wants to use the efl version which is still in development (by the heroic mterry no less, is there any cool project that guy isn’t involved with?). The problem with the shipped version is that it recommends the old ‘netbook-launcher’ package which pulls in unity. So I’ve built a new version of that without that dependency problem and I’ll try and get mterry to update the package for Oneric.

To use/test this branch try this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/netbook-launcher
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install yeold-netbook-launcher netbook-launcher-efl

I hope this ppa will be useful to a few people and do let me know below if you would like a natty version of the package…

While I was at LGM I got into an interesting discussion about communities and how much they are like biological organisms. When the organism is doing well and all the parts are working on their own little jobs, the rest of the organism doesn’t have to pay much attention. But if something goes wrong then all sorts of attention is paid to the damage/infection.

The conjecture I tested this morning was that “negative posts in a community will attract more comments and longer comments than positive posts” this in essence was a critical look at weather it’s hard work to praise but easy to complain on a unit level. So, apologies to all my test subjects below, I turned a fairly positive post into a fairly negative post to see what would happen.

Conclusion: There was a strong community reaction to the negativity, taking data from a number of older positive posts I’m able to confirm that communities do act like complex organisms focusing on damage.

My post is this: I had a good time at LGM and though I missed UDS in Budapest last week, I have some plans of my own for Oneiric:

• I’m running a community Center for Boston Housing Authority (ubuntu 10.10)
• I’ve got a community greeter login project to allow users to register at login.
• A new deviantArt upload library using their new stash API (OAuth 2.0 draft 10).
• Some new plugins using said library for inkscape, gimp and nautilus.
• Edubuntu wallpaper refinement for the next release.
• More free culture artwork and posters promoting use of creative tools.
• Getting more involved with Inkscape bug fixing (already fixed one bug).
• Worrying about the release of baby 1.0 in October, new father syndrome.

Apologies again for playing with your collective. Thanks for posting comments