I know this is of niche interest, but the Remember the Milk provider does actually work with version 3.0.3 of Thunderbird. All you do is change the version as described here (the rest of the hack isn’t needed with the latest version of the RTM app). Unless you actually use both apps regularly, you can’t imagine what joy it was to make this discovery this morning.
This probably isn't as exciting for you as it is for me. Also, time to change my desktop background.
Desperate to entertain Tabby on yet another three hour drive to Brighton tomorrow, I decided to load some Charlie and Lola onto my Moblin powered Eee 901. The problem is that as ace as Moblin is, with its sub-20 second boot time, because it’s an Intel sponsored project all the common media codecs for MP3, DivX and so on aren’t in the repositories – unlike Ubuntu or Fedora, there’s no easy way to install them.
This guide helped – and also highlighted how painful it is to alt-tab between running apps in Moblin when cutting and pasting to the terminal. I say it helped, there’s a couple of typos (specifically in the lines “sed -i ‘s/10/11/’ /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora” and “yum install gstreamer-ffmpeg”) but sadly, being a Fedora newb, I’m not entirely sure how. Following the guide threw up an error when trying to install gstreamer-ffmpeg, but I also installed SMPlayer as per the advice in the comments. I don’t know if SMPlayer would work without the bits of the walkthrough that did, if I’m honest, but I’ll try and find time to uninstall everything and find out.
Still, many thanks to the author for making tomorrow’s journey a bit more bearable for the three-year-old.
I’m really enjoying writing the occasional list feature for TechRadar lately, giving me reason to jot down thoughts which I should by rights probably have published here long ago and just got too busy. The latest is a quick introduction to Linux which I hope covers most of the pain points for anyone thinking of switching from Windows – a move I wholeheartedly endorse, natch.
On the busy front, been ludicrously so trying to clear my desk for the Kyrgyzstan trip next week – a feat I’ve almost accomplished and just need to nail down interviews with Orange and Vodafone for a feature due at the end of this week. Otherwise I’m burying my head researching more about the country and the issues I’ll be investigating once there.
No idea what access to WiFi or even a mobile phone is going to be like, but will be doing my best to blog at least once a day and post regular Twitter updates again while I’m out there.
A simple fix for a problem that shouldn't be there
For months now I’ve had an annoying problem with Ubuntu. It boots to Gnome login in less than 30 seconds, but then pauses for a long time before showing the desktop. Through tweaking and fixing I’ve got this down to something reasonable – another 30-40 seconds, but it’s still too long. I’d narrowed the problem down to an error message with PulseAudio, but figured a full reinstall was the only way to fix the machine (and undo all the other bits I’ve fiddled with and lost track of). Not having the time to do that recently, I’d filed it under ‘Things to do’ at some random point in the future.
Except I don’t need to any more. After months of occassional searches, yesterday finally threw up the solution. In order not to trigger a time out error during login, both your user and root apparently need to be members of the groups pulse, pulse-access and pulse-rt. But, for some reason, they’re not by default. At some point in the past I’d added my user to one of these, but not completed the whole set.
Anyway, the upshot is that now everything is working smoothly and perfectly and I’m happy. Anyone else who’s having problems can find a much more detailed troubleshooting guide here.
Finally plucked up the courage to upgrade my main machine to Jaunty and it was an absolutely painless process. Even VMWare is working fine after the kernel upgrade, and that’s the first time that’s ever happened.
I still get a 20-30 pause between the gnome login screen and the desktop appearing though. Something that’s been installed and removed in the past is bugging it out, and the only error I get is a gnome-desktop-panel timeout one. The problem is that this has been related to a Compiz/Nvidia bug – which isn’t the one I’ve got. A clean install is probably the only way to fix it.
Having failed completely to get Tweetdeck working – Adobe AIR not wanting to play happy with Ubuntu – I’m really glad I finally checked out Spode‘s JournoTwit.
JournoTwit, yesterday
Embarrassingly, I had no idea he was such an accomplished coder. This really is a great app, which filters out stories from potential news stories as well as highlighting @ replies, retweets and auto-loading pics. And, there’s a mobile version too.
Even better, it doesn’t require a proprietary format like Adobe AIR to make it work – it’s all done in PHP and Javascript. Of course, it does mean I’m trusting Spode with my login details, but he works for the Telegraph now, so he’s clearly a man of integrity, right?
I haven’t had the time to properly research the claim that four times as many Linux netbbooks are returned as XP ones, but ever since I first heard it, it struck me as malicious PR. I’ve spoken to a couple of people at large netbook manufacturers who refute it, but never seen the actual figures – a little project for later that one.
Today’s link of the day is on a similar subject.
It’s a good example of where citizen journalism falls down. Slashdot reruns the returns story repeatedly and unquestioningly. Today, for example.
This is the Eee now. Decided against a dock like AWN for a change, to try and keep things as low overhead as possible.
The Ubuntu wallpaper will change, obviously…
The new Jaunty theme is great. And can be cut down for a netbook.
Still the same. 10 seconds to Grub, 20 to login, 20 to desktop. Probably needs a full reinstall when the final version goes live to clear out the custom ACPI scripts and stuff I played around with in the Alpha.
Excitingly, the beta for Ubuntu 9.04, aka the Jaunty Jackalope is out. I’m downloading it to my Eee 901 right now. I have high hopes that finally this is the distribution that will give me the boot time I had with the original Xandros, make all the function keys work, and still be a fully functional desktop.
It’s also very attractive. Screen courtesy of Softpedia.
It looks even better when you delete the gnome panel bars and throw in a dock like AWM
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