To all Free/Libre/Open Source Software lovers and enthusiastic in the Kingdom, we are planning for a FLOSS Ramadan Iftar day gathering for Jolug, Ubuntu Jordan and Jordan PHP.

We didn’t decide the day yet but it should take place sometime between 15-25 Ramadan/September and should cost around 20 JOD per fasting human in one of 3+ stars hotels.

If you are one of them, if you want to get to know them, if you want a prove that we eat with a GUI not CLI or if you just feel hungry and want to join bunch of geeks on Iftar, send me an email to blog (at) Syntux {dot} net including your mobile number to arrange money collection for reservation.

Ramadan Karim :-)

Tags: open source software, money collection, mobile number, jod, ramadan iftar, ramadan, floss, ubuntu, geeks, jordan, email, hotels

©2008 Don't Say Geek! Say Syntux!. All Rights Reserved.

As many of you know, Im an avid KDE user. Now I like to keep up with where KDE is at, so Im currently running KDE4, which is a lovely system - for many reasons. However, one thing that really sucked on KDE4 was the menu system. The default menu was quite user unfriendly in my opinion, the main reason  being that things were labelled with their description and you had to hover over them to get the name (at least this was so on the dark theme I use). For example Ktorrent was just labelled “Torrent Client”, which make it hard to find if you are looking for “Ktorrent”.

Enter Lancelot. This was packaged for hardy recently - its in the Kubuntu-members-kde4 PPA - and I decided to give it a try. It is beatiful! Its useable! The only small things I dont like are the fact that the menu section is hardcoded white (see the screenshot below) and that it comes with a weird goblet icon - I want my k-menu icon!

Other than those, its a nice menu and you should give it a try today!

Is there any way to get Google Chrome working on Ubuntu?  I’ve been using it since launch day on Windows, and absolutely love it.  It’s cleaniness, simplicity, and speed beats any other browser I’ve used.. including Firefox.

no, I’m not talking about the latest mailing list discussion …

This morning my wife and I got the chance to go to The Great Reno Balloon Race. It’s the largest (over 100 balloons) free ballooning event in the US and we’ve had it here for 27 years. I’ve seen the balloons from a distance before but this year we were invited to help “crew” one of the balloons.

The day starts bright-and-early at 5:30am with five balloons going up at the same time in the dark in what’s called the Dawn Patrol. Seeing the balloons glow in the dark as they ascend was really cool.

The first ballon up is always the American Eagle and the national anthem is played as it gets underway.

American Eagle hot air balloon

We then had a missing-man-formation flyover from some WWII-era planes from the Reno Air Races that are going to start in a few days.

Next everybody started filling up the balloons and launching (they stagger the start times so that there isn’t too much traffic in the air).

Looking from the top as the balloon is being filled

The mass ascension starts

It was really nice, sunny day with calm winds so the balloons stayed fairly close and we got some great shots from the ground.

Looking up at just a few of the balloons

Once the balloon we were crewing (called Daydreams) got off the ground, we packed up the truck and trailer and started chasing it. The breeze ended up blowing it a lot farther than we thought and we had to “walk” it a few hundred yards back to a parking lot where the air was slowly let out and we were able to pack the whole thing into maybe a 3 ft (1m) diameter bag.

In all we were there about 5 hrs (getting back to the car around 10 am) and it really was one of the most enjoyable events I’ve been to since we’ve been in Reno.

Article submitted by Hugo Carrer.

As any other Debian user I love writing obscure commands on my terminal. I love too having so many open terminals that I have to come up with a special system to find the one where my favorite obscure command is running on.

To be able to enjoy this I need a very fast multitabbed terminal emulator: mrxvt.

Some of the things I like the most about mrxvt are for example,

• It is very fast and light.
• Fast pseudo-transparency.
• Background with your favorite images.
• Highly configurable keyboard shortcuts.
• You can have the same command typed on every tab at the same time. This feature is disabled by default. you can enable it by editing /etc/mrxvt/mrxvtrc and uncommenting the ToggleBroadcast macro (around line 171). After that, Ctrl+Shift+d toggles input broadcasting to all tabs.
• Automatic or “by-hand” tab labeling.
• It is independent of your desktop (no KDE or GNOME needed).
• Did I mention that is very fast and light?

After installing it would look something like this:

You can change this rather old fashioned look by copying the example config file from
/usr/share/doc/mrxvt-common/examples/mrxvtrc.sample.gz
And placing it in ~/.mrxvtrc

The file is full of comments helping you with the meaning of each option. Of course you can find all available options in the man page. Some useful shortcuts are Ctrl-shift-t to open a new tab and Ctrl-shift-m to show the menu.

So, after playing, trying and tweaking for a little while you can get a futuristic look for your terminals. Like this one of me sketching this article on an emacs session inside mrxvt (Note all those beautiful tabs up there)

Downsides? Well it depends on the kind of user,

• No UTF-8 support.
• It has no config menu.
• You have to remember the shortcuts or read the config file every now and then.
• And as with anything worth doing, to get things working the way you want to you’ll have to read through the man page and maybe scratch your head once or twice but it’ll work.

To sum up, it’s the perfect application to config during those boring rainy weekends and then show off to your friends at work.

mrxvt is available in Debian stable and in Ubuntu too.

Nearly a week after its release, I suspect most of my audience has seen the FSF's Freedom Fry video of Stephen Fry wishing the GNU project and the free software movement a happy birthday. While I'm not usually one for birthdays, I thought I'd at least reflect on it briefly. Certainly, it's a wonderful video -- for which Matt Lee at others at the FSF should be proud. But it's fact that the GNU project is now twenty-five years old that is truly noteworthy.

Wikipedia says that a generation (i.e., the average interval between the birth of parents and of their offspring) is somewhere between 25-30 years in most of the Western world. Twenty-five years isn't just a big number divisible by five, it marks a generational shift.

Certainly, GNU has matured and accomplished wonderful things in last quarter-century. More importantly perhaps, it's produced wonderful progeny. It has spawned hundreds of thousands of free software projects, thousands of free or nearly-free operating systems, and an unbelievably vibrant global free and open source software community. Beyond the software realm, the free culture movement, most free licensing projects, and much of the access to knowledge movement can trace a connection back to GNU. We are living, and building, a new generation of the free software movement.

It's not been an entirely smooth ride, feelings have been hurt, and it's hard for GNU's proponents -- myself included -- to not wince at some of what has been done in GNU's name and because of its example. But even cynics must admit: the world is an undeniably better place because of GNU and the efforts and ideas that it has motivated.

I turn 28 in December and have spent my entire computing life in world where free software was a viable option and an active form of resistance. Here's to another generation! May we be half as productive and positive as the last!

It’s been a while since I last posted on my blog. The “downtime” had several reasons:

• I participated in Googles Summer of Code this year and was quite busy due to that (blog post for that is on its way).
• I didn’t want to use Wordpress any longer.

I never planned to quit blogging completely because there’s always stuff coming to my mind that I want to make accessible to a wider audience. So now I sat down and worked on a new blog using Zine. Zine (formerly known as TextPress) is a python-powered blogging application similar to Wordpress. It is quite easy to write plugins and themes for it and since I use to program in Python I chose this awesome (but not yet released) piece of software. I didn’t migrate my old postings over from wordpress (although there’s a converter) because I want to change my style of writing a bit (e.g. no smileys anymore). Any link out there pointing at my old blog will be redirected to this very post. If you want some old posting, just contact me by either mail or comment. I keep the database alive.

As of that, I also changed my hackergotchi since the old version somewhat resembled a criminal. (Just in case you were wondering who I am.) I have to thank my fellow student and friend Alvaro for spending several hours with me, testing his new camera and producing the photos.

The new blog is dressed in a theme that I wrote, supported by my buddy Arne. Thanks so much for providing the graphics and coming up with the basic layout idea! (I cannot count the many days of work he put into that. I owe you a beer.)

Expect postings from me at a much higher rate now. I’ll try not to flood planet ubuntu too much, though. (Due to excessive testing there should be no remaining bugs, but one can never know for sure. If you notice anything, please drop a comment to this post.)

• Microsoft sends experts into Apple stores to educate staff about Free Software.
• The Free Software Foundation sends experts into computer stores to educate customers about Windows Vista.

At least I think I have that right.

Oh well, I was busz at work and I just wanted to go out of our office at 7pm.
This did not work out....

Upstream Sput of Quassel fame was proposing to have a beer...and somehow he proposed to watch "Batman, The Dark Knight" ...
Well yes, super goody movie, but now, it is Saturday and I am still at Sputs place to drink beer and watch this guy named "Jeff Dunham". Hopefully political correct north american US people know this guy cause he is right ;)

With Magifab (Fabian) as invited, navelson and an excelent grup of enthusiasts Ubunteros, in El Salvador, they are doing a UBUNCON, you can join it in live in: http://giss.tv:8000/celvin.ogg.m3u

No doub to connect, and join

CONGRATS to UBUNTU-SV :D

This is a very familiar question I am sure many of you have come across from your non-FOSSy friends. I have it always coming from loads of people including my mom who asked “What is this Linux thing you have all around and what are you getting out of it?”. As it always happens with most moms she just doesn’t get it.

Well now, I have been replying to most of them with a standard “I dont know, may be becuase I am having great fun??”. Now I got the answer for that question. Apt and fits me. I always wanted to make a difference to others and myself, hence this is the answer to this golden Question.

I am having FUN and making a DIFFERENCE

I got this answer from Pramode and Swaroop’s blog post. I also would like to take this opportunity to appreciate and congratulate the updates Swaroop has done to his book “Byte of Python”. Great going Swaroop! Keep it going. You ROCK!

I love the Ubuntu Wiki, and I think the Official Ubuntu Documentation is great!  These are two important reasons why Ubuntu has been such a successful Linux distribution.

But at the end of the day, I’m a terminal-and-manpage kind of a guy.

Earlier this year, I found myself on IRC answering basic questions from an Ubuntu user about some random utility, and I asked him if he had read the manpage yet.  He responded that he had read whatever he could find on the web, but he didn’t really dabble on the command line in general.

It occurred to me that there may well be a contingent of Ubuntu users who are entirely disconnected from the wealth of resources so many developers have poured into manpage-based documentation.

A cursory search turned up a couple of RH-based, or advertisement-riddled Linux manpage websites.  I also found manpages.debian.net, which is closer to the Ubuntu target, but unfortunately, the pages are CGI-generated and thus not indexable by Google/Yahoo.

So I submitted a request-for-comments to the Ubuntu Documentation team, and no one could point me to an existing web repository of Ubuntu’s manpages.  I started the obligatory Launchpad Blueprint, Wiki Specification, and Bazaar project.

And as of today, the Ubuntu Manpage Repository is live at:

• http://manpages.ubuntu.com

This site contains nearly 300,000 HTML viewable manpages included in Ubuntu releases (Dapper, Feisty, Gutsy, Hardy, Intrepid) and across all of (main, universe, restricted, multiverse) and across all languages where manpages are available.  It is automatically updated daily.

I expect there are some remaining issues, or oddball manpages missing from the archive due to not matching my regular expressions.  I invite you to file bugs against the ubuntu-manpage-repository Launchpad project.

The site also hosts the gzipped manpages too, and I’m working on a patch to man(1) that would optionally fail over to remotely retrieve a requested manpage if not found on the local system.

Thanks to Kees Cook, Jamie Strandboge, and Colin Watson for their patches and code review, as well as LaMont Jones for helping bring the site online!

:-Dustin

The linux client for Dropbox is now available.

To put it simply - you run a client on your computers, and it syncs a ~/Dropbox directory with the Dropbox web service (which uses Amazon's S3 as their backend). You now have all the stuff you cared about synced with your desktop, your laptop, etc. As a bonus you can share directories with friends AND the web interface has built in per-file rollback version control. It's pretty hot. More info here. I use it for my wallpapers, documents, and even some dotfiles that I want on all my PCs.

Anyway this is a godsend if you have multiple PCs and whatnot, and it's the only tool in this space that I've seen so far that even tries to support Linux, and it's the simplest of its kind I've seen so far, so I give it a thumbs up.

Download here. (Note, you need an invite, and I am out, but I've given a bunch out yesterday and today to a bunch of Ubuntu people on identi.ca, so either ask around or check out their forums or something - and yes, only the nautilus plugin is GPL, the client and server are closed; so before you lecture at me go fix iFolder first plskthx.)

The fifth alpha for intrepid, intrepid alpha-5, is released! Intrepid Adventurous testers can download it from the usual place.

I’ve decided (somewhat late) to attend the inaugural Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland.  It’s shaping up to be an interesting collection of people and topics.  I think the idea of a conference which spans the kernel/userland boundary is a useful one, though so far it’s pretty heavy on the kernel side, probably in large part due to overflow of topics (and kernel developers) from the preceding Kernel Summit.

I’ll be there to meet up with some far-flung Ubuntu folk and learn about the next round of hurdles which will be faced by integrators like us.