I personally don’t see google buying canonical happening any time soon. (Nor should they) Canonical’s business model is built round the very thing google wants to kill – The Desktop (as we know it)
Google’s business model is built round ads and cloud services, imperative to this model is the need to get everyone to the browser, the cloud and away from the traditional means of using the computer which involves having an OS built around local computer resources Hard drive, CPU, etc.. Ubuntu (Windows and Mac OSX) represent the very thing google is trying the get the world away from.

The new frontier in computing is the cloud. (at least that is what they wants us to believe) and google is doing everything to be the “Microsoft” of the post PC era. In light of all these Ubuntu and canonical (whose business is built around the traditional desktop computer paradigm) is not an attractive proposition to google. For google, the best way to beat Microsoft is not to take the fight to their strongest turf (even apple with all their sexiness and marketing power and industrial respect has not been able to dislodge MS on the desktop) Google wants to beat MS by obsoleting PC era of computing and replacing it with thin client devices (be it mobile phone, tablet or the chromebook) connecting to a cloud backend. Hence it would make more sense for them to invest their effort accelerating the demise of the PC era by taking out some of the stumbling blocks to the post PC era. “How do we get more people connected to the web?” “How do we reduce the cost of the Internet.” Buying canonical is validating the PC era.

In any case if google wants to use Ubuntu as some kind of stopgap to take some momentum off Microsoft’s grip on the desktop. Then all it needs do is try to improve the desktop experience in Linux. It could start by releasing natives Linux version for some of its popular desktops applications that run on other platforms. However from their body language google could care less about the Linux desktop. It never released a Linux version of Google Sketchup , the recently released google music uploader has a Mac and Windows version non was released for Linux, remember how Linux users had to wait for close to a year to get a stable version of google chrome. Even when they do release Linux version of their desktop software. Its doesn’t run native e.g Picasa for linux (which is essentially the windows version using wine hence lacks native OS integration with Linux and also lacks some of the features available in the windows version ) or is feature crippled compared to the windows version e.g google desktop for Linux lacks support for google gadgets. Has it stands Windows is googles number one choice for their PC applications

While I don’t think google hates Ubuntu or Linux (Words on the street is that google does in fact run its own version of Ubuntu which it offers to its developers as one of its OS of choice) however I think google is just not interested in the PC computing space. Google is a cloud company and its business model is built around people connecting to the cloud where it can make money from ads and software as a service. Canonical just does not fit into this model.

Beside canonical can hardly be described as a money making machine. The company is yet to break even in close to it’s 4 years of existence. It has not been able to build a successful business model around Ubuntu. Hence buying it would be a very bad business move, rather google can work with canonical and use some of their expertise to enhance their chromebook. (which is what their doing actually)

If ever (you can never say never ) google does indeed buy canonical. It will find a way to kill off the Ubuntu project or merge it with their chrome OS effort. In any case I am not sure this what we want. So maybe we should be careful what we ask for

Just my 2 cent

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I did however see the move as food for thought for those spending so much time and energy trying to convince same adobe to port photoshop to Linux. Not that I don’t want photoshop or the next cool proprietary desktop app to be ported (Ok frankly I don’t think am missing anything so I care less) But we really have to come to terms with the reality, we can not compel or cajole a company to port their X application to Linux. it is a situation beyond our control and not something we have the power to change (any time soon).

What we do have power to over is how to take advantage of the open source ecosystem and see how we can improve it. How can we improve Gimp, make it rock, and blow pass photoshop – Donation, code, documentations, even the occasional writing a developer of your favourite app to let him know you appreciate what he is doing all goes a long way.

The reason why many Linux users cared less about this Adobe move is, I mean let’s be frank over 90% of adobe air apps are twitter client, an area very well covered in the Linux ecosystem. Majority of Linux users use Choqok/Gwibber/Hotot/Pino/etc. (applications which not only have better UI and OS integration with Linux but in many cases are have richer feature set compared to the tweetdecks of this world) hence couldn’t be bothered.

I think what these reveals is that, When we make the applications on the Linux ecosystem rock. (The Amarok, the Gimp, The Libreoffice etc) More people would find reason to use and stick to Linux on the desktop, when they see a reason to use Linux, The ecosystem would increase to a point where even the big application vendors might take notice and decide that the Linux ecosystem is perhaps worth giving a try. Even if it doesn’t turn out like this. Then at least we would have applications which are comparable (if not better) than the alternatives in other platforms.

Ok maybe things are not that simplistic, but I do feel strongly that it is more pragmatic if we improve the Linux ecosystem from within the ecosystem. A situation where efforts are being channelled towards sulking up to adobe to port Photoshop to Linux while the Gimp Project is desperately short of hands really doesn’t make sense (IMHO) We have Gimp which is free and developed in the open. Fine photoshop has some features not available in Gimp (but which are really not needed by mainstream users) however Gimp is extendible developed in the open. Effort channelled towards getting the missing photoshop features to Gimp would definitely yield more positive result than the out come of getting photoshop on Linux.

I use Gimp here as a case study but same thing applies to many important free software projects Libreoffice, Scribus, Inkscape, Evolution, Kontact etc. I think everyone from the distros to the users and even the companies whose business model is built round Linux all need to play more proactive role at improving our ecosystem.

Being proactive means doing something to improve the software you use everyday. File a bug, documentation, feature request with mock up, code, donate and remembering to thank those whose labour of love we are enjoying. We have to make the best of what we have in hand and spend less time chasing shadows.

Just my 2 cents

Situation under Natty Narwhal

Things did improve under Natty, at least out of the box I got basic multitouch functionalities like finger scroll, two/three finger tab to right click and middle click respectively. However right and middle click is still missing.

Luckily..

There is a work around which fixes most of remaining issues I have with clickpad on Kubuntu 11.04. This work around provides even better Multitouch, right and Middle Click support.

Basic gist of the WorkAround

So words on the street is that Opensuse has very good clickpad support (probably not unrelated to the fact that some variants of the HP Probook ship with Suse Enterprise Linux) so there is a patch which when applied to the synaptic source package fixes the issue. Hence the fix for this involves some command-line. I will try to make it as easy as possible though usual caveat applies: This fix works for me on the HP Probook 4420s, I do not guarantee it would work for anyone else. In fact it might kill your cat.

Work Around.

Open your favourite Terminal (Konsole for kubuntu)
First create a directory (folder) where the package will be built. for the sake of consistency you can call the “build” and place it on your desktop. all that is done with this command

mkdir $HOME/Desktop/build

Next move into the directory just created and download the opensuse patch.

cd $HOME/Desktop/build && wget http://david.hardeman.nu/synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2

Then download the Ubuntu source package for synaptic

apt-get source xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

What the next series of command will do is to move into the directory of the Ubuntu synaptic package just downloaded and from then into a directory named “debian” and another named “patch”, extract the suse synaptic patch and apply it to the Ubuntu synaptic source package. (Honestly its not as confusing as I made it sound. Just follow the commands step by step and you should* be fine)

cd xserver-xorg-input-synaptics*
cd debian
cd patches
tar xfvj ../../../synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2
ls -1 2*.patch >> series
cd ../..

Next thing is to build the Ubuntu synaptic package from source, but before that the dependencies needed to get a successful build would first have to be installed

sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

Then the actual building of a new synaptic package into a deb for easy installation

dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot

If everything goes fine, 2 .deb files would be created in the root of the “build” directory (created earlier)
Both can be installed with the follow

sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-synaptics_1*.deb
sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-synaptics-dev*

All that is left now is to log out and log in back (Better still restart) and the clickpad should have both multitouch and right click support

Kubuntu users can go to systemsettings –> Input Devices –> Touchpad to tweak the clickpad to suit their taste.

Known issues

• Double tapping the LED to disable touchpad still doesn’t work
• Click and Drag sadly still doesn’t work

The work for better clickpad support is still a work in progress on Linux generally. But you can follow the bug here.

Thanks to David Härdeman for providing the documentation for this patch.

Hope this helps someone

…after I installed Kubuntu 11.04 beta, everything was going smooth, wireless worked out of the box, (unlike 10.10 where I had to install some freedom hating broadcom driver) I had the awesome kde 4.6.2, seating on top what has been tagged the most significant Linux kernel release for desktop users in a long time kernel v2.6.38 (with the magic patch and all). Life was good.

Then it happened!

Trouble started when I wanted to send some files to my phone from laptop via the bluetooth. (You see I happen to be among the unfortunate set of people who have the same button for enabling wireless and bluetooth.) I tried enabling the laptop’s bluetooth when the whole system came to a standstill. I did a forceful shut-down after which my install never saw the light of the day again. Everytime I tried booting the PC, it always got stuck at the boot process. The scary part was even the the Kubuntu 11.04 Livecd stopped Booting at all! Only Kubuntu 10.10 was able to boot (from Livecd).

Searching for Answers

The most frustrating part of my Nasty Natty experience (pun intended) was trying to determine the root cause. How to explain how an OS installs fine, then crashes and not only does it become unable to boot, even attempts to do a clean install also hits a dead then. Here were a list of my suspicions

Corrupt system Memory (I know from experience that the best way to test if a system has bad memory is to load in a Live cd, this was ruled out by the fact that I was able to load on Kubuntu 10.10 on Live cd without issues)

Then I thought maybe a bad system Bios (I really wanted to pursue this option and upgrade the system BIOS via windows. Thankfully windows won’t install, complained about some partition issues)

I also considered a badly burnt media (but checked its integrity and it was said to be ok)

Kde 4.6 bug? (Xubuntu 11.04 had the same problem) kernel bug? hmmm

Light Bulb Moment…

Came while talking to a friend about the problem on irc and he suggested it was most like kernel problem probably some bad module. This got me thinking, I remembered the last thing I was doing (or wanted to do) when all this started was enabling bluetooth (shares the same button as the wireless)

I then decided to go into the system BIOS and disable the wireless / bluetooth radio. Fired the LiveCD of Xubuntu 11.04 and Voilà Xubuntu booted successfully, no hangs or freeze. But also no wireless.

Work Around

After I was able to get Xubuntu to successfully boot. I proceeded to install it. (for testing purpose I enabled the wireless radio from Bios and had the issue the freshly install Xubuntu 11.04 freeze at login screen (again) disabled it and everything worked fine (But no wireless)

Here is what I now did to fix the issue on my laptop. I did not have this issue on 10.10 mostly because that version of Kubuntu did not ship with the opensource broadcom drivers. I had to use the binary only driver from broadcom, hence the idea was to revert back to that setup.

first I installed the broadcom-sta-common (It provide a binary only closed source driver for broadcom)

sudo apt-get install broadcom-sta-common


Once installed, I edited the following file /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

NB its always a good thing to backup before making any change to config file.
backup with this command

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig

In case things gets jammed up and you want to revert, you can easily do so with

cp /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf-orig /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf

kdesudo kate /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf


NB gnome user should use gtksudo gedit in place of kdesudo kate (and if you are like me, you can use ever reliable vim )

Anyway I blacklisted the brcm80211 open source broadcom driver by adding this line to, /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf blacklist brcm80211 Before the last line. When done, everything looked like this

# wl module from Broadcom conflicts with ssb
# We must blacklist the following modules:
blacklist b44
blacklist b43legacy
blacklist b43
blacklist ssb
blacklist brcm80211
install wl /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install wl $CMDLINE_OPTS

I saved the file and then edited this file /etc/modules (again backup before editing)

cp /etc/modules /etc/modules-orig

By adding the module for the closed source (freedom hating but stable) broadcom driver so it is loaded at every system boot

I added lw to the end of /etc/modules so the file looks like this

# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be loaded
# at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with "#" are ignored.

lp
lw

Saved the file, exited, and rebooted this time with the wireless on to test if the issue as been fixed. The laptop rebooted fine, no issue, but still no wireless. Then I started the Kubuntu additional driver tool or kdesudo jockey-kde (from commandline on Kubuntu) or gtksudo jockey (from commandline on Ubuntu) which searched and informed me I needed to activate some proprietary drivers to make the wireless card work properly. I enabled them, It did its magic and voilà the wireless card came on. I was able to enable and disable it without the system kernel panicing.

I rebooted my laptop and there was no problem at all, everything worked just like it did on 10.10.
I explained the same step to some dude on irc having similar problem and my solution worked for him so I decided to share in case anyone is having such problems.

I hope someone finds this useful.

if you are on U|K|Xubuntu 11.04 there is a better workaround were both right / middle click and multitouch works and works way better than this. Although I don’t know if same would work on Ubuntu 10.10.

One thing admire about Macbooks is their Multitouch enabled Touchpads which allows for advanced gestures like pinch to zoom, double tapping to right click, Two finger scroll etc.  I recently bought a new laptop which did not ship with the traditional laptop touchpad but with something called a clickpad.

The Good News

Clickpads are the latest innovations from Synaptic (Not the package Manager Gui ) It replaces the traditional touchpad which is convention with most laptops.  It is  (From what I read)  suppose to bring better gesture support and (Mac like) multitouch. Unlike tranditional Touchpads which has 3 physical button, built with single touch in mind. The clickpad is just one Click Button which has been mapped into Zones (i.e there is the right and left click zone etc)

Naturally this should mean that all the awesome gesture support I have always admired about Macs is finally available for my laptop?

The Bad News

Well not Quite. Support the for clickpad on Ubuntu is still a bit flaky (to say the least). Not only are advanced features like enhanced gesture support and multitouch not available out of the box on Ubuntu. Other basic features like right clicking, horizontal scrolling, click and drag etc can be quite a hassle. On Ubuntu 10.04 some of the basic features have been fixed (although multitouch support is still lacking).

Same thing can not be said of Ubuntu 10.10 because there was a regression which make it impossible to right click using the touchpad. Already a bug has been filled concerning the issue and I wrote about a work around which works quite well.

Ray of Hope

It came yesterday when I stumbled on this bug report . Some (Awesome) dude created a package which brings basic Multitouch support for Clickpad on *buntu 10.10 . According to him

“the attached dkms package should provide multitouch support for a family of synaptics touchpads. Install and reboot. Please report both success and failure here. Thanks!”

source
And from feed backs there seems to be more success than failures.

Installation, configuration and Caveats

Installation

is very easy, Just download the deb package here and download click to install. Once installed, Reboot

Configuration

If everything goes well, Out of the box you should get basic multitouch goodness like two finger tapping to right click. To get more you have go a step further.

Kubuntu users

should head over to Systemsettings  > Input Devices > Touchpad Go to the “Scrolling” section and enable “Vertical Two Finger Scrolling” (There are other options there like “Horizontal Two Finger Scrolling” which I did not enable cause I am not really sure what it does, if you do please let me know how it goes :p) Then head over to the next Tab called “Tapping” what I did was to enable tabbing, then I went on to map Two fingers tapping to the Left click action menu and mapped three fingers tapping to the Middle key Again there are couple of options that can be set but I choose to limit myself by what I felt I needed.

Ubuntu users

Go to System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad and select “Two-finger scrolling”.

When all is set and done I logged out (rebooted? I can’t remember) and Voilà! I am able to use basic Multitouch support like two finger scrolling, three fingers to right click, three fingers to middle click. And my work flow? It increased by 50% percent (well more or less)

Caveat

While I hate to be a kill joy, I have to say that Ubuntu support for Clickpad even with this patch installed is not yet Nirvana. There are still some draw backs and advance gestures support like pinch to zoom are still not yet supported. Here is a list of what works and what doesn’t

What works

• Two Finger Scrolling
• Two fingers tapping to right click
• Three Fingers Tapping to Left click

NB There are lots of configuration (at least on Kubuntu) I only enabled the ones which made sense to me and which I was certain I needed hence this should not be seen as a conclusive list of which gestures are supported.

What doesn’t work

• Pinch to Zoom: Simply does not work period
• Traditional Right click: there is a regression with Ubuntu 10.10 which make it impossible to right click using the clickpad. I wrote about a work around this bug a while back Unfortunately the fix for the clickpad right click issue is not compatible with the patch that enabled multitouch. Hence the user has to pick which they are comfortable with. Either you still with the Traditional (single touch) Touchpad where right and left click are supported. Or you go with the Multitouch Clickpad where right | middle click is not supported (At least the traditional way)

I choose to stick with the latter .As many users most have noticed, the right click support in my work around is quite flaky, and pretty annoying sometimes. I have been using the Multitouch package now for 2 days and the difference is clear, while it might not be as smooth as the Mac experience (Yet), Its a generation better than the situation in my previous workaround. Just remember that this is a work in progress and Work is been done to bring an even better support to the next version of Ubuntu 11.04. It is important to subscribe to this bug report and follow its progress. With all the activities and work going into clickpad and multitouch on Linux both upstream and downstream, the only way is up

NB:

If you applied the patch (which enables right | middle click for clickpad) in my previous post. You need to remove it for the multitouch patch to work. You can remove the pmouse patch by doing the following

sudo dkms uninstall -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic
sudo dkms remove -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic --all

Reboot (not sure if that is necessary but its not bad to play it safe), and then install the Multitouch patch.

Hope someone finds this useful.

My previous favourite was winff. It is a nice frontend to ffmpeg and is capable of some pretty neat stuff. However there is a new* kid on the block which I found to be the coolest Media Converter  on Linux in terms of easy of use and number of cool features it packs.

Mobile Media Converter

(The name is self explanatory I guess)

is a free video and audio converter for converting between popular desktop media formats like MP3, Windows Media Audio (wma), Ogg Vorbis Audio (ogg), Wave Audio (wav), MPEG video, AVI, Windows Media Video (wmv), Flash Video (flv), QuickTime Video (mov) and commonly used mobile devices/phones formats like AMR audio (amr) and 3GPvideo. iPod/iPhone and PSP compatible MP4 video are supported. Moreover, you can remove and add new formats  or devices through the internet

source

Features

Some of the really cool features packed into MMC include

• Integrated YoutTube downloader for on the fly downloading of files from youtube and converting to preferred formats
• Trim and Crop Support It allows the user to trip audio clips or crop video clips taking out unwanted parts (excellent for rings tones and stuff)
• Subtitles Support Allow subtitles to be encoded onto the video for watching even on devices that does not supports them. Just drag and drop your video files and their subtitles on Mobile Media Converter

My Experience

Ease of Use

The first impression I got from using MMC is the ease of use. Even though it does comes with some very powerful features it manages to (brilliantly) expose these features allowing the users to easily make use of them. A good example is how the Video Trim feature is implemented It uses two sliders (top and bottom) the top slider is used to select where to start the trim and the bottom slider for where to stop the trim. I found this to be very intuitive and easy to use. The Crop feature is just as dumb proof. There are two vertical sliders (left and right) and two Horizontal sliders (Top and Bottom) Adjusting the sliders can be used to crop out unwanted section of the screen

Simple Sleek and Logical UI

One of the things that struck me about MMC was just how simple sleek and logical the UI was. It is not cluttered by menus and every feature is implemented in a way that makes them easy to discover and logical to use It supports dragging and dropping files to convert. To edit a file all you have to do is right click and edit It also makes use of very unobtrusive animation which provide smooth transitions between tasks. Overall it manages to unlock some of the most powerful features of FFmpeg and mencoder (Both commandline utilities) and exposes them to the user in a very simple way.

Features and Stability

Ability to embed subtitles to files, download files from youtube and encode them on the fly are just some of the neat features packed into MMC yet it manages to performs all the function without crashing or hogging my CPU. It also supports quite a large number of preset and allows for additional preset to be downloaded from the web providing a UI for the latter

Usage and Result

I have to admit I did not do a thorough test of MMC. But couple of Videos I tried converting all seems to work fine without any issues. The encoding went fast. The output was pretty decent. I have unable to test out some of the advanced features because I have not had any need for them. In all MMC is pretty much a frontend to FFmpeg which is a pretty solid tried and tested (knock on wood) commandline tool for doing that kind of stuff.

Installation

MMC is cross platform hence they are packages for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X If you are running Ubuntu Then you can easily download a .deb package and double click to install. The download instruction can be found here

So I guess you can call this my little review for the Mobile Media Converter. I hope someone finds it useful.

Recently though I have been given Clementine and amarok a fare share of play on my desktop (even though the later is still the star player (pun intended). However it seems all that might change. I was  reading a blog post about the monochomization of the notification area icon of clementine in the latest development build, so I decided to give it a go to see how that would fit in with kde 4.5 systemtray icon which are also monochrome. I did not notice any different in the systemtray icon ( which was still the same ole draining orange icon. sigh) But I got an unexpected surprise inform  some new features. Here are some of the new features and improvements I noticed while using the development branch of Clementine.

Lyrics Support ..  

…which by default uses lyric.wikia.com as backend (very configuration in fact from the  settings there are tons of lyrics backends to choose from)

Better Integration with lastfm (yay!)

Beside basic integrations like scrobbling, and loving tracks. It add cool features like displaying cool stats about the track you are listening to like how many times you have scrobbled that particular song to lastfm and how many times the song has been scrobbled as a whole, and how many others are listening to same track.   

The Artist info tab (Part of the redesigned sidebar) Displays Artist Pictures, Tags,  Similar artist and Biography which uses wikipedia as default (although lastfm, aol, myspace etc are also supported)

Though I am still discovering the latest Clementine which in turn is still under heavy development, I can not help but feel this is what Amarok 2x should have been design wise. I really feel Amarok could do without many of the clutter and buttons, even then its still one of the best Music players on Linux. I would not advise you give it a go if a stable music player is what you need because the current stable release is quite good. However if you (like me) don’t mind living on the edge then head over here on how you can get the latest development version

K|X|Ubuntu user can simply add the Clementine development PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:me-davidsansome/clementine-dev
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install clementine

From what I have seen so far, the next stable release of Clementine is making strong strides to becoming the Most Valuable Player on my Desktop. The Tight Integration with Lastfm and Kiss design wins it for me.

N.B

For those who have not heard about  Clementine, it  is a multiplatform music player, inspired by Amarok 1.4, focusing on a fast and easy-to-use interface for searching and playing your music. It has packages for Linux, Windows and Mac. (On its way to world domination)

Features

• Search and play your local music library.
• Listen to internet radio from Last.fm, SomaFM and Magnatune.
• Tabbed playlists, import and export M3U, XSPF, PLS and ASX.
• Visualisations from projectM.
• Transcode music into MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, FLAC or AAC.
• Edit tags on MP3 and OGG files, organise your music.
• Download missing album cover art from Last.fm.
• Cross-platform – works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Native desktop notifications on Linux (libnotify) and Mac OS X (Growl).
• Remote control using a Wii Remote, MPRIS or the command-line.
• Copy music to your iPod, iPhone, MTP or mass-storage USB player.
• Queue manager.

There is a Post on how to enable Multitouch support using a patch not supported with this work around, you might want to take a look first.

I got my self a new laptop recently. The old one was well getting old and starting to lose it, so when I got an offer I could not refuse, I sold it and didn’t look back. I settle for the HP Probook 4420s which turned out to be the best notebook in terms of performance, under the hood awesomeness, and build (Hopefully a review would come later. )

The first thing I did after unboxing my laptop was to install Kubuntu 10.04 which installed and ran smoothly with everything working out of the box. When the beta version of Kubuntu 10.10 was released, I decided to give it a go but noticed that I was unable to rightclick with the laptop’s clickpad.

Clickpad

Clickpads are the latest innovations from Synaptic (Not the package Manager Gui ) It replaces the traditional touchpad which is convention with most laptops.  It is  (From what I read)  suppose to bring better gesture support and multi touch. Unlike tranditional Touchpads which has 3 physical button, built with single touch in mind. The clickpad is just one Click Button which has been mapped into Zones (i.e there is the right and left click zone etc)

Ubuntu Support

Support the for clickpad on Ubuntu is still a bit flaky.  Not only are advanced features like enhanced gesture support and multitouch not available out of the box on Ubuntu. Other basic features like right clicking, horizontal scrolling, click and drag etc can be quite a hassle.  On Ubuntu 10.04 some of the basic features have been fixed (although multitouch support is still lacking).

Same thing can not be said of Ubuntu 10.10 because there was a regression which make it impossible to right click using the touchpad.  Already a bug has been filled concerning the issue which should hopefully be fixed during the Maverick release circle.

Walk  Around

The Good news is there is a walk around this issue for those who won’t mind getting their hands dirty with messing around with the command-line. The walk around involves using a psmouse patch submitted by Paul which fixes the issue. (At least for me)

For this walk around some packages would have to be installed namely the build-essential package and the dkms packages. Build-essentials helps install basic tools needed for compiling packages from source, while the dkms  ”is a framework designed to allow individual kernel modules to be upgraded without changing the whole kernel. It is also very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels. framework designed to allow individual kernel modules to be upgraded without changing the whole kernel. It is also very easy to rebuild modules as you upgrade kernels.” which in English means whatever module we patch  would not need to be repatched should the system’s kernel be upgraded. (At least that’s the idea)

sudo apt-get install dkms build-essential

The fix involves patching the psmouse module using the paul’s archive which is the mouse source directory for   linux 2.6.35-22-generic (The version of Linux Kernal which shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 as at blog time)

First download the archive file from here

save the downloaded file to your desktop

Open a terminal (Application/Accessories/Terminal –  Kubuntu users should go /System/Konsole)

Move to the Directory where the archive was saved (In this case the desktop) and extract the content of the archive

cd $HOME/Desktop && tar xvf  psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic-patched.tar.bz2.tar

The name of the package as changed since writing this post the new command which reflects the change is

cd $HOME/Desktop && tar jxvf psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic-patched.tar.bz2


Move the extracted folder to /usr/src which is under the root directory hence the command would have to be executed with sudo

sudo mv psmouse-2.6.35-22-generic /usr/src

Move into the /usr/src directory

cd /usr/src

Then install the psmouse module with the following commands running them one after the other

sudo dkms add -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

Once installed reboot for the module to be loaded.

If you are still having issues with right clicks. This command would help check if the psmodule is installed

sudo dkms status -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

The output should be something like this

psmouse, 2.6.35-22-generic, 2.6.35-22-generic, i686: installed

If it is not installed. It can always be rebuilt with the following command

sudo dkms build -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms install -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

In case you followed this guide and it did not work for you, or Ubuntu releases an official fix for the issue (in which case you would have to remove the changes made following this guide to prevent conflicts) or for some reason you would like to revert the changes made following this guide. simply do

sudo dkms uninstall -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic

sudo dkms remove -m psmouse -v 2.6.35-22-generic --all

Following this guide does not lead to the nirvana of clickpad awesomeness (at least not for me). There are still some issues with Jumpy mouse which also affect windows 7. However it does make the clickpad much more useful under Ubuntu even then I would suggest that for serious work it won’t hurt to have a mouse handy

NB You can track the bug concerning this issue here

Thanks to Paul and Tob who really helped with the patch which fixes this issue.

I hope someone finds this useful.

Artha is a free cross-platform English thesaurus that works completely off-line and is based on WordNet. It is released under the GNU General Public Licence version

Source

Features

Although a gtk app  it has very little gnome dependencies (So KDE fans dont have to worry -much. Yeah yeah I know its would have been better if written in Qt but then “what can we do”  :(  ) However Artha has tons of features to make anyone (Gnome, Kde, whatever floats your boat) Drool.

• Offline : Unlike most dictionaries which can only be used if you are online. Artha works completely offline. So if you like me are not completely bought up by all this cloud computing craze and live in Africa where Internet sucks. Then Artha is a no brainer for you.  (Even if you are lucky and have highspeed internet Artha is also a no brainer )
• Regular Expressions Search : OK lets say there is a word you  vaguely know or you are unclear as to its meaning or spelling. (Happens to me a lot ) you can speed up/narrow the search using regular expression to locate the particular word they have in mind.
• Suggestions : Say you mispelled a word Artha can give you near matching suggestions (I also love this)
• Relative to Sense Mapping : Artha doesn’t just give you the meaning of words. It so includes words like Synonyms, antonyms. When you Select a relative its corresponding definition is scrolled and highlighted for easy comprehension.

The Awesomest  Feature that rules them all : Yeah I saved best for the last.  For me the feature of Artha which kills every other Dictionary software out there is its support for Notifications.  Here is how it works – Lets say I was going through my RSS reader and I found a word am not familiar with I just need to highlight the word, press the keyboard combination Ctrl+Alt+W (Which can be changed to any key combo that suits you) The meaning of the word gets displayed as a Notification Bubble .

Hence I can easily check the meaning of the word without having to launch the application window.

The notification feature of Artha is supported system wide and works with just about every application which support text highlighting.

Installation

Ubuntu / Debian : Although Artha is available in the Ubuntu / Debian Repository The version there is quite dated. However the latest version has been compiled to .deb and can be downloaded from   here

Fedora (Leonidas/11 or above) :  Artha can be installed with

yum install artha

Note* The version in the Fedora Reposittory is 0.9.1

Other Linuxes : If a binary package is not available for your distribution, you can easy download the source code from here and follow this installation instructions on how to compile from source.

Configuration: After installation, the rest is easy. When you start Artha Its minimizes in the Notification area of your desktop.  From the application window you can easily set you keyboard short cut by clicking on the settings. The default keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Alt-W.  By default the Notification feature is disabled but can be easily enabled by right clicking on the notification area icon. The rest is easy.


I found Artha to be very useful and goes a long way to enhance my workflow and user experience.  I hope someone find this useful.

There’s a PPA for that
PPA is means Personal Package Archive. It provides a way to easily install application which can not be found in the Ubuntu official repository on Ubuntu ( since the Ubuntu official repo takes a conservative approach to updates and number of applications it includes in its official repository with focus on stability over latest and greatest packages.) PPA is one of the coolest thing about Ubuntu. It creates an avenue for developers, packagers and even users to create their own personal repositories and include their packages which can easily be added and installed on Ubuntu.

The down-side of all these is that most of the applications contained in a PPA can be quite too bleeding edge and not as well tested as  what comes with the Ubuntu repos, so the users would sometimes want to revert back to the official Ubuntu packages. This is where PPA-Purge comes in handy

PPA-PURGE:    ppa-purge will reset all packages from a PPA to the standard versions released for your distribution.  So basically its like a way to restore your system back to the way it was before you installed packages from a PPA.

Installation: ppa-purge is very easy to install. You can grab a deb executable file directly from the web page of the xorg-edgers repository

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

Usage

ppa-purge is very easy to use.How this works is e.g If I wanted to remove say the blueman PPA I just go to terminal and paste the following

sudo ppa-purge ppa:blueman/ppa/

A break down of how this work is

sudo ppa-purge ppa:repository-name/subdirectory

e.g ‘deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/blueman/ppa/ubuntu karmic main’ the part in bold is the part you need to add to

sudo ppa-purge ppa:

to make it

sudo ppa-purge ppa:blueman/ppa

I actually tried the tool after I installed the xorg-edger repository to see if it would solve my graphic display issues, unfortunately it only made things worse, thankfully I was able to use ppa-purge to remove the PPA and reset (downgrade) my packages back to the default version on karmic.

So there you have it. You can go on installing all the latest and greatest packages using the Ubuntu PPA. knowing full well you have something to fall back on. I hope someone finds this useful.