Tips for Ubuntu 9.04

Testing the new release of Ubuntu I found some changes that don’t like very much. First of them is that now the sortcut Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace is deactivated by default, the other one is that the update manager just appear when there are some new update instead of the old icon in the systray. I really hate windows that appear out of control in my desktop.

Fortunately, looking for Internet I could find a solution. In the first case it’s enough to add this lines at the end of /etc/X11/xorg.cong file:


Section "ServerFlags"
Option "DontZap" "False"
EndSection


To avoid that update manager appears whenever it likes just type this in a terminal:

gconftool -s --type bool /apps/update-notifier/auto_launch false

I have also some problem with the 3D acceleration of my card, a Intel 945GM, that was fixed downgrading the driver to the intrepid version. For that, I added these lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:


deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/siretart/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main


and doing apt-get update and sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel.

The moral of the post is that Human Beings are prisoners of our habits.

Official packages for gtranslator

The last release of gtranslator (1.9.4) has been included in Debian and Ubuntu as official package.
This is still an unstable release. In the case of Debian, it has been included into Debian Experimental and in Ubuntu has been included in the next stable version, Jaunty.

I would like to say thank you to Debian and Ubuntu people that make this possible. Now, if you are fan of Debian or Ubuntu you can test the new gtranslator installing it from the repository of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

Links to official packages:

Debian
Ubuntu

GNOME Merchandise

Last week was my birthday. A friend of mine, Andrés, had a brilliant idea, give me something related to GNOME. He could have thought in give me a sticker for my laptop, for instance, but I have already one. He could have thought in a T-Shirt, but I have already a couple of ones. He could have thought in a… nothing else. There were no more possibilities so finally he found this:

This is a funny bathroom rug, obviously this is not the GNOME logo but if it was, it would be really cool. I would like to have a bathroom rug with the GNOME logo, and I’m pretty sure that many people that love GNOME would like too. GNOME Marketing, it’s time to create a powerful merchandise line!

gtranslator 2.0 is one step closer to be reality

Yesterday gtranslator 1.9.4 has been released. This is the first Beta version of gtranslator 2.0. It includes the new features which I talked in a previous post.

I want to say thank you to all the people that have contributed with the project somehow.

You can download it from here and test it.

I would be happy if gtranslator makes your work a bit easier.

Testing Intrepid Ibex with QEMU

In one of the first posts I told about testing the new version of Ubuntu. In that post I had just upgraded muy ubuntu 7.10 to ubuntu 8.04 Heard5, that was, one month before ubuntu 8.04 becomes stable. I didn’t have any several problem but to be honest I had lots of lucky.

Now I am going to test the next ubuntu release, this is ubuntu 8.10 or if you prefer Intrepid Ibex.
According to the ubuntu release schedule the last version to test if the Alpha 4. Two months left for the release.

This time I am not going to trush on luck. In one of the last sessions of the Master on Free Software, Berto told us about Virtualization. Among the virtualization systems about Berto told us I liked specially QEMU, so I decided to use it in order to test ubuntu 8.10. These are the steps that I followed:

- First I downloaded the iso image of ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 from here.

- Installing QEMU:

- Then I created a qemu file image, this will be my virtual hard disk, doing:

- Now I could install ubuntu 8.10 in that virtual hard disk from the iso image just doing:

where 512 is the size of the RAM.

- Finally to run ubuntu 8.10 after installing it:

$qemu -hda ~/intrepid.img -m 512

Some tips:

- If you are using a 64 bits operative system you should use qemu-system-x86_64 as command instead of qemu.

- If you want the virtual system run faster you can install the qemu accelerator:

$sudo apt-get install kqemu-common

you will need to load the kernel module for the accelerator:

$sudo modprobe kqemu

then you can run qemu with the option –kernel-kqemu to use the accelerator.

Gtranslator 2.0 is comming…

It has been a long time since I decided to start to collaborate with the development of gtranslator, first as my dissertation in order to get my degree as Technical Engineer in Computer Sciences and now as my practicum in the Master on Free Software working at Igalia.

Gtranslator is a PO files editor that was created by Fatih Demir and maintained until October 2007 by Ross Golder when he transfered the maintenance to Juanjo and me. Thank you guys for trusting on us. It is not very common that there are two maintainers in a gnome project but in this case I think we are a good team, Juanjo is the experience and I am the enthusiasm.

For the last months we have been working a lot with Ignacio Casal trying to migrating gtranslator to Gobject and implementing some new features:

• Support for different profiles with information about the translator and language.
• Translation memory.
• Plugin system
• Plugins for OpenTran, alternate language, integration with subersion, diff…
• Catalog manager for PO Files.

All this features are working right now and we hope to make a beta release as soon as possible so that translators can check them.
Besides we are preparing a new web page with all the information about the new features, a roadmap for the future and information about how to use the program and how to collaborate with its development.

We are thinking also in changing the name for the project. So far we had created a section into gtranslator’s wiki where people can write its suggestions for the new name but this decision it’s not definitive because change the name for a project it is a decision more complicate than it seems to be. In fact this is worth analyzing in another post.

Master on Free Software students talking about quality and Libre Software

As activity for one of the subjects in the Master on Free Software we made a paper entitled Quality and Libre Software: a theoretical and practical approach.

In that paper we tried to test the OpenBRR model. This is an attempt to meassure how much suitable a free software project is when we have a group of requirements. We chose as example in order to test the model in a real case which would be the most appropiate GNU/Linux distribution to an average user.

By means this example we could study the model and discover its strenghs and weakness. In the paper we suggest also some ideas in order to improve it.

Besides, thanks to Caixanova we could travel to Brussels in order to attend to Fosdem and present the paper into the Research Room.

Resources:

• Paper (pdf)
• Slides
• Video of the presentation

Very special thanks also to people from Libresoft and Igalia for their support and to my classmates for trusting on me as speaker. (You didn’t know what were doing)

Encoding video for the NDS

I have had a nds since a couple of months. Of course its best quality is the gaming but it has more possibilities. There are many homebrew or applications that you can download from internet and they let you do many things like surf the web, check your email, you can use it like video and music player even install GNU/Linux.

The video player is a great feature, for example I use a video and music player for my nds called moonshell. The problem is that application uses a specific video format (dpg) so it is necessary to encode the videos before.
Recently I found this script in python, licensed under GPL2, that let you do it easily. You need also mpeg_stat, that analyze the streaming of a mpeg file. The use is as follow:

First you need to copy mpeg_stat to your /bin directory. Then you should copy the script to the same directory where you have the video/s to encode and then you can execute doing:

$ python dpgconv.py file_name.extension

It works perfectly with avi and mpeg videos, once it has done you can copy the video in your nds and to enjoy.

The moral of the post is: Is there anything that it cannot be made with python?

Many reasons to use Libre Software

These last days I had the opportunity to attend to many talks about Libre Software.

Last week, in the Master of Free Software, we had two exceptional guests: Alberto Abella and Marcelo Branco, you can see a summarize of their talks here.
Besides, these days gpul is organizing its VIII Xornadas Software Libre and yesterday I attended to one talk that my classmate Pedro did about the process of making free gisEIEL, a proyect between Deputación da Coruña and University of Coruña.

These three talks have in common one idea: the advantage of using Libre Software, but from different points of view.

In the first one, Alberto Abella tell us with statics and data how Libre Software is better than Privative.

In the second one, Marcelo Branco tell us about his experience in Libre Software and public administrations. Marcelo is pure passion talking about Libre Software but his arguments are true. Countries should not use Privative Software in their public administrations because on the one hand, they are putting economics resources out of the country and they cannot be sure about the integraty of the public data because they cannot really what the privative software do without seeing the source code.

Finally, in the gisEIEL talk, the reasons are technical. They started the project using Privative Software but they realize that was depending on the one company exclusively. They could not make their own applications to access to the database. The data was storing in binary way so they could not get them without using the privative applications… so they make up their minds to migrate the project to Libre Software because it was better from technical point of view.

Therefore we can deduce that Libre Software is not only for ‘frikis’. It is a real inovation in the computer world. The world is changing. Do not stay in the dark!

Libre Software in Galicia

This week has just published the new number of Codigocero, a very important galician magazine about technology. This number is special for me because there is an interview to Roberto Vieito, one of my classmates in the Master of Free Software. Roberto made a study about the situation of the Libre Software in Galicia which you can see here (in English).
You can also read the interview here (in Galician).

Well done Roberto!