Category Archives: Ubuntu

Testing Nemiver

Progress on nemiver has been slightly slower of late, but we’re making some steady progress on new things. In an effort to help more people test out newer versions of nemiver and to brush up on my packaging skills, I set up a personal package archive at launchpad about a week ago where I’ve uploaded a recent build of nemiver. Those of you using Ubuntu Feisty that want to try out a more up-to-date version of Nemiver can do so by adding the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb     http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonathon-jongsma/ubuntu feisty main universe
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/jonathon-jongsma/ubuntu feisty main  universe

Followed by the requisite apt-get install nemiver.

I’ll try to upload new versions periodically. Let me know if you have any issues with them. All of the usual caveats apply — this is development code so may not be completely stable, etc.

That sure is Edgy

Well, I upgraded my main laptop to Ubuntu Edgy last weekend, and for the most part things went OK (I used the official ‘update-manager -c’ procedure, so I didn’t get any severe breakage). Unfortunately, my wireless doesn’t work anymore. Sigh… I know I should have done more research into which laptops have good driver support for linux before I bought it, but it’s still frustrating. In the past I had to resort to the ndiswrapper driver to get it to work, but that doesn’t seem to work anymore. And I can’t seem to get the new bcm43xx driver to work right either. Alas, if only I were a hardware wizard. But congrats to the Ubuntu team. If I had the right hardware, I’m sure it’d be a fantastic release 🙂 And at least I get to play with the new GNOME stuff now.

Oh wait, I do have one more complaint about the upgrade: Bug #350053 drives me insane. I love Epiphany, but that bug completely screws up the way I use browse. I can use the ‘smart bookmarks’ feature, but it’s hard to reprogram my brain after getting used to just typing search terms in the location bar and hitting enter. If anyone can get the fix for that into Edgy, I’d be eternally grateful.

Also, if any of the brilliant Tango Friday participants want to make a nice little icon for the Nemiver debugger, that’d be great.

Joanne and I are heading out to the L.A. area for a long weekend tomorrow. Hopefully the weather out there’s nice and warm there. It’s certainly feeling a lot like winter up here. I could really use a few days off work, so I’m hoping for a few nice relaxing days, and the computer’s staying home.

Experimental colorscheme packages for Ubuntu Breezy

I took a little while this afternoon to sit down and try to teach myself a little about packaging software. I’m of the general opinion that software packaging should be left to the experts so that things can get done right. In fact, this is one of the things that makes Debian (and by extension, Ubuntu) great. The packages are all of high quality and available in a central repository. Before moving to Debian I was a Red Hat user (around version 9 — before Fedora and the extras improved things dramatically), so I’m well aware of the mess that comes from every user offering homemade packages on their websites.

Nevertheless, I’ve been getting a fair number of requests from people who want to use colorscheme but don’t have the necessary expertise to install it from source. And I’d really like to get more people using it and giving me feedback. So I’ve made a couple experimental colorscheme packages for Ubuntu Breezy (i386 and amd64). Hopefully this is just a temporary stop-gap measure until the software gets packaged for more distributions.

I make no guarantee that the packages will even work. Nor will I guarantee any support for them (remember, I don’t actually know what I’m doing — I just whipped those up in an afternoon). So I don’t particularly condone using them, but if you want to use the application and can’t get it installed from source, it’s an option.