ken’s blog

Pidgin sucks less for IRC

Now that we have the message indicator applet in Jaunty, I decided to give pidgin another try as an IRC client. A little background for those that have not had the pleasure of hearing my constant complaining about how pidgin just isn’t an IRC client, I love xchat-gnome for IRC. I have tried pidgin on many occasions, mostly because I would really prefer use a single app for IM and IRC. Pidgin just never felt right to me, mostly because I felt like it was impossible to follow as many channels as I am generally in.

This has changed now, not because pidgin has gotten better at IRC, but because of the message indicator applet. The message indicator grabs notifications from notify-osd that are based on human to human interaction, and stores them in a little applet in the panel that indicates what might need your attention. Currently only evolution and pidgin support it, but hopefully many more soon (gwibber, please gwibber!). Now when people highlight me in a chat, IM or private message me I see the nice little indicator with a star showing it needs attention.

I am very happy to say I can use Pidgin for my daily IRC use… Yay for a single client finally!

I am sure nobody will be surprised to hear that the indicator-applet is included in Foresight as well, just add it to your panel.

So close

Macbook Air vs. Commodore 64, amazing the Macbook Air wins

n810… trouble getting my discount

So I finally got notification that I could get my n810 in the US… yay! Rushed over to the site they sent me to just to find out them rejecting my discount code. The error I get is “there is no balance”. Is anyone else experiencing this? I used the contact page to ask for help, but no reply yet.

UPDATE: Just talked to OgMaciel, he said this is the same problem he had when he ordered his n800 last time around… this is a sad trend!

Year of the Linux Desktop

It is 2008, time for predictions/wishes/etc. Every year people predict “This will be the year of Linux on the Desktop” and later people make jokes about it. The thing is, people assume that declaring it the year for Linux on the Desktop means Linux will dominate the desktop. I see it differently, it is more about accelerating the move to Linux as the choice Desktop. And what do you know… last several years we have been growing like crazy, each year demonstrating more growth than the last.

I am going to put it out there, (drum roll) this year will be the year of the Linux Desktop

I will predict that we will experience even more growth than last year, and 2008 will be a banner year. Linux isn’t perfect as a desktop yet, but none of the alternatives are either.

The areas I really want to see improvement:

• Printer detection/configuration/driver selection
• Better Open Source video drivers

Short list huh? We are close… I am just not thrilled with any of the Linux printer detection/configuration tools. I want it to be dead simple, and imho not even Mac OS X can get that right. I struggled getting an HP printer to work on 10.3.9, so painful!

And don’t get me started on video drivers, it isn’t so much about the quality of the drivers (which needs improvement too), but hardware support. If someone buys a new laptop with the most current ATI video card, it needs to be well supported by a free/open driver at the time it was purchased. Not told “download the closed driver” or use the vesa driver for ~6 months until we get initial support for your device. Or even worse… just stuck not knowing what to do and give up on Linux. I don’t know how to solve it, but it needs to happen.

I have converted most of my family over to Foresight Linux with great results. First impression has really been GNOME related, things really just work how they should and they all say they would never go back to windows.

So lets ride this wave M$ has given us with Vista… the best thing to happen to Linux on the Desktop yet

Choosing a default Messenger client

As we are actively developing Foresight 2, it might be a good time to look for a new default messenger. Pidgin has been good for us and sort of the defacto standard for linux desktops. However, I am very interested in the future and where messaging is going. Telepathy, calling themselves a “Flexible Communications Framework”, is very interesting. The idea of a common framework for accessing a variety of communications services is very appealing. Not only can this be used for messaging and presence information, but now other desktop applications could potential tap into that framework very easily, via dbus. The possibilities are very cool!

A number of the pieces are packaged up for the Foresight 2 alphas, including Empathy and Banter clients.

I am looking for feedback, should Foresight Linux 2 default to using telepathy for messaging, not shipping pidgin by default? Let me know what you think!

PackageKit now included in Foresight

I am very excited to report that we have decided PackageKit is ready for wider spread use. Foresight users will all get PackageKit with their next update, and hopefully all future updates will be performed with PackageKit.

I have been extremely pleased with the progress of PackageKit, I really think it is the right solution and other distros should consider including it in the future. Richard Hughes and the other developers have really done a great job with it. For more information on PackageKit, check out the project site.

Going green

Everyones doing it… Hillary is going green, of course so is Obama, and you name your favorite politician, they are all vowing to go green too.

Foresight is the green distro… I say “Go Green!”

Ashlyn rode a horse!

So today while I was at work, Laurie took the kids to Spence’s Farm. We have taken the kids their quite a few times, and it is always a big hit. Well today was a little different, Ashlyn was going to learn a little about riding a horse.

It sounds like they have a great perspective there. They started out by teacher her that she has to do something for the horse, before she can expect the horse to let her ride him. So, they taught her to brush him. Then they fed the horse a snack. Gave her some instruction on getting on and off the horse, etc… and even had her pick her own helmet. She was responsible for all the details involved in getting out there to ride. She is only 3 (well almost 4) years old, but she handled it well. She really had a great time.

After the ride, he offered to let her “help” him feed the chickens. Basically that was his next chore to do, and let her tag along. Showed her the real responsibility that is found on a farm. I wish I could have gone, I ended up having to watch it all on video.

Anyone that has children, I would highly recommend a visit to Spence’s Farm.

A big thanks!

Since the Foresight project started, we have had quite a few people contribute. And I have really appreciated that! For this last release (0.9.8), we had an enormous amount of help from António Meireles (aka doniphon). Without him, we would have never gotten Xorg 7.1 into 0.9.8. It required lots of cooking, testing, and recipe hacking. He has also gotten Xgl/compiz working, and setup jira and confluence for us to use (will post links soon). So thanks to António!

I also have to thank the folks that hang out in #foresight around the clock and provide such great support to our new users. I am always hearing such great things about the quality and friendliness of our support. Thanks to all of you!

When the new (powered by django) website goes live, we will create a contributors page so people can get the proper credit.

Of course even with the great folks we have now, we could always use more help. If you want to join a friendly community, please stop by #foresight on freenode. We need testers, packagers, and people that are willing to help new users on irc, forums, and the mailing lists.

vim 7

Have I mentioned that vim 7 rocks! Here are some of the reasons why.

And, vim 7 is included in Foresight 0.9.4.mr6!