I've been eyeing getting this blog on a Planet-type blog aggregator, and to do that I needed a hackergotchi — a smallish, cut-out PNG image of my head, examples of which you can see on Planet Debian, Planet Ubuntu and Planet Fedora, among others.

My graphical skill is pretty much confined to messing around with JPG images, and things like cutting out the background are lost on me. So I found help with creating a hackergotchi and found this Linux.com page that helped me roll one out quick and dirty. I didn't even use a good photo of myself - just something I shot on the webcam a while back that I've been using here and there.

The instructions were pretty clear, and here's what I came up with in five minutes of work:

I've got no chin because that didn't get captured in the webcam image. But otherwise it's not bad for a lousy photo and a few minutes in the GIMP, don't you think?

Is Twitter's new oauth feature responsible for this annoying login box when I go to Twitter.com?

I ignore Twitter and Identi.ca for weeks at a time. Sure I have feeds from my blog going from one to the other, but I pretty much stay away from Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook (the latter of which I also feed automatically).

So today I figure I'll look in on Twitter and Identi.ca via the Pino microblogging client that I installed in my Fedora 13 Xfce system. Pino is in the default GNOME desktop but not in the Xfce spin.

Anyway, Pino just hangs there when I start it. So I go to Twitter and do a search, eventually learning that it's something called "oauth" that is breaking Pino.

On the Pino site, a message says the app will have oauth support in 0.3, so I'm not terribly worried. I can live without a microblogging client until then. (We still have HootSuite, which is about to start charging all but the most casual user, and which due to its extreme usefulness we might just pay for at the shop here.)

Also ... I've heard Gwibber is affected as well.

Here's the important part of this entry, which I've wisely saved for the bottom: Is this oauth thing responsible for the annoying password box that keeps popping up at http://twitter.com? (see picture above)

When I discovered after uploading a couple dozen breaking-news JPGs I had written captions for in gThumb 2.11 that those captions weren't being recognized by my IPTC-capable content-management system, I worried that my go-to Linux/BSD application for photo editing would be useless to me. I even went so far as to install Wine so I could get my work done with IrfanView.

Well, not even two weeks have passed, and everything is working right once again.

The whole process gives me a great feeling about the people behind gThumb, GNOME, Fedora and the free, open-source software world in general.

When I discovered the gThumb 2.11 problem, I found users in the Fedora Forums with other gThumb issues and saw the suggestion that we file bugs upstream. I immediately figured out how to file a bug in GNOME Bugzilla,started an account and filed a bug.

As detailed in my last post on gThumb's broken IPTC metadata capability, the prompt answer to the bug I filed suggested that I try gThumb 2.11.90, in which this bug should have been fixed.

In Fedora 13 right now, gThumb is at 2.11.5, and while there was a 2.11.90 package for Fedora 14, I was reluctant (and not so knowledgeable as to exactly how) to update the dependencies that went with gThumb 2.11.90. I also was unable to build 2.11.90 from source (although I've since installed the necessary compiliers in an effort — not quite completed or successful — to fix my Conexant sound problem with another source package).

It's been barely a week since that last entry, and I checked the gThumb area of the Fedora Build System today and found a gThumb 2.11.90 package for Fedora 13.

I downloaded and installed the RPM. I immediately did a test on the IPTC metadata, and gThumb is now writing that data in the proper way, which means captions written via IPTC (in gThumb's Comments) will now show up in other IPTC-capable image editors (IrfanView, Photoshop, PhotoMechanic) as well as in Web-based applications that tap into the IPTC data fields in JPGs.

My participation in this is in no way a big deal. I found a bug, filed a bug report, got helpful advice from a GNOME developer (thanks, Paolo!), installed a newer version of the package and am now back in my go-to image-editing application in Linux/BSD.

So in this case, the free, open-source development model is working perfectly. If you're running Fedora 13, grab the new gThumb from the page linked to above.

Installing this RPM went without a hitch. And gThumb will be in great shape when Fedora 14 is released. I'm not sure if/when gThumb 2.11.90 will be pushed to all users of the app in Fedora 13 — I'm still too new of a Fedora user to have a handle on these things. But I bet it's coming, given that there's an FC13 package in the Build Service.

Ubuntu 10.04 rolled back from gThumb 2.11 to 2.10, which is also in Debian Lenny. The Ubuntu package situation right now has 2.11.3 in Maverick, and I have a pretty good feeling that they'll get to 2.11.90, so when the next Ubuntu release comes around, users will have no idea there was ever IPTC trouble in gThumb 2.11.

Debian Squeeze currently has gThumb 2.11.5 (same as stock Fedora 13). Looking at Debian's gThumb situation, 2.11.90 is in Experimental and should be at least percolating into Sid soon.

I'm not sure what the freeze in Debian Squeeze means for gThumb, but it would be a problem for users if 2.11.90 is held back from Squeeze.

Do any Debian people out there know if Debian policy will prevent gThumb 2.11.90 from being included in Squeeze?

I'd like to thank the GNOME/gThumb developers who made all this possible, plus the Fedora developers who put together the gThumb 2.11.90 RPM for FC13. You've done a great job in making my Linux installation more productive.

Britain's BBC has its own Click, it turns out.

The Abiword 2.8.4 on my Fedora 13 Xfce system just got an update to 2.8.6. It's not a major upgrade, and some bugs are addressed, but I don't expect an application like this to get even a bug-fix update in a distribution that's been out there for awhile. A security patch, yes, but a new package because upstream has a new release (even though the distro itself isn't so new anymore)?

I like it. Very much. I've seen quite a few updates roll by over my last month or so in Fedora, and a lot of these things have been bug fixes, not security updates.

First Midori was fixed, now Abiword gets new features (and fewer bugs). I feel like the Fedora developers are really looking out for users and making sure that if the release can be made a little better, that actually can and does happen.

Overall I've been extremely happy with Fedora 13. I'm not happy with either Conexant or the whole of Linux/BSD for making a laptop soundcard that refuses to mute the speakers when a headphone jack is plugged in, but as I say — it's not Fedora. All of Linux and BSD appears affected by this Conexant problem, and I don't see any fix in sight.

I haven't had a lot of time on the laptop I upgraded — seemingly successfully — from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 (LTS to LTS).

Everything seemed to go OK, and the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop rebooted into a nice Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid desktop.

Wireless networking didn't work, and the NetworkManager icon was missing (and Networking is no longer a menu choice in Ubuntu). I haven't yet had time to hook it up to a wired Ethernet port so I can see if DHCP remains that way.

If I can get networking into the machine (and I can manually configure if I have to), maybe a reinstall of NetworkManager will bring the icon back to the upper GNOME panel.

Other than that I haven't noticed anything amiss, but I haven't done much beyond wonder why I can't seem to get the WiFi working.

Once I do get some time with the laptop, I'll evaluate further.

I have a pretty good feeling that I can fix the NetworkManager situation, and if I can't it's an easy reinstall of 10.04 ...

So rest easy, Ubuntu people, this one looks like it's going your way.

This Bruce Byfield piece from Linux Magazine looks like it's going to go negative but instead offers a reasoned argument for why Debian GNU/Linux remains relevant and useful in the Ubuntu era.

Just last night I pulled out my Compaq Armada 7770dmt — the 1999-era laptop that refuses to quit working and sports a 233 MHz Pentium II MMX CPU, 144 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive.

I once wrote a multipart series centered on which OS I should run on this laptop.

For just about a year now I've had Debian Lenny with a "custom" Xfce desktop — custom because I built it up from the "standard" install to keep it as lean as possible in the 2 GB I have set aside for /root and /swap.

With Debian, it just rolls down the track and keeps running. How many of today's distributions will even load up on a Pentium II?

Even though I'm running Fedora 13 right now (Fedora 14's not looking so good as far as video on this Lenovo G555, so I may be back to Debian sooner rather than later), I've tried Debian Squeeze, most recently with the Alpha 2 live image, and it's another solid system for what amounts to new hardware. Yep, machines spaced over 10 years apart can run the same distro.

As I've said many a time, if you can manage to avoid ill-time dist-upgrades (killed my Lenny-to-Squeeze plan about six months ago ... but I pulled the trigger at the wrong time), it's hard to do better security-, performance- or usability-wise than Debian. Sure some things are harder to configure than in Ubuntu. But nothing is that much harder, much less impossible. And you will see a performance bump.

I stray from Debian because I get itchy, but I often regret it. I've never run Testing for any length of time, or Sid/Unstable at all, and I probably should. But Debian Stable? It runs better on more machines than anything I've ever tried.

Can I see myself running Ubuntu again? Sure. But I can't see a time when I won't have a use for more than one instance of Debian.

I haven't run the AbiWord word processor in an age. I barely ever run OpenOffice, or MS Office, or any office software outside of Google Docs.

But this Fedora 13 Xfce desktop included AbiWord and Gnumeric instead of the heavier OpenOffice, and I decided to give AbiWord a try again.

AbiWord is pretty great. It's super fast, and version 2.8.4 in Fedora includes the spell-checker (I often had trouble getting spell-checking to work in other distros). If you just want to do word-processing and do it quickly, there's nothing better than AbiWord.

I was looking for the word-wrap settings (still don't know if these exist ...) and instead learned that AbiWord now offers SMART QUOTES. Now if you read entries from this blog in 2007, you could glean that I was somewhat obsessed with smart quotes in word-processing documents.

I had an editor at the time who took Word documents and basically plowed them into print. If you had "smart quotes" in your document — you know, with the open-quotes curving one way, the close-quotes the other — your printed output would look great. Otherwise it would look ... not so good.

So I was on a mission to find word-processing software that was a) free b) fast and c) handled smart quotes well.

And now AbiWord includes smart quotes. I probably complained 80 separate times in this blog, and the feature is here.

This almost makes me want to go back to Abiword. Thanks to the entire Abiword team who put in a feature that geeks sneer at but regular people pretty much expect.

From the Abiword home page, here's the announcement for version 2.8:

Oct 27, 2009
AbiWord 2.8 has been released! This milestone supports annotations, or "comments", smart quotes and native SVGs. Furthermore it includes powerful collaboration capabilities allowing multiple people to work on one document at the same time. These features are tightly integrated with a new online web service called AbiCollab.net, which lets you store documents online, allows easy document sharing with your friends, and performs format conversions on the fly.
Read the release announcement here.

With all these new features, I'm just about to update the Abiword on my Windows XP box, and enjoy the extreme quickness it offers over OpenOffice (again ... like I've actually even fired up OO over the past 6 months).

Chromium — the community build of the Google Chrome browser (is that even the right way to refer to the project?) — isn't in the Fedora repositories, but you can get it.

I'm still feeling my way around Fedora 13, and while I've added the RPM Fusion and Adobe repositories, I'm still proceeding slowly with a great many things.

One thing I finally did do was add Chromium. I did it with the Spot repository for Chromium from Fedorapeople. I added the fedora-chromium.repo file to my /etc/yum.repos.d/ directory, as instructed in the file itself. Then I used PackageKit to add Chromium. Easy as heat-and-serve pie.

So what if you already have Flash installed for Firefox and want it to work in Chromium, too? The instructions on how to make that happen aren't exactly compatible with the way this particular Chromium package is installed in Fedora 13. I'll have to look into this further to fine-tune the suggested symbolic link.

A look at the roadmap for Ubuntu One reveals the following feature planned for Maverick:

Windows file sync

* Addresses the needs of the many Ubuntu users who operate in a mixed platform environment of Ubuntu + Windows
* Will support syncing files between Windows desktops and your Ubuntu One personal cloud

You can't argue that Windows is the world's most popular operating system and that it's, in one sense, the proverbial "no-brainer" for Ubuntu One to sync with Windows, but this is free, open-source Linux we're talking about.

What about a free, open-source Ubuntu One client that could be used in any Linux distribution?

Will this Windows code be open source? I have no idea. If you know, please leave a comment on this post.

I realize that one of the main reasons for Ubuntu One's existence is to draw users to Ubuntu, but allowing Windows users a degree of functionality that users of other Linux distributions will not have — that just seems wrong.

After filing a bug on the IPTC metadata issue in gThumb 2.11, namely that the application doesn't put the data entered in the "comment" area into the right format for IPTC, I heard from one of the developers that my bug was similar to another bug that was fixed in version 2.11.90, and he suggested I try that version.

My Fedora 13 skills are rudimentary, and I haven't yet been able to build gThumb 2.11.90 from source, and I haven't yet had the time to grab the required dependencies to install the RPM for Fedora 14 (and I do have that RPM). I'll get around to it, I'm sure.

What I'd like to do is thank the gThumb team for being so responsive. The developers did a lot of overhauling to gThumb between 2.10 and 2.11, and I can understand there being a few glitches. I'm just glad the process seems to be working, and I hope that gThumb will be back in my workflow very soon.

All I really need to make gThumb the ultimate photo-editing app for my purposes is the ability to sharpen images in the app. As it is, gThumb allows me to edit an image with another program, say the GIMP, and then return to gThumb. If I do this just right, gThumb returns the IPTC metadata to my JPG image file after the GIMP zaps it out. A GIMP that also recognized, edited and didn't obliterate IPTC data would solve many a problem. I've brought this up before maybe a dozen times, and I'm not expecting anything to happen regarding the GIMP and IPTC. I continue to be thankful that gThumb and digiKam handle IPTC.

I've tried Mapivi, which does handle IPTC data, but it didn't work particularly well for me.
Fotoxx also didn't work well for me, but I'm open to trying both of these applications again. I'd also love to see IPTC capability in Krita; that alone would push me into KDE (a desktop environment that I tried recently in Fedora 13 but didn't much like).

I'll close by saying that gThumb remains my No. 1 image editor.

I decided to go ahead with the in-place upgrade of the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 LTS.

After some initial bumps along the road, everything today has gone extremely smoothly. I've already addressed the fact that the 10.04 upgrade is only presented to 8.04 users when update-manager is run with the --devel-release switch. It's hacky, in no way self-evident, but once you find the information is easy enough to act upon.

Thus far the process has been long but uneventful. I know in a few short minutes whether or not this Celeron-based laptop will boot into 10.04 with or without incident.

If you use or follow Ubuntu, a great way to see what's happening somewhat behind the scenes is the Canonical Design Team site/blog.

I assumed this was a fairly new thing (and I think I'm right in this assumption), but it has posts going back to 2005. Where did those posts come from? I didn't know there was a design team in 2005 ...

One thing that holds my interest is that Canonical in general, and the design team in particular, are doing usability testing on the user interface and such applications as Rhythmbox.

As somebody said in the comments to the Rhythmbox entry, this is a great way of "giving back" to open source that just happens to be something besides hacking at code.

For free, open-source software to really break out of its geeky box, we really need to celebrate and encourage contributions that go beyond coding, and I'm glad to see Canonical putting resources into areas such as design and the user experience.

Fedora 13 has been working out very well over the past couple of weeks. Let me bullet-point the good and bad:

• As I wrote a few days ago, the Midori browser is working again. I've been amazed over the few weeks I've run Fedora that even though the release of the distro is already out there, some bugs have actually been fixed in applications. Another app that improved during the course of my use of F13 is the gPodder podcast client, which had an issue with selecting the type of audio player in its UI. That's been fixed, and I'm using gPodder pretty regularly.

• The gThumb image editor's IPTC-data capabilities are pretty much broken in version 2.11 (with Ubuntu's decision to revert to 2.10 in Lucid, initially criticized by me, looking now like an excellent move and huge point in Ubuntu's favor). I couldn't figure out how to install 2.10 in Fedora 13 (I'm not that good yet), so to keep my workflow going, I decided to install IrfanView under Wine. I initially tried ot use Bordeaux with the .sh script, but once it installed the Bordeaux front-end refused to install IrfanView. I ripped Bordeaux out of there and instead used the Wine package provided in Fedora. I still couldn't get Wine to run the IrfanView install .exe, even with the required .dll file moved into the Wine install from my XP box. Somewhere on the Web I saw that somebody with the same problem just took the IrfanView directory from Windows and moved it into their Wine system, so I got a USB stick and did just that. It worked. I then made a desktop shortcut for IrfanView as well as a panel icon, and now I have IrfanView with which to edit images and their IPTC data — a must for my Web production duties.

• And yes, I did open a bug on the gThumb 2.11 IPTC problem with the upstream project.

• While on the subject of Wine, I don't know if my aborted install of Bordeaux had anything to do with this, but I did bring the wine-desktop package into this Fedora installation, and while it initially appeared in the Xfce menu, it now only does so sporadically. I really don't need any of those things in the menu (and since I didn't install IrfanView the "regular" way it never appeared in the application menu, which is seemingly impossible to edit manually or any other way, a weakness of Xfce, especially in Fedora). But a yum reinstall of wine-desktop does bring all those Wine items back into the menu, albeit temporarily. Not a deal-breaker; I'm just noting it.

• Xfce's Thunar file manager doesn't have the direct capability of opening network shares or FTP sites but somehow can do so with the Gigolo package, which I've used successfully in Xubuntu. However, on most of the FTP sites I've tried to connect to in Fedora 13, Gigolo crashes. I'm a heavy enough user of FTP that I needed FileZilla anyway, and that app has been working great ever since I installed it.

• I commented recently on one of the Xfce features I like, that being the ability to "roll up" a window. Somebody said you can do the same thing in GNOME, but I recently tried to do it in a couple of GNOME-running installations, including Ubuntu 8.04, and I couldn't figure out how to "roll up" a window. So once again I'm declaring this feature a reason to run Xfce; until futher notice anyway.

• I really like yum. It's powerful, well-documented and easy to use. I don't miss apt or Aptitude at all. I'm not so in love with PackageKit. It's less than intuitive and makes Synaptic look good. Yum is easier.

• I still like the Xfce Terminal a whole lot.

• I had to do some work on my network configuration on the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop, and it makes me extremely thankful for all the improvements made in NetworkManager since that release.

• The way Fedora (and pretty much all distros except Ubuntu) notifies me of software updates is better than the way Ubuntu does it now.

• I haven't installed OpenOffice on this Fedora 13 Xfce laptop. It came with Abiword and Gnumeric, and I haven't used them either. I pretty much use text editors (Geany is part of this build) and Google Docs.

• GNOME's Totem seems to work "better" than Xfce's Parole media player, at least on this newer hardware, but Parole uses less CPU. That could be a factor for older hardware.

• While I've pretty much abandoned traditional mail clients, I've been using the Fedora 13 Xfce's default app Claws Mail to run a couple of accounts via IMAP. I really like Claws - it's fast, light and easy to configure. I really felt the heaviness of Thunderbird 3 in the brief time I ran it, and this looks like a really great alternative. I still have something like 4 GB of mail in Thunderbird format parked on a USB stick and I guess I'll have to deal with it at some point, but for my day-to-day mail, I'm using Gmail; it's just too convenient and useful to ignore.

• This Lenovo G555 laptop is good enough hardware-wise that I really don't need to go through the trouble of installing Google Chrome or Chromium. Firefox, which I need for a few critical tasks, runs so fast that I'm pretty much using it all the time.

• While the Pino microblogging client is in the F13 GNOME default, it isn't part of the Xfce spin. I installed it, and I really like it. It's way, way, way, way, way lighter than Gwibber, which really dragged down my last Ubuntu 10.04 system with its database issues. The one thing I miss from Gwibber is the ability to update any number of microblogging accounts with a single post. But overall Pino, which hooks up to both Twitter and Identi.ca, is a great microblogging client and nowhere near the resource hog that Gwibber is (at least in Ubuntu Lucid).

I use Audacity for podcast audio capture and production on a variety of platforms, and the speed with which my new Lenovo G555 (AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz) mixes down to MP3. I can't remember adding the LAME package from RPMFusion, but I must have done that because I tested that feature before I needed to edit a podcast and all was working fine.

What I forgot to test was the ability of Audacity in Fedora 13 to import MP3 audio, the format in which I get interview segments from my JV Show host Jon Gold.

Audacity wouldn't import the MP3, throwing off a message saying something close to "this version of Audacity is not compiled with MP3 support."

Now I'm all about freedom and free formats, but the rest of the world pretty much speaks MP3, and while I choose Ogg, Flac and other free formats when possible, the rest of the world doesn't know such formats exist. I like the choice of whether or not to use MP3 or any restricted format.

So it's Friday evening and I have to put the podcast together. So what do I do?

A quick Google search yielded the following from the Audacity Forum, with this post focusing on solving the problem in Fedora:

I had the same issue and found that the audacity-freeworld package solves the problem instantly!

I just had to remove the other version:

# yum remove audacity

Then install the new one:

# yum install audacity-freeworld

That did it. Now I can import MP3 audio into Audacity. Like I said, I fully support choosing to use non-encumbered formats, but I like the flexibility of using them if I want or need to. And this "freeworld" package allows me to do that.

Now ... if only the Linux world could help me and the rest of the Conexant 5069 sound-chip sufferers figure out how to have the internal speakers actually mute when headphones are plugged in, we'd really be getting somewhere. I wouldn't mind the internal microphone muting when a mic is plugged in, but both the internal and external mics are controllable through ALSA, so I have the internal mic muted that way.