Andrea Grandi

Even this time Pistoia Linux User Group decided to join the international event "Ubuntu Global Jam" organizing it in collaboration with Ubuntu-it Community. The international event will be on March 2nd, 3rd and 4th and we have decided for March 3rd (saturday) from 15:00 CET to 19:00 CET. This event will be organized in a room made available by Circolo ARCI Bonelle. We'll have a room capable of about 100 people and a smaller one with 4 PC and a big table for people who want to bring their own laptop. Wifi internet connection will be available for everyone.

The event will be introduced by a talk made by Paolo Sammicheli of the Ubuntu-it Community and then we will divide in some smaller groups that will dedicate to different tasks. One will be coordinated by Paolo Sammicheli and will be dedicated to testing and bug triaging. Another group will do some translations from english to italian and will collaborate directly with italian translation team talking with them on a dedicated IRC channel. The last group will be leaded by a very good Unity rockstar..... (suspance)...... Marco Trevisan! People collaborating directly with him will try to help fixing some bugs or at least they will learn how to get started to bug fixing (probably we will pick a bitesize bug and we will fix it together).

We've created an event on Facebook and invited all our friends to attend. We really hope that many people will partecipate to this opportunity to make the next Ubuntu version more... "precise"!

If you try to install Nokia QtSDK on Ubuntu using the Nokia installer (that provides a newer version than the one distributed in Ubuntu Software Center) you could get an error like this:

(Qt_SDK_Lin32_offline_v1_1_3_en.run:3126): Gtk-CRITICAL **: IA__gtk_widget_style_get: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

to fix it, you need to run the installer with a specific parameter:

andrea@centurion:~/Downloads/Qt$ ./Qt_SDK_Lin32_offline_v1_1_4_en.run -style cleanlooks

and everything should work!

I've been a Flickr pro user for 4 years, but the pro account costs 24,95$/year and I was looking for something cheaper. Anyway I was thinking that after all, even if I don't renew my account, I can always access to all my pictures.... wrong! If you don't renew your pro Flickr account you can only access to the low resolution version of your own pictures. That's not acceptable for me, so I decided to download all my pictures and upload them somewhere else. Here comes the second disappointment: there is no automatic way to download all your pictures.

I simply had no time to write an application by myself, so I started searching on Google to see if there was something available to do this simple task. At the beginning I only found abandoned tools (closed source, the API was expired ecc...), paid tools, Windows only tools ecc... but finally I found this post http://hivelogic.com/articles/backing-up-flickr/

There is a Python script that automatically downloads all your Flickr pictures getting the highest resolution available, you can download the script from here https://github.com/dan/hivelogic-flickrtouchr

The usage is very simple

mkdir FlickrBackupFolder
python flickrtouchr.py FlickrBackupFolder

A browser's window will be opened and you'll be prompted for authorization. After that, all you pictures will be downloaded.

Tomorrow Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) will be released officially and I decided to test the RC (release candidate) version on my desktop PC. Being involved in Unity-2D development I used only that desktop environment on my development virtual machine so I didn't have much time to test Unity (3D version).

I must admit that there have been a lot of improvements from 11.04 (Natty Narval) release, but also a lot of bugs and regressions have been introduced. I've noted all the problems I found in every day use and as soon as possible I'll also submit proper bug report on Launchpad for each of them. In the mean time you can give a look to the following list.

Bugs and regressions

Notifications broken: on Ubuntu Natty when an application wants to notify of a new message it popups an icon from the Launcher, then displays a small blue triangle in the top-left corner of the screen. Oneiric doesn’t have the small blue triangle anymore. In this way, if the user is looking away when he gets a notification, he can miss it for hours. There’s no way to know that there is a notify without manually going with mouse to the left and making the launcher to appear.

Launcher visibility: on Ubuntu Natty when the user moves the mouse in the top-left corner the Launcher is shown. Oneiric doesn’t show Launcher if you move the mouse in the top-left corner. You can’t use the top 30-40 pixels (the height of the panel).

Notify area icons: often in Oneiric when you click an icon in the notify area (for example the volume icon, the network manager icon ecc...) the popup is shown and suddenly hidden. You have to click a second time to view it.

Notify icon - Empathy: in Oneiric you cannot open Empathy from the notify area. If you click on “Chat” Empathy is open and visible on the Launcher but not on the screen. You have to move to mouse to the launcher then click on it to view the application window.

Empathy: “Automatically connect on startup” doesn’t work. If you enable this option in Empathy it doesn’t start anyway when the system start.

Launcher doesn’t work as expected: sometimes when you move the mouse on the left, Launcher is not shown. You can try it many times and it still doesn’t appear. I’ve to SUPER+D a couple of times (to show/hide Desktop) to show view it. Even the opposite problem happens: sometime you cannot hide the Launcher.

Boot failing: every time I boot Oneiric the first boot fails. I cannot know what happens because nothing is shown on video. I press CTRL+ALT+CANC, the system reboot and then boot normally.

Showing Skype: on Natty you just need to double-click on Skype icon in the notify bar to show it, now you need to click once on the icon, choose “Activate” from menu and you show it. Why the need to complicate an easy thing?

Webcam problems with Skype: with Natty I could use my webcam with Skype without any problem. Now I can still use it but if I activate the view of myself during a videcall, the video completly locks and it doesn’t work anymore. Skype is always the same version, so probably there is a problem with the new driver used.

Window manager: sometimes moving an application window doesn’t work. You drag a window around the screen then suddenly the window stop moving and the mouse icon starts vibrating. You have to release and click again to move the window and stop mouse icon vibrating.

Conclusion

Even this morning I didn't wake up early because I still felt sick (I already know this sore throath won't abandon me untile I go back home).

I had a light breakfast at 10:30 and then I finishes uploading some pictures and published articles on my blog I already had written before.

While waiting to attend a session, I found Mark Shuttleworth around and I congratulated with him for the effort he is putting into Ubuntu. Without a similar distribution, I'm pretty sure that Linux would not be so popular today.

We had lunch at 13:00 as usual and after that I attended a couple of presentation. The first one on Eucalyptus, then "Cooking Recipes" for Ubuntu and another one dedicated to Wine. The Wine session was so funny! They had a little problem with video projector and all the images appeared with a blur effect so that you could think to be drunk

After these sessions I had to go back to my room since I didn't feel very well, but I was able to attend "Unity's relations and dependancies on GNOME" thanks to audio streaming, IRC for asking questions and etherpad to take notes.

I attended also "desktop-dx-o-unity-a11y" where there was a discussion about the state of Unity and what can be improved before Oneiric release. Lot of work has to be done yet, in particular about accessibility.

Last session of this day, a Q+A with Mark Shuttleworth. The session was very interesting! He replied to all questions coming from the public and from IRC.