I’ve set up WordPress on some space provided to me by a friend who does webhosting for swedes. Gonna be moving, at least, most of the blogging over there.

You can find it a http://www.poltergeist.se/

Are you as sick of broken dark themes as I am? Many of you probably know that a lot of the darker themes you get at places like gnome-look many times are unusable because of things like text input-boxes have fault coloring, so you might not be able to see what you’re writing.

Well, there is a solution.

Gnome Color Chooser

This handy little application lets you manually specify what color different elements of your desktop should be. It’s pretty complete, and even let’s you decide what color of icon highlighting you want.

One thing, that’s really cool, is that you can use different gtk-engines to draw different parts of your desktop. That feature, however, is limited to some predefined engines, but still very nice. I, for instance, like how the “Crux” GTK-engine draws buttons, but not the theme overall, so now I can use just that, and ignore the rest of the theme.

You can find this great little application in the Ubuntu repositories, and also at Launchpad

To be honest, there isn’t a discussion to be had over which os is better between the major Linux distros or Vista. It’s so obvious that you have a lot more functionality in, say Ubuntu or Suse. I tried Vista out yesterday, trying to clean all the crap of my girlfriends mothers brand new laptop. And it was just so slow, it wasn’t even usable.

I still haven’t used a Mac, but to be honest, I don’t see why I would either. Even if Mac OS were to be a bit more stable, or contain a bit more functionality than Ubuntu (or another free OS) it wouldn’t matter. I trust free software, and I don’t trust Apple, but more importantly: Linux is good enough, and that’s the key.

Everywhere I turn I seem to stumble into discussions about what office suite is better, what graphics program is better etc.. But this discussion is only relevant to a very small portion of users. Openoffice will continue to be just as good as MS Office for the majority of people, and the Gimp is absolutely an alternative to Photoshop to most people. There are some functionality that isn’t available for the free options out there yet, but the actual portion of people that need that specific funtionality is so small.

There is so much stuff that could be added to Openoffice that are available in MS Office, but it wouldn’t make much of a difference, because the most major thing about both Openoffice and The Gimp, is something else than the actual functionality. It’s about the fact that the free alternatives doesn’t look exactly like the proprietary, and the fact that they are free, which convinces most people it can’t be any good.

That’s the kind of narrow thinking that causes the most problems. Of that I am certain.

Consider this, thepiratebay.org tracks over a million torrents. Head over there and check their statistics if you don’t believe me. Now, browse their site, and you will find that a lot of the files, if not most, are contained in proprietary formats. The fact is, online piracy is one of the most effective way of reaching standards. Everything from rar-compression, and mp3-audio, xvid-video, I dare say, would not have been as succesful if it had not been the choice of the pirates.

I’ll leave the moral issue in the closet today, because this is more of a  mind experiment than a part of a debate in the evening paper.

I have thought a lot about this, and I must say, I see no more effective way of promoting free and open formats than through the distribution of some “must-have” materials in those formats.

Let’s say Timbaland’s new album would be made available to the public in the ogg-format long before it get’s release, or even before it’s available in the mp3-format…

The effect? Well, some people would get angry of the stupid moron who deided to use the worthless ogg-format. Who has ever heard of ogg anyway?

Now, let’s consider the effect if the above scenario were to occur every day, with more and more new releases being prereleased in free formats.

I don’t think I’m the only one believe that this could be a truly effective way of promoting ogg as a viable option to mp3. After all, “the scene” seem to use it, so it must be good, right?

The same could be true for everything from movies to digitalized comicboks. Of course, XviD is free software, but to avoid patent trolling it might be good to convert over to Theora.

I’m not trying to make some pro-piracy statements. However it will not matter if ogg vorbis is superior to mp3 if the most popular ways of getting music doesn’t provide that format.
I realize it might be a bit controversial of me for suggesting that piracy, quite possibly, is the only way for us to spread the use of free formats, but it needs to be said.

Links: 
ThePirateBay
Xiph.org (For Ogg Vorbis/Theora)
Disclaimer:
Please do not post comments that point out that thepiratebay.org has torrents for completely legal purposes too. I do know this, however that particular site is open for anyone to post anything, so the availability of content that is illegal in some countries is almost guaranteed.

Which menu-applet is the best?

I cannot possibly give an answer to this that will apply to everyones taste, but what I can do is give an overall review of the three contestants and tell you what I feel is the good, and bad, things about them.

Our first contestant is..

Gimmie

Gimmie is the name of a pretty new contender in the Gnome-menu contest. It consists of four dropdown-menus:

Linux is the menu for bookmarked folders, devices and media, printers, and computers in your network. This is also where you find “Settings” which contains everything that would normally be in the “System”-menu in the original Gnome menu-bar, like Synaptic.

Programs is where you.. find your programs. It’s easily navigated with tabs on the left for browsing different categories.

Under Library  you find your recently used files, your tomboy-notes, your music and movies, and your Firefox-downloads.

The last dropdown-menu is People. This is, according to me, the coolest feature of Gimmie. Here you can view your instant-messaging contacts, and also GMail and Friendster (even though those two weren’t tested, I just assume they work, or will work, seeing how the icons are there

SLAB

The SLAB-style menu originates from Novell’s SUSE/OpenSUSE distributions but are available on many others. It consists of one window with three tabs on the top:

Applications which displays popular applications, and if you wish to browse all of the applications, you can click the “More Applications” button and it will display a separate window for the rest.

 Documents  displays the recently used documents and pictures, and when clicking “More Documents” button nautilus is opened in the Documents-folder in your home-directory. I’m not sure what happens if you haven’t got such a directory though.

Places displays a the Nautilus-bookmarks and brings you to your homefolder in when clicking “More Places”. As simple as that.

Other than these three tabs there is also the right panel on the SLAB-menu that has icons for  “Help”, “Lock Screen”, “Control Center” (The Gnome Control-center), “Logout”, and also “Harddrive” and “Network Manager”.

Gnome Menu Bar

Of course, the original Menu Bar is also in this post. Most of you are probably familiar with this menu-applet, if you’re not running a distro that uses some other applet of course.

Basically it’s the three dropdown-menus Applications, Places, and System.
The Applications menu is divided into submenus for different categories, such as Internet, Accesories, and Programming.

The Places menu consists of shortcuts for your home-folder, home-desktop, bookmarks, network. It also has a submenu for recently used documents and a “Connect to server”-option.

Oh, and a “Search” option of course.

The third and last dropdown-menu is the System menu, which consists of “About Gnome”, “About Ubuntu”, the helpbrowser, and an option for shutdown/logout, other that, of course, the two submenus.

The submenus are Preferences and Administration, where Preferences is full of options like “Apperance”, “About Me”, “Keyboard”, etc. Administration is where you find your system administration tools, such as  Synaptic, Network tools and more.

Personally, I use Gimmie, because I find it to be fast and responsive, at the same time as it offers all the funtionality I could wish for, and a little beyond that. I especially like the fact  that I can access my Pidgin-contact directly from the menu.

Slab is a nice looking menu-applet, but I just find it to be a bit annoying that I have to bring up a whole new windows just to access all of my applications.

The original Gnome menu bar is fully functional but sometimes the lack of structure is a bit annoying. This is especially true in the Administration/Preferences menus.

So I’ll go with Gimmie, even though it currently is beta software. I won’t tell you what to choose, make up your own mind.

Note to readers: All of the above was tested on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

I’ve spent some time on Ubuntu Brainstorm lately.

Brainstorm is the place to go to give your thoughts and ideas on what Ubuntu should be. It’s really a great idea, and there are lots of neat things being proposed. If you got some thing that you want to be implemented och changed in Ubuntu, that isn’t really a bug, go to brainstorm.ubuntu.com.

However, apart from the nice ideas being proposed, there is a trend that really worries me.

Many users of GNU/Linux these days, think that projects like Gnash are stupid, when you can get the original Flashplayer. Those are the same people that think you’re stupid if you don’t want to use the mp3-format, or install support for the windows-media format. This isn’t true only on brainstorm of course, but also in the overall community.

I’ve seen people posting on blogs and online-communitys and forums about Richard Stallman being a complete moron, and about how the FSF is hurting the GNU/Linux-community. These people really don’t know what they are talking about, and it hurts me to read such things.

I was met by sarcasm when posting in IRC and forums trying to find an all-free portable media device too.

So I don’t think people are bad or  evil just because they are installing proprietary software on GNU/Linux, because I do install some proprietary drivers and codecs too. What’s worrying to me, is the fact the people don’t think twice about what it really means to install those things, and don’t really think that free alternative are important.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that we should support the projects that are developing things like Gnash, even if we are using the proprietary flash-player. We should buy an ogg-capable portable mediaplayer if we can. We should encode our videos in Theora if we can. We should use free fonts, if we can.

This is a request for tips, on where I can find a portable audioplayer, that only do free formats.

What is a free format?

Free Formats are the likes of Ogg Vorbis (for audio), Ogg Theora (for video), Matroska (for video), FLAC (for lossless audio), ODF (word documents), Jabber/XMPP (Instant Messaging) and many more.
These formats are licensed under a Free Software License. This is opposed to non-free formats, like MP3, WMA, WMV, AAC(+), DivX, and many others.

Why use free formats?

This is an easy question to answer: To protect your freedom! Non-free formats aren’t freely distributable, or even freely usable. They require a company to give you the permission to use it.

While it might seem far from reality, using non-free formats means a risk of you not being able to access your data in the future. Using a free format means you always have the right, and possibility to use access what’s rightfully yours to access.

Free formats will probably not contain copy-prevention software, such as Microsoft DRM or Apple FairPlay, because there would be no point in implementing it, seeins how this could be easily circumvented. This is possible because source code of the format is available for free distribution and free use. That means anyone who knows how to write computer software (and there is quite a few of those people) could write a decoder that removes the copy-prevention technology.

What I want to know…

… is where I can find a portable mediaplayer, which is what the general public refer to as an mp3-player, that only plays free formats, like Ogg Vorbis.

Why I want this?

I want this because I do not wish to contribute to non-free formats. Simple as that. Give me some tips, if you got any.

If I don’t find any players that fit my wishes, I might just have to build one. There are som decoderchips available.. I think. I’m not really into building electronic devices, but something like this could probably be used to build an all-ogg-player.

Xiph - The authors of, amongst other things, the Ogg Formats.

For Music in Free Formats, see Magnatune & Jamendo.

I’m so sick of this. Everywhere I see morons complaining that Linux is junk, Linux is ugly, etc..

How did they come to this conclusion? Well they tried Ubuntu on some hardware that wasn’t compatible. It didn’t work very well, so they hate all that is Linux. Also, I can understand the fact that If you come from the Mac-side of things, you might not like the Ubuntu-brown theme.

But seriously, how hard is it to make OS X work perfectly when it’s just sold for certain machines, made by the same company that delivers the OS? Not that hard, I would say.
And c’mon, if you’re so stupid you can’t see the difference between “One OS based on the Linux kernel doesn’t work on my machine” and “All that is Linux sucks”, then you really aren’t that tech-savvy, or maybe you’re just a moron.

To some of you: Sod off!

It’s very well know by many of us Linux/Free Software-geeks that a big problem when promoting Linux is the fact that there aren’t that many commercial games available for it. Sad but true, Microsoft really dominates the PC-gaming thing. How do we change this? Or, that is, do we really need to change this?

One of the biggest advantages to doing your gaming on a PC has been that a computer has, historically been a lot more powerful and configurable. However, look at the Playstation 3, or even the Xbox 360. Those machines are really powerful, and they can do the gaming thing just as good as a PC. Now a lot of people doesn’t want to use the console’s controllers for FPS or Realtime Strategy games, but that’s as simple as plugging in a mouse and a keyboard, and you’re good to go.

The fact that a lot of games nowadays are played online is also no longer a problem since the games consoles that are available today handle the online-thing as well.

I think that sometime in the near future, a lot of people will find that their gaming-needs are met by the consoles. This means that there are less people tied to a specifik operating system, and therefore more potential Linux-adopters.

Of course, I see that some people will hang on the PC for gaming. Well, that’s just the way it is, I guess.

There are a lot of distros today that ship with non-free codecs and such. Linux Mint is one example, but there are a whole lot of them now. Ubuntu makes it easy to install non-free codecs/drivers but they are not installed by default. That’s a major difference. To make something available to people isn’t the same to make it available as a part of the operating system.

To ensure that the Free Software-philosophy stays somewhat intact it is, in my mind, really important that we make it totally clear what is free and what is not. We want to get rid of closed non-free stuff right? I think most of you agree at least when it comes to media-formats.

And to be honest.. Including those non-free codecs/drivers in the standard installation makes you, the team behind the distro, officially support those closed source formats, no matter what your disclaimer says.