The Ubuntu NL boot at the Ubuntu NL release party 2010 with demo computers of OS4Free can be seen in the background. The table in the front is the table of one of the many HCC! groups present.

HCC!platform Linux and Ubuntu NL organise a large release party every two years to celebrate the LTS release. Yesterday was the ‘Ubuntu NL Releaseparty 10.04‘ in hotel and conference centre ‘de Reehorst’ in the town of Ede. A large group of people assembled to tell visitors all about the new release and install it for them on their computers. Representatives of the different (Dutch) open source communities were present as well with their own stands and space was also available to the sponsors of the release party to show their involvement in the open source community. There were about 30 lectures and workshops on the day introducing visitors to a range of subjects.

Members of interest groups in the HCC! — the Dutch computer users’ association — showed their hobbies to the public: Unix, Music, Photo Editing, Gaming, CompUsers. There were also a few representatives of local HCC! groups to show visitors what there is to do in HCC! near them. There were also members providing support to visitors with computer problems.

I spent most of the day behind the Ubuntu NL table, which was also where the three demo computers kindly provided by OS4Free stood. OS4Free is the online computer shop of an Ubuntu NL member that almost always lends us demo computers for conferences and such. We gave answers to general questions from visitors. showed them some of the Ubuntu books available on the market and handed out leaflets of OS4Free.

The stand wasn’t the only place I saw that day. I attended two talks: ‘Ubuntu 10.04 Demo’ by Sebastian Schauenburg and ‘Changing the Linux Desktop Game’ by Fabrice Mous, coincidently both employees of Ictivity. The first was a nice and varied introduction to the new Ubuntu release, but since I have been running Lucid since Alpha 1 I was pretty familiar with the changes already. Therefore the most interesting one was the latter: Fabrice Mous — who has worked as a consultant for the Dutch government’s NOiV project — talked about the way the desktop has changed since 2001/2002 and why open source in general and particularly Linux never makes it to the desktops of governments. There have been many test pilots, but once those end and (in the typical Dutch fashion) twenty reports have been written about it everything stays like it was. The conclusion basically was: changing the way a government works is a terse, bureaucratic process that will take time. We’re not there yet, but some encouraging things were said in parliament and by (former) secretaries of state. Most of these pretty words didn’t lead to anything, but it does show that politics becomes increasingly aware of open source and its advantages.
Fabrice Mous said he would put his slides online at his LinkedIn profile.

I was also pleased to meet journalist Brenno de Winter, who has done a lot of work to open up local governments to the public by forcing municipalities via legal case to give information on their IT policies — that should be freely available (on request) to civilians — freely. The Dutch Federation of Municipalities fought hard against this. Brenno de Winter is also monitoring the Dutch government’s project to encourage and oblige the use of open standards and open source for government, the NOiV. When around 2004 the license contracts with Microsoft had to be renewed the Dutch Federation of Municipalities suddenly started to behave very evasive and aggressive to queries for more information about what was happening and how it fitted in the government policy that government and semi-governmental organisations have to use open standards unless a sufficiently compelling reason is given. It is still unclear what exactly happened back then.

You can read the Dutch news article from HCC! about the release party at their website. According to their estimates around 300 visitors came to the event.

Lean menu, slick icon!

It has been a while since I blogged about giving Transmission an Application Indicator. In that post I said I was also working on giving Banshee an Application Indicator, bug #518171. Since then we’ve decided to not provide the indicator in the Banshee.NotificationArea extension, the default tray icon in Lucid still. Instead I’ve moved the code I already had over to a separate extension that has become part of the Banshee Community Extensions. The Banshee Community Extensions project, or BCE, is a set of extensions that are not part of the Banshee core, but shipped separately. The entry-barrier for new extensions is lower — useful if you’re submitting yours just before the 1.6.0 release — and they are hosted at Gitorious, which makes cooperation a lot easier.

Bertrand Lorentz accepted my merge proposal at 27 March and was so kind to clean up the code a bit and since then the Banshee.AppIndicator extension has been available from the BCE code repository.

Using Banshee.AppIndicator on Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”

Thanks to the hard work of Chow Loong Jin Banshee.AppIndicator was one of the community extensions that got packaged in Debian and later synced by Ubuntu. If you want to use the Application Indicator for Banshee you first need to install the banshee-extension-appindicator package. Install ‘banshee-extension-appindicator’. At the moment there is a small packaging bug in banshee-extension-appindicator, it should depend on the libappindicator0-cil package, but it doesn’t. You can work around this issue by manually installing libappindciator0-cil.

Once you’ve installed you first need to disable the Banshee.NotificationArea extension. Go to Edit->Preferences–>Extensions, scroll down and untick the checkbox for the “Notification Area Icon” extension. Now scroll up again and enable “Application Indicator for Banshee”. Done!

Are you still out there, lone Ubuntu Karmic user? You must feel quite deserted with all the awesomeness and shiny new stuff that draws everyone’s attention to Ubuntu 10.04 ‘Lucid Lynx’. I hope you can forgive us.

To make up for the lack of attention I decided to provide Indicator Application for Ubuntu Karmic. I’ve changed two dependencies in Indicator Application’s control file — back in Karmic we were still providing some pkg-config (.pc) files for Mono assemblies in their main package rather than in separate ‘-dev’ packages — and uploaded it for Karmic to a PPA: ppa:qense/appind-karmic.
If you want to add it you can add ‘ppa:qense/appind-karmic’ to your Software Sources in System->Manage->Software Properties=>Other Software=>Add and download the archive’s GPG key, or use the command sudo add-apt-repository ppa:qense/appind-karmic.

WARNING: I haven’t tested if it works, I just made sure it built correctly. Be careful and please report all problems here and not on Launchpad since Ubuntu Karmic isn’t supposed to run the Indicator Application.

Also make sure to reload your Indicator Applet after you’ve updated to make the service load.

Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week

OK, I admit it, I lied to you. I didn’t provide the PPA just to please those poor Karmic users. As you may already have seen in Jono’s blog post containing today’s UODW schedule — complete schedule at the wiki — I’ll be giving a session about using Indicator Application in your application at 19.00 UTC this evening. Because a lot of people are obviously still using Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ I wanted to provide a way for them to try it out without having to upgrade.

If you’re going to attend, are using Karmic and would like to see AppIndidcator in action on your computer, you can use this PPA to do that. If you’ve got any question, please don’t hesitate to ask here, on this website, or at IRC in #ayatana on Freenode; I’m ‘qense’ there.

So far everything’s going quite fine actually, booting has become a lot less scary now the “Segmentation error” message that was the first thing you saw on boot is gone now and I found a way to solve the issues with the NVidia drivers.
Currently the package ‘nvidia-glx-185′ in Lucid is incompatible with the Xserver — ‘nvidia-glx-185′ provides the virtual package ‘xserver-xorg-video-5′, and that conflicts with ‘xorg’, which wants ‘xserver-xorg-video-6′.  Fortunately Collin Pruitt came to rescue with his blog post “Problems With Xorg and the nVidia Drivers“, which explains that you need to use the PPA ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa to get newer versions of the NVidia driver, nvidia-glx-195 is the latest release available from this repository, but legacy drivers are also available and should work on Lucid.

If you still get error messages from the Xserver and you can only run it in the safe-graphics mode you should make sure that the NVidia driver is enabled in System->Manage->Hardware Drivers and try again.

New stuff
Understandingly there isn’t much new in Lucid currently, the most striking difference I found was the new lay-out for the Users and Groups (‘users-admin’) configuration utility. The interface is cleaner and simpler and shows details that previously were limited to the About Me-dialogue. I reckon this is part of Canonical’ effort to make account managing easier and more consistent across the desktop, as outlined in the User Account Management-blueprint.

The Ubuntu Software Center is also being worked on, the most distinguished visual addition so far are the nice breadcrumbs that already received a lot of attention on other blogs.

Usplash is now definitely gone from the default installation and ‘libplymouth2′ is already a dependency of ‘mountall’, we’ll see probably more of that in the future. Currently there is no splash whatsoever before GDM is launched, but this is probably going to change. Keep an eye on the Boot experience work-blueprint for updates on the work being done.

I end this blog post with a Warning: the system might seem stable now, but this is because a lot of the changes still need to be made. Do not use a development release in a production environment unless you’re prepared to face the risks.