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While my girlfriend was visiting her sister in Rotterdam, I finally set up her notebook to dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux. Before you think bad of me: I didn’t sneakily do this without her knowing, but instead because she once mentioned that she’d like to try out another OS.

Now you may wonder why I chose Ubuntu over Gentoo, but I’m afraid the answer is rather pragmatic and uninspired: I had a magazine CD of the current release, so I dind’t have to download an ISO. Also installation is fast and painless and there are lots of nice HOWTOs. Besides that I’ve aleady used Ubuntu to convert one of my non-techy friends to Linux and it has worked pretty good. To sum it up: I think Ubuntu is a decent distro, but I maybe wouldn’t use it on one of my own boxes.

Back to the original topic: I’m really curious to see how well my girlfriend will get along with her new operating system… So far it seems she’ll have a smooth transition. There are free alternatives for all the programs she uses on a regular basis and I found a nice explanation of how to share Firefox and Thunderbird profiles on a dual boot system (the link doesn’t contain anything surprising, but it’s a nice reference anyway). Additionally I’m really curious to see how she will like GNOME and if she finds it as user-friendly as I do.

Boomtime, The Aftermath 35, 3171 YOLD

This week I finally had a little more time to work on Gentoo related things again, so I commited some overdue packages to the tree.

The action started on Tuesday, when I commited the 20+ ebuilds from ruby-gnome-0.14.1 (mostly version bumps plus a few new packages like ruby-gtkmozembed). Quite a lot of users have been waiting for this, as the previous version we had in the tree (0.12.0) didn’t play nicely with GTK+ 2.8/GNOME 2.12. This problems are now sorted, so that quite a few bugs could be closed and marked fixed.

And then George released Nitro 0.25.0 yesterday, which found its way into the tree only hours later. This has mainly to do with the fact that I already had everything in place from the 0.24.0 release, which I then never commited because George said that there soon will be a release focussed on bug fixes and code clean-up. Apparently this has worked out nicely, so go ahaed, emerge Nitro and play around with it, I’m sure you’ll like it.

In the evening we had our montly Viennese Gentoo users meetup, which as always was really funny. I came home pretty late and my head still hurts, but it definitely was among the most entertaining evenings in the last few weeks. Thanks guys!

Boomtime, The Aftermath 30, 3171 YOLD

Today is the perfect example of a nice and lazy afternoon, and I just love it! After having a great brunch at HighTea where we had toasties, antipasti, bagles and lots of other really good stuff, I’m just hanging around in front of my PC reading, doing some Gentoo work and generally having a good time. Live can be so easy…

Now let’s see if I have anything interesting to tell you:

I’ve already blogged about this preview of GNOME 2.12 a while ago and talked about how eager I am to try out this new release. So when Gentoo developer John N. Laliberte asked for some people willing to test the ebuilds for GNOME-2.12_rc1, I immediately went ahead and installed them.

Yeah, today my copy of Mono: A Developer’s Notebook finally arrived! I ordered this book because I’m a fan of Mono pretty much since I’ve first heard about it, and examples like this tutorial on writing a web browser show that the framework is quite capable. Additionally there are all this cool new GNOME apps like Blam!, Beagle, f-spot, Tomboy etc., that demonstrate the possibilites of Mono.

That’s why I ordered this book that has gotten pretty good reviews everywhere and which was modelled after the important FOSS mantra “Show me the code!”. Instead of long-winded syntactical explanations, the author uses lots of annotated examples to get his point across. I hope that this weekend I’ll have some free time to get started with reading….

A last note: it’s incredibly cool that Amazon gives you the possibility to buy books from alternative dealers via their site! I can go to Amazon, look for the books I’m interested in, read the reviews etc. and then compare if it may be cheaper to buy this book somewhere else. And if it really is, I can still buy the book as if I would have bought it from Amazon. But guess what? Of all the books I’ve ordered there, only 2 so far were from alternative dealers, because most of the time the extra shipment costs make the book more expensive than the ad itself makes you believe. But for the “Developer’s Notebook” it really made sense to buy it from Caiman, because it was not only cheaper, I also got the book after 7 days (from Florida!) compared to 10 to 13 days Amazon.de states as delivery time for this article.

P.S. I’m tired. My English probably sucks because of that. Live with it.

As most of you GNOME lovers out there will know, release 2.12 of our favourite desktop is due on September 7th, 2005. If you are like me and can hardly wait for this new version, have a look at the prerelease tour that GNOME Applets maintainer Davyd Madeley has ready for us. There you’ll find quite a few nifty things, the most interesting for me were the integration of GTK+ 2.8 with the Cairo vector graphics engine, further integration of the Hardware Abstraction Layer and improvements on Totem’s GStreamer backend as well as the development of a Totem Mozilla plugin. As I don’t use (or even install that is) Evolution and Epiphany, I don’t really care about them, but it seems they’re getting some nice features too, as is Nautilus, another application I hardly use for more than displaying desktop icons. There are also quite some really nice minor and cosmetic changes detailed in this preview, which surely will further enhance the great usability of the GNOME desktop. As it seems there won’t be too many new applications in this release, which I think is pretty cool, as I’m a person who doesn’t want to install everything plus the kitchen sink with my desktop (that’s why I use custom ebuilds, thanks to the wonders of Gentoo ). However, the really nice PDF and PS reader Evince will finally replace GGV and GPDF, which IMHO is a Good Thing™.

So much for this prerelease tour of GNOME 2.12, but I have some more cool apps for you! Have you ever been looking for a comfortable editor for changing the tags of your music collection and finally went back to id3ed on the command line because all the graphical apps just wouldn’t cut it? Well, now that there’s Cowbell, it seems like there’s one thing less to worry about, as this tag editor for our preferred desktop doesn’t only look nice, it also integrates with the Amazon Web Services SOAP interface and does most of the work for you automatically. As most of the cool new apps I ran across lately, Cowbell is written using Mono and GTK#. The same holds true for Diva (except for the libGdv core engine which is written in C), a project which aims at creating “a decent, lean&mean video editing solution for the Linux/Unix platform“. There’s not too much to see yet, but personally I’d love to get a decent video editing solution for my Linux desktop, so all the power to the DIVA developers! Maybe you also want to check out Seahorse, which despite not being written in Mono/C# is pretty cool too. It’s a nice GNOME frontend for GnuPG, which I’ve installed quite a while ago and which has released a new version less than a week ago. Although I don’t really have any need for it (long live the GnuPG command line!), I think everything that makes privacy technologies accessible to the non-techy folk needs our fullest support. So go grab Seahorse, test it, find and report bugs and show it to your friends. This surely will make you really attractive for whichever demographic group you want to be attractive for*!

*Note: This may be just a blatant lie, but you have to find out for yourself.

Well, actually I just wanted to add alexandria-0.5.0 to the tree. This however depended on ruby-gnome2-0.12.0 which means I ended up version bumping around 15 additional ebuilds and testing them for 3 different Ruby versions. I’d love to say that this was a funny excercise, but honestly I would be lying.

Besides that I finally took some time to start redesigning my personal dev webpage. Lazy bastard that I usually am, I just copied the concept and the style sheet (which I adjusted to my own liking) from ciaranm’s site. As I’ve always planned to buy him a beer for app-vim/gentoo-syntax if we ever meet, I guess that adds up to a second one. Now let’s just hope he never makes it to Vienna… Anyway, I hope that my shiny new page will motivate me to finally add some content to it.

For the rest of the week university duties and lazyne…other projects kept me away from doing useful stuff, which is a bad thing™. Bad citizen428, no cookie!