Martin Notes

One of the features I’ve always liked in the Mac is that it hides the mouse pointer when you use the keyboard. That makes it possible to type or read without having the mouse pointer in the way. So I went looking for a solution for Ubuntu. After some googling I found “unclutter”.

Unclutter hides the mouse pointer when you haven’t used the mouse for 5 seconds. Although this is different from the Mac approach, it actually works fine for me. When the pointer is hidden you can type and read and when you move you mouse then the pointer is shown again.

According to the man pages it should be possible to let unclutter hide the pointer when you press (or release) a key, but I couldn’t get that to work.

Installation is easy, it’s in the Ubuntu repos:

sudo apt-get install unclutter

And start it:

unclutter & disown

If you want to start unclutter when you login you can add it to your session:

Open Sessions, click “Add”, type some name (”Unclutter”), command (”unclutter”) and comment (”Hide mouse pointer”) and that’s it.

GUI, Ubuntu mousecursor, unclutter

I have a bit of an obsession with getting Ubuntu to work with MS Exchange 2007. On the website of Johnny Jacob I read that they have started to publish source releases of the plugin. So I downloaded the source of the 0.25.3 release and started fixing dependencies.

First of all you have to fix the pkg-config path setting. I find this weird, since I have to set it to the default setting, ah well. Do this:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH

Then I had to replace some version numbers in the config. This sounds strange, but Johnny said it would work. Although I made a broad interpretation of his comment.

replace 2.25.2 with 2.24.2 in configure.in
replace 2.25.2 with 2.24.2 in configure

Of course there is a list of dependencies to fulfill:

sudo apt-get install intltool libmapi-dev evolution-data-server-dev evolution-dev libtalloc-dev libdcerpc-dev libsamba-hostconfig-dev libldb-dev libebackend1.2-dev libecal1.2-dev libedata-cal1.2-dev libebook1.2-dev libedata-book1.2-dev

Sadly that’s where things went wrong. The libldb-dev depends on libldb0, but to install libldb0 I need to remove libldb-samba4-0, libmapi-dev and libmapi0, which broke the dependencies:

For now I’ll have to wait until this issue is fixed.

Linux, Ubuntu Exchange, Linux, OpenChange, Ubuntu

The iPhone contains a nice 3G radio and a bluetooth radio, so I thought I’d let my Ubuntu laptop connect to the Internet through the iPhone’s 3G. A little research showed that it is quite straight forward to connect Ubuntu to a 3G service there days (since 8.10), so I didn’t expect a lot of problems.

To my surprise the setup failed at the very first step. I checked the iPhone’s bluetooth capabilities by finding the bluetooth address:

hcitool scan

And looking up the capabilities:

sdptool browse <address> | grep Networking

To my surprise the iPhone doesn’t support a dailup connection through bluetooth. Isn’t it rather strange that Apple sells us a phone that doesn’t allow us to share it’s network with the rest of the world? I would assume the TelCos wouldn’t mind, actually I’m surprised they even accepted it.

Apple has been down this road before, the whole Mac OS 9 and earlier was closed to the outside world. You’d have to buy Apple stuff to make it work. Mac OS X improved that a lot, and the hardware support also improved: USB, standard VGA. It’s strange to see that Apple is going back to the more closed approach now. The iPod was still a bit open; you can upload songs from Linux, but the iPhone can’t even be used without iTunes.

Watch it Apple, you won’t be able to hold this so much longer. There will be competition at some point, and then people will start to make different choices. So far you’ve been the best in what you’re doing, but you’re not the only one.

I hope Apple will start seeing that competition is not bad, but that they should learn from them.

Linux, Opinion, Personal, Ubuntu, iPhone bluetooth, iPhone, Linux, Ubuntu

I’ve been having problems with the automatic updates of OpenOffice 3.0. I’ve been using this PPA:

http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

And automated update gives me the option to do a partial update, which doesn’t work either. Irritating! After some googling I found the following:

That fixed the problem! Update works and OpenOffice works. What I couldn’t find out is whether OO actually updated. That’s not the important part, since it worked fine and it still does.

Linux, Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice, Ubuntu

VirtualBox 2.1 has been released. Apparently it is a major update from the 2.0.6 release. Check this installation guide to update or install.

Linux, Opinion, Ubuntu, Web Linux, Ubuntu, VirtualBox

I’ve installed GnoMenu 1.6. It is a Vista style menu for the Gnome desktop. You can just download the deb files (gnomenu_1.6-2_all.deb) and install it. After installing I had to run:

/usr/lib/gnomenu/DesktopIntegration.py

To get it to show up in the Gnome panel “Add to Panel…” dialog.

I must say that from reading about the GnoMenu, and seeing the themes on Gnome-Look, I was quite looking forward to the little panel applet. But after installing it I was disappointed.

First of all the GnoMenu catches your Windows key to open up.  I always hated that feature in Windows and I don’t want it in my Ubuntu. Especially since I’m using the Windows key as my main shortcut key: Windows 1-4 are my desktops, Windows-T is a terminal, Windows-E is Nautilus (yes, that’s a Windows shortcut).

Second, the thing just feel clunky. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it doesn’t feel smooth or elegant. I want my main menu to give me the feeling that I will find the application I’m looking for. GnoMenu gave me the feeling that it might take a while. Not only from the feel, but also because it’s just slow. When you start typing in the search field it takes ages before it shows you the application that you’re looking for.

I must admit that’s where I stopped testing. The GnoMenu is just not ready yet. It’s a nice idea, and the Gnome main menu is ready for an update for sure, but this is not the one.

I’ll just stick to Gnome-Do.

GUI, Linux, Ubuntu Gnome, GnoMenu, Ubuntu

Ultimate-edition 2.0 has been released. It’s a release build on top of Ubuntu 8.10, but it has been hand tuned. There are three releases: 32, 64 bits and the game release.

Linux, Ubuntu release, Ubuntu, Ultimate edition

Will Williams made a mock-up for Ubuntu Intrepid a long time ago and people generally agreed that this was one of the best out there. Apparently Mr. Williams has found himself some friends (I saw some comments from the Elementary guys) to make the theme for real.

I have the theme installed now and I must say I’m impressed. It’s not a 100% perfect, but it comes really close. Especially the background and the menus are brilliant. After some time working with the controls I switched those over to the Dark Room set, which suites the brown better then the gray that Will used.

GUI, Ubuntu theme, Ubuntu

There is a new code release of Google Gadgets. I’ve been looking for a .deb file all over, but apparently the interest is gone since the first release. So the only thing left to do is: compile it myself. Luckily Google has already posted most of the dependencies on their how-to-build page, that saves a lot of make time. I’ve described the build for Gnome GTK here:

Download the Google Gadgets source

wget http://google-gadgets-for-linux.googlecode.com/files/google-gadgets-for-linux-0.10.3.tar.bz2

Install the dependencies

sudo apt-get install libdbus-1-dev libmozjs-dev libxml2-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libltdl3-dev libxt-dev libxul-dev libgtk2.0-dev librsvg2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

I’ve added the “libxt-dev” which was missed in the Google instructions.

Configure the build

./configure --prefix=/usr

Google advises to add the prefix to avoid library linking problems.

Make the application

make

Install the application

sudo make install

And start it

ggl-gtk

I haven’t seen any major updates to the last release yet. All I can say is that it feels a bit faster.

GUI, Linux, Ubuntu build, Google Gadgets, intrepid ibex

Since I own a Sony TZ laptop, and it has a wide screen monitor, I’m worried about vertical screen space. I’ve been blogging about that before. Now I found a hack that might help a bit. There is a thing called Global Menu for Gnome.

It kills the menu in the window and puts in it an applet in a Gnome panel. The idea is stolen from Apple, but it’s a good idea I think. It removes the completely useless line in each window. Now all that has to be removed ins the titlebar, then I’ll be even more happy with the interface.

Now the weak thing: I haven’t tried the global menu yet. I don’t want to kill my Ubuntu immediately after installing Intrepid. I want to create a VM with Intrepid and try it out there. It will take some time, but I’ll post the result here.

GUI, Ubuntu Gnome global menu, GUI, Ubuntu