I was doing some thinking and I realized there’s a few pieces of technology in Linux that have so much potential but are extremely under-utilized.

PolicyKit

PolicyKit is an awesome piece of software. It allows for a finer grained permission system. Instead of launching an entire application as root, you can elevate your privileges in a seamless manner. However, PolicyKit is so under used. For example, when Gnome deprecated gnome-vfs and moved to gio/gvfs, Nautilus supposedly got a framework in place that would allow PolicyKit integration. So if you needed root permissions to makes changes to the file system you would be able to basically click a button and elevate your privileges through PolicyKit. Synaptic could also benefit from some PolicyKit integration. Why isn’t PolicyKit used more?

Tracker

Tracker is a great metadata indexer that crawls your files system and indexes metadata from files. Instead of only searching by file name, you can use Tracker to search ID3 tags or search for text in a OpenOffice or Word document. The problem is, no one has integrated this great search functionality into applications. Once again, there’s an opportunity for some integration with Nautilus. If Nautilus could use Tracker as a backend for searching and have the ability to add tags to files, it would really add some great functionality.

There’s so much potential here. It’s a shame it’s not being used.

Just a little heads up. If you have an Iomega Prestige USB hard drive and you use suspend a lot and you are planning to upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 or already have, there’s an annoying bug that makes the drive go in to an unresponsive state until power cycled. The symptoms include

• Takes a long time to actually suspend, waiting at a blank screen
• Drive doesn’t automatically power off like it should when it detects the computer has been suspended
• Drive is no longer visible to the system after resuming, even after unplugging it and plugging it back in
• Must be power cycled before it functions properly again

Here’s the bug report

I am happy to announce that the HP LaserJet p1505 printer works out of the box on Ubuntu 9.10. No more hacking around that was required for Ubuntu 9.04. If you followed my other post to compile the drivers and you are going to upgrade to Karmic it would be best to uninstall the compiled version of foo2zjs. Hopefully you’ve kept the source directory around. If so all you need to do is “cd”  into the directory and run

sudo make uninstall

Then you can upgrade and then reinstall the Ubuntu foo2zjs package

sudo apt-get install foo2zjs

When you plug the printer in system-config-printer may prompt you if you want to install a plugin for the printer. Accept and follow the instructions. Afterwards you will probably need to open hp-toolbox and click the “download firmware” button in the main window. Afterwards the printer should be working. That said, after I upgraded and plugged in the printer it “just worked” and I didn’t have to do any of that stuff. As much as I was disappointed that this printer didn’t work in Jaunty, I am equally happy that it is working perfectly in Karmic.

Update: See here if you’re using Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

Recently an HP LaserJet p1505 printer came into my possession and I was eager to set it up with Ubuntu.  Unfortunately, (and disappointingly so considering how well other HP printers that I have work ) this printer does not work out of the box.  There seems to be a number of factors in play as well.  For one thing, this printer requires firmware to be loaded.  That seems to spell trouble all by itself.  Another thing is that if you try to install this printer though hp-toolbox, it will offer to automatically download and install a plugin that is required for the printer.  If you try to do it this way, it will appear to have successfully downloaded and installed it.  However this is not the case.  It doesn’t do anything at all.  Some have reported success by running

sudo hp-setup

manually.  For me, this did actually successfully download and install the plugin.  However, the printer was still not working.  Here is what I had to do to get this printer working.  If you’re having trouble with this printer, this may be worth a try.

If you haven’t already, install hp-toolbox

sudo apt-get install hp-gui

Remove the foo2zjs if it happens to be installed

sudo apt-get remove --purge foo2zjs

Make sure to delete the printer from System → Administration → Printing if you’ve already tried adding it.

We’re going to need build-essential for this.  So install the build-essential package

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Now get the source for foo2zjs

wget -O foo2zjs.tar.gz http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/foo2zjs.tar.gz

Unpack it and enter the directory

tar -xzvf foo2zjs.tar.gz
cd foo2zjs

Now to compile it. Just run

make

After it’s done compiling, we need to download the firmware. So run

./getweb P1505

Now to install everything.  Run

sudo make install
sudo make install-hotplug

And finally to restart CUPS

sudo make cups

Now you can add the printer with System → Administration → Printing.  Be sure to select the Foomatic/foo2xqx driver.  The printer should now be working.  The only quirk that seems to be present is that hp-toolbox thinks there is some kind of error with the printer that says “service request please correct the problem and try again.” Yet there’s nothing wrong with the printer.

Resources:

http://foo2xqx.rkkda.com/

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal-cups-utils/+bug/289410

It doesn’t like me

click for larger view

Lolwut?

This isn’t actually part of Grub like I first thought, but it was part of what I was trying to boot off of a USB drive. It gave me a good laugh nevertheless.

Every time around a new Ubuntu release the topic of upgrade vs. fresh install always comes up.  I’ve noticed that there seems to be a general hate towards upgrades.  The most common thing I hear is that the upgrade totally breaks your system, it will make you lose all your money, and it will burn your house down.  Ok, well maybe not the last two things, but there seems to be a lot of “OMG upgrades are bad!!!!” out there.  Now I may be going out on a limb here, but I think a lot of people just repeat what others say about upgrades.  I’d be willing to say that a lot of the people that say the upgrade breaks the system have never actually done an upgrade, they just get suckered in by all the other people saying upgrades break your system.  And then it just goes in circles.

Now I’m not saying that Ubuntu’s upgrade process has never broken someone’s system, I’m sure it has, more than a few too.  Nothing is perfect.  What I’m saying is that the upgrade breakage is being blown way out of proportion.  Personally, I have upgraded 5 computers multiple times and I have never had a single thing break due to the upgrade.  My desktop machine has not seen a reinstall since Ubuntu 7.10 was released.  It’s been upgraded three times and it’s still running strong, never had anything break on it due to an upgrade.  So either I’ve been extremely lucky or it’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be.  I’m thinking the latter.

</rant>

Yes you read that correctly! As of VirtualBox 2.2, Compiz works inside your VM.  It works best provided it’s supported on the host.  All you need to do is update your guest addons with the newest version and enable Hardware Acceleration in the VM settings.  I tested this on a Nvidia GeForce 8400GS M and it works wonderfully.  It’s not even slow.  It’s just as fast as running Compiz natively.  Incredible!  Good work to the VirtualBox devs!

Over the past few releases, Xorg has been gradually moving away from xorg.conf.  The goal would be to completely get rid of xorg.conf and have everything “just work” through auto detection.  However, since auto detection was introduced along with some nifty HAL goodness, I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about it.  A lot of people are saying that they actually want to edit their xorg.conf.  This strikes me as odd because a while ago it was the exact opposite.

2 years ago, back when I started with Linux, everyone made a huge deal about editing xorg.conf.  The big complaint was that dealing with xorg.conf was the biggest thing holding Linux back from making it onto the mainstream desktop.  A new user would be turned off if they had to edit a confusing text file to get their graphics working.  If Windows doesnt’ need a xorg.conf, we shouldn’t either.  And it went on and on.

This is where we are right now.  Things should “just work” with little or no configuration, but now people are complaining that they can’t edit their xorg.conf.  I thought that’s what everyone wanted.  It seems to be a no win situation.

I’ve been using Gmail for a while and I’ve always been somewhat disappointed in the way it works with an email client.  It wasn’t until recently that I tried to use IMAP for the second time that it really started to piss me off.  Believe me, you’ll spend more time pulling your hair out than actually using Gmail with IMAP.  POP3 isn’t terribly bad with Gmail, but come on, POP is old.  IMAP is becoming the new “in”.  Also it was becoming inconvenient for me since I access my mail from multiple computer.  So I would end up with some mail on this computer, other mail on that computer, and it was never on the computer I was using when I needed to go back to that particular email.

If you want to use Gmail+IMAP with Evolution, you might as well forget it.  You can sort of get IMAP to work with Thunderbird by fooling around with where certain folders are mapped to on the server.  But that still doesn’t work 100%. (I’m looking at you Trash folder )

The reason why this is so problematic comes down to one thing: Labels.  That’s one thing I never liked from the beginning.  I rather prefer folders.  Labels really only make sense if you use the web interface.  If you happen to use a mail client, they are 101% useless.  Not only are they useless, but they also completely ruin protocols like IMAP.  For example, when you try to delete a mail in Gmail over IMAP it doesn’t delete it, it just strips the “Trash” label from it and it ends up back in with all your other mail.  That doesn’t fly with me.  When I say “delete” I mean I want it erased, removed from the server, not moved back to my inbox!   To put it simply, Gmail ruined their IMAP implementation.   Gmail+IMAP has now been labeled (oh the irony!!) FAIL in my book.

So I went looking for another email provider that offered IMAP and I found one called GMX.  I’ve been very impressed with it so far.  The first thing I tried was Evolution+IMAP with it, and guess what, it actually worked like IMAP is supposed to work.  No stupid labels.  I was also extremely impressed with the web interface.  Now I’m one that usually hates web apps and the like with a passion, but I really really liked GMX’s web interface.  And that’s saying a lot.

A new version of VirtualBox was releases today, 2.1.2.  Among the changelog was this:

USB: improved support for recent Linux hosts

Sure enough, no more “Cannot connect to USB subsystem” error upon opening the Settings dialog, and USB works without any messing around with anything.

Get it now http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads