init 7

Fuffa per Gnome

Nuovi mockup, nuove idee, stili, linee moderne. Sarà ormai più di un lustro che gli sviluppatori Gnome promettono innovazioni che poi non arrivano o che arrivano quando ormai è roba vecchia.

Non so se sia una mancanza di fondi, tempo o sviluppatori. O semplicemente la voglia che hanno tutti di sognare senza aver poi veramente voglia di mettersi in gioco e scrivere il codice che serve per trasformare in realtà quella che per ora è soltanto un bel quadro.

Evolution 2.24: The buggiest version ever

Almost two weeks earlier than the official release (I’m so brave!), I upgraded my Ubuntu Box from Hardy to Intrepid. Everything shines and it is great, except for one: Evolution 2.24.

The new version of famous Gnome PIM Client by Novell (ex Ximian) is absolutely a pain in the ass, buggy and very easy to crash (it seems a software by Microsoft!). Let’s start.

Google Calendar

At the very first beginning it seems this new version eventually works well with Google Calendar. If you add an event on your Evolution, you will see it magically appears online. But at the very second try you will understand it is not working so well. Events in some of the calendar are read only and any time you try to move them or to modify you have two possibilities:

1. The event doesn’t move: it’s well protected and the cut and copy commands in the context menu are gray.
2. The event moves, you start singing “hurrah!”, but it actually makes a duplicate creating a new event just beside the previous one.

Of course forget any chance of deleting any event: any changes must be done through the web interface of Google Calendar.

After that you could have the great idea of changing some settings for the calendar which gives you problems. The default settings are “sync every 30 minutes” and “use SSL”. Well, let’s try to make the sync happens every 5 minutes and do you really need SSL for the calendar about your dog poo time?

After changing those settings somethings seems changed, but it’s just an impression: give Evolution a couple of minutes and it will disappoint you again. So you open the settings again and you see that they are back to 30 minutes and SSL is activated again.

Mail

I have to admit: there are not so many problems about the email. Only two.

1. Email notification

I was used to run the Email Notification applet to make an envelop icon appear on my panel any time I have an unread email. I just don’t like the Evolution native notification: it doesn’t behave as I want, and until differently proven this computer belongs to me.

Of course, since you are reading this, the Mail Notification 5.4 doesn’t work well with Evolution 2.24. You could think this is just a matter of configuration. So I tried to configure the Mail Notification but as I try to change any settings inside the Mail Notification Preferences I see Evolution crashing. The big giant defeated by the small dwarf who, by the way, didn’t want to hurt the big giant.

2. Virtual Folders and email count

Evolution 2.24 has some serious problem with calculation. I have some VFolder: one of this is the “Unread Messages” that will collect all the messages tagged as unread. This folder says I have two unread messages but it’s actually empty.

But there is another VFolder which behaves much funnier. This folder collects all the messages received in the last two days plus all the email tagged as “Important”. This folder says that I have 6 messages total (they are actually 27) and -1 unread messages (yes: minus one). Maybe Evolution thinks I have to write one message to get even.

Evolution 2.24 has been released along with Gnome 2.24. Both are great projects and I’m using them since several years ago (I suppose I started using Gnome in 2000), but they cannot pretend they are good and stable only because they shouted out so. It’s some kind of arrogance that puts out a quality much lower than the one I got used to.

Problems with database when rolling back from F-Spot 0.5 to F-Spot 0.4

Some people would like to try the new F-Spot 0.5 just to see the new features, and then rolling back to F-Spot 0.4, which till now looks stabler.

Actually the new F-Spot uses a different version of the database: upgrading F-Spot will upgrade the database, so rolling back to an old version of F-Spot will result in database damaging. Obviously it’s better to avoid this.

So ff you are planning to try F-Spot before switching to the new version, there are a few things you can do to save your work¹ .

First method. Make a backup of your F-Spot settings

To make a backup of your F-Spot settings, you only need to make a copy of the ~/.gnome2/f-spot/ folder, which is the place in which F-Spot store its database. You can navigate to that folder by using Nautilus, or run a simple command from the console:

cp -av ~/.gnome2/f-spot/ ~/.gnome2/f-spot.backup/

After you finished trying F-Spot 0.5 and you still like the 0.4 version, you can easily rollback by running:

rm -rf ~/.gnome2/f-spot/
mv ~/.gnome2/f-spot.backup/ ~/.gnome2/f-spot/

Those two lines will restore the backup you made and will delete all the work and the updates you made while trying F-Spot 0.5.

Second method. Run F-Spot with a new empy database

You can also run F-Spot without touching at all your old database by using the following:

f-spot --basedir /tmp  --photodir /tmp

This will store all the work you make during the try in the temporary directory, which will be deleted on your next reboot. F-Spot will not touch any of your old settings.

I already got database error: am I lost?

No, your aren’t. Everytime F-Spot gets an error loading the database it will try to restore it but will also make a copy of it in your home directory. So just have a look in your home: you will probably find a file called photos-20080924-0.db. The name could change a little bit: those numbers are the date in which the database was created, so in this case it’s 24th semptember 2008. After you find the file, you only need to copy it (do not move it, copy it) over the damaged database file, that is located in ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db. Just remind that this will be the database used by the 0.5 version, so you must use that version to load it (i.e. you cannot use 0.4 anymore).

1. we all know how long it takes to tag all the images [↩]

Installing WebKit powered Epiphany on Ubuntu Hardy

The next version of Epiphany (it will be included in the future Gnome 2.24) will use WebKit engine by default. The WebKit rendering engine is mainly developed by Apple for their Safari browser and is based on the glorious KHTML, originally made by the honourable KDE Team.

The current version of Epiphany (2.22) is already supporting the WebKit engine, but it is not the default choice because of some issues which make Epiphany-WebKit not suitable for everyday browsing (e.g. embedded flash player). Anyway trying Epiphany-WebKit is a good chance to see whether this alternative is really faster as thay say (I’m anticipating you the result: yes, it is).

I made a little change to the original debian control files in the source package and compiled it using the Launchpad PPA.

To install Epiphany-WebKit you only need to add the following two repositories to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stemp/ubuntu hardy main #WebKit & Midori
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/michelinux/ubuntu hardy main #Epiphany-WebKit

The first one is the PPA by Stéphane Marguet (aka Stemp), and contains the webkit libraries used by my Epiphany build. It also includes an updated version of Midori, another GTK based web browser using webkit: give it a run. At the moment I’m writing this post, the version of WebKit available Stemp’s PPA is svn34798 (not sure Apple is publicly providing stable releases of WebKit, at least I could only find nightly builds and sources).

The second one is my Personal Package Archive and currently includes only the Epiphany packages.

After you add the two repositories (you also can do this from Synaptic) you have to reload the repositories lists: press the reload button on Synaptic or type in a terminal sudo apt-get update.
At this point you can find the epiphany-webkit package. To install it from the terminal, just type

sudo apt-get install epiphany-webkit

It will automatically load all the dependencies (mainly the webkit libraries from Stemp’s ppa).

The command to run the WebKit powered Epiphany is epiphany-webkit. I suggest you to edit your menu: on Gnome right click on the menu and choose Edit Menu. In the Internet folder you can activate the items to directly launch Epiphany using WebKit or Gecko, the original engine made by Mozilla and also used by Firefox. If nothing is specified Epiphany will use Gecko as default choice.

At this point you will have the Webkit Epiphany available from the menu, along the Gecko version.

In the future, hoping I have time, I will talk about the performances of WebKit compared to Gecko, and the differences about memory occupancy of the two differences. In the near future on this blog you will also find a post about getting Flash Player working in Epiphany-WebKit. Any suggestion or hint is welcome.

A special thanks to Stéphane Marguet.

H264 YouTube video in Totem

This is just a two minutes hack to the original YouTube plugin for Totem 2.22, the Gnome Multimedia Player. It’s nothing more than a proof of concept: I hope in a very near future the original plugin could have a setting to allow users to choose the favourite video quality.

You can install it without damaging the original plugin. You also can have both enabled.

You can download it as a gzipped package:

youtubeh264.tar.gz

You only need to extract it and copy it in your totem plugins directory (usually it’s /usr/lib/totem/plugins).

[Fixed] For Ubuntu Hardy users I also prepared a deb file, easier to install and uninstall, architecture indipendent:

totem-youtubeh264_0.0.1-2.deb

Some Screenshots following (click to enlarge).