My Ubuntu Blog

After disliking camera phones and people using camera phones for a long long time, I finally gave up and bought myself one. I am totally in love with my new camera phone. I love it for making things so easier. I can plugin my phone and share pictures and videos with the world. It is time for me to install some nice software to organize these audio, video and image files. Specially I am looking for some tool to organize image files and upload them to Flickr.

Unfortunately there is no plenty of such tools. I only found Picasa and F-spot. Picasa is Google’s proprietary software, I don’t mind using proprietary software but it is too slow, cluttery and doesn’t match with the rest of the environment. I don’t like installing software if they are not available via synaptic. But the lack of good alternates forced me to try Glimmr and Gnickr. Glimmr installed but I can not do anything with it as the program freezes often, doesn’t connect to my flickr account and crashes whenever I try to use anything in the Go menu. I installed the deb package for Gnickr but was unable to launch it for some unknown reasons.

Now my only choice is F-spot ubuntu’s photo management utility with the release of Edgy Eft(ubuntu 6.10). I am using Dapper Drake (ubuntu 6.06 LTS) so I had to install F-spot via synaptic.

The problem I am facing with F-spot is that I would prefer adding tags in a much more easier way. I just want to select an image right click and enter all the tags I want. F-spot also comes with some pre defined categories. May be I will learn how to do these things easily with f-spot after using it for sometime.

Right now I am using Nautilus to manage photos on my hard drive. It is much easier that way. Though I am unable to tag images but I can save them in different folders and nautilus’ default preview generation makes it easy to browse these galleries. There is a Nautilus script available to upload images to flickr directly from the file manager, but I was unable to try it as the script depends on a perl module and that perl module has other dependency issues.

After spending sometime looking at the available tools for photo management on Ubuntu I have made a set of features that I want from my ideal photo management utility:

1. There is no need to import and make copies of image files stored on my computer.
2. Tagging should be simpler. The application should use xml and save meta data inside the image.
3. Clicking on a image provides me a menu to fill meta data information such as camera used, date picture taken, whether its a modified or an original version, who owns this image, tags, notes, comments, etc.
4. Image editing is a plus but it should be simpler. I would rather use image editing applications to create different versions of image.
5. Uploading to flickr or web albums should be easier.

Update: I tried Digikam with Kipi-plugins under Gnome desktop environment. Unfortunately it needs Konqueror to communicate with Flickr.

Recently I realized that the Disks utility was showing 8.6 GiB consumed on my Ubuntu partition (I have Xubuntu installed on another partition and have one FAT partition). I decided to free up some disk space by deleting temporary files. I found that there is no tool in Dapper to automate this process. There is a tool for KDE called ‘Kleansweep‘ and also there is a feature specification on launchpad to integrate a similar tool in Ubuntu. But right now Dapper users should do it manually relying on Google and their own instincts to decide what is safe to delete and what could break their system’s stability.

To free up disk space we need to delete unnecessary files. But where are these files and how do I know that it is safe to delete them? I have found that it is safe to delete files in /home/username/.thumbnails/normal and /home/username/.thumbnails/fail folder.

It is also safe to delete the downloaded packages in /var/cache/apt/archives I personally don’t like to delete these files. Infact I even copy and paste these files to a separate partition on my hard disk. Why? Because these files are the downloaded packages we install using apt (apt-get or synaptic). If we uninstall a package and then later decide to reinstall it we will have to download it again which consumes time and bandwidth. But if you are not like one of those people who install and uninstall software on a daily basis without need or reason then it is safe to delete these files.

You can also free up disk space by emptying browser cache, saved chat files, old log files, etc.

Have we cleaned all unnecessary files? I don’t think so. I really think that there should be an easy to use application to do this job.

I haven’t upgraded to Edgy yet. I really want to but I am afraid to loose the stability, usefulness and the charm of Dapper that comes with Long Term Support. I was looking around to see what kind of trouble people facing while upgrading to Edgy from Dapper. To my surprise, there is a whole lot of users out there who had bad experiences while upgrading to Edgy. Looking at these complains on Ubuntu forums, Slashdot and blogosphere, I decided to compile a list of links that might offer some help to those who want to troubleshoot their Upgrade Disaster.

Debian Admin has a wonderful article about Ubuntu Edgy upgrade problems and their solutions. If your issue is not listed there then you can add it in comments or move on to the Ubuntu forums.

In the sub-forum Installation and Upgrades, you will find plenty of solutions. It is good to search the forum and the best way to do it is to search for the error you recieve during your upgrade failure by typing the error in the search box. While browsing the forum, I found quite interesting bits about Edgy upgrade issues in the First sticky thread of the sub-forum, titled “PLEASE use the official upgrade method! (if you decide to upgrade)“. Like I found that the first recommended method described on EdgyUpgrades wiki page does not work for Xubuntu. After further more research I found people who upgraded from Clean 6.06 to 6.10 without using any third party tools and causing any harm to their Ubuntu System’s health and still they faced trouble.

Dennis talked about the issue of unhealthy Ubuntu systems and how they interrupt between distribution upgrades. Dennis presents a list of signs to identify a possibly unhealthy system. He writes:

What makes an Ubuntu system unhealthy, you’d say – well here are a few examples:

• Automatix/easyubuntu/fasterdapper
• Third party packages
• checkinstall’ed or alien’ed packages

The problem is that many people think that Automatix, EasyUbuntu, fasterdapper, and other such tools are the easiest and quick ways to configure their systems for multimedia and everything else. Since these tools are mentioned throughout Ubuntu forums and has their Wiki pages in Community Documentation, newbies usually assume that it is safe to use them and they can undo these actions just as easily as they perform them. Looking at the Ubuntu forum’s edgy upgrade troubleshooting thread, it seems untrue.

It makes users like me wonder, how we might go about customizing our Ubuntu system in a safe and healthy manner. We need a solution which does not create problems with future upgrades and could easily be undone if needed. Some ways to resolve this issue were suggested in the discussion on Dennis’ post. These include a Ubuntu Health Checker, warnings on using scripts such as those mentioned above and providing properly integrated Ubuntu alternates to these tools. I particularly found Joey Stanford’s Distribution Upgrade technique more useful, but it needs a fast working Internet connection.

So many people complained to me that they do not enjoy gaim because it does not supports Yahoo! web cam. Personally I don’t like web cams, but there are so many people out there who love to use Yahoo! messenger with web cam support. I wanted to assure people that they can chat with their Yahoo buddies and with Web Cams, this led me to search for an Instant messenger that supports Yahoo Web Cams and is available on Linux and I found GYachE.

It has all the features of Official Windows Yahoo Client and then some more. It is a little buggy at the moment. Like whenever someone invites me for voice chat I get disconnected from Yahoo servers. Popup menu that appears when someone right clicks disappears as soon as I remove my finger from the mouse button. So I need to hold it until I select an option from the menu. The extra information that it displays in a Chat window is really annoying specially when one is in a crowded chat room. Documentation on official site is empty and there no FAQs or Wiki. To get information about troubleshooting you will have to join their mailing list.

With all these minor issues, I still think that it is quite usable.

I downloaded the deb package for Ubuntu Dapper and installed it. Once logged in and joined a Yahoo! Chatroom, I instantly noticed the enhanced spam protection which is a blessing since usually there are quite many spam bots on all popular yahoo chatrooms spamming users with spam instant messages. I do not have a web cam so I decided to check the performance of Web Cam feature by viewing some one’s web cam. I don’t have any one on my Yahoo messenger buddy list with a web cam. So I had to request strangers to show me their web cam. This was difficult and I felt awkward but I needed to write this post so this was required. Some guy kindly showed me his webcam which worked quite well.

So I think now I can tell people that they can use Yahoo! web cam on Ubuntu. It is not as good as in Windows, but its there waiting to be polished.

Microsoft’s ISA server firewall is the tool used every where on networks in Pakistan and it is the second most common problem for Linux advocates in Pakistan. The first most common problem is getting drivers for win modems.

My Cable Internet service provider also uses the same stupid MS ISA server firewall. They are a nice group of guys but they act crazy sometimes. This time, they updated the servers and forced me to authenticate to a proxy server. No big deal, I knew how to get around this trouble but this time they had gone totally mad and configured the sever to accept HTTP requests from Mozilla and IE only.

I was unable to download updates using either synaptic or apt-get. Fortunately I found Micheal Carden’s Ubuntu – ntlmaps post and it solved all my problems. Not that I was unaware of ntlmaps but actually I was unable to get it configure to use my proxy. Micheal Carden’s post explained how he solved this by moving the server.cfg from /etc/ntlmaps/ to /usr/lib/site-python/ntlmaps/main.py. This ntlmaps thing just works!

Support forums and Ubuntu Wiki are full of articles to help out people using Ubuntu Dapper on older machines. I am using Ubuntu Dapper with a 800 MHZ processor and 256 MB of RAM. Ubuntu runs well on my system it is not slower than my previous operating system (Windows XP) at least. But there are some tweaks that I made to make Ubuntu faster and more responsive. There is no scripting or writing difficult to understand commands in the shell involved in these tweaks and these minor tricks has improved performance of Ubuntu on my computer significantly.

1. I added a 280 MB of swap space during the installation. I had more disk space but I found that adding a big Swap space could have an inverse effect.
2. I use themes that use less cpu resources. I use customized Clearlooks theme, with atlanta window border and gnome icons.
3. I have stopped icons to appear in menus, to do that go to System -> Preferences -> Menus and toolbars uncheck “Show icons in menus” option and select ‘Text only’ in Toolbar button labels dropdown menu. Doing so I am not able to view icons but it improves overall system performance.
4. I have also made changes under Preferences in Nautilus. To do that open any location using Nautilus, go to Edit -> Preferences, in the view tab select List view as Default view instead of icon view. In the Preview tab I select never for all options. It stops nautilus to generate previews of files which saves time and makes nautilus even faster.
5. Instead of Gedit, I use mousepad which is similar to MS notepad. Mousepad lacks certain features such as syntax highlighting, tabs, spell check, etc. But this doesn’t mean that it is any less capable of handling files.
6. Right now I am having trouble with web browsers. I can not just settle on one. Firefox on my computer is terribly slow and I am developing a taste for Epiphany which is faster than Firefox but lacks certain features.
7. There are many other settings that one can change to make Gnome faster using Gnome Configuration Editor. For more information check out Improving Performance and Using Gconf sections in Gnome 2.14 Desktop System Administration Guide.
8. These guides also come with default Ubuntu Dapper installation available under System -> Help -> System Documentation but then again Yelp the Gnome help browser loads like a turtle. I would instead read the same pages on my web browser either from my hard disk or on the web.