Showing headlines posted by Steven_Rosenber

In my test of the Fedora 18 Alpha release, I was left thinking the "connect to server" feature in the Nautilus file manager disappeared in versions 3.5.x and 3.6.x of the GNOME desktop environment. Thanks to readers, I learned that "connect to server" has moved to a separate application that you call from the shell with the not-so-friendly name "Nautilus-connect-server."

The "fast" pace of Iceweasel/Firefox and Icedove/Thunderbird releases over the past couple of years has really thrown longer-term Linux distributions for a loop. Enter the Extended Support Release version of Firefox and Thunderbird. After seeing its Mozilla applications get really old really fast in Squeeze, Debian picked up on the ESR releases of Iceweasel and Icedove for Wheezy. That's what I see in CentOS, Scientific Linux and Stella as well, so it appears even Red Hat Enterprise Linux has opted for ESR.

The more I think about it, GNOME's renaming of applications with clear words describing their function is a good thing to do.

PyBlosxom, a very worthy project that took the Perl-based Blosxom and re-did it in Python, has been slow, development-wise, for a long time now. In recent months the project was near death, but a new maintainer is at least watching over what's left. Not that Blosxom is an active, living project, because it isn't.

I get offered products for review here and there. Usually those products are hard for me to get excited about. But a computer built for Linux, assembled in Berkeley, California, by the well-respected ZaReason? That was exciting. (Sorry it took so long for this review to see the light of day.)

The bright, shining light in open source hardware -- software-wise anyway, as the hardware ain't all that open -- has been the $35 Raspberry Pi single-board computer that runs Linux, sips power and has a great deal of the world busy crafting enclosures, fine-tuning OS images and basically geeking out. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But there will be competitors. Others that want to take the throne.

Gigolo -- Xfce's "mounts anything" file-manager-helper utility -- has an unfortunate moniker. But what's really annoying is continually losing my ftp bookmarks in Nautilus. This never happens in Gigolo. It may be awkward, poorly designed and cringe-inducingly named, but it does what it says.

I bit the bullet and did some repartitioning of my Debian Wheezy-running laptop to give myself more space on the Linux side, taking it from the seldom-used Windows side of my dual-boot system.

While there's always a pack of geeks telling me how they've been running the same Debian system since Potato, I've found that most desktop systems under any kind of heavy use by those of us who do a lot of experimenting and install a lot of software don't last forever. Or they won't last a long time without a great deal of maintenance and fixing mistakes made along the way.

It’s time to talk about GNOME 3.6. I’m more excited about this release than any since 3.0. The list of major updates is impressive: new message tray, updated Activities Overview, lock screen, integrated input sources, accessibility on by default, new Nautilus. Then there are all the small changes: new style modal dialogs, bags of improvements to System Settings, a new Empathy buddy list, SkyDrive support, natural scrolling, new backgrounds, an overhauled Baobab… the list goes on and on.

My current Debian Wheezy installation is an upgrade from Squeeze, so I was unprepared for what just happened: I'm doing a bunch of installs in between my other work, and I just got around to a traditional Wheezy desktop installation with the GNOME desktop using netinstall image. I was unprepared for the only GUI package manager to be GNOME Package Kit. No Synaptic Package Manager. Not even the "Sofware Center" ported from Ubuntu that shipped in Squeeze.

For quite some time now, the newest version of the gPodder podcast-catching client has not included the ability to sync podcasts with devices such as an iPod or non-Apple audio/video player. In a bit of very positive news for fans of the application (of which I am most definitely one), gPodder 3.2.0 has been released, and device sync has returned to the application.

It's nice to say that the very-very-very-long-term-support releases in the Linux world that won't cost you arms and legs -- the RHEL-source-fed CentOS and Scientific Linux -- are there if you want to run the same distribution for years and years. But that's only true if you can stick with the relatively anemic selection of desktop packages available in the CentOS, Scientific Linux and, by extension, Red Hat repositories.

Since the GIMP edits JPEG images superbly but obliterates their IPTC metadata captions, and gThumb, my main image editor of the past three years, outputs horrible resized images in version 3.0.1 in Debian Wheezy, I need a new image editing application.

I was prepared to embrace SpiderOak as a more secure, better-suited-to-me backup/syncing service than Dropbox. I thought I'd like the ability to sync any directory/folder, and not just items under /dropbox.

After a few weeks in GNOME 3, which I actually like, I decided to give Xfce 4.8 a try as the desktop environment on my recently upgraded Debian Wheezy laptop. After a full day in Xfce, I've finally stopped mousing into the "hot corner," GNOME Shell-style, and I'm getting used to moving among my virtual desktops and various applications the old-fashioned way.

Though I'm very much a fan of the "traditional" menu, I had an inkling that I'd enjoy using the "type to search" box to start applications in GNOME 3 (or, more specifically, GNOME 3.4 in the just-frozen, still-Testing Debian Wheezy).

Though my track record with in-place upgrades of Linux/Unix systems is far from positive, I decided to do just that with my long-running (since late 2010) Debian Squeeze laptop today. It went surprisingly well -- and by that I mean I'm using a fully upgraded Debian Wheezy laptop to create this post in Nautilus via sftp.

If you are homophobic, you probably want to stop reading now. Just go to the next blog, or dial up Fox News, because the rest of this blog entry will not be satisfying for you. Do not worry, you will be able to read my next blog, just not this one.

I came across Debian project leader Stefano Zacchiroli's most recent Bits from the DPL. The more interesting bits this month include a controversy over duplication between the Debian Multimedia archive and Debian proper. Stefano suggests that what package belongs where be worked out, or that Debian Multimedia shed its Debian name and move on. Surprisingly (to me anyway), Christian Marillat of Debian Multimedia didn't argue the point. He just said he's going to change the name of the project and the archive.