I’ve also seen some of the completely awesome progress made with Free Software Flash players. I’ve seen both gnash and swfdec, and both of them seem rather good. We watched Tickle-Me Elmo on Fire on YouTube on Gnash, and I’ve seen Tonio_ watch some videos with swfdec. It all looks really cool and it seems like a rather high priority. We really need Free Software Flash players, so this is a really nice development.

I’ve been busy as well working on some stuff as well. The two things I’ll likely be doing for 7.10/Gutsy are some improvements to Adept (possibly looking at merging in version 2.1), and a KDE4 port of kde-systemsettings. This is all very cool stuff.

For those of you reading this from Illinois, I would just like to remind you that all of this, and more, will be discussed at manchicken’s house of hack on May 19th. Don’t forget to email ubuntu-illinois-rsvpATnotsosoftDOTnet to get the address and phone number. I hope to see you all there.

Well, I’ve been a Kubuntu hacker since December of 2006, and I am not tickling Mark Shuttleworth’s brain, or reading the minds of the management at Canonical. But I do know that everything I’ve received as a developer on the Kubuntu project leads me to believe that Ubuntu does have some very serious love for free software, but there’s a lot of “open source” to be found there as well.

So I’ll rant on two ideas I have on how Ubuntu could really solve some of the ethical concerns from the community, and how the community should reconsider its position on Ubuntu. Before folks call me inconsistent on this point–I have argued both sides several times–let’s remember that we’re all still learning here, and we’re all still figuring out what strategy will make us more free and meet our own needs. You can call my inconsistent or a hypocrite, and you’d be right, so I’ll just go ahead and get that out of the way.

First, let’s talk non-free drivers. I know this is a powder-keg, and it seems as though everybody’s got a very strong opinion it. Let me ask you though… is it Ubuntu’s fault that these drivers are not free software? Did Ubuntu or Canonical insist on licensing them as non-free software? I doubt it. Actually, I think Ubuntu would be ecstatic if nVidia, ATI, and Broadcom (to name a few) called them up tomorrow and offered to give them specs or free software drivers. I sincerely believe that.

So then, what is Ubuntu guilty of in this situation? Including the drivers, right? Well, why do you think they included the drivers? Do you think they’re making money from ATI or nVidia to include these drivers? I don’t. I think they’re actually catching a lot of crap for including them, but that in the best interest of the users who bought hardware that does not allow for a fully free system they’re accommodating a large audience of previously non-free people who can now be more free. There’s the argument of freedom of choice and all that, yadda yadda yadda. Whatever.

If you know that nVidia is non-free, and you buy it anyway, then you are supporting a company that is against your freedom. End of story on hat one. But if you’re Mr. Smith who bought this sweet laptop, and later found out that he could have more freedom with his computer, and then after the fact realizes that it has a non-free graphics card in it, that’s not his fault. He didn’t know anything about software freedom before, and he doesn’t have the cash to upgrade to a machine that does support a fully-free environment. Have you looked at the prices of a tweaked out lappy these days? They’re certainly not free, and you can’t just swap out the video card. Besides, nVidia already made their money, so it’s no further support to them by using it.

All this to say that it is nVidia’s fault and ATI’s fault and Broadcom’s fault that these drivers are non-free. Mr. Smith will know not to buy from fascists later, but this time around he’s pretty much screwed. Let’s not blame Ubuntu for nVidia’s crimes. But there is something that I feel Ubuntu could do to help things out a little bit.

Offer a choice. I know that it’s simple to just not activate the non-free modules or to purge them, but I don’t even want that rubbish on my computer to start with because I do not agree with their license agreement. So what choice would I like to see? I’m glad you asked. I’d like to see two ISOs for every Ubuntu flavor. One that meets Mr. Smith’s needs with his non-free hardware, and one that meets my needs as a user who wants a completely free system.

I know that there’s talk of a GNUbuntu or FSF-approved flavor of Ubuntu, but I don’t even think Canonical should waste the marketing money on that. I think we should just have “Kubuntu-free,” “Ubuntu-free,” “Edubuntu-free,” and “Xubuntu-free.” In a perfect world, the free versions would be the default ISOs (e.g. Ubuntu and Ubuntu-nonfree rather than Ubuntu and Ubuntu-free), but I’ll take what I can get.

All that said, I am 100% the Ubuntu fanboy. I’ve been using Kubuntu for the better half of a year and there’s not much in the way of going back for me. Ubuntu is an excellent distribution, and Kubuntu does some insanely cool things to further KDE. There are plenty of folks criticizing Ubuntu because they want to see it fail and something else succeed. I criticize Ubuntu because I think it’s a great project, and there is always room for improvement.

Okay, I’m done ranting for now. Feel free to disagree.

Remember to RSVP by emailing me at «ubuntu-illinois-rsvp *AT* notsosoft *DOT* net» for directions, address, and phone number. I really do hope to see you all there.

Sorry about that folks, I forgot to actually make sure the email address was there. This even it out of south-west Champaign, IL (about 2.5 hours south of Chicago, close to the University of Illinois campus).

On December 9th of 2006 I went into #kubuntu-devel on freenode and told them I was bored and asked them to give me something to do. Since then I’ve submitted several patches–many of which are in feisty fawn–and had more fun than you can shake a stick at. All of you aspiring hackers and UI designers and artists, I encourage you strongly to consider contributing to this project. It’s a blast, and it has results.

For those of you who intend to go to kubuntu.org or ubuntu.org to download the latest version, you will notice that things are running a bit slowly. Please be patient as quite a few people from around the world have also eagerly anticipated this release, and are very excited about it as well.

So, it is my delight to call this first meeting of the Ubuntu Illinois LoCo team. On Saturday the 19th I invite folks to join me at my house in Champaign, IL–manchicken’s house of hack–for pizza, beer, and Ubuntu from 12:00 until 17:00.

During this meeting I would like to pass on information from the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit, and I would like to discuss how we could coordinate some local development efforts.

If you will be attending, please RSVP (ubuntu-illinois-rsvp *AT* notsosoft *DOT* net) so that I know how much pizza to pick up. If you have special dietary needs let me know and I can see if I can accommodate you within reason (sorry, but I can’t afford the caviar and champagne diet). As soon as you RSVP I will reply with the address and contact information.

This event is open to all Ubuntu users and developers. I’m a big Kubuntu guy, it’d be nice if a GNOME Ubuntu person and an Xubuntu person wanted to come and help lead some development discussions for this as well. If any other UDS attendees are interested in showing up let me know and I’d love to have you join me in presenting some of the ideas.

Anyway, my rambling aside, I hope to see you all at manchicken’s house of hack on Saturday the 19th of May at noon.

Also, if you join irc.ubuntu.com and join #ubuntu-illinois (which forwards to #ubuntu-chicago) we can discuss the possibility of a hackathon.  If you’d be interested in such a thing make sure you mention that in your RSVP.

Okay, so have you ever seen this icon before? This is the adept notifier, and it will tell you when you’ve got things to update! How insanely cool is that? I think it’s pretty darn cool, and I think you do too… even if you won’t admit it out loud. Why don’t you click it and see what happens? You know you want to….

So, once you’ve clicked it you’ll see the ‘kdesu adept_updater’ kdesu window pop up. Go ahead and type your user password in there and hit enter to get the main dialog to show up. This is how KDE allows you, a normal user, to execute programs intended to be run by root. Since adept_updater actually installs programs, it needs root access.

So now you get this lovely window that pops up. If you click the “Fetch List of Updates” button, you’ll see an interface that is pretty familiar. First you’ll see adept_updater fetch updates from your sources.list, and then it’ll present you with a list of updates with the needed activities for the upgrade to take place. This doesn’t just show you new versions of programs, but it also includes any new dependencies, and allows you to manage conflicts. From here you can do everything to the packages displayed in adept_manager, even uninstall and purge.

Well, that’s it. That’s adept_updater. Don’t believe me? Try using it. It’ll work.

I’ll now open this to questions. If you have any questions about adept, I’ll answer them in comments, or if they warrant their own post, I’ll make a new post for them. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this series. I’m going to continue talking about programs that I like, and if you want me to do other topics, let me know. I’m always open to ideas. Nighty night.

Just look how useful they are. Here’s how you can install some codecs…

Just visit http://wiki.ubuntu.com and search. I am always amazed at how simple it is to find information there.

So, let’s begin. The adept manager (to the right here) allows you to do a few things that I really like. Most importantly, it allows you to manage all software packages currently installed on your computer. Secondly, it lets you search and filter software–both installed and yet to be installed–in a variety of extremely useful ways. The third major thing it does is allow you to install, upgrade, reinstall and purge packages. Lastly, it lets you see some very important details about the packages you have installed and wish to install.

Let us walk through some scenarios. Okay, so you if you’re like me, you love quick games that occupy short bursts of time. So you want to find the world’s greatest quick Free Software games. So let’s just search for game programs. We accomplish this by simply typing the word “game” into the “Search” field. Adept will automagically start filtering, so there’s no further work necessary to fire off this search.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge GNOME fan–sorry GNOME guys, no disrespect–but I prefer KDE applications. Therefore, let us filter out the GTK and GNOME stuff. I look under “Available Tags” and see a “[gtk] GTK” tag. I’ll just drag that over to the “Tags I Do Not Want” box. Now, I do want KDE games, so I’ll drag the “[kde] KDE” tag over to the “Tags I Want” box. Your window should look something like what I’ve got to the left after that.

So right off the bat, I see a game that I know I’m going to love. kbattleship sounds like a game I used to play when I was a kid. How awesome. Let’s take a deeper look at the package by clicking on the blue arrow to the left of the package. It should expand a little bit with some details about the package. I would like to see more details though. I can accomplish this with a click of the “Details” button.

Well, this certainly is more detail, eh? With this view you can see several key details about the package. The section tells you what category or section the package is listed as. This display tells you how much disk space it will take up when installed. It also gives you a description of the package, who the maintainer(s) is(are), what the version is eligable for install, and if it is already installed, what version is currently installed. But boy oh boy, that isn’t the end to this fount-o-wisdom. If you look in the tabs below you’ll see three different groups of information: “Package Relationships,” “Installed Files,” and “Additional Information.”

In the “Package Relationships” tab you can see what packages are required, which packages are in conflict, and which packages may be relevent (there may be others, but they’re escaping me now). In the “Installed Files” tab, if the selected package is installed, you’ll see all of the files that are installed with quite a bit of detail about each file. Finally, if you look in “Additional Information,” you’ll see your list of tags again, but also the source package (the package where source is available from), the architecture, the filename in the repository, and the MD5 sum (which helps you verify the integrity of the package, and also helps if you’ve got two different versions you’re comparing to see if they’re identical, but that’s another story).

So let’s request to install the package. Click the “Request Install” button and notice that the “Requested change” field now shows “install.” Now let’s look at all of the operations that have been queued up. To get there click on the “Preview Changes” button up at the top of the main window. So now we can see the two packages that will be installed to put kbattleship on your machine. So now if you hit “Apply Changes” you will see the familiar install screens, and then it will take you back to the main display again.

Now, say you play kbattleship and you don’t like it. You may then–in the main display–remove it. Just right-click the package in question and click “Request Removal” and then click the “Apply Changes” button again to remove it.

I understand that this is a pretty light-weight tutorial on adept manager. I will get into the sources selector tomorrow. Have a good night, and thanks for reading the blog. I really hope this is helping you learn how to use one of my favorite programs.

Okay, so I must confess up front, I’m not going to give you any information about adept here. This is related to adept, though not actually about adept. This is about how to get behind the scenes of package management. I invite all you happy people to comment on this entry with your own tips and tricks. Let us please stick to deb-related stuff here (sorry RPM and Gentoo people, but focus helps learning).

By the way, since my target audience is Mary Sue home-maker and Joe Schmoe, I promise to do my best to expand my acronyms. To that end, “CLI” is “Command-Line Interface.” A command-line interface is a text-based interface where a user types in commands and the computer–like a good little kitty–does as it is told. To get to the command-line interface you can use a terminal emulator. I like Konsole, so let’s use that one. Go to the K menu and go to the “System” submenu, and locate “Terminal Program (Konsole).” Click on it and a new window will open that will look something like…

manchicken@larry:~$

Okay, so let’s talk about this in scenarios….

So, you want to install a program.
So, I’ve been hearing quite a few good things about this awesome children’s learning game GCompris. I want to install it to check it out for myself. To do this I start up my handy-dandy konsole and take to the commands. So, I already know what package I want to install, so let’s go ahead and install it now. You do this with apt-get. I’ll show you the command first, and break it down for you afterwards.

sudo apt-get install gcompris-sound-en

Okay, so sudo is a command that allows you to run everything that follows as root. You should always be careful when doing things as root. Make sure that when you do this that you know know what package it is that you’re installing. All main ubuntu software repositories use GnuPG signatures to verify the authenticity of the packages, so normal ubuntu repositories are pretty reliable.

Next up, apt-get is the remote package installer. It grabs packages from the repositories and it installs it on your computer. The install portion is instructing apt-get to install the package. And, of course, gcompris-sound-en is the package we’re installing.

So, now I’m installing the gcompris-sound-en package, which is the sound package for gcompris for the English language. I like sound, and I suspect you do as well. Here’s the output of the above command for me. This will very likely vary for you…

manchicken@larry:~$ sudo apt-get install gcompris-sound-en
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
gcompris-sound-en
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 15 not upgraded.
Need to get 1885kB of archives.
After unpacking 2699kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com edgy/main gcompris-sound-en 7.4-3ubuntu2 [1885kB]
Fetched 1885kB in 7s (245kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package gcompris-sound-en.
(Reading database … 235936 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking gcompris-sound-en (from …/gcompris-sound-en_7.4-3ubuntu2_all.deb) …
Setting up gcompris-sound-en (7.4-3ubuntu2) …

So, to be exceedingly concise, what this is doing is opening the database, reading dependencies, locating the package to be installed, determining disk space requirements, informing me of disk space requirements, downloading the package, installing the package, configuring the package, and then closing the database. I’m sorry that I don’t have the time to explain in any more depth than that, but it would really take a while. Package management software is multi-faceted and complicated.

So, I’m going to explain one more scenario and then I’ll let you folks share. Sharing is good; don’t let anybody else tell you differently.

So, you have a program, you’d like to know what it is and where it came from.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to know this information. This is a two part process how I do it. Others may have better ideas. Let’s all learn and share together.

What on earth is /usr/bin/dund? I’ve never heard of it before. Let’s learn! So, first, let’s find out what package it’s in. To do that we can use dpkg-query. dpkg is the debian package manager, and dpkg-query queries dpkg. Here’s the command…

dpkg-query -S /usr/bin/dund

Now, dpkg-query is the program we’re running. The -S flag tells it to look for a file name in the database and tell us where it came from. The /usr/bin/dund argument, of course, is the file we’re trying to look up. When I run that I get:

bluez-utils: /usr/bin/dund

That tells us that /usr/bin/dund comes from bluez-utils. Now we can use apt-cache to find information about the package. Here’s the command:

apt-cache show bluez-utils

This command tells apt-cache to show us details about the package bluez-utils. Below is the output.

Package: bluez-utils
Priority: optional
Section: admin
Installed-Size: 876
Maintainer: Ubuntu Core Developers
Original-Maintainer: Debian Bluetooth Maintainers

Architecture: amd64
Version: 3.7-1ubuntu4
Replaces: bluez-sdp (< = 1.5-2), bluez-pan
Depends: libbluetooth2 (>= 3.0), libc6 (>= 2.4-1), libdbus-1-3, libusb-0.1-4 (>= 2:0.1.12), module-init-tools, makedev (< < 3.3.8.2-0) | udev, lsb-base (>= 3.0-3), dbus
Recommends: bluez-passkey-gnome
Suggests: bluez-firmware
Conflicts: bluez-sdp (< = 1.5-2), bluez-pan
Filename: pool/main/b/bluez-utils/bluez-utils_3.7-1ubuntu4_amd64.deb
Size: 290770
MD5sum: 96a2a998d8121cafaa4e5f48c0eb24b0
SHA1: d6ea9d05c2be90f6d58637ee13c3c73c33d44fd4
SHA256: 2930de56b51148f7bb694cfa8e111d62c1d6f5aa989b4769bffdb1f443aaf290
Description: Bluetooth tools and daemons
This package contains tools and system daemons for using Bluetooth devices.
.
BlueZ is the official Linux Bluetooth protocol stack. It is an Open Source
project distributed under GNU General Public License (GPL).
.
More information is available at http://bluez.sourceforge.net/
Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com
Origin: Ubuntu
Task: ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, edubuntu-desktop

Oh, wow. Now we know what this is. It is a bluetooth protocol package. I think this output is pretty self explanatory. I could explain all of these lines as well, but as previously mentioned, it would take more time than I’m willing to dedicate to this one post. If you have specific questions, ask in the comments and we can learn together.

Okay, so I’m done now. I really hope this has been helpful, and I truly encourage you to comment and share and learn. With this software you have freedom and you can help your neighbor. Let’s exercise this freedom and help our neighbors. Nighty night all you happy people.

By the way, did you remember to call your mother?

Okay, so you all know that I am the ultimate Adept fanboy, and that’s not just because I’m knee deep in its code either. Oh no no no. It’s because Adept has some crazy-cool functionality. Let’s talk Adept Installer, shall we? If you missed the last post, you can look at this thumbnail to help you find it in the K menu.

Now, lately I’ve had a hankering for tea lately, so I’ve decided that we’re going to install KTeaTime. This program helps you know how long to steep your tea for just the right cup. I want to warn you though, according to the description here, it only works with KDE, so pick another package (perhaps another one having to do with tea?) if you don’t want to risk it. You can always uninstall it later

Okay, so let’s locate the package. I just navigate to the “Others” group, with the filter bar (in the toolbar) is only filtering for KDE programs. Then, scroll in the “Application (Others)” column until you see KTeaTime–this column is sorted alphabetically.

After reading the description–very important to read the description!–I check the checkbox just to the left of the gear icon (icons may vary depending on your theme) and notice that what was the disabled “Next” button lights up to an “Apply Changes” button. So let’s click the button.

You’re going to see three screens, and I’ll go into a bit of depth on them. So, this screen is showing you that it’s checking your sources list. It does this for each operation you do. For this one package it should only show one of those. Continuing on…

Righto, so now apt is preparing the database, downloading the file, installing the file, and updating the database. This is all very important stuff. If you click the “Show Details” button it’ll show you the output of the apt process in the background. If you were seeing weird errors, this window could help.

Yay! The installation is completed! Now you should be able to go and brew a cup of tea. Let’s check out the K menu…

Yeah! Rock on! Sweet tea-steeping goodness is mine for the taking!

Now that you too can install sweet sweet Free Software programs using our beloved Adept Installer, post a comment telling us all what you’re installing!