Leaving Ubuntu or Staying Ubuntu?

Overview

This is a thought piece, related to my choice of Linux Distribution Ubuntu. Recently I thought about moving from Ubuntu to some other Linux Distribution.

Worries

Some of what brought on these thoughts are as follows (in no particular order):

1. Firefox kde support being dropped.
   I personally loved this package and would really struggle to live without it now.
2. Kubuntu being dropped by Ubuntu
   I have never liked Gnome, either versions 1, 2, or 3. I have always felt that with rare exception KDE was a superior desktop environment. (The biggest exception being the initial development and release of KDE 4, which was a colossal debacle to even its staunchest supporters. Why KDE? Just WHY!?)
   
   But I certainly don't think Gnome2 was bad. (I have no opinion on Gnome3, since I've really never used it or 2 enough to know the difference.)
3. Focused move onto Unity (and thus on Gnome).
   Again, I don't use Unity at all (or Gnome) nor particularly like it. I've even felt it was a hinderance to the Linux Desktop adaption worldwide because Gnome is not as similar to the Windows Desktop as KDE is. But again, that's only my limited opinion.

At the time of these things happening (especially items #1 and #2), I began to worry that Ubuntu might be moving in a direction that would ultimately not support my needs as a user.

Where to go for an alternative?

If I am going to pick a new distro, what are my other options?:

• Red Hat/Fedora: Not Debian, and possible stability issues compared to Debian based systems. (Again, only possible ones. I'm not flaming here.). On the plus side it does include Firefox-Kde-Support natively, I think. But I would miss the apt-package system, which I love a lot. I also would miss the Ubuntu PPAs, which are darn useful.
• Debian: Doesn't keep up enough. I have to wait too long for kernel updates with important features that enhance performance and graphics and fix bugs.
• OpenSuse: Not based on a Debian system, which puts me at a disadvantage. I've been using Debian since I started Linux. On the plus side it does include Firefox-Kde-Support, I think.

The Real Issue

Eventually I realized my alternatives were not what was important. The ultimately important question is what really matters: "What do I want from a distribution of Linux?"

My answers so far:

• KDE 4 (with desktop effects)
• BTNX (Button Configuration for my mouse)
• Firefox (with KDE integration) (latest)
• Gimp (very recent versions)
• VLC (very latest)
• Eclipse
• Vim
• Ssh
• Amarock
• Gwenview (very latest)
• Konqueror
• LiberOffice (very latest)
• Wine (very latest)
• Pidgin IM (very latest)
• Proprietary Driver installation (easy and convenient installation)
• Wacom Tablet support
• Synergy
• Avidemux (very latest)
• Klipper
• Workrave
• Regular updates to keep as current as possible while also maintaining as much stability as possible

A lot these things I want (mostly software packages) can be found in other distributions of Linux.

Some Pro's for Ubuntu

• Ubuntu Software Center: Great idea and pretty good execution, plus they keep adding more stuff to it.
• Ubuntu is really really popular: It's a namebrand that third-party software contributors and developers actually account for, more than most other distributions of Linux.
• PPAs: These are just awesome.
• Finance Support: Ubuntu is making a lot of money and has a good backing. They are also pushing their technology into new areas and trying new things. Even if I don't always like or care for what they do, that's something to be admired.
• Ubuntu for Android: Just plain awesome, especially because I so want to use this for my next phone.

Conclusion

I started writing this about two months ago and now as I finish it, I am happy to report all of my issues have been solved.

• Kubuntu's Future: Kubuntu received funding from another external backer. (I believe they were offered backing by a couple of companies.) They aren't going anywhere, and in fact this may be a better move for them in the future.
• Firefox kde support: Firefox kde support has been provided by a member of the Ubuntu Community, which is very awesome. This just demonstrates how the Ubuntu PPAs are a great aspect of the Ubuntu community. I was considering whether I should step up to providing a PPA to solve this problem, but someone did it for me.
• Ubuntu's focus on Unity: Unity has been around for years now and I've been mostly unaffected sitting in my KDE castle. So, why start to worry now with Kubuntu backed by external parties?

Lastly I have seen the Ubuntu community work hard to support various packages and software I care about. People really try to help and support a lot. Just today I found that Ubuntu had added the 'btnx' and 'btnx-config' packages back into their repository, after they had been disabled a few weeks ago due to a bug preventing readiness for OS version 12.04. This just showed me in a small way they are doing a lot of what I want from a distribution.

So yeah, I'm staying with Kubuntu/Ubuntu. I hope other's experiences are generally as good or better than mine as well. Peace all. :)

MyBookLive SSH

Just a quick story here to share how I regained SSH login access to my "MyBookLive" after doing a firmware upgrade (earlier this week) and randomly losing access. After the reboot suddenly I could not log in via SSH. However the web-page UI was available.

To enable SSH on it, you must first go to: http://mybooklive/UI/ssh, but it was already enabled for me. This was not the problem. After changing all the passwords I could find and trying the default one, nothing worked. I still could not log in via SSH. (It appeared all my SSHD settings were reset to defaults, such as back to default port 22.)

So after making sure all my data was duplicated, I used a paperclip to press the tiny reset button on the back of the machine.

I had done some research and for my MBL (pictured above) this does NOT wipe out the data apparently. It runs a shell script which resets many of the login passwords and I believe some ownership permissions but mostly on the web-interface and SSH.

After doing this, I was able to log in with the default password and change whatever I wanted. As seems normal with firmware updates, any extra programs I installed on the machine (through commandline via remote ssh login) were uninstalled. But thankfully it is a trivial thing to reinstall.

One last word, if you are going to use SSH, please be careful as the commandline is a powerful (but relatively unforgiving) tool. You can screw up your system if you don't know what you are doing. Also, if you are going to leave SSH enabled and you leave your machine on the internet for long periods of time (as most of us do), please consider changing the default SSH settings for safety and security. Choose a non-standard port to run your SSH on. (Anything above 1024 is good. Pick a random number in the many thousands, and stick with it.) I also make a white-list of allowed user names to login and forbid 'root' to login remotely.

FIrefox-KDE-Support

Firefox-KDE-Support

Overview

So if you are using KDE and running Firefox, and if you haven't been using the extra-functionality of "Firefox-KDE-Support", you are really missing out. This modifications make use of the truly excellent KDE/QT file-selector dialogs, among some other more under-the-hood changes.

In fact, the KDE/QT file-selector is hands-down the best file open/save dialog in the world, bar none. After using this, I really can never go back to using the GTK file open dialogs for frequent intense use.

(Opinion: I save a ton of files in my browser every day. In my opinion, the GTK file dialog is  just broken on a few key features, like hover previews for images, and auto-highlighting existing filenames in current directory. Small features, yes, but I use them literally every day many times a day.)

Ubuntu/Kubuntu version 11.10 and prior

In Ubuntu/Kubuntu version 11.10 and prior, simply install the package 'firefox-kde-support', restart your firefox and you will be good to go.

Ubuntu/Kubuntu version 12.04 and later

Sadly Kubuntu dropped their Firefox-KDE-Support package. But fear not! I have a solution for you. (though I didn't make it. I'm just passing it along!)

Background on why it was dropped

Concerning the information about the dropping, I know why the support is being dropped and though it saddens me I don't blame the maintainer. Mostly it was a fair bit of work and he didn't want to commit to doing it again for another five-years to coincide with the Ubuntu ultra-longterm release of 12.04. (In fact, on the Phoronix forums thread for the issue, I'm a little ashamed of the rude comments from some people, and I shake my head at some of the kooks who can't live with software where they "didn't compile every byte themselves." Yes, that's an exact quote from a few... sigh. These people are why Linux sometimes gets bad Public Reputations. But I digress.)

Firefox KDE Support for Ubuntu/Kubuntu 12.04 and later

Some awesomely helpful soul has created a version of Firefox with the KDE support bundled right in and created a PPA for the files. Here is the original post from the awesome contributor found on the Kubuntu forums:

I've uploaded both kmozillahelper (firefox-kde-support) and firefox 12 / firefox 13 with KDE patches re-enabled here:

https://launchpad.net/~alexey-ivanov/+archive/firefox-kde

It should be built in couple hours so you can try it if you want.
Tested both packages and everything is working - plasma notifications, file associations, and KDE dialogs

That link again: https://launchpad.net/~alexey-ivanov/+archive/firefox-kde

Some useful links

Here is the link to where I believe the source code for the modifications in Firefox are. This is mostly just here for reference.
https://github.com/blue-shell/firefox-kde-support
https://gitorious.org/firefox-kde-opensuse

How to Disable Profile Pictures in Gmail

How to Disable (Other) Profile Pictures in Gmail

A short while ago changed Gmail to display the profile photos/pictures of the people who send you email and whom you chat with. I don't like this feature, since sometimes I receive emails from online services, and when it shows up with a random person's face I've never met, it is unsettling. Here is how to disable the "People Widget" in your Gmail.

Go to: Gmail -> Settings -> General -> People Widget -> Hide the people widget.

Simple huh? Well, it is subtle and took me some time to find. Heck, I was able to google it a few weeks ago but then today I couldn't find the answer on Google no matter what I tried. I wouldn't have known the option was there if I hadn't already found the solution.

What they really need is a whitelist option, since there are a few people I actually would like to see this People Widget used for, but for 95% of all the email I get, I really never want to see these people.

(On a personal note, I hate Facebook's outright oppression of anonymity online. I just hope Google never goes that route.)

Google Talk Audio Fluxuation Problems

Overview

Fixing (randomly changing/auto-adjusting) audio levels for Google Talk (Google Voice) microphone in Linux.

Problem

So I started using Google Voice chat a lot in the past few months. But just this passed week, I noticed the microphone volume was automatically increasing itself, until it became too loud for others in the conversation. I don't know why it suddenly started, but here is the solution to the problem. (I recently upgraded to Firefox 12 and this might be the change that caused the problem.)

Solution

Google Talk voice chat has an configuration file called 'options' in the folder '~/.config/google-googletalkplugin'. You want to edit this file or create it for yourself.

Make a backup '~/.config/google-googletalkplugin/options'. If the file does not exist, don't worry. Just create one. Edit file and add this line:

audio-flags=1

If you need help editing a file in Linux, see this article.

Debian 5.0 Package Authentication

I've got a GNU Linux Debian 5.0 machine here. It's a Western Digital "MyBookLive" sort of machine. Network storage and media device. Have some nice features and runs Linux under the hood. You can log in with SSH and use the command line. I decided this machine needed to be updated with the latest security patches, since I'm use sure it hasn't happened in a long time.

When running the apt-get update command, I get this warning:

WARNING: GPG error: http://ftp.us.debian.org squeeze Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY AED4B06F473041FA

"WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!" http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/

The solution to this is to add the appropriate 'apt-keys' to allow for package digital signature verification. You can do this in Ubuntu as well, since it uses the Debian Package system. (Debian's apt system is one of my favorite features of the distro and all it's derivatives.) You use the program gpg to download the relevant key, fingerprint it, and export it into your armory while adding it as an apt-key.

gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv AED4B06F473041FA
gpg --fingerprint AED4B06F473041FA

gpg --export --armor AED4B06F473041FA | sudo apt-key add -

Interesting I don't actually KNOW any Debian Key-server addresses, so I had to use an Ubuntu one, but I knew they would have it. Do this and your package authentication should work.

UPDATE: I discovered the updates I was trying to apply didn't work. Had an unusual error when trying to unpack the dpkg_1.15.8.12_powerpc.deb file. So I went through the web-interface to the device and tried to update there. Fixed the problem, but in an unexpected way. It seemed to roll the system back to previous set-point. Still, fixed my problem, and undid every change I made. I'm not complaining, since it did restore the system to proper working order. I'm not sure if my tweaks were what caused this or not. It even reset my SSHD configurations. (Should always use a non-standard port and limit allowed your users.)

Still, using the above solution does allow me to authenticate any new packages I want to install.

Pidgin GTalk "mail.google.com" Certificate Issue

Here is how I dealt with connection problems this morning using Pidgin. I am writing this in hopes other people with this problem can benefit from my stumbled-upon fix.

This morning my router stopped working around 2am (much to my annoyance because this interrupted other things). But it was only a partial failure. The wireless stopped working. It still presented an active access point, but nothing could connect to the access point, despite everything else looking okay. (I tried to laptops and one cellphone. Nothing worked.)

However wired connections partially worked. Some machines seemed to have decent Internet access but very slow response times. My main desktop worked alright, except that Pidgin seemed to have trouble connecting to GTalk.

To enable Wireless back for other devices, I power-cycled the Router, which seemed to fix the problem. Wireless came back and I proceeded to debug Pidgin with GTalk. Important note: I did NOT reboot my desktop during the network down/up cycle, which I believe lead to problems later.

I began to debug the Pidgin GTalk problem. The details seemed to be this (taken from the console debug output):

proxy: Error connecting to gmail.com:5222 (Connection timed out).

I began investigating, and fiddling with the settings. At one time I managed to get a connection by setting the account connection security to "Use old-style SSL". However then I received this message once a connection was partially (successfully) established, in brief:

Verify certificate for "mail.google.com":

Finger (SHA1):
59:29:78:a7:2a:90:61:f7:0a:d7:c4:4c:4d:44:9d:cf:25:8c:d5:34

I became really puzzled at this. While investigating the problem, I was forced to reboot for another reason. Upon reboot, Pidgin worked perfectly again. I restored the setting back to default and now I'm writing this post.

All I can figure is that my Router had a hiccup, probably some corrupt data table and partial crash (the wireless going down), but the power-cycling fixed that. However I needed to reboot my system to clear the DNS and other Network info cache. (You can do this without rebooting, but I don't know the commands off hand, so it was quicker to reboot.)