As it turns out, the reason was very simple: they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Yesterday it was announced that Qt 4.5 will be available under the LGPL.

I’ve been working on a project recently using Qt/C# and have been very happy with the combination. The bindings are called Qyoto, and available as part of the kde-bindings package. On Ubuntu, the Qt bindings alone are in a package called libqyoto4.4-cil (no KDE dependencies). The Qyoto developers have been fixing tons of bugs lately, so I’ve been building packages regularly from SVN and posting them to my PPA.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/firerabbit/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/firerabbit/ubuntu intrepid main

Please let me know if you find them useful!

Note that these packages are unofficial, if you have any problems, please let me know directly. Do not file an ubunu bug.

Also, here’s the diff against the pkg-mono repository which is currently at v1.9.1.

Hacking BoF

I’ve organized a “hacking session” BoF at Ubuntu Live, anyone interested in improving Ubuntu and GNOME is invited to attend.

Here’s the official description:

Do hackers of a feather flock together? Let's find out at Ubuntu Live!

Anyone interested in hands on experience improving Ubuntu is invited to come by
to share ideas, bugs, code, or whatever else is on your mind.

Agenda may include (and is certainly not limited to):

    * Overview of technologies that make up the modern GNOME/Ubuntu desktop
    * Problem solving/debugging tips
    * Brief introduction to launchpad.net (reporting bugs, suggesting features,
      etc.)
    * Going through the Ubuntu Desktop team TODO list and working on small
      tasks.

I'd also like to throw everyone in the room at a specific project, such as
fixing out-of-the-box touchpad support for laptop users, and see what we can
accomplish in a night. This will be a great opportunity for both experienced
and brand-new developers to make something cool that will (hopefully) see it's
way into a future release.

See you there!

P.S. If you're from the area and have a projector and/or whiteboard to bring,
that would be great!

The event will be taking place on Sunday from 8:00pm to 9:00pm. If things are going well, we will find somewhere else to keep hacking after they kick us out at 9.

More information at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuLive2007

See you there!

Rather than just going with my google account like a lot of people have been doing lately, I figured that since I was going through the trouble of switching IDs anyway, I might as well set up my own server so my jabber id could match my email address.

Someone on IRC suggested ejabberd because “it’s one config file instead of 20″, which was more than enough to convince me, especially after listening to Matt relay all the “fun” he was having trying to get the official server software to work properly.

I found that ejabberd is available in Debian Unstable, but my server runs sarge – so I backported it along with erlang (the only unavailable dependency). The packages are available on my apt server if anyone else would like to use them (sudo apt-get install ejabberd after adding the repository).

I was able to get it up and running very quickly by following the installation instructions as well as the comments in the conf file, and was very impressed. It even has a nice web gui for administration.

My new jabber id is eric@extremeboredom.net, please update your buddy lists!

If you are reading this wondering “what the hell is jabber and why should I care”, allow me to try to explain. Jabber is an instant messaging protocol, similar to AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, etc. The difference between jabber and these other IM networks is that jabber is open, anyone has the ability to run a jabber server and communicate with people on other servers. This is contrary to the other IM networks what force you to connect to their server to talk to people on their network (you have to have an AIM account to talk to AIM users). The jabber protocol is also free, meaning anyone is able to (and encouraged to) write software that uses it.

You should use jabber if you think that communication should be free, and not controlled by large corporations such as AOL and Microsoft.

More information, including a list of clients you can use, is avaliable at http://www.imfederation.com/.

Step 1. Enable the Restricted/Universe/Multiverse package repositories

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list (as root) and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ breezy universe restricted multiverse

Step 2. Install packages

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins gstreamer-0.8-plugins-multiverse gstreamer0.8-pitfdll

This will install a whole crap load of codecs.

Step 3. Find the W32Codecs package and install it

The Microsoft ELUA forbids redistribution of the windows media codecs, so it is illegal to use them unless you own a windows license. Assuming you have an extra license, you can find a deb package online fairly easily. Once you find it, install it as such:

$ sudo dpkg -i w32codecs_20050412-0.0_i386.deb

You should now be able to play most windows media files.

Step 4. Find and install libdvdcss

Almost all commercial DVDs that you buy in a store are encrypted to prevent people from making copies. To legally decrypt (and therefore playback) a DVD you have to buy a (very expensive) license from the group that maintains the specification. Hackers were able to reverse-engineer the encryption that DVDs use, but due to the DCMA it is illegal to use this unlicenced reverse-engineered DVD library in the United States (other countries have similar laws), making it illegal to watch DVDs that you paid for on a Linux system.

If you are in a country that does not have insane copyright laws, you can find a libdvdcss package for debian/ubuntu online fairly easily and install it the same way as you install the w32codecs package.

Step 5. Install additional media players (Optional)

If you want. you can install some additional media players.

Out of the box Totem is configured to use the gstreamer library. After much extensive research, it has been determined that there is a lot of “suck” surrounding the version of gstreamer in Breezy, so you might will have a lot more luck switching to the xine backend as such:

$ sudo apt-get install totem-xine

The VLC Media Player is very popular:

$ sudo apt-get install vlc

MPlayer generally does the best job of playing windows media files (assuming you have w32codecs installed):

$ sudo apt-get install mplayer-586

And let’s not forget Xine:

$ sudo apt-get install xine-ui

And you might want to forget this one, but sometimes it’s unavoidable…

cd ~/Desktop
sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
wget ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/pool/main/r/realplay/realplayer_10.0.6-0.0_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i realplayer_10.0.6-0.0_i386.deb

(buffering… buffering…buffering…error! :)

If you agree that the current state of audio/video formats is pretty bad, support Xiph, who has developed an open-source and completly free audio codec (vorbis – sometimes refered to as “ogg”) as well as an open/free video codec (theora).

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia

Obviously this whole process is much much more complicated than it should be. The solution is to have a graphical tool to configure the X server. Someone has submited a specification suggesting this but the description page is totally empty.

From The Fridge:

Daniel Holbach sent out a reminder that this Thursday, November 24nd is the next Bug Day. This is a day where volunteers trudge through the bugs filed by users and make sure they get assigned to the right teams. Bug Day is a great learning experience if you want to learn how to get involved in Quality Assurance testing and squishing defects in the upcoming release. Anyone with time and a browser can contribute, even one triaged bug can help stem the tide, so don’t be discouraged if you’ve never done it before.

Hope to see people there!

We have also released an unstable version of gtk+ 2.8 bindings for
people who want to start experimenting with the cairo API. This release
is not for the faint of heart, and comes with no API stability guarantee
for the new 2.8 API. Again, this is a source only release and the
tarball is available for download at:

http://go-mono.com/sources/gtk-sharp-2.0/gtk-sharp-2.7.1.tar.gz

Since 2.8 is a relatively small API change over 2.6, we hope to quickly
move to stability. If you find any issues, with the new API, please
raise them promptly to ensure they are fixed. As always, please file
bug reports for any issues at http://bugzilla.ximian.com under product
gtk#.

It is very important for as many people as possible to test this release and report any problems so 2.8.0 can go out the door as soon as possible. Hopefully starting after 2.8.0 we can start to see new versions of GTK# released very soon after new releases of GTK+, so mono developers dont have to wait 6 months before being able to take advantage of new features.

I have a breezy repository with Mono 1.1.10 and GTK# 2.7.1, but if you use it please remember that these are NOT official packages and are very very likely to break your system.

deb http://packages.filefind.net/ ubuntu-breezy dotnet

If you have any problems with them do NOT ask for help on the mailing list or in any IRC channels, please contact me directly.

I was thinking back about why I started using Gentoo. Before Gentoo I was using Red Hat (7.0-9.0) which gave me a very bad attidude twords a binary package manaegment system. There would never be a package for what I wanted, or the package would be built for some slightly different system that would refuse to install… it was just a mess. Nothing ever worked right, I would always managed to break the system pretty good after using it for a fairly short period of time.

Then a friend recomended Gentoo, which promised to do away with dependency hell because everything was compiled from source for your system. This sounded great, and I have to admit, worked great. I had never had a system that worked so flawlessly. I learned quite a bit from the install (how to use and configure grub, how the filesystem is layed out, etc.).

After time though I started to experience problems. First, it quickly became very irritating to have to wait for every package to compile from source, as well as for rsync to go through the several thousand files when updating the portage tree. I also begain to notice things start to break, and found myself spending way too much time trying to fix very obscure problems. When I first used Gentoo I thought that it was basically linux from scratch with a frontend to make things easier. I had *no* idea that it used a completly non standard init system or half of the packages would have five or more gentoo-specific patches applied to them. I thought I would be getting every piece of software exactly how the author intended, but ended up with a set of packages that could become so broken not even the original developers wanted to deal with them.

I didn’t use Gentoo because I thought it was better than Debian, I really never knew about Debian. I have no idea how that happened, but I guess after I found Gentoo I was happy and stopped looking for something else.

One thing that I do think that Gentoo does much better than Ubuntu, but especially much better than Debian is their documentation. The Gentoo website has a great set of easy to read and understand documentation that explains how to set up lots of common software such as Apache. The debian website is extremely unattractive and difficult to navigate, and while the Ubuntu website doesn’t look too bad (although it is brown), it is quite difficult to navigate too. Gentoo also ships with some nice looking shell prompts and pretty colors during the bootup sequence which gives a nice modern “feel” to the distro, something that both ubuntu and debian lack, and although some may say that this really doesn’t matter, I think that inexperienced users apprecieate it a lot.

So there’s my story. If anyone reading this still uses Gentoo please leave a comment explaining why. I’m not trying to start a war, just curious.

1. Download & Install vtun

$ wget http://debian.yorku.ca/debian/non-US/pool/non-US/main/v/vtun/vtun_2.6-3_i386.deb
$ sudo dpkg --install vtun_2.6-3_i386.deb

This will install all dependencies automatically.

More mirrors are at: http://packages.debian.org/testing/non-US/vtun

2. Load the tun module

$ sudo modprobe tun

3. Add tun to /etc/modules so it will be loaded automatically

$ sudo echo tun >> /etc/modules

Done!