Microsoft bribes Best Buy to disparage Linux

It’s a measure of how much I’ve neglected this blog the last few months that I found this item a couple of days ago and posted it to Clipmarks and Facebook without mentioning it here.

According to British computer magazine The Inquirer, Microsoft is offering training to Best Buy employees. This wouldn’t be sinister in and of itself, but apparently the training includes FUD claims about Linux. Here’s an excerpt from the article, complete with charming British slang:

MICROSOFT IS INVOLVED in a programme to train the spotty Herberts working at leading US consumer electronics chain Best Buy to disparage Linux and Macs in favour of Windows.

According to MacInsider, Microsoft has created ExpertZone “training courses” to prevent retail employees from selling customers Macs or PCs running Linux.

It provides them with “facts”, consisting of a series of claims about how Windows 7 compares to Linux or Apple, followed by a “quiz” that tells retail employees that their answers are “incorrect” if they don’t parrot back the Vole’s talking points.

Apparently Microsoft bribes BestBuy staff and other chain stores’ retail employees with a ticket to buy a copy of Windows 7 for just $10 for completing the training.

What’s Up with Ubuntu-Art?

This item from Ubuntu-Art showed up in my RSS reader. It’s an ad for Levitra masquerading as a Linux font. Now, I’ve seen message-board spam and blog comment spam, but this is something new. I’m kind of shocked that the community of registered users hasn’t reported this account and had it banned. I’m tempted to sign up for an account myself to report it.

Screenlets

Maximum PC has an informative article about customizing the Linux desktop. It’s a great resource for people who have seen people talking about things like Compiz and Emerald and wondered what they were talking about.

One topic the article covered was desktop widgets. For GNOME, it recommends Screenlets, which is available in the standard Ubuntu repositories. This means you can download it by simply opening a terminal and typing in  sudo apt-get install screenlets.

Screenlets comes with a variety of preloaded widgets, and the handy Get More Screenlets button. Since I don’t have a widescreen monitor and want to have some room for my Pidgin buddy list on the side, my widget desires are pretty simple. I went with the obligatory weather widget, a simple calendar, and a Vista-like CPU meter I downloaded from GNOME-Look. Here’s a screenshot:

Several Ubuntu Themes

My readomatic directed me to a post by Anurag Arora, in which he gives detailed instructions on how to install several Ubuntu themes by Francois Vogelweith. Since Mr. Vogelweith himself writes in French, these English-language instructions are invaluable.

There is one spot in the instructions which might confuse the unwary, though. In the line

sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0×1781bd45c4c3275a34bb6aec6e871c4a881574de

you need two hyphens before the words “recv” and “keyserver” (first occurrence). This isn’t necessarily obvious when reading the small font the line is written in.

These themes are well worth the effort of adding the extra repository. The files are large, but that’s because they contain a lot of extras you often don’t get in a theme download. For example, each theme comes with its own set of icons (though they’re mostly similar except for the colors). They also come with matching desktop backgrounds and GDM (login screen) themes.

I tried a few of these themes before settling on Balanzan (screenshot below):

Balanzan fits in well with the standard Ubuntu color scheme. That means if you don’t like the icons that come with the theme, it will work well with the default Human icons as well. I haven’t had that problem, but I can tell that the alternate icons may not fit everyone’s taste.

Two of the other themes, Bamboo Zen and Aquadreams, look like they would make good themes for Linux Mint if I ever get around to messing around with the new version (Linux Mint 7 Gloria).

Google Chrome, Chromium, and Linux

Apparently, Google has released a developer preview version of Chrome. Though I’m not a developer, this is good news to me. I’ve been spending more time in Windows lately working on school projects, and Chrome 2.0 has become my default browser in Windows. My favorite features of 2.0 are:

• Tabs in the window border. This feature (a duplicate of Apple’s Windows versions of Safari) saves a lot of screen space.
• Incognito browsing. In Chrome, instead of having to clear private data to maintain your privacy and anonymity, you can open an “incognito” window. Basically, when you browse in an incognito window, all history and cookies associated with that window disappear when you close it.
• The download fucntionality. In Chrome, instead of dealing with dialog boxes when you download files, an arrow appears to direct your attention to a download bar at the bottom of the window. In the download bar, each downloaded file has its own button with an arrow to the right. Clicking on the arrow gives you the option to open the file. One drawback of this feature is that Chrome automatically saves files, rather than giving you the option to open them without permanently saving them. However, the visual slickness of this feature makes up for that minor drawback.

Thus, I am encouraged by Google’s new attempts to make a Linux version of Chrome. While you can download Crossover Chromium, the open-source core of Chrome, Chromium has a few issues. Though it has the first and third of my favorite Chrome features, it runs slow on Ubuntu on my machine (the download arrow creeps down the screen), and it sometimes flickers in and out in a strobe-like pattern that might induce seizures if I had such medical conditions.

The Limits of OpenOffice

I tried to do this week’s “web exercise” for a class in OpenOffice instead of Word. I figured it wouldn’t be a big problem, since I wasn’t going to be graded on precise formatting. The biggest problem was that I need to post screenshots into a table in a Word document in order to do the assignment. This is where two limitations of OpenOffice 3 came into play.

First, you can’t crop pictures from within OpenOffice. This meant that, in order to get rid of the menu bars and blank space in my screenshots, I had to use GIMP. This, in itself, wasn’t a huge problem. The GIMP online help pages are well done, and I now feel like I wouldn’t mind playing around with GIMP the way some people like to play around with Photoshop. Problem #2 ended up being the real sticking point.

And that second problem was that OpenOffice table cells don’t resize to fit pictures. This would have meant that I would constantly have to resize table cells every time I inserted or resized a screenshot. Since I had to play around with the scaling of the images in order to make the text readable, I couldn’t complete the project in OpenOffice. I had to boot into Windows to do it in Word (since I haven’t gotten around to getting Office 2007 to work under Wine in Jaunty).

Fortunatley, this is probably only a minor bug in OpenOffice. After all, how often do you have to put pictures in tables?

Miscellaneous Pidgin Stuff

I’ve just noticed that Pidgin is even more thoroughly integrated into the GNOME desktop in Jaunty Jackelope. Now, every time one of your buddies comes online, in addition to the standard sound alert, you get a prominent notification dropping down from your system tray. This is really helpful if you have a lot of buddies on different services and don’t want your Buddy List window to take up the entire height of your screen.

I’ve also noticed that MySpace’s new ripoff of Facebook’s online chat feature doesn’t get along well with Pidgin. The account still works correctly within Pidgin. The problem is that, if you sign on to MySpace IM on MySpace, it disables the account in Pidgin. This wouldn’t be a big deal if not for the fact that you sign on to MySpace IM by clicking the Online Friends button at the bottom of the web page. This makes it easy for one errant mouse click to leave you logged off of your account after you leave MySpace.

EDIT: And the desktop integration is even better than I thought. If  you’re having a conversation, you get notifications of the other person’s replies, complete with the text of the IM.

New Theme

I haven’t played around with desktop themes since upgrading to Jaunty, but the other day, I found one that triggered the itch to experiment. It’s a vaguely Mac-flavored dark theme called Squaredoid-Black. However, this theme doesn’t come with window controls (GNOME’s name for toolbar colors, apparently). So I ended up downloading BlackWinter again in order to get darker toolbars. The next step was to find another dark wallpaper, since the old BlackWinter wallpaper was deleted when I did my Jaunty install. I ended up with something called Aurora, which looks like a rip-off of the default Mac OS desktop background. The resulting combination looks like this:

Desktop with Aurora Wallpaper

And here’s how the custom theme (which I’ve dubbed “SquareWinter”) looks in an actual window:

Picture Window in "SquareWinter"

And it looks like, as any fan of Halloween will tell you, the orange of the default human icons mixes well with black.

The New Linux.com

According to Linux Journal, the Linux Foundation has launched a new website called Linux.com. Apparently, the site is to serve as a central clearing house for Linux information. It includes news and blogs related to both the Linux kernel and individual Linux distros. It looks like the RSS feeds were empty when I tried to view them, but I subscribed to the home page’s feed anyway.

I look forward to seeing what happens with this site. It would be nice to have easy access to so much Linux content straight from the horse’s mouth.

Wubi and Jaunty Jackelope

For the first time in a couple of weeks, I have an actual Linux dual-boot on my hard drive. Another relative has temporarily moved in with my grandfather and me, so I decided to reinstall Windows on my computer to allow him to work with an OS he was more familiar with. I decided to set up a Wubi install of Intrepid Ibex to tide me over until Jaunty Jackelope came out.

Wubi

That was my first use of Wubi. Having experienced it, I wish it would have been an option when I first got into Ubuntu and Linux (back in the days of Gutsy Gibbon). If I’d had the chance to try Ubuntu out without setting up a permanent dual-boot, I wouldn’t have set up the conservatively sized partition I originally did. Then I wouldn’t have spent so long trying to figure out how to expand the damn thing.

Wubi works very well. The boot-up seems to take longer, but Ubuntu runs just as quickly under a Wubi install as it does on a regular dual-boot. The biggest differences are:

• You don’t have access to your Windows files under Wubi.
• You only have a maximum of 30 GB of storage for Ubuntu under Wubi.

Otherwise, everything seems to work the same, including the update feature.

Gnome Partition Editor (GPartEd)

In my past experiments with the Gnome Partition Editor, I’ve never been able to get the results that I’ve wanted. I finally figured out that this is because you can’t manipulate the partition on which you’re running GPartEd. Thus, when I downloaded the program and attempted to grow my Ubuntu partition, I was out of luck.

Fortunately, the Jaunty Jackelope live CD comes with GPartEd, which allows you to manipulate any partition on your drive by running it from the CD. Unfortunately, I didn’t come to this revelation until after my relative had already saved some stuff on his Windows account, so it’s going to be a while before I can really grow my Linux partition. However, I was able to gain about 10 more gigs for Linux because of the fact that a Wubi install apparently creates an ext3 swap drive separate from the Windows partition.

Jaunty Jackelope

At the end of the day, I got Jaunty Jackelope installed. So far, I like what I’m seeing. A few things struck me right off the bat after I installed it and started playing around.

• The boot time has dramatically decreased, as others have pointed out.
• The new wallpapers (though there are only two of them) are much better than in the last couple of releases.
• The preinstalled themes are better. This batch includes popular third-party themes like New Wave and a couple of versions of Dust.
• The default shut-down widget now gives you 60 seconds to change your mind.
• OpenOffice 3 is now preinstalled. That saves me the trouble of adding the OOo repository to get it. (I do need the ability to occasionall read Office 2007 documents in case I accidentally download or otherwise access them in Linux. Of course, OOo 3.1 is sounding interesting enough that I might end up doing that eventually anyway.

I’m sure I’ll find more to write about as I mess with Jaunty some more, but this is enough for now. Besides, who keeps a blog to write one comprehensive entry every six months?