Unity Workarounds

I'm currently running the unity desktop shell on my development computer. I got fed up with KDE's lack of support, and the gnome-shell just annoyed me. Unity seems like a good start, but suffers from several problems. I've found workarounds for all of these, and thought I'd post them below.

Scrollbar Corruption:


One of the major changes in unity is the thin scrollbars (technically called "overlay scrollbars", I believe), which are enabled by default for all GTK applications. This is what I'm talking about (image from techgarage.com):

These work fine for native GTK applications, but applications built using the wxPython toolkit suffer from render corruption when you try and scroll a styled text control (bug report). This bug manifests itself in many applications, including my current favorite development text editor editra. Here's a screenshot of the issue:

Solution:


The problem can be avoided by turning the thin scrollbars off. How do you do that? Easy - launch the application with the "LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR" environment variable set to 0, like this:

You can of course edit the menu item for editra to include this, or add the line "export LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0" to your ~/.xprofile file (create it if it doesn't exist).

Panel Corruption:


Whenever I change a setting in the compiz config settings manager (ccsm), the top panel of my unity desktop becomes corrupted. Previously the only way to fix this was to log out and log back in again (effectively restarting unity). Here's a screenshot of the problem:

Solution:


When this happens you can restart unity without having to logout, or close any applications. Simply run (either by pressing Alt+F2, or in a terminal):

unity --replace

Ubuntu One Madness

For those of you who have been living under a rock the last few months, Ubuntu One is:

...your personal cloud. But it's not just about syncing files — whether you need to access your contacts, notes or bookmarks from any computer or the web, enjoy your favorite music from a cloud integrated store or stream your entire collection to iPhone and Android mobile phones — we've raised the bar on personal clouds.

Clearly the marketing department at Canonical have been hard at work!

Unfortunately, the ubuntu one client has no support for any desktop environment other than Gnome. For a service that offers file synchronisation, having to launch a non-native client application makes the whole system rather useless. At first, this seems fair enough - a company with limited budget must allocate resources where they will do the most work. However, after a bit more digging, things seem to be in a rather poor state of affairs.

It's worth noting that the Kubuntu project is an official derivative of Ubuntu. It's listed as such on the Ubuntu derivatives page, you can purchase official canonical support for Kubuntu, purchase printed CDs through shipit, and the two projects use exactly the same software package repositories.

For a while there was light at the end of the tunnel: Harald Sitter started work on a KDE ubuntu one client. At one stage there were packages for it in a PPA, and people started using it. It even got a few independant web articles written about it. Then everything died. The PPA was removed, and development halted. Why? Harald commented on a bug report, and had this to say:

Well, Google Summer of Code is over.

And after having spent more than a week shaking a new graphical frontend for the now third version of authentication handling out my sleeve, I have learned but one thing. While you work on building something, something else will surely break in a way that will requrie half a work day to track down.
It is somewhat impossible to develop a KDE frontend while sitting outside of canonical and being in a completely different time zone than the Ubuntu One team.
On top of that I have seen crappy code design, crappy packaging, inexistance of cross-desktop awareness and cross-operatingsystem awareness and unavailability of a stable working target to develop against...

So I would put it as "I am giving up".

In the future I will devote time towards making ownCloud (a truely free "Cloud" implementation) more accessibile to the masses.

So what can we do? owncloud is not yet at a point where it can be used, and I cannot see any further development on an Ubuntu One client for KDE. Probably the most useful thing non-developers can do is to ask for clarification on the main bug report (politely please!), and make sure you click the "This bug affects me" link at the top of that page.

The real tragedy in all this isn't that there is no officially supported U1 client for KDE, or even that Canonical decided to support Windows and Mobile OSes before it's second-most popular operating system, it's that the upstream sources are (apparently) being built with no consideration to portability to other desktop environments. For a product with so many derivatives, you'd think this would be a required part of the development & planning process.

Sexism in IT?

Mark Shuttleworth recently copped some flack for allegedly sexist content in a talk. I wasn't there, and haven't seen the talk, so I can't really comment on the material itself, but a few things struck me about some of the online responses:

1. Many of the people complaining weren't there - they watched the video footage online. Why would you do this? If you suspect that there's going to be content that offends you, don't watch it. If you do decide to watch it, I'm not sure you can complain too loudly when (surprise surprise) you are offended by it.
   
   
2. Yes, IT is a male dominated field - for whatever reason (there's lots of research discussing why this is, but that's for you to find). That's not to say that sexism should be inherent, or even tolerated, but it is to be expected. Anyone shocked by this statement should try working in other male-dominated fields, such as construction or engineering. No, it's not right, but it's how it is.

I met Mark briefly at a Linux conference a number of years ago and he seemed to me to be a straight-talking, reasonably honest, good natured kind of guy. I'm sure he made an honest mistake, and regrets his choice of words. I would urge Mark to apologise, and urge everyone who complained to spend the same amount of energy protesting equally important matters such as software patents, or advocacy for open, sane standards.

Henry lives on

After complaining about the poor state of the web browser in a KDE platform, I have to report with mixed emotions that I've bitten the bullet and installed firefox. I'm not a huge fan of firefox - yes, it's open source, and seems to work fairly well, but it's also slow and a huge resource hog.

Who here remembers when firefox first came out? It was supposed to be a stripped down version of the mozilla web browser. The idea was that by removing the mail client, IRC chat application, and god knows how many other applications we'd end up with a smaller, faster, lighter browser. To some extent it worked. However, I'm starting to wonder if they'd have been better starting from scratch.

I challenge anyone reading this to use Chrome for windows for a week and then switch back to Firefox for good - I guarantee you you'll be pulling your hair out within a week; firefox is slow! I always assumed that the reason my browsing experience was so poor was down to my slow Internet connection, but it turns out that a fair amount of the delay is the browser.

So I have firefox - the GTK theme KDE installs looks awful, and several web sites look rubbish, but at least I can check my email...

Well, that's it for now. More to come soon (and this time I'll lose the shakespearean titles).

My Kingdom for a Browser!

This post is set to be one of the most painful entries I have ever written on this weblog. Not because the subject matter is particularly difficult, but because the technology has let me down.

The story starts with me upgrading my laptop to Kubuntu 8.10. It's been out for a while, and I'm a big fan of KDE 4, but I hadn't had a sufficiently quiet weekend in which to take the plunge. I was previously running Kubuntu 8.04, so I could have just downloaded the latest packages, but I wanted to start from scratch, for a couple of reasons.:

1. I wanted to remove all the rubbish that I had installed over the last six months. I frequently download and install applications, only to find that they're not quite what I want. I rarely uninstall them, so over time my lhard disk fills with cruft.
   
   
2. I wanted to wipe away all the stale config, especially as my window manager would be changing from KDE 3.x to KDE4. Besides, there's a certain pleasure to be derived from configuring a brand new KDE installation.
   

The install was a breeze, and for the first time ever all my laptop hardware was detected and configured correctly without any hacking on my part - even the weird web-cam, which doesn't even work in Windows XP. Life was good, until I went to browse the Internet.

KDE ships with Konqueror as it's default web browser. As far as web browsers go it's fairly nice - It lacks the large "Add-Ons" repository that Firefox has, but many of the plugins I can't live without when using Firefox are included as standard in Konqueror.



Konqueror is more than just a web browser though - the integration between konqueror and the rest of KDE is truly stunning (as an aside: this is why I prefer KDE over other desktops. Technologies like KPart and DBus are the future of desktop applications, and KDE is leading the charge in this area). As an example, if you want to search google for something, but don't have your browser window open, what can you do? Easy! just press Alt + F2 to open the "Run Command" dialog, and type "gg: " followed by your desired keywords. Hit enter and you'll launch Konqueror with the google results right there waiting for you.


Konqueror also has extensive protocol support. For example, SCP and SFTP are supported by default. Try typing something like "fish://user@host" - konqueror will as for the user password, and will then behave like a file browser for the remote machine.

These two examples hardly scratch the surface of what Konqueror can do. However - there are some very serious problems with it. Using GMail with Konqueror is torturous. First Google will give you the plain-old-HTML-only mode, since Konqueror isn't officially supported. Then, if you ask for the full version anyway you get all sorts of weirdness - and a completely unusable inbox. The solution seems to be to set the user agent to Safari 2.0, but even then my inbox seems to be incredibly slow.

Members of the KDE community have pointed out that GMail plays fast-and-loose with web standards, so it's understandable that Konqueror misses a few tricks. The Google engineers must have tested the javascript enhanced version of GMail with the most popular browsers, and left Konqueror out in the cold - and fair enough. However, the KDE developers are missing the point: no matter how good their browser is technically - no matter how standards compliant it is, it simply does not work for me - the user. I now have a browser that I cannot use to check my email (no, using the HTML-only version is not an option).

So what are the alternatives?

Before I upgraded Kubuntu I had Firefox installed. However, when I went to install it, I nearly had a heart attack. In order to install Firefox, I had to install 63 other packages - most of them gnome or GTK packages. The reason for this is simple: Firefox uses the GTK toolkit to provide a UI. I knew this already, but this early on in my new Kubuntu install I wasn't about to pollute my OS install with GTK packages.


What can I do? There are a few other options available to me:

There's been talk of a Firefox port to Qt. However, nothing usable has materialised yet, so that's off the cards.

There's the Arora browser - this is a Qt browser running the Webkit engine (which is included as standard in later Qt distributions). A quick install told me what I needed to know: also not really usable as my default browser.

Finally there's Google's offering: Chromium. However, this has not yet been ported to Linux.

So what's the underlying cause of my troubles? Without hacking the code directly, I have no idea. Perhaps this is part of the KHTML vs Webkit debacle - There's a good article outlining the whole issue here, but I'd like to quote a couple of paragraphs:

So, what's the situation? Well, it appears that KHTML will remain the web rendering engine for Konqueror going into KDE 4.0, and that it could be changed to qtWebkit as of KDE 4.1. That does not seem to be officially settled, so much as the most likely scenario. It appears that the KHTML team seems hesitant about the proposition, while many KDE developers and users alike have expressed a very receptive attitude toward seeing Konqueror user qtWebkit. And Rusin made clear to a reader that he believes the KHTML team should continue their work as long as they like.

The challenge is that Webkit, which comes from Apple, is widely tested, and is thus known to work well with a large number of websites. KHTML is not as widely tested, and, for example, GMail doesn't work well with Konqueror. Many Konqueror fans have expressed regret at having to keep Firefox around just for sites like GMail, that don't recognize KHTML. Using Webkit would solve these problems, enabling many users to stick to one browser.

In other words: "The developers are dragging their feet to implement a fix that would arguably make Konqueror a better browser". Of course, the developers involved are free to do as they please with their code, but they're dragging down the rest of the KDE platform - I now have to have multiple browsers installed to do the most basic of day-to-day tasks.

While the situation is frustrating in itself, the unfortunate fact is that similar things are happening all over the open source scene. Frequently developers get too caught up in making sure that their code is "right" (that may mean designed correctly, stable, cool, standards compliant, well integrated, or anything else the developer feels is important), and not enough time is spent making sure that the product is usable. I suppose this is one of the draw backs to a development methodology where there is no external pressure to develop your product.

Usability is king, and trumps all other concerns in a product. If it's not usable, it's no good.

Releases Galore!

It would be negligent of me if I did not point out that today several important software releases were made:

The first is the project formerly known as project greenhouse - now known as Qt Creator. I've blogged about this before. You can now download a technical preview. I'm very excited about this - having played with it in it's beta state I can't wait to use it with some of my active projects. Unfortunately I won't be doing any coding this weekend, as I'm off to Switzerland for a long weekend. I'll have to try it out when I get back.

The second big release event today is the Ubuntu family of distributions. That's right, version 8.10 is out now. I'm a kubuntu man myself, so I'll be trying this out after my long weekend as well.

That's all from me - I have several projects in the wings to blog about in the coming weeks, but for now I need to catch some sleep - my taxi arrives at 5:00 AM tomorrow.

Cheers,

VMWare Server 2: Worse Than Failure

OK, so this is hardly breaking news, but I thought I'd share this mini-rant with you now any way.

At work We deal with multiple operating systems (WinXP, Vista, Linux), and multiple programming environments. A few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and do all my development work inside virtual machines. The advantage of this approach is that it's very fast to switch from one environment to another (much faster than a whole machine reboot).

There are two problems with this approach:

1. Performance. Programming is a pretty CPU-intensive task. Well, compiling the code is anyway. Compiling our code base takes around an hour on a physical machine with top-of-the-line specs (this makes compiling the Linux kernel seem fast). On a virtual machine, that time doubles. This is an inescapable truth about software virtualization: there will always be some overhead.
2. Hardware. The applications I program need access to physical hardware, over a variety of interfaces, including RS232, RS422, USB, Parallel, TCP/IP, UDP/IP and a few others besides. Any software virtualization package must be able to forward all these hardware interfaces through to the virtual machine.

In my experience, the only software virtualization package that meets requirement 2 is VMWare. I know I've raved about Virtualbox before, and I was very tempted to use it again now, but it lacks the hardware support I need.

So, VMWare Server it is then. The next question then becomes: which version? I've used version 1.x before, and it fulfilled all my needs at the time. However, I noticed that version 2 is now available. I thought "In software, bigger numbers are better, right?"

After downloading the sevrer, and registerring for a free license key, I spent a busy 30 minutes clicking through the ubiquitous license agreements and installation options (does anyone ever read these things?). Everything was installed. I went to fire the application up, only to have it launch Mozilla Firefox. What's going on here? Then it hit me: a wave of fear and horror. What were they thinking?

The managment interface for VMWare Server 2 is web based.

That's right... you want to use your virtual machine? You need to run a web browser. The interface is slow, the browser plugin that supports the interface is buggy... I could go on, but some other people have detailed the problems with the software far better than I ever could (Yes, I realise that link is talking about the beta release. Trust me, nothing much has changed).

Maybe I'm missing something, some gold nugget of understanding that would make Server 2 more usable for me, but right now I just don't get it. Why would you decide that the primary interface to a virtual machine should reside inside a browser? Browsers are notorious for implementing different standards, being generally slow, memory-hogging apps that occaisonally crash. Who in their right mind would want to use a browser for their virtual machines?


Until then, I'll stick with VMWare server 1, thank you very much.

piwup: A Picasaweb Image Uploader for Linux

One of my pet peeves has always been that unless you want to run google's picasa application under Linux, the only way to upload photos to your picasaweb account is via a klunky web interface that only allows you to select 5 images at a time. When I come back from a trip I have hundreds of photos, so this gets tiresome very quickly.

There is a kipi plugin that is supposed to be able to do this, but it has not yet hit the Linux distribution I am using, and I'm not about to start compiling plugins from source. Besides, half the fun is in making the application!

This is definitely not a finished application! I got it to the point where I could upload my images in a batch, but it needs more work before it's useful to anyone else. Here's a few sample screen shots:

Selecting images to upload.

Uploading the first image.

The application still has a long way to go. Just some of the things yet to complete are:

• Remove hard coded items from the code (account details, service host, album name), and make these configurable via a nice configuration dialog. Make sure password is stored in a secure form - via the KDE wallet perhaps.
• Make the GUI half-decent. Originally I just wanted something to work - I need to go back and do it again with a proper menu and image thumbnail support.
• Bug fixes too numerous to mention here... this is some rouch, cheap and nasty code!

Perhaps, once I get all this done I will attempt to get it officially released into some distros. I think it's a useful application, and the kipi plugin version doesn't seem to be moving along much. Yes, I realize that I'd be better off spending my time improving the kipi plugin, but to be honest I can't be bothered right now - this was a learning experiment for me as much as it was about making an application that solved one of my problems.

The entire application is written in C++ and Qt4. The more I use Qt the more I like it. This application was simplicity itself to make, and I look forward to continued development.

Virtualisation under Linux

I've been doing some Qt development lately - a little cross platform utility that will save me lots of fingerwork when programming. I've found that certain aspects of Qt don't work the same under Windows as they do under Linux. In order to debug these niggly bugs I've begun running windows XP under a virtual machine.

I looked at three different virtualisation projects: bochs, QEMU, and VirtualBox. Of the three, virtualbox really stands out. It's a commercial product that is also released as open source software, and it really shows. The user interface is very similar to Microsoft virtual PC, possibly even a bit better.

It's been a long time since I tried running any virtualisation software under Linux, and I'm pleasantly surprised at the results.

post-vacation blues.

Well, I'm back from my holiday, with a slight tan and some great photos. Works has been busier than usual, so I'm struggling to find spare time to domuch at all.

My next hobby project will be to build my own ADSL / Ethernet / Wireless router box. I'm planning on using a Soekris net 4501 motherboard running a cut down version of Debian Linux. I'll update the blog when I get the parts, and I plan on writing a short HOWTO document which will include selecting the hardware, putting it all together, and the software as well.

I've added a selecton of photos from New Zealand to the main page - these haven't been edited in any way - yes, the country really does look like that!


Until next time!