In fact, it is pretty easy to change the button layout. To do so, simply run “gconf-editor” then select apps -> metacity -> general from the left hand menu. Now highlight the button_layout attribute and change the entry as follows:

change
close,minimize,maximize:
to
:minimize,maximize,close

i.e. move the colon from the right hand end of the line to the left and relocate the close button to the outside. Bingo, your buttons are now back where god ordained they should be and all is right in the universe.

Presentation issues aside, there are some more fundamental design issues which are indicative of a worrying trend. As I noted in the post below, it is now pretty easy to install restricted codecs as and when they are needed. Rhythmbox will happily pull in the codecs needed to play MP3 encoded music with only a minor acknowledgement that the codecs have been deliberately omitted from the shipped distribution for a reason – the format is closed and patent encumbered. Most users won’t care about the implications here, but I think it is only right that they should know the implications of using a closed format before accepting it. It is also worth bearing in mind that some software (including that necessary to watch commercial DVDs) is deliberately not shipped because the legal implications of doing so are problematic in many countries.

So, whilst from a usability perspective, I may applaud the decisions which have made it easy for the less technically savvy users to get their multimedia installations up and running with minimal difficulty, I find myself more than a little unhappy with the implications.

But it gets worse. Enter ubuntu one.

Ubuntu one attempts to do for ubuntu what iTunes does for Apple (but without the DRM one hopes….). The new service is integrated with rhythmbox and allows users to search for and then pay for music on-line. The big problem here is that the music is all encoded in MP3 format when ubuntu, as a champion of free software, could have chosen the (technically superior) patent free ogg vorbis format. The choice smacks of business “realpolitick” in a way that I find disappointing from a company like Canonical. Compare and contrast this approach with the strictly free and open stance taken by Debian and you have to wonder where Canonical is going.

Watch this space. If they introduce DRM in any form there will be an unholy row.

A wet and windy bank holiday weekend (as this is) meant that my plans to go fishing were put on hold so I downloaded the 10.04 .isos to play with. I grabbed three versions, the 32 and 64 bit desktops and the netbook-remix version. Given that this was a mere day after the release date, I expected a slow response from the mirrors, but I was pleasantly surprised by the download speeds I obtained. Canonical must have put a lot of effort into getting a good range of fast mirrors. The longest download took just over 22 minutes and the fastest came down in just 14 minutes.

I copied the netbook-remix .iso to a USB stick using unetbootin on my 8.04 desktop (later versions of ubuntu ship with a usb startup disk creator) and installed to my AAO netbook with no hitches whatever. The new theme ditches the bright orange (or worse, brown) colour scheme used in earlier versions of ubuntu and looks attractive and professional.

UNR 10.04

I spent a short while adding some of my preferred tools and applications and configuring the new installation to handle my multimedia requirements, but all this is now remarkably easy. Even playback of restricted formats (MP3 or AAC audio for example) is eased by the fact that totem (or rhythmbox) will fetch the required codecs for you when first you attempt to play a file which needs them. So, pleasant and easy to use. But I /still/ can’t get sony memory sticks to work.

But the netbook is simply a (mobile) toy. I do not rely upon it as I do my desktop. Any data on the netbook is ephemeral and (usually) a copy of the same data held elsewhere, either on a server in the case of email, or my main desktop. It would not matter if my installation had trashed the netbook, but my desktop is far more important. It has taken me a long time to get that environment working exactly the way I want it, and there is no way I will update it without a lot of testing first.

I am lucky enough to have a plenty of spare kit around to play with though and I normally test any distro I like the look of in a virtual machine on an old 3.4 GHz dual core pentium 4 I have. Until this weekend, that box was running a 64 bit installation of ubuntu 9.04 with virtualbox installed for testing purposes. Running a new distro in a virtual machine is normally good enough to give me a feel for whether I would be happy using that distro long term – but it does have some limitations and I really wanted to test 10.04 with full access to the underlying hardware so I decided to wipe the test box and install the 64 bit download. If it worked I could then re-install virtualbox and use the new base system as my test rig in future. If it failed, then all I have lost is some time on a wet weekend. It failed.

To be fair, the installation actually worked pretty well. My problems arose when I started testing my multimedia requirements. I installed all the necessary codecs and libraries (along with libdecss, mencoder, vlc, flash plugins etc, etc) to allow me to waste time watching youtube, MP4 videos and DVDs only to discover that neither of the DVD/CD devices in my test box were recognised. I could not mount any optical medium. This is a big problem for me because I encode my DVDs to MP4 format so that I can watch them on my PSP on the train. Thinking that there might be a problem with the automounter, I tried manually mounting the devices – no go, mount failed consistently because it could not find any media. I could not find any useful messages in any of the logs so I checked the ubuntu forums to see if others were having any similar problems. Yep – I’m not alone. This is a common problem. But it seems that I’m pretty lucky not to have seen a lot more problems (black, or purple, screen of death seems to be a major complaint). I think I’ll wait a month or so before trying again.

Meanwhile, I guess I can always ask for my money back.

I have continually upgraded the firmware on my PSP since 2007 so that I am now running version 6.20 (the latest as at today’s date). Somewhere between version 3.72 and now, sony decided to stop being so bloody minded about the format of video they were prepared to allow to run on the PSP. We are still effectively limited to mpeg-4/h.264 video wth AAC audio in an mp4 container, but the range of encoding bitrates and video resolutions is no longer as strictly limited as it was back in late 2007. So when going about converting all the DVDs I received for christmas and my last birthday and considering whether I should I move my viewing habits to take advantage of the power of my N900, I recently revisited my transcoding options.

Despite the attractiveness of the N900′s media player I concluded that it still makes sense to use the PSP for several reasons:- it works; the battery lasts for around 7 hours between charges; I have a huge investment in videos encoded to run on it; and most importantly, not using the the N900 as intensively as I use the PSP means that I know that my ‘phone will be charged enough to use as a ‘phone should I need it.

But whilst revisiting my options I discovered that the latest version of handbrake (0.9.4) now has a rather nice GUI and it will rip and encode to formats usable by both the PSP and a variety of other hand-held devices (notably apple’s iphone and ipod thingies) quite quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately for me, the latest version is only available as a .deb for ubuntu 9.10 and I am still using 8.04 LTS (because it suits me). A quick search for alternative builds led me to the ppa site for handbrake which gives builds up to version 0.9.3 for my version of ubuntu. See below:

This version works so well on my system that I no longer have to use my mencoder script.

Recently I have consolidated mail for several of my domains onto one of my VPSs. I don’t have a lot of mail users so at first I stuck with the simple approach available to all dovecot/postfix installations, i.e. – using dovecot as the local delivery mechanism and simply telling postfix to hand off incoming mail to dovecot. Dovecot then has to figure out where to deliver mail. I also used a simple password file for the dovecot password mechanism. This mechanism worked fine for a small number of users, but it rapidly becomes a pain if you have multiple users across multiple domains and you wish to allow those users to change their passwords remotely. The solution is to move user management to a MySQL backend and change the postfix and dovecot configurations to use that backend database.

Now to allow (virtual) users to change their mail passwords, most on-line documentation points to the sork password module for horde. But have you /seen/ horde? Sheesh, what a dog’s breakfast of overengineered complexity. I flatter myself that I can find may away around most sysadmin problems. but after most of a day one weekend trying to install and configure the entire horde suite just so that I could use the remote password changing facility I gave up in disgust and went searching for an easier mechanism. Sure enough I found just what I wanted in the shape of postfixadmin. This is a php application which provides a web based interface for managing mailboxes, virtual domains and aliases on a postfix mail server.

Postfixadmin is easy to install and has few dependencies (beyond the obvious php/postfix/mysql). There are even ubuntu/debian packages available for users of those distributions. I also found an excellent installation howto at rimuhosting which I can recommend.

I can now manage all my virtual domains, user mailboxes and aliases from one single point – and the users can manage their passwords and vacation messages from a simple web interface.

postfixadmin domain creation

Whilst I currently only provide pop3s/imaps mail access through dovecot, postfixadmin offers a squirrelmail plugin to integrate webmail should I wish to do that in future.

Simple, elegant and above all, usable. And it didn’t take all day to install either.

In early January we discovered that two of the seven directory authorities were compromised (moria1 and gabelmoo), along with metrics.torproject.org, a new server we’d recently set up to serve metrics data and graphs. The three servers have since been reinstalled with service migrated to other servers.

Whilst the direrctory servers apparently also hosted the tor project’s svn and git source code repositories, Dingledine is confident that the source code has not been tampered with – and nor has there been any possible compromise of user anonymity. Neverthless, the project recommends that tor users and operators upgrade to the latest version. Good advice I’d say – I’ve just upgraded mine.

(I still want one though.)