ntfs-3g - mount defaults

[Milan Niznansky]

Hi all,
  presently, default mount options for ntfs-3g are:
... gid=46,umask=007 ...

This has (common user) usability consequences:
1) it disables "silent" option
2) it activates "default_permissions" option
See http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-manual/


When a user attempts to copy files from ext filesystem to NTFS mounted
with this option, he is very likely to be greeted with a huge ammount of
ntfs-3g error messages as the "silent" behavior is suppressed.

When user then searches for the problem, most solutions navigate him to
create and configure .NTFS-3G/UserMapper.
Getting that file right is several levels beyond getting /etc/fstab
right manually for a casual user...


I would suggest both gid and umask options be removed for desktop
releases.

User mapping is of limited use for basic dual-boot filesharing and
requires extensive maintenance for correct operation.
Also, the preferred way to create UserMapper is from within Windows
which is by no means intuitive.


Hopefully, I am not duplicating this.

Regards,
Milan


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Re: sound from multiple apps

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le jeudi 12 juin 2008 à 17:40 +1000, Luke Yelavich a écrit :

> > I'm just a little appalled at the state of audio support on Linux (I believe
> > this issue is not Ubuntu only); I was trying to have a conversation on the
> > google chat (from within the browser) and since the chat has audio alerts,
> > mplayer refused to play audio (while the chat is open). Just a little
> > example of broken audio support. I do not know the cause, nor the solution
> > to the problem, I wonder how ubuntu is trying to become mainstream and have
> > mysterious issues, such as this.
> 
> What does Google Chat use? Flash? Java?
It appears to use Java. So this may be a bug in a JRE.


> If you are using Ubuntu and GNOME, then its likely that whatever you are 
> using is grabbing the sound device, and PulseAudio, the sound server for the 
> Ubuntu desktop is unable to access the device, since whatever you are using 
> in Firefox has exclusive use of the device.
> 
> Its hard to say more without knowing what browser technology google chat 
> uses. If you could tell me what it uses, then I will be able to more quickly 
> help you work out a solution, or a workaround.
Gezim, I guess you should open a bug against the package gij, and we'll be 
able to investigate more there. You've run into a very particular bug, and in 
Ubuntu the sound system is not so bad as you may think for desktop uses - 
actually it rocks, it's just that Java support may not be very well integrated 
to the rest of the system. Thanks for reporting anyway.


Cheers


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Re: Weird downstream Power Manager changes?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mardi 03 juin 2008 à 08:06 -0700, Dylan McCall a écrit :
> Aha! Sorry about the double post. Just realized that the minimum is idle
> time + 1 minute, which probably makes sense somewhere. (Except for the 1
> minute part?!). Still, the fact that this basic setting of timers needed
> research to figure out suggests a need for some reorganizing. Firstly,
> idle time should be set in gnome-power-preferences, not just
> gnome-screensaver-preferences, if it has such a widespread impact.
> Furthermore, I think it is problematic that the idle time cannot be set
> differently for when on battery as opposed to when on AC power, again
> because of its tie to screensaver time. Perhaps this would make more
> sense if idle did not automatically trigger the screensaver, instead
> with another timer to handle that.
I'm sure I read a proposal by somebody working on this in GNOME - but I
cannot find where. The chances are you'll land in 2.24 with all those
settings on the same preferences tab. I can't check it though, but maybe
you'll be able to locate this document.

Regards


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Re: Incomplete with no response >30 days

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le dimanche 25 mai 2008 à 18:33 +1000, Sarah Hobbs a écrit :

> There seems to be an attitude of "screw the developers, we are the 
> mighty bug squad, and can do what we like" here.
The contrary can be true as well, but that's absolutely not the point
here. ;-)

> But really, isn't the job of the bug squad to get bugs into a good state 
> of triage, so they can be dealt with by the developers?  Does it not 
> make sense, therefore, to listen to what the developers want the bug 
> squad to do to the bugs, in a general sense, and then for the bug squad 
> to go away and deal with the specifics?
> 
> I don't think the bug squad should have the right to say "we will make 
> the rules, everyone else must follow them", as, while there are many bug 
> squad people (yes, developers are still bug squad too), the bug squad 
> does not put real bugs (ie, not invalid, etc) in a final state, so 
> someone always has to come after them, and touch the bugs afterwards. 
> This is not the case for developers.
I don't see the need here to oppose bug triager and developers here - yes, 
developers are members of the bug squad too, and the only aim of all these 
groups is to make Ubuntu work right. For this we need rule the best cooperation 
between all classes of contributors. And bug triagers are a really diverse 
group, from which you cannot expect to master every Ubuntu trick.

The bug squad is not here to serve developers, but precisely to get
needed information so that bugs are made useful to them. Developers also
should make the life of bug triagers easier since their own work depends
on the bug squad efficiency.

As Henrik Nilsen Omma summed it up [1], there's just a need to find
better conventions in order to make special bugs (sync requests...)
conform to the general convention. No need to hurt anyone here:
developers could simply use "Confirmed" instead of "Incomplete" when
waiting for more information that *they will get by themselves*, and not
from any user; "Triaged" and "In progress" are still here for more
advanced states. And surely assigning bugs when somebody is taking care
of a bug, even if no work is going on would help, since other developers
that may want to work on the bug will know what kind of "special tricks"
are involved.

Hope we can find a common rule


1: http://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-bugsquad/2008-May/000854.html




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Re: Strip incompatible characters from Windows partitions!

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le vendredi 16 mai 2008 à 00:06 -0400, Scott Kitterman a écrit :
> On Thursday 15 May 2008 21:31, Evan wrote:
> > On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 9:14 PM, Scott Kitterman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >
> > wrote:
> > > I'd say that if there's a bug it's in Windows.  I could see a wishlist
> > > bug against Ubuntu to provide a way to check for this/suggest changes to
> > > avoid problematic filenames, but there is nothing inherently defective
> > > with the current behavior.
> > >
> > > Scott K
> >
> > I agree that there is no inherent problem with the Ubuntu code, and it
> > should really be up to Windows to support more characters. However I can
> > think of several situations where this could cause considerable problems
> > for the end user. We should at the very least provide a warning that
> > "Naming a file on this partition with any of the following characters will
> > prevent Windows from opening it. Are you sure you want to continue?"
> >
> > Evan
> 
> Personally I'm against such hand holding.  If any such feature is provided, I 
> think it should be off by default.  
> 
> I happen to have some legacy FAT32 and NTFS partitions for various reasons, 
> but the odds that they will ever be read from Windows are very low.  I don't 
> think Ubuntu's design should be predicated on the idea that it's an adjunct 
> to using Windows.  
Sorry for your legacies, but IMHO partitions with a Microfost-ish filesystem 
are meant to be used with Windows, and if you want to use the full 
possibilities Unix offers you, just use Unix filesystems. The default should be 
to be fully Windows-compliant - and you may add an option in /etc/fstab 
disabling character stripping. Why the hell would you use a Windows filesystem 
in a Linux-only environment?!

I can only think of cases when Windows will have to access one day or
another the filesystem: USB keys, external HD, Windows partitions on
dual boot... Samba does not provide Windows with invalid characters when
sharing files, and Linux must do the same with filesystems.

Hope Ubuntu is more modest than you appear to see it. Serve the user,
not the ideal technology you dream of in which every character is
supported in filenames. When you're working on documents, being able to
read it in a conference from your USB key is much more important than
being allowed to keep a '?' in its filename, isn't it?



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Re: Ubuntu beyond GTK apps?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le vendredi 16 mai 2008 à 11:26 +0200, Thomas Novin a écrit :
> On Fri, 2008-05-16 at 03:02 -0600, Conrad Knauer wrote:
> 
> > Wouldn't it be interesting to take that a step further and have Ubuntu
> > represent the best Linux apps (e.g. K3B?), regardless of widget
> > dependency?  If QGtkStyle (or such) could seamlessly integrate them
> > visually, I don't see why (beyond LiveCD size restrictions) that this
> > wouldn't be a good idea...
> 
> That would be amazing. I think a pretty long list can be easily made of
> KDE-apps that are better than their Gnome equivalents.
> 
> - Amarok > Rhythmbox
> - Konsole > Gnome Terminal
> - Kate > Gedit
> - Kdenlive > ???
Dear, just switch to KDE, you'll have a nice desktop environment that
will suit your applications. ;-)

Seriously, using some specialized Qt programs that have no good equivalent in 
GNOME is very important (Rosegarden, Scribus, KDenlive...), but for standard 
tools this would make no sense.

Cheers


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Re: Ubuntu boot speed fall in Hardy

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mercredi 14 mai 2008 à 18:10 -0400, Phillip Susi a écrit :
> Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-05-12 at 02:17 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote:
> >> Il giorno dom, 11/05/2008 alle 17.32 -0400, Mackenzie Morgan ha scritto:
> >>> On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 10:40 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia wrote
> >>>  I wish I could configure what it considers "low."
> >> You can: just launch gconf-editor and take a look at
> >> apps/gnome-power-manager/thresholds.
> > 
> > It claims it hibernates when 2 minutes remain.  It lies.  
> 
> Sounds like you need to replace your worn out battery pack then.  Or 
> just increase it to 5 minutes and see if that buys you enough time.
Normally, gnome-power-manager should detect the real time left, and not only 
what the batteries claim. But if you never let the battery go until 0% without 
trying to stop the machine, I cannot see a way for g-p-m to calibrate that, 
since when your computer will shut down in the middle of the hibernation 
process, g-p-m has already been stopped.


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Re: 1. Unabel to unmount/eject CD/DVD ? (( ``-_-?? ) -- Fernando)

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mercredi 14 mai 2008 à 21:03 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas a écrit :
> That's a much better explanation than the error message. So you're
> right, it's not a bug: it's two bugs. One is that the error message is
> unhelpful, and the other is that the CD should be ejectable if the only
> programs that were using it aren't running any more.
About the latter, see bug 91239: "Cannot unmount volume: show which 
application(s) still use the drive" [1]. This is a bitesize work that could be 
worth a bounty for somebody motivated.

Cheers

1: http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-mount/+bug/81239


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Re: Bug madness: High frequency of load/unload cycles

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mardi 13 mai 2008 à 11:22 +0200, Oliver Grawert a écrit :
> hi,
> Am Montag, den 12.05.2008, 23:14 +0200 schrieb Milan Bouchet-Valat:
> > I'd like to raise the developers' awareness about bug 59695 [1]: High
> > frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime
> > 
> please see this article:
> http://lwn.net/Articles/257426/
> it is not aything ubuntu specific but a hardware vendor setting, note as
> well that the relatime mount option is the default with hardys 2.6.24
> kernel.
If you think it's been solved with the relatime option in Hardy, then
please go there and explain it to the subscribers, and set the bug to
Invalid. Don't let people talk again and again about these issues.

But AFAIK the problem is still here, and some users are returning to
Windows because they say then their Hard Cycle Count is not rising so
quickly - whether this can be Ubuntu's fault or just a result a kind of
bug in Windows, I cannot tell.

Anyway, if it is real that on Windows heads don't park, and on 
Linux they do, so no matter of the cause, we should at least provide an
easy workaround. Can you claim there is nothing in this bug but
nonsensical fear from users? I'm not taking side here, I can be sure of
anything. What I know is that we should tell them if something has to be
done, will be done, and why.


Thanks for you work



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Bug madness: High frequency of load/unload cycles

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

I'd like to raise the developers' awareness about bug 59695 [1]: High
frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime

I'm not sure everybody knows about it. It deals with hard disks parking
after a too short period of idleness, and waking quickly after that,
causing their Load Cycle Count to skyrocket, potentially killing the HD
in a few months.

I'm not affected by this bug, and I've just read the thread and other
related topics. I'm concerned by the fact that people are afraid and
thus mix many different issues on the same report, that has become a
place to protest, to fear or to ask for help. There seem to be different
issues, that can be related to the file system, to running programs, to
hdparm settings, to laptop-mode being enabled manually, to hibernate and
suspend, and to specific hardware bugs. Thus, we can hardly think of a
fix.


A kind of fix was included by Debian and got into Hardy, which is:
* Set hdparm power management to 254 for all hard drives. (Closes:
#448673)
But it has not fixed all issues. And it appears to cause some HD to
heat, which can possibly be dangerous. But this may just be an illusion.


One interesting point is that it seems Ubuntu does not let drives sleep
for more than a few seconds, and then forces them to wake up, even when
no action is performed by the user. This may be related to the
filesystem settings and should be fixed as a general rule.


Maybe it would be good that a developer triage all this mess, apply some
patches to fix most trivial issues and above all reassure people about
this, since for now we cannot even distinguish between different
problems. If some HD models are broken, we should be sure it's the case,
and ensure normal cases are handled correctly.

I know it's easy to ask and harder to work, but I think we are numerous
wanting to help triaging: if somebody with the needed knowledge and
ready to apply patches is OK to tackle that, I and many others are ready
to help. For now, some try to sum up the issues but it's rather
discouraging.

Thanks - this is the only critical bug that got into Hardy, one of the
most stable Ubuntu releases I've used!


1: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695
2: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/229693


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Re: The new firefox start page looks a bit tricky when searching google

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le samedi 10 mai 2008 à 16:01 +0200, Vincenzo Ciancia a écrit :
> And, to get back on the issue, perhaps the page could just be made
> local.
Why do we need a special Ubuntu homepage anyway? The first thing I do
when creating an account is changing my homepage to google.com. This
practice mades me think of Internet Explorer defaulting to msn.com -
well, much less ugly since our page is not full of ads and is using a
"real" search engine.

Wouldn't it be better to provide a page with help and informations about
Ubuntu and some links like: "Set your homepage to google.com"/"to
yahoo.com"/"to a custom page" ?
We should keep in mind that people install an OS not to think about this
OS but to work or surf; let's not be intrusive but help them to find
easily what they want.

What do you think?


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Re: firefox and bad ssl certificates

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le vendredi 09 mai 2008 à 17:02 -0400, Phillip Susi a écrit :
> Martin Pitt wrote:
> > I don't consider it a new feature, but a better UI. Firefox has always
> > complained about invalid certificates, but until version 2 it was just
> > the well-known 'SSL yadayada cannot be verified mumblemumble click
> > here to shut me up' popup dialog, and really everyone just clicked
> > this away, right? Security click-through dialogs should be abolished,
> > since they achieve nothing and are really just an excuse for the
> > software provider: "I know it is unsafe, and cannot give you something
> > better. Of course you can't know either, but at least I can make it
> > your problem now."
> > 
> > Now you get at least a proper error message page. I don't doubt that
> > the text can be improved, and make more concise/clear, etc., but the
> > UI is much better IMHO.
> 
> I could not disagree with this more strongly.  You can't go around 
> applying nerf padding to everything to protect against the possibility 
> of someone running head first into the wall.  When you try to protect 
> people from themselves, and that protection has a negative impact on 
> them, you aren't doing them any favors.  I don't like the fact that my 
> car won't let me ( or my passenger ) choose to fiddle with the gps while 
>   the wheels are turning, and I don't like this change to firefox.
> 
> An invalid cert is something that MIGHT be cause for concern, but often 
> is not, so a notification is quite sufficient to let the user decide if 
> it is ok to proceed or not.  Making them jump through hoops of fire to 
> be SURE they want to proceed is a bad idea.
Notifications are never read, especially by users that are not
passionate by computers - they're exactly like there was no message at
all, only they annoy users: "click OK and then see if there's a problem"
is what OS have used people to for many years. And after that the lock
in the adress bar still seems to confirm you're on a secure website.

> Now improving the existing message to be more informative and educate 
> the user as to what is going on is something I'm all for, but you should 
> not assume the user has no clue and must be locked up to protect him 
> from himself.
IMHO it's not mainly about educating the user, but to force servers to
use correct certificates. When freedesktop.org will understand every
person that goes to their bugtracker gets to the new Firefox warning, I
guess they will change their certificate. ;-) (just an example)

To continue your metaphor, it's primarily intended to force GPS vendors
to provide hands-free models so that then you can drive without this
kind of concern.


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Re: Four crashes, no apport actions

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mercredi 07 mai 2008 à 18:00 +0200, Martin Pitt a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> Milan Bouchet-Valat [2008-05-07 17:41 +0200]:
> > Why is it disabled? 
> 
> Because 
> 
>  (1) we have our hands full with fixing the development release and
>  want to concentrate on it
> 
>  (2) we should already know about the top crashers in stable releases,
>  and the ones which just occur randomly or very seldomly are not a
>  good target for stable updates anyway
> 
>  (3) we want to avoid people filing bugs and dozens of duplicates in
>  vain
> 
>  (4) automatic bug reports are always a potential privacy issue, which
>  is more concerning for stable users.
> 
> > I find it very useful to debug for advanced users
> > instead of getting gdb traces. Is there a way to manually activate it?
> 
> Sure, you can turn it on in /etc/default/apport.
OK, thanks for the info, I had not managed to understand why apport did 
sometimes start and sometimes not. But it's definitely a great tool when 
debugging. And I guess this can help when triagin bugs: we can simply tell the 
user to activate apport for the time he gets an automatic trace.


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Re: Four crashes, no apport actions

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mercredi 07 mai 2008 à 14:36 +0200, Stéphane Graber a écrit :
> Apport is only used during development, it's turned off in final release.
Why is it disabled? I find it very useful to debug for advanced users
instead of getting gdb traces. Is there a way to manually activate it?


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Re: Suggestion to make remote recovery easier

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mercredi 07 mai 2008 à 03:44 +, Justin M. Wray a écrit :
> Another idea would be to not only tunnel SSH but also VNC.
> 
> Allowing the "newbie" to watch the "helper" do something at times might be 
> the goal, and will make help facilitate learning.  In addition the issue 
> might be with a GTK/GUI app, and VNC would be the fastest approch.
If you limit your goal in this spec to "general help" (as opposed to "recovery 
from an unusable system"), then you can do it in a nice and easy way with 
Telepathy. The "newbie" only has to select his technical friend while they chat 
on Empathy, and say "Give this contact control on my desktop". Then if a 
console is needed the geek will start it by itself (gnome-terminal).

The drawback here is that in case X does not start anymore, this would not 
work. But for the most common case of a new Linux user asking "how can I do 
that", this is perfect since you can see what the friend is doing, and 
possibily learn. And this is nicer because you don't give total control on the 
computer to a friend who may install what he wants (even if you trust him, this 
possibility may refrain you from remote help).


A word about openssh-server:
Please don't disable password connexions by default, it is your script
that will have to do so. The defaults now are sane and quick to use.
Many people are behind firewalls and can install a SSH server without
fear of terrible attacks on their LANs.

Only when the user is known to be a newbie not controlling the SSH
server we should secure it the most.


Very nice idea anyway!


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Re: Developemnt and use - Training manual

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le lundi 05 mai 2008 à 09:11 -0400, Blaise Alleyne a écrit :
> Billy Cina wrote:
> > George Farris wrote:
> >> On Mon, 2008-04-28 at 10:38 +0300, Billy Cina wrote:
> >>   
>  Right, so if we want to use the manual in our Community Education course
>  to introduce and teach Ubuntu Linux while charging the student a fee for
>  the course, this would be okay?
> 
>  Note: these are not degree courses they fall into the same category as
>  "learn to paint" or "better life through yoga".  Strictly for community
>  personal interest with charges usually between $50.00 - $199.00
>    
>    
> >>> Non-profit are key words. $50 - $199.00 sounds like profit seeking to me.
> >>>
> >>> Billy Cina
> >>> 
> >>
> >> Exactly which brings me back to the original question.  
> >>
> >> It seems a little out of touch with the rest of Ubuntu.  
> >>
> >> If one can take Hardy Heron and use it to present a course on Linux
> >> while charging for the course, why wouldn't you have the license similar
> >> for the documents?  Charge for the course (not the material) but use the
> >> material to refer to in the course.
> >>
> >> Cheers
> >>
> >>   
> > Dear George and Blaise,
> >
> > Am addressing both in the same email.
> 
> Thanks for the response.
> 
> > 
> > Ubuntu is a free distribution and will always continue to be free.  
> > However, this does not mean that every service provided to support 
> > Ubuntu or its further expansion must also be free.
> 
> Free as in price or freedom? No one expects that every service provided to 
> support Ubuntu will be provided at no cost, but one does expect Canonical to 
> have a more consistent respect for the freedom central to the open source 
> software it provides. Using a non-free license by choice seems inconsistent 
> with Canonical's stated mission of "facilitating the continued growth and 
> development of the free software community" since it's inconsistent with the 
> community's beliefs and restricts its development. [0]
> 
> > Both the Ubuntu 
> > community  and Canonical have invested a lot of time and money in 
> > developing this course,
> 
> I don't think anyone takes for granted the effort that's gone into this 
> project, which is why it'd be a shame if the fruits of that labour are only 
> unavailable under a non-free license, limiting their value and usage.
> 
> > it is therefor reasonable for: a. the community 
> > to be able to use the material (freely) to further spread the work of 
> > Ubuntu and grow the user base, 
> 
> The important point raised is that the community /isn't/ able to use to the 
> work freely, in the sense of freedom, only in the sense of price. Community 
> members are in a legal grey area, at best, if they want to be compensated for 
> any time and money they spend on training if they make use of these materials 
> because of the non-commercial clause.
> 
> > and b. for Canonical to determine who 
> > should be seeking a profit out of its investment.
> 
> It's reasonable, in the sense that Canonical has the legal right to make such 
> a decision. But Canonical (and the community) would benefit from some 
> consistency in their commitment to free software and free culture. If 
> everyone in the free software world believed it was reasonable "to determine 
> who should be seeking a profit out of [their] investment[s]," Canonical 
> wouldn't have a distribution.
Totally agreed. If you don't want to make the community documentation
(really) free, please just tell it and benevolent people will go
elsewhere to work. I don't think we're willing to spend time on
restricted material, we have better to do. Ubuntu is not just a
competitor to Microsoft, it is free software - please don't play with
definitions of free.

To me, it's a shame this point is discussed; I believed this was just a
mistake, but no, this is a strategic choice... Would you like to release
Ubuntu under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license too? Hopefully you
can't, but what is for you the difference between the software and its
documentation? Please be consistent.


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Re: Pulseaudio/Jack in Ubuntu Hardy

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Please don't take my remarks so badly! I did not said I was smarter than
every audio packager in Ubuntu, nor did I said this was absolutely
required for Ubuntu to be something usable and that else I'd immediately
go to Windows. Believe it if you want: I'm not even personally
interested in getting Ardour working out of the box since I don't use
it. And I'm okay to configure jackd myself for use with Rosegarden
(which AFAIK needs jack) - actually on my computer it requires no
configuration but the defaults.

I perfectly agree with you that as soon as you want to make your
computer something quite serious you need to configure things. But what
you managed until now not to answer to is: would basic defaults making
jackd output to PulseAudio hurt anybody? Sure it would be slow, it would
not be serious at all, but would it allow people that can stand that use
JACK then? Others, as you said, will configure it.

I'm not asking you to implement it, I'm just looking for a possible
theoretical solution. As a user I guess I can help by telling developers
what users may like to see.


Have a good day



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Re: Pulseaudio/Jack in Ubuntu Hardy

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le lundi 28 avril 2008 à 12:25 -0400, Cory K. a écrit :
> Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
> > I've been through both bugs and to me, as an occasional jack user, it
> > seems that the best would be that jackd defaults to the pulseaudio
> > output. Users that have better hardware and do more advanced stuff are
> > able to tweak what they need.
> >   
> 
> This could be done if JACK were in main. Then the needed module could be
> built.
What module and why does it need to be in main?


> But it should *not* be the default behavior because it introduces a
> added layer of latency that also impacts the user experience in a
> negative way. ie: performance.
My point was: is performance really an issue for base users that don't
know how to configure jackd anyway? If we leave it not working
out-of-the-box at all, this is worse for everybody than getting bad
performances.

If you don't need a high-quality sound in perfect realtime and don't use
many tracks/instruments/sources at the same time, the problem may not
appear at all. And if so, you are likely to accept tweaking things a
little further (using a GUI?).


> It is trickier than it seems. There is no "best" solution for everyone.
> This (to me) is simply one of those situations where the user has to
> figure out what they are doing.
I think Ubuntu's philosophy is "make it work anyway for every standard
user needs". That may not be possible in the state of the software but
if there's a way to reduce the unexpected issues, it should be chosen.
Further configuration should always be leaved to more special cases.


> PulseAudio or JACK should be used separately by default IMO. I'm not
> saying don't make the tools available, but making JACK work through
> PulseAudio by default is bad.
Think of somebody that uses Rosegarden/Ardour/etc. once in a month and
uses its computer for everyday work: he needs PulseAudio because running
JACK all the time would be a waste. This case should be handled.

I know Ubuntu Studio aims at a professional system, not at a basic usage
suiting set of applications. But since it is also Ubuntu, I guess it
should find a compromise.


> I'll consult upstream to see what their opinion is.
Good - they have too find a solution for this kind of case too.

And thanks for your work!



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Re: Pulseaudio/Jack in Ubuntu Hardy

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le vendredi 25 avril 2008 à 19:45 +0200, Gonz Hauser a écrit :
> My opinion is that it should be possible to provide a _default_ 
> configuration where jackd connects to pulseaudio (this is what 
> module-jack-source is for, right?).
> 
> Let me repeat my two concerns:
> 
> 1. Ardour in Ubuntu Hardy doesn't work out of the box
> 2. It is not possible to use mplayer and ardour at the same time
> 
> I believe it is possible manually fix this up but I have still the 
> opinion that it should be possible to provide a simple default 
> configuration.
> So please convince me that I'm wrong (and it isn't possible to have a 
> working ardour on a notebook) or tell me how this can be resolved.
> You put so much hard work into ardour/jack/pulseaudio that it should not 
>   fail because of a small configuration mistake.
> 
> Thanks for your work/ideas/help,
I've been through both bugs and to me, as an occasional jack user, it
seems that the best would be that jackd defaults to the pulseaudio
output. Users that have better hardware and do more advanced stuff are
able to tweak what they need.

The current situation is bad for everybody: noobs have to configure
jackd, but advanced users configure it anyway.

What I don't understand is:
- whether the -n 3 option would work for every standard card or if some
absolutely require -n 2
- whether going though pulseaudio is really an issue concerning
performance (I mean, only for base users)

Since ardour requires jackd, the latter should configure itself
automatically so that ardour can start it flawlessly. But maybe this is
a little trickier that it seems - at least this was why pulseaudio was
introduced in Hardy.

Cheers



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Re: merging keyboard & keyboard shortcuts capplets

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le vendredi 25 avril 2008 à 16:23 +1000, Jared Moore a écrit :
> Around a month ago I uploaded a patch to GNOME bugzilla to merge the
> keyboard shortcuts capplet (gnome-keybinding-properties) into the
> keyboard capplet (gnome-keyboard-properties) [1]. This was discussed
> on the gnomecc-list [2], but there was fairly limited interest from
> the gnome-control-center developers.
This is a good idea, but what Matthias Clasen says [2] about adding mouse 
gestures to a broader Shortcuts applet is not stupid either. Though I can agree 
he's maybe not as comprehensive as he could be... ;-)

> I'm wondering if there is any interest in adopting this patch in
> Ubuntu. Clearly there is a lot of work left to be done on the patch,
> but I'd prefer not to spend working time on it if there isn't any
> interest. In particular I'm looking for developer interest, i.e. from
> whoever would be in a position to eventually commit this to Ubuntu. I
> believe that with some work this patch can be redone in a way that
> will minimise the size of the patch (and therefore not cause horrible
> breakage if/when there are upstream changes).
> 
> Note that reducing the number of items in System->Preferences is the
> 4th highest idea on Ubuntu brainstorm [3], and there are numerous
> related Launchpad bugs / wiki pages / blog posts / etc. [4][5],
> probably more if you dig deep enough...
I don't think it is reasonable to fork upstream GNOME since this will
lead to quite a few problems when they change their applets. Imagine for
example they create a Mouse gestures tab in the Shortcuts applet. Where
will it go in Ubuntu?

But maybe you can propose them to help merging applets that they'd like
to see merged. Bluetooth preferences could go to Removable devices for
example, and I'm sure there are plenty of ideas in that way.

Hope this helps - anyway IMHO your goal is right (TM)


> [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78102
> [2] Thread beginning at
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnomecc-list/2008-March/msg00018.html
> [3] http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/most_popular_ever/
> [4] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MenusRevisited2
> [5] http://architectfantasy.com/?p=25


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Re: Hardy abnormal disk use on battery

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le jeudi 24 avril 2008 à 21:45 +0200, Jan Claeys wrote:
> Op zondag 20-04-2008 om 20:35 uur [tijdzone +0200], schreef Milan
> Bouchet-Valat:
> > I noticed that on Hardy, when (and only when) my laptop is on battery,
> > the hard disk makes a sound every second or so, and never stops, even
> > when no application is running but the desktop.
> > 
> > atop reports this is pdflush that is writing something to the disk,
> > but
> > I could not identify why. What is strange is that as soon as I plug
> > the
> > power cable, the sound stop (rather illogical, sin't it?). Before
> > reporting a bug I'd like to know if anyone sees this behavior - just
> > unplug the cable and listen!
> 
> Just a guess: check your logfiles if anything starts spewing error or
> warning messages when you are on battery?
Nothing there either. I've opened a bug report here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/221967

Thanks anyway!


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Re: Hardy abnormal disk use on battery

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le dimanche 20 avril 2008 à 23:11 +0200, Przemysław Kulczycki wrote:
> Do you have laptop mode enabled?
> My guess is that it might be the (in)famous bug 59695.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695
No, it's a fresh install without any tweak. But my guess would rather be
that the bug I experience may accidentally solve the cycle count issue
(bug 59695) since the heads can never park because of the disk activity.
This is juyst an idea but may be worth checking.

If no confirmation from others comes, though, I'll simply file a bug and
investigate. I thought many people could experience the same, since it
should not be related to hardware, but for now it's not really the case!

Cheers


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Re: Hardy abnormal disk use on battery

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le dimanche 20 avril 2008 à 15:11 -0500, Jerone Young wrote:
> Hmm..this is a guess...I have a feeling this is the new indexing
> search (tracker) feature at work (which I personally hate.. but it's a
> feature somebody is using). In your task bar you should see a
> magnifying glass (usually orange on the inside). In right click on it
> to find prefrences. You see a check box to diable or enable
> preferences.
No, I forgot to mention I already checked it occurred even when trackerd
was killed. Actually, it is smarter than you would expect and does not
bother you when on battery - very nice tool IMHO. ;-)


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Hardy abnormal disk use on battery

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Hi all!

I noticed that on Hardy, when (and only when) my laptop is on battery,
the hard disk makes a sound every second or so, and never stops, even
when no application is running but the desktop.

atop reports this is pdflush that is writing something to the disk, but
I could not identify why. What is strange is that as soon as I plug the
power cable, the sound stop (rather illogical, sin't it?). Before
reporting a bug I'd like to know if anyone sees this behavior - just
unplug the cable and listen!


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Evolution spam filter not working?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Has anybody managed to get the bogofilter plugin for Evolution work in
Hardy? For me, Evolution reports that learning spams works fine,
everything is present (plugin and binaries), spamassasin is disabled,
junk filtering is enabled, but spams don't get caught.

I wonder about this because I did never have it working in precedent
versions either, and I don't know if this is worth a bug. Maybe just
clearing my user configuration would solve it - upgrading is often cause
of trouble.


Cheers


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Re: gnome-panel and Fitt's law?

[Milan]

Le lundi 31 mars 2008 à 10:32 -0700, Dylan McCall a écrit :
> My panel is at the top of the screen. Perhaps this changes weirdly
> depending on orientation?
Mine is a the top too.


> I am using Metacity, with compositing turned on. Possibly a Compiz
> issue?
This has always been a compiz issue.


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gnome-panel and Fitt's law?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

What's up on this topic? The bug report [1] says it's been fixed in 
Hardy, but I'm using compiz-fusion-plugins-main 0.7.2-0ubuntu1, and I'm 
still getting this issue (I guess it's the same, not being able to 
activate e.g the Applications menu from the very top of the screen). Is 
anyone experiencing the same?

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Re: Unneeded System Tools menu

[Milan]

Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> We will likely move some other things back there if we continue to use
> the category. The comments there are interesting though. Why do you
> think it's an issue? Do you find confusing to have the category unmasked
> and containing only one item if you install vmware for example?
This would be less of a problem for me, since as Timo said, users that
install such programs are likely not to be afraid by system stuff. 


Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> I think the confusion is in the naming.  We have a "System" menu and
a
> "System..." submenu now.  The suggestion that it be renamed to simply
> "Tools" makes sense to me.
The expression "System" is not the only, nor the main problem: adding a
submenu when you only have 7 of them is a major change in Applications.

For now, this menu is very nice and only contains "productive" apps, not
tools. In a day-to-day use, users won't need this system tools, however
you may name them - I like the idea of separating clearly these
categories of programs. And "Tools" already exists, if you don't go this
way: it's called "Accessories".


If you agree we should do something, here is short list of options:

- the easiest may be to move g-s-m to Accessories and hwtest to
Administration

- another more complex approach could be to create a submenu in
Administration called System Tools or something like that, so it would
not annoy us when we want to work and not administrate the system. This
would work on a long-term outlook, since we can completely remove the
System Tools menu from Applications.

[- Almost out of topic: we could hide hwtest-gtk and instead use
gnome-device-manager with a button to start hwtest, like we used to do.
This tool would be useful (no way of getting hardware infos ATM) and
could go to Administration.]


The constant moving of items between the menus is IMHO the result of
the fact that we don't really know what do to with them: no perfect
scheme has been found so far. Hope we may find the right one. 


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Unneeded System Tools menu

[Milan]

In Hardy, all applications that don't really manage system-wide or user
settings were moved from System->Preferences and ->Administration to
Applications->System Tools.

This is a good idea as a general rule since previously both
configuration menus were bloated by numerous tools. But in the default
install, adding a System Tools menu in Applications in not
user-friendly. The two only tools that appear there are hwtest-gtk and
gnome-system-monitor: these are not likely to be used by the base user;
furthermore, their use is very different from that of most applications,
i.e. editing documents, and so on.

So I suggest we choose either to put g-s-m and back to
System->Administration, or we hide its icon, adding elsewhere a way to
start it (a keyboard shortcut?), and the sme for hwtest-gtk. We may
consider short-term and long-term solutions to this, because the current
situation is IMHO not very good.

This was already raised in this bug (with one duplicate):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-system-monitor/+bug/205190


Cheers


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Re: Got Hardy? With Sound?

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Jerone Young wrote:
> I think I am seeing a similar problem in Hardy. It appears to have
> something to do with gstream.
>
> 1) If i use any app that uses gstreamer (rhythmbox) , then I can no
> longer hear sound out of flash or vlc.
>
> 2) When using flash or vlc .. I can nolonger hear anything from
> gstreamer enabled apps (rhythmbox).
>
> I believe gstreamer is trying to get complete control of the sound
> deivce.. no idea yet. I figured I would do a better analysis of this
> over the weekend.
>   
GStreamer normally automatically detects which sound output is the best
to use - it may be wrong here, and for example use alsa instead of
PulseAudio, thus blocking the whole sound system. But this scenario
would imply that PulseAudio is not started first...

Anyway, you can run 'gstreamer-properties', which will allow you to
select manually sound outputs. Just try every proposed sink, and see
what happens with each case. You may also want to check whether
PulseAudio is started at all! ;-)

Hope this helps

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Re: [Policykit] No possibilty to unlock the save option in Gedit while

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

"(``-_-´´) -- Fernando" a écrit :
> On Monday 24 March 2008 15:01:07 Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
>   
>> Here we can just agree, but nobody codes directly into gedit.
>>
>> Cheers
>> 
>
> But isn't this a problem with PolicyKit and not Gedit?
>   
AFAIK PolicyKit already allows to do this, gedit just needs to use it to
get the adequate rights.

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Re: [Policykit] No possibilty to unlock the save option in Gedit while

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

thibaut bethune a écrit :
> I think that :
> either the save button should not be active (at less)
> either the user should have the possibilty to give the password to be
> able to save the file (that would be perfect to me)
>   
This is a good idea, but ubuntu-devel-discuss is IMHO not the best place
to talk about that. Please report a bug (wishlist) on
http://bugzilla.gnome.org to the gedit product: they'll see what they
can do. Here we can just agree, but nobody codes directly into gedit.

Cheers

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Re: Bug and discussion about ubuntu menu

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Greg K Nicholson a écrit :
> On Sat, 2008-03-15 at 11:19 +0100, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
>   
>> Ouattara Oumar Aziz (alias wattazoum) wrote:
>> 
>>> You'd call it "My
>>> Diary" because you are creating it for yourself.
>>>   
>
> The user doesn't label the Preferences menu for themself—the label is
> applied by the computer.
>
> “My” is only ever used to mean “your” on toys for three-year-olds*, much
> like how when talking to a small child one refers to things using the
> name *they* should use to refer to them (for example calling yourself
> “Mummy” or “Daddy” instead of “me”). Small children aren't clever enough
> to understand pronouns.
>
> (* Windows XP—I know.)
>
> Speaking for the user—using “my” as if they'd written it—is disingenuous
> and/or talks down to the user, so it should be avoided.
>   
I like your way of presenting this language habit. ;-)
> If we could pull in the the user's actual name in a way that's
> compatible with a wide variety of cultures, I'd suggest using something
> like “Preferences for Greg”.
>   
That may do the trick, as it's already used by the home folder on the
desktop.
Or we ca say "User Preferences", with this "Administration" will appear
much clearer.
> If that's not possible, just “Preferences” will do—the word “preference”
> tends to imply *personal* preference anyway.
>   
I thought so, but it looks like people don't make the difference between
preferences (personal) and administration (ugly system and hardware
stuff). The fact is that we are now turning round. Anyway, we should
make clear whther we need a deeper refactoring, in which case the
Preferences/Administration issue will disappear.


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Re: Bug and discussion about ubuntu menu

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Ouattara Oumar Aziz (alias wattazoum) wrote:
> Anyway, do we validate "Preferences" to "Your Preferences" ?
>   
I'd say "My preferences", as Remco argued  few  mails before:

> Those are different things. Those tool tips are like a teacher
> directly speaking to you. But the text in programs is about the data.
> Think about a program that let's you create a diary. You'd call it "My
> Diary" because you are creating it for yourself. You're not creating
> one for the computer. However, the tool-tips and suggestions would
> address you as "you". That's the computer helping you by talking to
> you.


I approve of his classification, but this will require much work from upstream, 
and from Ubuntu to merge distro-specific tools into GNOME ones, like it was 
done for "Appearance".



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Re: Bug and discussion about ubuntu menu

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Ouattara Oumar Aziz (alias wattazoum) a écrit :
> I like the proposal. Moving from
>
> System
> | -> Preferences
> ` -> Administration
>
> to
>
> Configuration
> | -> Your Preferences
> ` -> System Administration
>
> Is every one okay with this one ?
> To me it's seems clearer: *Configuration* is more generic and correct
> regarding the sub menu items than *System* ( which seems more linked to
> the system Administration than to the User Desktop configuration ).
>   
You forget one detail: System is not only for configuration, else this
menu would not exist. It has definitely been carefully chosen.

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Re: Bug and discussion about ubuntu menu

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Ouattara Oumar Aziz (alias wattazoum) wrote :
> Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote:
>   
>> I read what you explained in the bug report, and here are a few remarks.
>> Clarifying the confusion around Preferences & Administration is IMHO a
>> good idea, since every base user seems to have problems with it.
>>
>> Naming them "User Preferences" and "System Administration" can be nice
>> since it's not too hard to change. Though, notice that the parent menu
>> is already named "System", so let's not end up with jokes like Start ->
>> Stop in Windows. If in "System" you have "System Administration" and
>> "User Preferences", this means that "User Preferences" is not a system
>> setting, and thus should not be there in the menu. This can look like a
>> detail, but IMHO it's important that we think of consistency. These
>> strings are also very long, and may not look nice. Maybe you could
>> simply rename them to "User Preferences" and "Administration", the
>> latter makes it quite clear that we're dealing with "hard"
>> configuration. Here I don't have a real solution, just some advice. ;-)
>> 
>
> I thought about renaming "Preferences" to "My Preferences" because "User 
> preferences" might be a very long label for some language.
>   
Good idea - this should not raise any issues and would help much. This
is quite like My Yahoo or other services, people will understand that at
the first glance. Just propose it to upstream GNOME.
>   
>> Please also take care of not doing this change alone - you're aware of
>> that since you asked the list. This should be discussed with GNOME,
>> since they have the same issue. Moreover, PolicyKit is going to add many
>> changes in this domain, and maybe the distinction system-wide/user-only
>> will disappear soon. This will be a real problem while we are migrating,
>> and I'm glad you're caring about this now. Maybe the best solution would
>> be a single Control Center, which already exists. So please see this in
>> a long-term outlook, changes are likely to happen in the newt months.
>> 
>
> This is indeed true. I remember the Gnome Control Center were introduced 
> to replace those two menu sets in feisty then removed after a few days. 
> I think the reason was that a lot of people found that it was slower to 
> access a menu item this way.
>   
I was a supporter of an option so that advanced users can use menus, but
this idea was not very popular. It's true that the default UI should
suit every need we can imagine, but meanwhile, both needs seem difficult
to satisfy.
> A more professional solution would be to merge the configurations GUIs 
> and use policy kit to hide System Wide tasks. But this takes time. I am 
> really wondering if we shouldn't study this solution. Have a single GUI 
> for Printing but hide some options using policy kit ...
> I'll think more clearly about this and I shall write here :-)
>   
I'm not sure we'll be able to hide all system tasks and merge all tools.
There are some that only deal with system settings (log viewer, software
tools...) and others with the desktop (menu prefs, energy, preferred
programs...); others are distro-specific system tools and thus cannot be
merged (easily) with GNOME prefs. We can try to make them the less
numerous possible, though.


Cheers

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Re: Bug and discussion about ubuntu menu

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

I read what you explained in the bug report, and here are a few remarks.
Clarifying the confusion around Preferences & Administration is IMHO a
good idea, since every base user seems to have problems with it.

Naming them "User Preferences" and "System Administration" can be nice
since it's not too hard to change. Though, notice that the parent menu
is already named "System", so let's not end up with jokes like Start ->
Stop in Windows. If in "System" you have "System Administration" and
"User Preferences", this means that "User Preferences" is not a system
setting, and thus should not be there in the menu. This can look like a
detail, but IMHO it's important that we think of consistency. These
strings are also very long, and may not look nice. Maybe you could
simply rename them to "User Preferences" and "Administration", the
latter makes it quite clear that we're dealing with "hard"
configuration. Here I don't have a real solution, just some advice. ;-)

Please also take care of not doing this change alone - you're aware of
that since you asked the list. This should be discussed with GNOME,
since they have the same issue. Moreover, PolicyKit is going to add many
changes in this domain, and maybe the distinction system-wide/user-only
will disappear soon. This will be a real problem while we are migrating,
and I'm glad you're caring about this now. Maybe the best solution would
be a single Control Center, which already exists. So please see this in
a long-term outlook, changes are likely to happen in the newt months.

About renaming the configuration items to emphasize ("Set" and
"Modify")/("Manage", "System", "Global"), please don't do this! I just
managed to remove every piece of unneeded text there, and these
expressions are really useless: if the menu description is clear enough,
you know what you want to do, and you're just looking for the domain
(printing, screen...) you want to configure. Everything else is bloating
the menu - and will ask much work that cannot be unified in one package.

And a detail: why do you make a so large list of packages to be
affected? gnome-menu should be (almost) the only one.


Just some (long) thoughts - good luck, it's not an easy issue

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Re: libc borked (and I stop testing)

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Vincenzo Ciancia a écrit :
> A possible idea to improve the situation is to have a "regression" tag,
> and to mark "high priority" all regressions. Say what you want, but this
> is *exactly* the behaviour that one would expect from any software
> distributor: things works, you break it, I tell you as soon as I
> discover it, you fix it as soon as possible because the bug is in the
> change you just made, so your change has to be fixed. If you let the
> regression there for three years, you'll have hysterical raisins when
> you put your hands back on that code. 
>   
+1

Would somebody that can set up new rules for Bug Squad, QA, Bug Control
and so on teams add the tag "regression" in the list of tags to use, and
shift policy so that every regression is marked as High priority? This
would at least help to sum up what should really be fixed, because often
these bugs are forgotten.

Cheers

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Re: System Presence Integration Idea

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Chris Warburton wrote:
> Hi thanks for the input. I realise that such a proposal is quite open
> ended, thus I tried to split it into relatively clear steps to go
> through to try and prevent both blue sky designing and worrying about
> issues that end up not appearing in the implementation.
>
> I think stage 1, the discussion, should be a quite technical discussion,
> ie. throw some ideas into the aether and decide which of those is
> possible. My own train of thought was about having Telepathy running as
> a central, standard system to use for presence. Presence would cover
> general key:value type data, ie. Location:Home, Status:Busy, Activity:On
> The Phone, etc. (those are just examples). There may need to be an
> agreed upon standard for the naming here, if multiple programs and
> desktop environments are going to use it.
>   
IMHO what you need is a central daemon that only performs a few actions
and communicated via D-BUS. You just have to set a D-BUS protocol so
that programs can set/get the state: Telepathy can set it, but also
retreive it when starting - this way the daemon can test some system
parameters and decide of a certain state automatically depending on the
network, on the battery...

Maybe gnome-session could be the place to do so. And network settings
has a profile management that you could integrate.

Just ideas...

Cheers

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Re: False default font "Times" in OpenOffice.org

[Milan]

Matthias Klose a écrit :
> Having "Nimbus Roman No 9 L" as the default results in the font included in 
> the
> document, when exporting to .ps or .pdf, making the result much bigger than it
> should.  There should be a bug report for this as well.
Thanks for the clarification, I understand better why this was done.
> We maybe can avoid the
> inclusion of the font in the generated .ps or .pdf, but how well is this 
> handled
> by other programs. On the other hand we know that a font like "Times" is 
> handled
> well in OOo.
>   
I don't understand what you mean here. Why Nimbus Roman No9 L should not
be well managed by PDF/PS readers? And Times is not a font, so why do
you say it is handled well in OO.o?

> Maybe somebody could recheck this with 2.4, if we still need to set a default
> font so that we do not get DejaVu as the default font for the document which 
> is
> worse than the current solution because this is a metric incompatible font to
> the default font used on other platforms?
>   
Upstream bug report seems to say that nothing has changed here: fonts
are always completely included in PDF/PS files. But when no default font
is set, Writer uses Nimbus Romand No9L and FreeSans, not DejaVu. These
fonts are quite similar to Windows Times New Roman. What is the real
issue here?


I don't really see the problem you want to tackle. If the "Times" alias
is only here to prevent OO.o from including fonts in the PDF/PS files,
this patch is quite an ugly hack - IMHO I'd better stand with this OO.o
bug, and not mess with it. People are not likely to use only the 2
default fonts: they will use other fonts, including Nimbus Roman No9 L,
and these will get included; moreover, a PDF using both "Times" and
Nimbus Roman No9 L at different places will look strange on Windows,
since Nimbus will still appear as under Linux, but "Times" will be
changed to Times New Roman, generating inconsistencies.

Isn't it sufficient to set aliases in psprint.conf, letting default
fonts clean?


These are my thoughts, sorry if I misunderstood your case

Cheers

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False default font "Times" in OpenOffice.org

[Milan]

Almost a year ago, I reported an issue [1] that appeared in OO.o Witer
in Feisty: the default font is set to "Times", which does not exist and
actually acts as an alias for the former default "Nimbus Roman No 9 L"
(this does not affect users that upgraded from Edgy and older).

The problem is, people believe this font exists, but they cannot choose
it from the fonts list when they want to use it. This is misleading and
does not help to become familiar with Ubuntu's own and good fonts.

This was introduced by a patch:
openoffice.org (2.2.0-0ubuntu1) feisty
  * Use Times/Helvetica as the default font for writer documents (calc and
impress still pick up the DejaVu screen font).

by Matthias Klose (who does great work apart from that) on Thu, 29 Mar
2007. Debian does not use it, nor AFAIK does Fedora.

I could not get more explanation of the rationale of this decision. OO.o
automatically chooses the right font according to what is installed, so
there's no need for hardcoding an alias. Substitution is only needed for
e.g. "Times New Roman", and can be nicely used with the Liberation
Fonts, but it is not needed for the default font.


So I raise this point here hoping that some developers can
explain/debate on this better (Matthias, more information?) since a bug
report is not ideal for that.


Cheers


1: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/105906

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Re: Strange Firefox problem

[Milan]

Christian Csar a écrit :
> So far the only problem with Firefox 3 in hardy, is that it seems to 
> have substantial problems visiting Google, but not other websites I have 
> noticed. This also only happens if I go by URL rather than IP address 
> from ping. What is also strange is that it is intermittent within 
> firefox. Google quite simply is not loading after more than 5 minutes, 
> but going to the 64.233.169.104 gets there nearly instantaneously.
> Konqueror gets to google nearly instantaneously.
>
> I imagine that if this problem affected others that they would have 
> filed some sort of bug report by now, so it may be specific to me.
>
> My only guess is that Firefox has a google ip hard coded somewhere, 
> which does not make too much sense.
> about:config searching for google does not turn up anything that seems 
> too strange.
> Christian
>
>   
IPv6 issue maybe? Just a guess, but a while ago a v6 DNS lookup was
performed and since no response was got, a delay was introduced. It may
be good to investigate in this direction...

Just my two cents

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Re: Use SVG icons instead of PNG

[Milan]

Ioannis Nousias wrote:
> I can see how that works in static/specific icon sizes, but considering 
> the numerous visual effects we get on our modern distros these days, in 
> most cases we are dealing with dynamically changing icons. Cairo-dock is 
> one example, several compiz plugins (like shift-switcher, scale or even 
> zoom) are some more. And with 'resolution independence' coming in the 
> near future, I can't see how PNG could 'survive'. You would need a 
> fairly high resolution PNG as a bases to avoid aliasing. And as you 
> said, resizing a pixmap isn't necessarily less computationally intensive 
> than rendering vector graphics. (well, it depends I guess)
>   
Here SVG would be required, but if you use composite graphics, you
accept to spend GPU power on it, and so that's not really a problem. In
this case SVG is the best and only solution, anyway.
Resolution independence should not be problematic, icons will still have
a fixed size and so PNG will be right.
> 
>> To sum up, yes, having SVG icons for every app would be good, and no, it
>> does not hurt performance. The best to do is reporting bugs upstream,
>> that should not take them too much time to fix.
>>   
>> 
> out of the 273 .desktop files in my /usr/share/applications, 31 use 
> explicitly .png suffix in their 'Icon' field, 7 use .svg, 8 .xpm and the rest 
> don't specify a suffix. Where should I file a bug report for this? It would 
> be cumbersome to file a bug report for each application that does not conform 
> to the standard.
>   
Every trivial bug that affects so many packages is a pain to solve. You
can still create an unique report on Launchpad, and mark it as affecting
several packages: this is faster to do and allows to see the progress of
the work. But many times, you have to report a bug upstream for each
project too so that developers know about it, so it can be a really
boring work.

At least, reporting bugs for a few of the most common applications would
help much, many other apps are only configuration tools or so, and don't
really need an eye-candy launcher (at least this can wait).

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Re: "Make sense" keymap to launch gnome-system-monitor?

[Milan]

Cory K. a écrit :
> Ubuntu Studio has decided to add a keymap to launch gnome-system-monitor.
>
> Most windows users see this as a equivalent to Ctrl+Alt+Del. That is of
> course already mapped and launches the logout dialog. So we decided to
> use the keys KDE uses to launch their monitor. Ctrl+Esc. This works out
> great in metacity but not so well in Compiz as both Ctrl and Esc are
> "special" keys and cannot be used this way.
>
> >From #compiz-fusion-dev: "maniac103: Escape == Cancel and Return ==
> Commit (regardless of the modifiers) and cannot be used together"
>
> So I'm asking what would possibly be a "make sense" keymap to use across
> both Metacity and Compiz to use for gnome-system-monitor?
>   
If you're motivated enough and willing to find a lasting shortcut, the
best to do IMHO is to contact freedesktop.org. This shortcut concerns
every desktop environment and should really be the same everywhere, else
people will always forget it when they (occasionally) need it.

This feature is non-intrusive for users that don't know it exists, so
adopting a shortcut (or even just free this precise combination) should
not be a problem. Maybe a solution could be found considering together
issues with compiz/metacity/kwin, X.org and GNOME/KDE/XFCE: add a second
key combination that X.org would always redirect to a command.

I hope you do so... ;-)

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Re: Use SVG icons instead of PNG

[Milan]

Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> On Feb 9, 2008 1:27 PM, Milan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote:
>
> To sum up, yes, having SVG icons for every app would be good, and
> no, it
> does not hurt performance.
>
>
> Depends on your system.  The calculations for SVG technically take
> more cycles to do than just drawing a raster does.  I'm guessing the
> 10 year old computer at my dad's house would be slower with SVG than
> with rasters, but P4 and newer wouldn't have any noticeable difference
> at all.  Maybe having a powerful GPU makes the point moot, but vectors
> do require more calculations than rasters do.
This assessment was referring to my previous comment:

> As for the performance side, several PNG icons are generated, one for
> each common size so the system doesn't need to use the SVG version. SVG
> is only used when really needed (i.e. for sizes superior to 22x22 or 48x48).
Which implied that installing more SVG files wouldn't hurt performance since 
they won't be used unless you don't have a suitable PNG version at that size. 
Resizing a PNG that will be blurry or drawing a smart SVG is likely to be quite 
the same in terms of calculation.


Apart from that, it is obvious that we don't want to make every icon displayed 
on the desktop come from a SVG, that would be waste of GPU. our current 
mechanism is quite good, indeed: installing every needed size in PNG, and a SVG 
version for special cases will solve all problems.


Cheers


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Re: Use SVG icons instead of PNG

[Milan]

Ioannis Nousias a écrit :
> I'm sure this has been asked before.
>
> Most of the system application launchers use PNG icons. For example, 
> Firefox and Thunderbird (two of the most commonly used apps). Very few 
> use SVG, like gnome-terminal.  I like to have few icons on my desktops 
> that are stretch to ~x2 their size. PNGs look aliased when stretched.
>
> Another case where the fixed resolution of PNGs gets in the way, is in 
> things like cairo-dock, where the application's icon in 'window list' 
> looks aliased.
>
> The obvious question is, why use PNGs and not SVG for all icons? 
> Performance?
> Also, is that theme related ? I use the 'human' theme.
>   
SVG icons have to be generated and present in the "scalable" subdirs of
your theme, or of the fallback theme ("hicolor"). Most apps already have
SVG icons, maybe some don't install them.
As for the performance side, several PNG icons are generated, one for
each common size so the system doesn't need to use the SVG version. SVG
is only used when really needed (i.e. for sizes superior to 22x22 or 48x48).

All this is developed in the freedesktop.org specification for icon
themes that you can read here:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-theme-spec/icon-theme-spec-latest.html
> regards,
> Ioannis
>
>
> PS: I've modified 'firefox.desktop' in '/usr/share/applications', just 
> to make sure that the default uses SVG. This works well for my desktop 
> icons, however, things like cairo-dock keep displaying a PNG icon of the 
> running firefox app. Is there something else I need to change, or is 
> this Cairo-Dock's fault ?
>   
Ideally, .desktop file should not use .png or .svg extensions, but only
the name of the icon. Every implementation will then use the preferred
actual file depending on the size (this is still from the same spec).

Concerning cairo-dock, there can be a bug, or maybe the .desktop files
it uses are copied to a static config dir, and thus are not updated. But
Cairo-dock is likely to use 48x48 icons, which are present in PNG format
- maybe I'm missing something?

Though, Firefox does not seem to have a SVG icon available: AWN uses the
48x48 PNG version. This explains why on the Desktop, it does not resize
without being aliased.


To sum up, yes, having SVG icons for every app would be good, and no, it
does not hurt performance. The best to do is reporting bugs upstream,
that should not take them too much time to fix.

Cheers

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Re: Hardy Alpha-4 synaptic error

[Milan]

Richard Mancusi wrote:
> Okay, I did another clean install and can repeat the problem.  On a test
> system I always set a root password and allow root logon.  Yes, I know
> that isn't a great idea, but it comes in handy on a test system.
>
> As soon as I set a root password in System/Administration/Users and Groups
> the root user Home directory moved from /root to /home/root.
>
> I guess it's a matter of opinion as to whether this is a bug.  Ubuntu and
> common sense tells you to not set a root password.  But if you are going
> to allow it, it should work correctly.  I leave that to the developers.
>   
Agreed, setting a root password is a common Unix feature that should
remain possible to do with a simple 'sudo passwd' or optionally using
the Users admin tool. This should always work, regardless of what policy
we'd like to promote about the root account: here it is simply a bug.

Please open a bug report on users-admin. Anyway, forbidding to set a
root password should be done in a smarter way if we wanted to do so.

Cheers

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Re: Spelling library consolidation

[Milan]

Since we talk about it, two questions about hunspell in Hardy:

1) The specification [1] about removing duplicate dictionnaries suggest
we make OpenOffice.org use myspell in order to avoid the need for
unspell. A comment states that hunspell is an improvement of myspell,
dropped by OO.o in the 2.x series. So is this true that we are willing
to loose the new features of hunspell when the contrary should be done
(i.e. dropping aspell and myspell)? Note Mozilla products also use hunspell.


2) When searching for what hunspell dicts are available, I can only find
these in our package list, in both Gutsy and Hardy:
hunspell-de-at - Austrian (German) dictionary for hunspell
hunspell-de-ch - Swiss (German) dictionary for hunspell
hunspell-de-de - German dictionary for hunspell
hunspell-uz - The Uzbek dictionary for Hunspell

Am I missing something, or aren't there any other languages we support
for now?

The OO.o wiki [2] lists many more available Hunspell dictionaries, many
of which were recently updated. In French for example, current OO.o
orthograph checker is quite poor, but a new dictionary will be provided
with 2.4, which will solve almost all of our problems. I guess this can
be the case for several languages.

So is Hardy be going to provide more Hunspell languages, and is this
hard work to package?

Cheers

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ConsolidateSpellingLibs
[2] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Dictionaries


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Re: gThumb

[Milan]

Kevin Fries wrote:
> This argument has raged before.  Has anyone thought of maybe a
> compromise... Something much better than GThumb (not hard) but not based
> on Mono.  Maybe something like Blue Marine?
>
> http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/
>
> Just a thought.  They already package a DEB file and it is about 30M,
> not sure how big the other packages are.
>
>   
Is Java really better than Mono? Not speaking of needs to stabilize this
development version...

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Re: Easy "Add/Remove Porgrams" for non-sudoers with local PREFIX?

[Milan]

Kevin Fries a écrit :
> 
> Modern Nix based systems have a wonderful tool called SUDO that makes
> getting around this issue extremely easy.  If you want someone to be
> able to admin your box, add them to the admin group on any Ubuntu based
> system.  Then they have sudo access to any root command.  If you want to
> allow non-root users to be able to install software, that is easy also:
>
>   - Create a group call swinstall
>   - In your /etc/sudoers file add the following line:
>   %swinstall ALL = /usr/bin/update-manager
>   - Add any user you wish to have software install access to the
> swinstall group.
>
> Hope this helps
>   
I should add that in Hardy we should have an even nicer system called
PolicyKit that will allow you to set many fine-tuned permissions, like
"user x is allowed to install packages from the standard repositories,
but not to uninstall any package and not do administrate anything else",
etc. So this will be nice to avoid the ugly (from my point of view)
hacks to install packages in ~. Our current way of managing packages is
very robust and much more secure, if we don't want to end up like Windows.

Cheers

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Re: Deprecating slocate for desktop users?

[Milan]

Jan Claeyswrote:
> Op vrijdag 04-01-2008 om 04:33 uur [tijdzone -0500], schreef Bryan
> Quigley:
>   
>> Is there any possibility of have locate use the tracker database?
>> 
>
> Tracker databases are currently per-user, so I don't think that would be
> useful.
>
> Maybe if there ever exists a concept of a system database next to the
> user database in Tracker...?
>   
The problem is, Tracker only indexes home folders, not the whole
filesystem. And Tracker uses a complex indexing with keywords that is
not needed for locate. Merging the per-user databases would be a mess,
so forget it...

By the way, exluding home directories from the updatedb path could be
nice: we don't need to index user folders because Tracker is doing that,
and this would avoid much work for updatedb.

Still, rlocate seems to be a nice improvement (combined or not with the
latter feature): it's a locate implementation that uses a kernel module
to store a list of modified/moved files and folders, and once a day (or
when you want) this list is read and the database is updated via a diff.
Looks more advanced than mlocate, isn't it?
http://rlocate.sourceforge.net/

Just a few ideas

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Re: Deprecating slocate for desktop users?

[Milan]

Timo Jyrinki a écrit :
> 
> So still, I argue that slocate should be _at least_ moved to
> cron.weekly, with the additional steps I'd hope for too:
>
> 1. move to cron.monthly instead of cron.weekly
> 2. switch from slocate to mlocate
> 3. remove mlocate/slocate dependency from Ubuntu default desktop
> installation (leave it on server installations)
>   
That seems just common sense, but last time (not the first) I rose this
issue here, people preferred to keep Ubuntu geek-compliant. The argument
is (mainly) that it's an almost standard Unix tool, and that sometimes
normal users need help from admins that expect the tool to be here.

Though, I think the best is not to install it, because if it's installed
and not enabled/up-to-date it may be confusing. But when you type
'locate', our nice apt tells you to install package XXX, which will be
done in a few seconds, and a few minutes for updatedb to run (once for
all if you regularly administer this machine).


One day this wil change.. ;-)

Cheers


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Re: Fwd: Mono (Re: New Programs for Hardy?)

[Milan]

Kevin Fries wrote:
> I will even help you with one more I would like to see... Scribus.  My
> mother uses this along with Inkscape for her scrap-booking (definitely
> not a geeky endeavor), and with a few tweaks to the descriptions, could
> be a very popular addition.
>   
I second that, but this adds a Qt dependency.

> But there are better places to trim than mono.  I personally would like
> to see more mono apps included by default to encourage Wintel developers
> to extend their product to the Linux desktop.  That would be a win for
> everybody but Microsoft, but that does not disappoint me so much.
>   
I guess you've read paranoid scenarios like this one:
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/mono
I'd rather hope that Mono stays an exception in the FLOSS world, only
using it for IT that want to convert Windows software or that develop
corporation-specific apps. Encouraging the use of Mono in GNOME and
default Desktops is IMHO very dangerous until we have got certitudes
about patents. Windows developers should better change their practices
and philosophy.

Though, I agree F-Spot is one of our killer apps, and that GThumb is not
as user-friendly as we may expect. May we hope it evolves? It may be
worth to care about it, since it has many nice features, and only lacks
a few (UI for the most part, and Conduit will come).

Cheers,
Milan

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Re: Password-protect grub interactive commands

[Milan]

OK, just forget the GRUB password idea, I've understood how it can
become a complete mess. Sorry for the idea...

But what about that?

unggnu wrote:
> 
>
> I like the way Ubuntu handles root that always sudo is needed so why we
> don't make it with Recovery mode too? Just don't autologin root like
> root has a password. Why not let the user login in with his user and
> then use sudo to gain root access or set the user password for root and
> disable the account? With this no grub password/lock is needed but there
> is still basic security.
> If you are afraid if people forget their password why not make a little
> program on Live CD which can make that for you? Everyone can boot a CD
> and reset their password but only if they have bios/boot access like
> every private person.
>   

I really second this idea, doing that and locking GRUB for any
modification of kernel parameters except recovery mode would be a real
security improvement. We should not let Windows XP overdo Linux here.
And anyway, there is the LiveCD if really needed.

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Re: Password-protect grub interactive commands

[Milan]

The issue for now is clear: you can't let your, say, laptop to anybody
for an hour or even less without risking ha may easily get root access
and maybe change your password or modify your system. It can simply be
used to read "confidential" files, like personal mail, not like military
secret but just private. Ubuntu is almost inviting you to do this by
simply rebooting and choosing "Recovery", without any restriction (you
need to know ho to use the very basics of console).

OTOH, inserting a LiveCD is almost as simple, and we can't prevent it.
Still, it's more complex to do. 1) The person must have the CD here by
hand, it may take time to get it 2) He must browse the system disks to
find the data ha wants, use a chroot to change passwords (much more
complex, only quite advanced users can do that) 3) This is a slightly
different pace, since the "attacker" must use an external software/disc
to do that, as opposed to the "included" Recovery mode. Using a CD is
clearly choosing to attack the computer.

Anyway, you have to secure your BIOS if you want a reasonably secured
computer. But locking GRUB would help the user to go this way if he
wants to.


Now what are the drawbacks of asking for a password in GRUB? The only I
can see is if you've lost your root/admin user password, or you have to
work on a system in which you don't have any password though you have
the authorization/request to administrate it. In this case, I think
requiring the admin to use a LiveCD in not abusive.

All in all, I'd rather suggest to activate password-locked GRUB, but I
understand this question is hard to decide. Does anybody see other
agruments on both sides?

Cheers.

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Re: Checking /usr/local/ before upgrading

[Milan]

(Please don't kill me for intervening in this thread. :-) )

Vincenzo Ciancia a écrit :
> I expected anything out of this thread, but people defending the idea
> that keeping /usr/local/lib in the library path during system upgrades
> is a good idea. I can accept to have problems *after* the upgrade, but
> not to be left with an unusable system just because I had stuff in
> /usr/local and that's my fault.
>   
Maybe there's no reason to fight over that, but I think this can be a
good idea. Are there any drawbacks of temporarily removing /usr/lib from
lib path before upgrading? In any case, this can help to make the
process work as expected by the developers.

I had recently such an experience with old GNUnet libs in /usr/local
that blocked it; not a big deal, but disabling them would have allowed
my update to go flawlessly. Many may be frightened by apt inconsistency
errors.

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Re: Grouping preferences/Administration items?

[Milan]

Nicolas Deschildre a écrit :
> The items in the gnome control panel are already grouped by categories
> (Hardware, Internet, system,...).
> Why not used theses groups in the System menu? Instead of current
> preferences/administration?
> This way it has advantages of both the system menu and the control
> panel : access easiness and logical organization.
>   
Because there are too many cateogries (6): we thus need to make them
submenus of a global "Configuration" item, which is (IMHO) as bad as
now. Furthermore, categories and tools are not really clear even in
gnome-control-center (just have a look - System and Personal for example
are really messy). In all cases, this needs more work.

I really believe the panel is where we should go: it's clearer to use
when you don't know what tool you need to use. And with an option (in
Alacarte?) advanced users could easily choose the current behavior - the
panel is definetly slower to use when you already know which item you
want to start. That's why using both at the same time also looks good to
me. I agree this may not be optimal, but I can't see what may be better.

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Re: Grouping preferences/Administration items?

[Milan]

Matthew Paul Thomas a écrit :
> On Oct 28, 2007, at 12:19 PM, Evan Huus wrote:
>>
>> I definitely agree that the non-techie will not understand the
>> difference between Prefs and Admin. Perhaps renaming "Preferences" to
>> *username* and "Administration" to "All Users"? Something like that
>> would be clearer, although then we might want to also rename "System"
>> to "Preferences"?
>> ...
> That probably wouldn't solve the problem. For example, almost everyone
> who uses a laptop is the only user of their computer, so the
> distinction between themself and "All Users" would be zero.
I agree this is not clear to all users and not always very accurate. But
there are two ideas behind each menu: Preferences, Desktop and Look &
Feel Setttings; Administration, hard system config. This is far from
perfect, but I can't find a better classification in the menu form (at
the moment).

What I would suggest is using GNOME Control Panel: it is the only
presentation that could be usable by newbies. Advanced users understand
the distinction Administration/Preferences (when it is cleary respected)
and will prefer to keep the menus (quicker to use). Maybe GNOME Control
Panel could be added in System just after Preferences and Administration.

> A longer-term fix would be to use PolicyKit to make everything not
> require a password unless/until you're actually making an
> administrative change. Not only would this collapse the distinction
> between Preferences and Administration, it would also allow more
> merging of related items. (For example, gnome-about-me could be merged
> with Users & Groups.)
You're right. In this long-term scenario, the distinction could/will
become pointless and problematic. Until then, we would better keep the
current system, but carefully looking out for new tools coming up that
would destroy its coherence. Then, maybe a single menu
("Configuration"?) could be sufficient, together with GNOME Control
Panel for those who prefer it. This is largely up to GNOME developers, I
guess.

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Re: Grouping preferences/Administration items?

[Milan]

At least, there is a logic: Preferences are/should be for user settings,
Administration for system-wide, often requiring admin rights settings.
Still, there are issues with this classification: the Network Tools are
not settings at all, Hardware Information is in preferences (see bug
147152)...

The problem with reorganizating the items is that we will get far too
much categories, and it will take longer to find what you're looking for
(for now you should be able to find an item in two clicks). Your
proposal is used in GNOME control center, which is like Windows' Control
Panel. Maybe we could make it available for users who prefer its
organization (less efficient but easier to use).

Menu items are organized according to a Freedesktop.org specification
that can't be changed easily:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/
...and that is quite good as it is.
What we could do is moving some items to a System Tools submenu in
Applications if there are enough tools that can go there (I don't think
it's true at the moment).


The idea among GNOME developers at the moment is that they should reduce
the number of config tools. This was done with the Appearance one
(theme, wallpaper, fonts, interface and cursors), and can be done with
many others too (Keyboard Shortcuts, Keyboard and Mouse...).  This would
be a nice improvement, and I guess is the best way to follow.

So far, IMHO the best idea is:
1) Merging tools when it makes sense to do so (GNOME work)
2) Hiding tools that can be accessed from better places, or create these
places when needed (Ubuntu and upstream work).

But surely a discussion about that would be useful... Maybe it's worth
an Ubuntu specification.

Cheers

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Re: UI for backports usage

[Milan]

There's obviously a need for a new infrastructure/UI. Since GDebi and
apt-url are to be disabled in future versions (which I approve of), we
should find a way to allow the user to select trusted repositories and
easily install software from there, either on a
replace-alla-installed-packages basis or on a ponctual one.

Maybe apt-url could be modified only to accept trusted repos. Else, we
would need a new graphical tool, or new features in "Add/Remove
applications".

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Re: Bug: blurry menu icons with most of gnome-themes

[Milan]

Sebastien Bacher wrote:
>> the release will be: "Ubuntu is not able to guarantee a basic clean
>> interface from a version to another." Whatever the new features can be
>> in other domains.
>> 
>
> The issue is not likely specific to Ubuntu and the upstream theme didn't
> switch to 22x22 this cycle, is the issue new in gutsy?
>   
For me at least, yes.

If nothing has changed and nobody seems to care about this, so maybe
it's a bug that only occurs on my box, maybe due to a bad upgrade from
Feisty. Please just tell me if you get the same results when using
Clearlooks. Is anybody here experiencing the same? I don't want to
bother all the list with personal issues, I can live with that, but I
thought it was general and nothing has let me think me it is not the case.

Given this, the interpretation of the bug may greatly differ.

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Re: Bug: blurry menu icons with most of gnome-themes

[Milan]

Sebastien Bacher a écrit :
> Gutsy is frozen now and new updates will not be accepted, the workaround
> doesn't look right and the issue is only a cosmetic one and doesn't
> impact the default theme. This could justify a gusty-updates stable
> update but it would be better to figure why the icons look blurry and
> fix that rather than using a workaround
>   
There are two things to figure out here:
- "cosmetic" may be high priority if we consider that the proper sense
of the word should be forbidden. The default theme has no problems, but
gnome-themes are installed *by default* and is simple to use, so it's
like it was default.  We should expect more than half the users use
gnome-themes, and Gutsy will be an important regression for them (no
need for Compiz when you base icons are blurry). The first impression of
the release will be: "Ubuntu is not able to guarantee a basic clean
interface from a version to another." Whatever the new features can be
in other domains.

- why gnome-themes use 22x22 icons when Human uses 24x24? I can't find
any reason to this, and I don't know whether it was the case in previous
versions or whether it has changed. Using 24x24 icons may not be a
workaround if the design is made to accept it. Asking the developer who
made the change somewhere (in the icons or in the theme) could help to
choose a solution. Changing the many icons involved (including Ubuntu's
own software ones) will require many uploads to gutsy-updates, more
likely to bother users later.
Why do you tell "the workaround doesn't look right"? Since it's used
with Human.

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Re: Bug: blurry menu icons with most of gnome-themes

[Milan]

Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> As mentioned on the bug already that's not an Ubuntu specific issue and
> should be worked upstream. There is no easy workaround known at the
> moment but if you know one you are welcome to describe it on the bug
>   
You know I'm not the kind of guy to damn Ubuntu because of the many bugs
that are still open now, but I'm going to end thinking you really don't
care. :-)
This is in my last mail:

> I found an easy workaround (see the
> report too): using 24x24 icons in themes such as Clearlooks restores the
> normal appearance of all icons. I could not find any drawback.


Which was cleary detailed here (two weeks ago):
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-themes/+bug/141227/comments/21

I quote my comment:
"I tried a dirty hack: adding gtk-icon-sizes = "panel-menu=24,24" to
/usr/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0/gtkrc. And now all my Clearlooks
icons are perfect in the menus. Should we only fix the erroneous themes
(they are in gnome-themes)?"

Please, could somebody have a look to confirm this? Now it's quite late but 
this fix is *essential*. If there are drawbacks (and I could find none), they 
can hardly be worse than now.

Cheers


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Re: Untrusted software and security click-through warnings

[Milan]

I completely agree with Ian: let's just get rid of GDebi & Co. installed
by default, thus requiring the users to copy/paste commands to a
console. This is IMHO the best warning we can provide, and daring/being
able to start a console and do this is already a check of the user will
and capacity at the same time.

Now, as Alexander says, we must provide easy ways to install missing
packages that are approved by Ubuntu. Else we will only be boring users
when they install a normal system. We need a list of all reasonably
needed packages to make a standard Desktop run (encrypted DVDs, drivers,
backports...) and of known trustable repositories.


What I like in Ubuntu, it's that constantly new outlooks emerge to
create completely new designs that will be fit to the Desktop for a long
time. With upstart it was great; today, we are concerned about what we
will become when Ubuntu is the first OS used in the word. That's what we
need to think of, and that's no joke! ;-)

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Bug: blurry menu icons with most of gnome-themes

[Milan]

I'd like to raise your awareness about bug 141227
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-themes/+bug/141227)
which deals with a major issue in Gutsy.

Many menu icons appear blurry when you choose a theme other than Human.
I believe this is impacting all Ubuntu Destkops. This is involving
pretty standard applications like Baobab, Preferred applications and
even About GNOME. It makes any custom theme unusable (i.e. ugly), thus
restricting Ubuntu to one only theme.

There are bugs open upstream (see the report), but nobody seems to act
there. This is a matter of 22x22 icons not being installed by
applications (Human is using 24x24). I found an easy workaround (see the
report too): using 24x24 icons in themes such as Clearlooks restores the
normal appearance of all icons. I could not find any drawback.

Is everybody here experiencing the same? Does any developer want to
tackle the ugliest bug I have found in Gutsy? Maybe it can be fixed with
a few tweaks.

Thanks - and sorry for talking about bugs in the list, but it seems that
in some cases we are allowed to, and we should

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Re: regular fsck runs are too disturbing

[Milan]

And how about using ReiserFS by default, or any other journaled
filesystem that doesn't require fsck to run regularly? I'm using
reiser3, and I hadn't noticed that fsck was run by default on startup
until a friend of mine installed Ubuntu with standard settings (i.e.
with ext3).

>From Wikipedia: "ReiserFS is the default file system on the Slackware
, Xandros
, Yoper
, Linspire
, GoboLinux
, Kurumin Linux
, FTOSX and Libranet
 Linux distributions
. ReiserFS was the
default file system in Novell 's
SUSE Linux Enterprise until Novell decided to move to ext3
 on October 12
, 2006
^ for future releases."
Why did Novell went back to ext3?

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Re: Apturl (security) issues and inclusion in Gutsy

[Milan]

Vincenzo Ciancia a écrit :
> Adding a way for people to provide user-friendly apt sources without
> having to upload screenshots on how to add sources in
> "system/administration/sources" (whatever it is called in english) does
> not change the overall security model of ubuntu and apt, which is, if
> you have the root password, you can do whatever you like to your system,
> and if you add an apt source and its gpg key using the root password,
> you are authorizing other people to do whatever they want to your system.
>   
The new point is that you can easily add repositories even when you
don't know a minimum how apt is working. And once you've added
repositories, even pepople willing to help you (by providing new
software) can impact in a bad way your desktop, and users will blame
Ubuntu for that. Expect to get many non-Ubuntu bugs form users that
don't know they are using bleeding-edge software from custom repositories.

At least, the first time you add a repository using apt-url, it should
warn you in a flashy way wat you're doing, and neeed to to really read
the warning. And then, before adding a repository, it should print : -
the number of packages the repository provides and - the list of
installed or main packages that may be replaced automatically. Using for
example two dialogs, you would need to click twice on 'Next' to install
it, this would be a minimum protection. Even more: at any time, the user
should be able to easily revert to a pure Ubuntu desktop by disabling
the custom repositories and removing their packages.


I still agree that this feature may lead ubuntu into Windows-like
behavior, with unknown programs starting now and then, and an unstable
system. We should think twice about it, and wait for apt-url to be
really mature (at least, for it to implement all needed security features).

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Re: update-db cron job: solving a long-standing issue

[Milan]

Mark Schouten said:
> I prefer this too. I also think it is good to think about newbies, but
> is it really necessary to ignore more advanced users just because they
> know what they're looking for? I know I would be annoyed if locate was
> missing on my server.
>   
We're not talking about servers but only Desktop versions. Of course, on
servers admin should need it.

Note I'm not hating locate by principle, but because it makes sometime
computers hang without explanation. If we could use a more comprehensive
way of indexing files, like Tracker does (ie when you do'nt work), this
could be OK. Comparison with Tracker is not accurate because of this
feature.
rlocate seems to be resource-intensive too, because it needs a complete
rescanning every 10 starts or so. IMHO, a workaround with find and dpkg
is not so bad for occasional usages, and 'apt-get install slocate' is
easy for anybody using the command-line.

Colin Watson said:
> Can we not come up with a way to generate the locate database
> from tracker instead?
Beagle does this for system-wide documentation, AFAIK. So this is
possible, only taking care of the filenames. (But Beagle was eating CPU
doing this too, though it is not necessary.)

The dependencies point should be investigated more, but AFAIK
gnome-utils (ie gnome-search-tool) doesn't depend on locate. Is it able
to use find ?

Anyway, I've opened a bug here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/slocate/+bug/140493
We should use it when we have found a common position.

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Re: update-db cron job: solving a long-standing issue

[Milan]

Thilo: OK, I didn't realise that. I closed this outdated Bug 27918
consequently.


To Thilo and Mark and Scott:
You agree that the operation of installing slocate is a piece of cake
for an admin or a power user, and even if it is "surprising", it's not
an issue for them. We can keep locate on the servers, because of the way
they work and of the users that are likely to log on them.

Thilo said:
> Yes i think also the absence of 'locate' would be suprising to anyone
who has
> used any distro before.
Not anyone, only admins, which are not likely to be afraid. I consider
myself as a power user, and I never used locate, because I disabled it
and I know that find can do the job when you know in which subtree to look.

No standard user will ever wonder "Where did I put that file again?" for
a file out of his home, and Tracker is here for it. Furthermore, there's
no need to be able to find system files except for admins, which
mechanically know how to install slocate. I'm not sure slocate should be
connected with Tracker by default, since standard users don't want to be
annoyed by system files when searching. We should never keep our admin
point of view, but think of newbie Desktop users: I'm often amazed of
the problems some simple features can bring about for these users, where
I would have solved it in two minutes.

As Vincenzo said, "often "dpkg -S" can replace locate": it is true for a
significant part of the system files (though not for all of them, or
locate wouldn't exist).

It's normal that kio-locate is installed by default with
kubuntu-desktop, since slocate is too. But we can safely remove
kio-locate from kubuntu-desktop deps:
$ apt-cache rdepends kio-locate
kio-locate
Reverse Depends:
  kubuntu-desktop
  ichthux-desktop

IMHO, the minimum we can do is using ionice and moving (as you said) the
cron job to cron.weekly. using rlocate could be good, but this should be
investigated more, and this is still something making the system slower,
for a void overall interest in most Desktop cases. According to Bugs
134692 and 13671, ionice is not working well at the time, and that would
make harder solving the issue.

Anyway, I'm glad the debate is raised; whatever the choice will be, it
will enhance Ubuntu.

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update-db cron job: solving a long-standing issue

[Milan]

The slocate cron.daily job has long been an issue, making users ask why
their computers were not responding or simply working hard without any
explanation. This little 'bug' is giving a really bad impression to new
users, making Ubuntu look 'Windows-like' (the worst for us), that is to
say unstable and strange.

Having a look to Launchpad bug tracker, you can see that at least 5 open
bugs refer to this problem, some proposing patches to make the issue
less annoying. Those are:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/slocate/+bug/134692 (with a
committed patch, about using ionice to lessen the io usage of updatedb)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/slocate/+bug/13671*
(duplicate*, reporting ionice issues making previous patch almost
unefficient)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/slocate/+bug/133638 (about
telling the user that the system is indexing files)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cron/+bug/27918 (about laptop
batteries issues)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/slocate/+bug/41742 (about a
laptop not wanting to suspend when updatedb has automatically started)

And partly those, because bugs with slocate affect out-of-the-box users
that don't really need it:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/slocate/+bug/113312 (about
encrypted partition being indexed without notice from a newbie user)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/slocate/+bug/74029 (about /mnt
default indexation issues)

This bug should really be rapidly considered and solves by choosing a
clear policy for Ubuntu. If we really want to keep the locate command
working out-of-the-box in Ubuntu, we should find out ways of making
updatedb run : 1) with low io and CPU priority 2) only when the user is
not using his computer and 3) when not on battery - (just like Tracker
will be doing by default in Gutsy).

Or we can consider using rlocate (http://rlocate.sourceforge.net/),
which is a synchronized replacement for locate, keeping track of the
filesystem updates when they are done.

We can also think (and this is my opinion ;-) ) that the locate command
is only used by advanced users that now how to install slocate in two
minutes, and thus that we don't need to install it by default. Newbies
don't use locate in a terminal, but Tracker in GNOME. And we should
remember that users are likely to use new background processes with
Tracker or Beagle, that may even be installed by default. So the less
are running, the better the system will work. Replacements like find can
be used when necessary (eg for occasional remote help), though they are
less efficient.

I'd like to get your comments about this point, in order to fix it in
the next release, before new users consider that their Ubuntu system is
doing jobs without their consent and in an irrational way. Thanks for
reading... :-)

Milan



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Don't install irrelevant character set fonts

[Milan]

Hi !

If you give a look at your OpenOffice.org Writer fonts list, you will
notice that it starts with 40 fonts whose names begin with "ae_". These
fonts are designed for Arabic, Japanese, etc. character sets, and thus
aren't really interesting for others charsets. They all look quite the
same, and they double the size of the list, impeding the user who is
searching for a nice font for him (there are much, but at the end of the
list). There are other fonts in the list that are designed for specific
languages ("ttf-*" packages).

Since Ubuntu has a nice localisation management, I suggest we add the
fonts to the language-pack-* packages' "Recommends", and not to
ubuntu-desktop's. We still need to be able to print Unicode characters:
this can be done using FreeFonts and DejaVu. Then, most of fonts should
be installed following what the user requests.

Any occidental language support should install Latin fonts, and Chinese
chinese fonts... The only common fonts should be 2 or 3 large Unicode
support fonts. When a user wants to use a language, (s)he installs the
language support and gets the fonts. Maybe the Language support tool
could use a column more, "Font support only", to avoid installing all
translations.

This way, you can select easily nice and relevant fonts, and we may
install more oringinal fonts. Am I saying something stupid here ? ;-) Do
you think this is worth a spec ?

Milan


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Re: Allowing passwordless login via GDM

[Milan]

Done :
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=414862


Milan

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Re: Allowing passwordless login via GDM

[Milan]

So, should I open a feature request ? On launchpad or on gnome.org ?

The question to think about is pam-keyring and passwordless login: the 
user is likely to have to type in is keyring password anyway.


Milan

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Re: Allowing passwordless login via GDM

[Milan]

I'm not tying to make a troll in any way, and I'm sorry if this subject 
is fulling the list with useless arguments. And I don't think neither 
that we should compare Linux to Windows: what I propose is really far 
from ActiveX, and I will castigate anyone intending to create this for 
Linux.

But you're mistaking on my proposal. I just ask to allow *GDM* to skip 
password check, just like it *currently does* with autologin.

First, this is just an extension of autologin system, so if my idea is 
dangerous, we have to remove automated connexion feature from GDM 
immediately.

Second, you can't connect to a passwordless account via ssh, vnc or 
others because it's disabled by default. As Jan Claeys said, 
PermitEmptyPasswords setting for sshd is "no" by default, and this is a 
good thing.

Third, I don't ask to use passwordless accounts, which are currently to 
only way to connect without typing anything, and which are weak 
œconerning security. With my proposal, your argument is no valid at all, 
since the account is using a password, and more, a *good* password, 
since the user hasn't to type it every minute. Think that many users 
want to use a simple, short, and maybe easy to remember/find (firstname, 
account name...) because they have to type it often. And I don't speak 
of empty passwords you are encouraged to set manually.

wattazoum, your criticism is really far from reality, because in 
addition of all this, openssh server is not installed be default, 
portmap doesn't allow WAN computers to connect to port 22, nor any other 
port. You currently have to hack the config files to enable it.

I would like this topic to be constructive, not only a sterile argument. 
But it seems nobody is taking seriously the problem and its implications.

Again, I'm sorry if this is taking space in the mailing list with no 
interest at all. But I'm surprised of the reaction.

Milan

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Re: Allowing passwordless login via GDM

[Milan]

Hey, you guys have a geek way of thinking I didn't expected to encounter 
on an Ubuntu mailing list ! I'm not talking about five-year-old 
children's ability to type in a password, nor of the need of their 
parents to control them. I'm talking of making life easier to users who 
want to use this feature. Let's them bring up their child as they want to !

For you, typing a password each time you log in isn't an issue. But I 
believe using the console is not neither. For a "normal" end-user, this 
is boring. Coming from Windows or OS X, it's, before people have got to 
their desktop, a bad point for Ubuntu.

Moreover, this feature won't bring down security at all: you still need 
to enter your password to use gksudo, or ssh... This is only an old 
Unix-geek reflex putting down Windows about its lacks. But this is not a 
lack, even Windows has many! Linux power is that you can enable almost 
all features you want/need, while they are not dangerous.

You said users that want to log in without password must have to search 
a little to set it up. This is what I've done at home. But this is not 
possible for most of the people, those who need passwordless connexions! 
I know this feature will be coded, if not now, within 5 years, because 
this is really needed. The question is, do we want to discourage people 
from switching to Linux, and do we want Ubuntu to be the best 
distribution for home end-users?

I can't believe that this position is the one of the majority of the 
team. This way, nothing would have been done at all on Ubuntu (compared 
to Debian, which I love, for example).

Amicably,
Milan

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Re: Allowing passwordless login via GDM

[Milan]

Martin wrote:
> This should not be necessary at all. gdm's configuration program
> already offers the option of automatic login (which should stay off by
> default, of course). If this does not work, can you please file a bug
> against gdm?
This is working fine. But it was thinking of a home computer with
several accounts (typically 2-5), some without passwords (what do you
have to hide to your family ?). Windows deals with this type of accounts
since XP, and we still require users to have a password, although it can
be  boring when you don't really need to protect your data.

I think this kind of use is a main target for Ubuntu, and using no
password at all should be proposed to the user when he creates an account.



Milan




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Allowing passwordless login via GDM

[Milan]

Hi all!

On home computers, people often want to log in without password at all.
This should be possible, and easy to configure. The problem is, you need
a password to connect using ssh, to have sudo rights, to protect others
from setting a new password...

I suggest to allow to log in without typing any password, but only via
GDM (just like Autologin does automatically). Users enter a password
when creating their account, and it's used when necessary (see up). But
GDM config panel allows to choose a "passwordless login" for some users
(like we choose showed users on face browser).

Together with the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnifiedLoginUnlock spec, this
will make Ubuntu usable for home users. Currently, I have to hack
/etc/pam.d and /etc/shadow to allow my parents to login without
password: this is a real lack compared to Windows !

What do you think ?


Milan



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