April 2008 Archives

I have have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04 64bit and I'm very happy with how it runs. That is without the exception of my Broadcom wireless not being detected on my HP Compaq 6820s.

I tried installing b43-fwcutter but that did not sorted the problem. It downloads the firmware but there seems to be something wrong with b43 and ssb modules. One of them, or both.. not sure, although i suspect ssb being screwed up from what dmesg shows. To get the darn wireless working I compiled from source the latest compat-wireless from Linux Wireless.

Here goes:
1. Install b43-fwcutter (select Yes when asked to have the scripts fetch the firmware)
$ sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter

2. Install tools needed to compile
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

3. Download latest compat-wireless tarball (http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download#Directlydownloadingthetarball)
$ wget http://www.orbit-lab.org/kernel/compat-wireless-2.6/2008/04/compat-wireless-2008-04-29.tar.bz2

4. Extract the files
$ tar jxvf compat-wireless-2008-04-29.tar.bz2

5. Compile and install compat-wireless
$ cd compat-wireless-2008-04-09
$ make
$ sudo make install

6. Testing the install
$ sudo make load

At this point you should have wireless working.

7. Make sure b43 module gets loaded before ssb on system reboot by adding the following to your /etc/rc.local file:
modprobe -r ssb # unloading ssb
modpobe b43     # loading b43
modprobe ssb    # loading ssb

8. Reboot. Your wireless should work just fine now :)

GIMP 2.5 came out and it has some interesting features. Since it is not available in Ubuntu's repos i thought it would be nice to make a detailed tutorial on how to install GIMP 2.5 on Ubuntu Hardy for evaluation purpose.

1. Install the packages needed to compile programs:
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

2. Install gimp dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

3. Make binaries, includes, libraries in /opt/gimp-2.5 available for use:

$ export PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/bin:$PATH
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib
$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gimp-2.5/lib/pkgconfig


4. Install latest BABL and GEGL libs from source (these libs were not installed in step 2 as the gimp package in the repo is not depending on them)
4.1 Grab latest versions from SVN:

$ svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/babl/trunk/ babl
$ svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gegl/trunk/ gegl

4.2 Install BABL:
$ cd babl
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..

4.3 Install GEGL:

$ cd gegl
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ cd ..

5. Grab GIMP 2.5 tarbal here: ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.5/gimp-2.5.0.tar.bz2
$ wget ftp://ftp.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.5/gimp-2.5.0.tar.bz2

6. Extract and intall latest GIMP:
$ tar jxvf gimp-2.5.0.tar.bz2
$ cd gimp-2.5.0
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gimp-2.5
$ make
$ sudo make install

7. Enjoy your GIMP by running:
$ /opt/gimp-2.5/bin/gimp-2.5

I've just found out that the default Web Browser in GNOME, Epiphany will move to WebKit only. Since now Epiphany had an abstraction layer that allowed it to use both Gecko and WebKit as backends, but that made development very slow.

The Epiphany user interface is built on top of an abstraction layer
above the web rendering engine, enabling us to support multiple
back-ends. Currently Epiphany supports the Mozilla browser engine
(Gecko), and the WebKit engine.

  The Epiphany dependency on Gecko creates a number of problems for us.
The Gecko release cycle is very long (e.g. Gecko 1.8 was released with
Firefox 1.5 in 2005; 1.8.1 with Firefox 2.0 in 2006 and 1.9 will be
released sometime this year with Firefox 3.0), prone to delays and not
synchronised with the unvarying 6-month Gnome release cycle.
Furthermore, it and the feature work on Gecko are mostly driven by the
Firefox browser, our main competitor on the Gnome desktop. Also the
embedding API of Gecko (GtkMozEmbed) has been unmaintained and stagnant
for a long time. Finally, the current plans for "Mozilla 2.0" bring much
uncertainty to us, as well as much work to account for their proposed
big API changes.

I can't wait to have a fully featured WebKit browser running natively in Gnome. For now i will settle for Safari ran via wine

Wohoo!

The Ubuntu ackage for Transmission is outdated so i decided to update to latest. Here is now it's done:

1. Solve dependencies:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep transmission

2. Download souces:
$ wget -c -t0 http://download.m0k.org/transmission/files/transmission-1.11.tar.bz2

3. Building the Transmission release in the command line:
tar xvjf transmission-1.11.tar.bz2