On day 1, the unofficial start of OLF with Ubucon among the few presentations tracks (IE: Medical, Early Penguins) began much like it did last year. I spent more time with the Early Penguins track than Ubucon. Much of Ubucon was a repeat of last year, which is not to say that’s bad but I wanted to experience other talks and learn something new. Ubucon is a wonderful day of getting to know Ubuntu’s Ohio Loco and Ubuntu’s approach to tackling Bug #1.

Beth Lynn Eicher gave the presentation about being Inside A Bug #1 Resolved Company which gave some fantastic insight about how much Linux has progressed within the professional community. A few members of the audience gave details about how the companies that they work for have been able to transition their services to F/OSS products.

From there I went to the Early Penguins room to listen through Clif Flynt‘s presentation about Writing Games With Tcl/Tk. Essentially in under an hour, we all went through a crash course of Tcl’s coding basics and walked through the creation of a simple game. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to code anything in any other language, so it was invigorating to get that creative itch scratched again.

Then came lunch at Barley’s across the street. They have a fantastic selection of in-house brewed beers. They also have great food and atmosphere, always feeling welcome whenever we go there.

Back to the conference, Mark Terranova gave an educational talk on So What Kind Of Cult Is Linux, Anyway? The insight is that as much as we dislike the strategies and goals of companies like Microsoft or Apple, much of the problems we perceive actually originates from the “fanboy” followers rather than the corporations they represent. That’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement. But you can compare that relationship to Linux community where we have avid followers of particular distributions or applications, the usual emacs vs. vim, Fedora vs. Ubuntu, Red Hat vs. Suse, etc.

Skipped the next hour to head back to the car, walk around Columbus and head back to Barley’s for another drink.

Linux For All by Edward Mokurai Cherlin with OLPC explained clearly that the initiative of giving every child in the world a laptop isn’t about technology but providing them the freedom to empower themselves, first by providing them the knowledge of the world, giving them the ability to connect to one another freely, and further to empower them with the ability to help shape the world by merging their culture with the rest of the information aware world.

Skipped the next hour to hit the bathroom, find connectivity to figure out was going on in the rest of the world, and grabbed a slice of cheesecake.

Friday’s keynote by the immortal Jon “maddog” Hall gave an entertaining presentation about the evolution of Linux from even before Linus Torvalds birth through to how it’s being implemented today with The Twentieth Birthday Of The Linux Kernel. The only person who could be more knowledgeable about Linux other than Jon Hall would be Linus. Everyone should get a chance to attend Jon’s presentation where ever he gives it as it’s entertaining and informative. I did my best to record it but connectivity here is lower than adequate, so I’ll post it later.

Right now I’m part way through Saturday’s presentations and the expo, so another update to follow.

I’m a little behind the news but for those that aren’t aware, Gnome has officially released 3.0. It’s a stunner if I may say. You can see plenty of visuals at Gnome’s website. If you want to give it a spin, Gnome is offering three live images that can be burned to CD or placed on a USB key. Two are built on openSUSE for either 32-bit or 64-bit machines, one is built on Fedora for 32-bit machines.

I downloaded the Fedora live image and had mixed luck. My spare Acer Extensa 4420 could get to the desktop with a movable mouse but nothing to interact with. I suspect it has to do with video drivers as Gnome 3 requires hardware acceleration for the “full Gnome experience”. It has an ATI Radeon Xpress video chipset and has not always easiest to use. After a few unsuccessful tries, I moved the live image to my desktop gaming machine which is pretty robust with nVidia graphics, tons of ram, and plenty of CPU. That’s when Gnome 3 came alive, and it was good.

There’s still some polishing that needs to be made, such as the integrated chat not displaying correctly, the behavior of taking a screenshot forced me to look for the screenshot window instead of having it appear as it does in 2.3, and at some point the whole system froze up.

I had install Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal onto the Extensa right before the announcement came out and was please to see that there’s an experimental PPA for Gnome 3 on Natty, and it’s very unstable, trust me. I finally gave up after trying a few things to get it to work. I’ll keep updating the system as time goes by hoping to find the sweet spot where everything works. It might be a while since changes are being made to both the release of Ubuntu and the Gnome 3 PPA.

At the very least, grab one of the live images and give Gnome 3 a free spin. It’s definitely the direction I want to see my desktop going. It does seem to require hardware video acceleration and will default to the familiar Gnome 2 desktop if it should fail to load Gnome 3.

Aside from that, I am having my ass handed to me on the “easier” Arcade mode for Steel Storm Episode II.

While Episode I was criticized for being too easy, that shouldn’t be a concern for Episode II. Along with the new maps comes new enemies and weapon upgrades.

It seems that weapons can be enhanced as well as added. They also come with the time-honored tradition of having to use them immediately upon unexpected visitors.

You’ll never know when or where they’re going to appear. They may show up in front of you, behind you, or all around you after a forcefield traps you from getting away.

You can get more information and pre-order your own copy of Episode II right now at the Steel Storm website.

Rikki Kite at Linux Magazine is organizing a ChipIn for anyone interested in tossing in a few bucks to help Amber and her family to get back on their feet and help pay for necessities like food and clothes.

Amber is held in high regard within the Ubuntu community. She’s only been involved with the community for a little over a year now, but what she’s been able to accomplish in that time frame is quite impressive.

I attended her presentation at this year’s Ohio Linux Fest during the Friday’s Ubucon and her personality seemed impenetrable. It’s hard for me to imagine that something so tragic would happen to someone as upbeat and cheerful as she is.

Gameplay is very smooth. Even with the video settings on max, my Acer TimelineX AS1830T, which has an Intel Core i5 U430 at 1.20GHz, was able to play the game just as well as my desktop with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ at 3.2GHz backed up by the GeForce GT240. That might speak more about the netbook’s ability than the game but I was happy either way. The game is built on the Darkplaces engine, a Quake modification by LordHavoc.

The bird’s eye view is neat concept that I have not seen before. I can’t recall another game with a similar aspect. Some areas of the maps are difficult to see at times, especially when some high overhang begins to block some of the action. Fortunately, the developers knew enough to have them go transparent at a certain point. The quality of the graphics and the sounds is very good with ambient background music adding a nice balance to the gameplay.

The strength of the enemies is considerable. At first they seem quite weak in comparison to your firepower, but you often find yourself surrounded by a small horde. If you’re fortunate to escape, you could still find yourself head-to-head with a big ass tank or surrounded by an even bigger horde that spawn out of nowhere.

You can get your own copy for Linux, Windows, and Mac at the official Steel Storm website. Episode 1 is still a Beta and is subject to bugfixes and feature updates. There’s already been a couple so keep up to date by watching Kot-In-Action’s blog.

In the meantime, here’s some game footage I was able to grab while playing.

Getting back on topic, we were given a brief welcome by Joe Buckley from Ubuntu Ohio team loco. Beth Lynn Eicher of What Will We Use kicked off the day with a discussion on tackling Bug #1 (Microsoft has a majority market share) and what we can do as a community to close it. And finally before the break, Canonical’s own Jorge Castro spoke about how anyone and everyone can help with the development process by tackling the “low hanging fruit”.

It’s been informative already so I can’t wait for the rest of it. For now, I’m getting back to my food so we don’t miss the start of the afternoon.

It’s that time of the year again to get registered for Ohio Linux Fest.

It runs from Friday, September 10 through Sunday, September 12. Three levels of registration are available:

• Enthusiast which is free
• Supporter for $65 which includes lunch on Saturday and a free t-shirt
• Professional for $350 which gives you access to OFLU classes on Friday, lunch on Friday and Saturday, and a free t-shirt.

There are presentations all day on Friday and Saturday given by many notable people within the Linux community. Mackenzie Morgan, Bryen Yunashko, Amber Graner, Jordan Keyes, and Tarus Balog to name a few.

Keynotes will be delivered by:

• John “maddog” Hall, Executive Director of Linux International, on Friday evening.
• Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, on Saturday morning.
• Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, creator of the open source OGG Vorbis audio format and founder of the Xiph.org Foundation, will be giving the closing keynote on Saturday evening.

There are also a ton of sponsors, including Google, HP, IBM, and Linux in the Ham Shack, with booths and tables for most of them in the Expo.

Special rates for rooms at Drury Inn and Suites are available, as well as rooms at the Red Roof Inn for those that need a place to shack up for the night.

More detailed information is available at the Ohio Linux Fest website. Space is limited so register as soon as you can.

Some people have experienced a problem with Thunderbird failing to start after upgrading to 3.0.4+nobinonly-0ubuntu2 (see [1]). An updated version which fixes this bug has been uploaded already and the affected binaries removed from the archive. If you have already updated to the affected version and you are experiencing this problem, then you will need to recover manually in order to use Thunderbird again.

The issue is that under certain conditions, the thunderbird wrapper script replaces your profile with a recursive symlink. If you are running the affected version and thunderbird no longer starts, please open a terminal and run “ls -ld ~/.*thunderbird*”. If you see output similar to the following, then you are affected by this bug and will need to proceed with the instructions following.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 chr1s chr1s   24 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.mozilla-thunderbird -> /home/chr1s/.thunderbird
lrwxrwxrwx 1 chr1s chr1s   24 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.thunderbird -> /home/chr1s/.thunderbird
drwx—— 3 chr1s chr1s 4096 2010-04-15 19:08 /home/chr1s/.thunderbird.upstream

To recover from this, you need to:
1) Delete the recursive symlink (~/.thunderbird) by running “rm ~/.thunderbird”.
***Only do this if you see the output above, else you could be deleting your profile. If you are unsure, then rename the file instead***
2) Move ~/.thunderbird.upstream to ~/.thunderbird by running “mv ~/.thunderbird.upstream ~/.thunderbird”

Once you have done this, you will be able to open Thunderbird again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards
Chris

[1] – https://launchpad.net/bugs/563893

Kudos to Hulu for showing some Linux love.

* UPDATE: Found out how to display full screen right after I published the post. Maximizing the window frames it between the panels, but clicking on the client will make it fill the entire the screen. Two new buttons appear in the upper-right corner to either unmaximize the client or close it.

How does one easily reset the preferences of Firefox?

philf: is there a way to ‘restore” to a previous days setting? all of a sudden firefox won’t open a site that requires flash [site removed] when trying to use it just a blue screen. I’ve had this issue before, I can’t remember how I fixed it, it was working yesterday perfectly. ALSO firefox used to open the previous tabs when closed, now just a blank screen..I didn’t do anything to it yesterday no updates at all…

This won’t exactly answer the question asked from the quoted IRC text, but as far as I know there isn’t a “snapshot” type service that can restore Firefox to a previous day’s settings. I would be surprised if someone hadn’t made a plugin for this scenario yet. What follows is an “all else fails” solution to just restore a default set of options in which to start over.

To paraphrase Mozilla’s own instructions:

1. Exit from Firefox completely (after copying/printing these instructions of course)
2. Locate your profile folder. This will probably be the most difficult step for new users as it lies within a “hidden” folder in your home folder. I’ll explain a little later.
3. Rename and/or remove your prefs.js file. Think safety first: rename now, remove later when clearly not needed.
4. Restart Firefox.

Firefox will rebuild the prefs.js upon restart to its default state. Some users may also have a user.js file which may or may not cause some issues. It’s not a default file and could possibly have been made by a plugin or another installed application. My user.js file was created for and by Google’s Picasa. Rename/remove it as well if you’re still experiencing issues.

The strategy of renaming a settings file is to ensure that you still have a copy in case you need it. Any time I find myself tweaking files, I will make a backup copy of it first (cp file file.bu). In the case of Firefox, we only need to rename it in order to force Firefox to save a new default file. We can always restore the original file be deleting the new one and renaming the original.

Your Firefox profile folder is contained in a folder named .mozilla that is hidden from normal viewing because of it’s leading dot or period. While viewing your home folder in nautilus’s file browser, you can use CTRL-H to show all hidden files. Open .mozilla then firefox. Within you should see a folder ending in .default. The first eight letters are randomly chosen for you when Firefox is first run. That’s your Firefox profile folder. Open that and you should see the prefs.js file. Continue with step 3 above.

Remember that within the profile folder is everything that Firefox knows about you including saved passwords and cookies. If you accidentally change the wrong file, you could prevent yourself from accessing certain websites.