Vacuus Verbum

Tonight I read an article on Canonical’s launch of a usability improvement project, called One Hundred Paper Cuts, which aims to work out minor nagging issues that make users’ lifes harder. I, for one, would like to mention one such issue (though it’s true it’s really a Gnome issue but, still…)

It bothers me that there’s no easy/direct way of knowing the dimensions of an image file from Ubuntu’s file browser, Nautilus. One has to open the properties dialog and select the Image tab (that’s 3 mouse clicks). Other than that, one has to open the file in order to get the info from Eye of Gnome’s status bar or another image viewer/editor.

This is an old pet-peeve of mine, which I have hoped might be addressed with each new Ubuntu release. I remember the first time I noticed that there was an Information view on the side pane of Nautilus and went ‘That must be it!’, only to realize there was no really important information there (the folder’s object count is already available on the status bar; ok, the folder’s modification date is there on the info pane as well).

It would be nice and productive if you could get such relevant information about image files as their dimensions in an easier way. Let’s see:

• they might be shown on the status bar, along with the file size info; you’d simply select a file and get the info (incidentally, that’s what you get in the OS-that-must-not-be-named);
• they might be displayed as a tooltip; hover the pointer over the image and there you have it;
• they might populate the Information pane, giving it a proper raison d’être; or, at the very least
• they might be directly accessible from an option on the images’ context popup menu.

Well, these are just some suggestions. I’ll be looking forward to seeing this and every other usability improvement that results from the Paper Cuts project.

Graphical desktop environments and window abstractions have been around for at least 25 years (if we limit ourselves to the 1984 release of the Apple Macintosh, the first commercial product to sport such an environment).

Even though we have seen improvements to the original ideas, all the basic funcionality is still in place. The ability to resize windows is one such basic funcionality which is (and should be) taken for granted by all kinds of users.

That being the case, it’s hard to accept the fact that a window manager like Metacity (the standard choice within the popular Gnome environment and, therefore, an important player) can’t seem to get it right. If you have not done it yet (unlikely), try resizing your windows from the sides or top/bottom and see how you perform. It takes a very good quality pointing device and a firm hand to grab those pixel-wide regions. As a side note, resizing from the bottom-right corner is not as difficult, at least in some applications.

Sure I appreciate the fact that there are very nice keyboard+mouse shortcuts to help the user manipulate windows. I often get frustrated at work as I try to move windows (the MS kind) around by using the ALT <drag> combination. Makes me feel like coming back home to Linux. The ALT+<middle button> combination for resizing windows sure rocks too! But none of that is an excuse for not getting the basics right.

The issue is certainly not new. Some people have pointed it out years ago. The bug #160311 on Launchpad provides some information and discusses a possible solution involving making the window borders thicker. I definitely disagree with any solution that goes in that direction, though. Resizing must not be related to nor depend on the visual characteristcs of the windows. Put another way, one should not have to cope with heavy, ugly 10px-wide borders just to be able to grab them more comfortably. Ideally, window borders should be left as thin as the user likes and the window manager should be the one responsible for “seeing” a virtual, say, 10px-wide border that would serve as a hot spot for the resizing cursor. Is that really hard to accomplish?

The Objective

To create a collection of MP3 files from the audio tracks of existing VOB files. The VOB files had been previously extracted from the original DVD with the help of dvd::rip which, by the way, is a great and very well put-together tool for what it sets out to do. It is a tool meant to assist one in extracting and converting video and audio streams from DVD discs to a variety of other encoding formats. I could not, however, use it to accomplish the task at hand.

The Solution

After a brief initial consideration about using ffmpeg on the command line, I decided to go GUI with Avidemux. To extract the audio tracks, I simply opened the VOB files (I did it one by one, because there were just a few of them; still to be tried is the tool’s ability to define a job list) and chose Audio > Save. I had thought I could do the extraction and conversion to MP3 right there with Avidemux but, for some reason, the configuration dialog box for MP3 lacks a VBR setting. So I chose to encode the files manually, using the following command:

lame -h --vbr-new -V 2 <audio file>

I’m sure people can point out a handful of simpler ways I could have achieved the same results. In any case, what really matters is that the experience was nice and I’m more than satisfied with the outcome.

Da First Boot

The booting process did go faster than previous versions and I really appreciated the new looks of the login screen. After logging in, I was able to see my usual desktop (since personal application settings are kept in the home directory, they survive the installation). Some aspects of the theme (mainly window borders) were not exactly as they were before, but I could recognize the desktop as my desktop, nevertheless.

Hardware Drivers

After a while, just as I started exploring the Preferences and Administration menus, Ubuntu popped up a dialog box telling me about the availability of restricted hardware drivers for my video card. I was pleasantly surprised. The driver version suggested was described as “NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 180)”. After I chose to download and install the suggested driver, I noticed that the progress bar on the download dialog box took a rather long time to actually show some progress; I would have aborted the process and started over, had I not seen this same behavior before, on Intrepid. This kind of faulty feedback can make a user feel lost. Following the installation of the new hardware driver, Ubuntu requested a system restart.

Logging into the desktop with the new driver in place, I already expected to have to adjust the system video properties to get back to my usual 1600×1200@85Hz setting; using my monitor’s OSD, I checked the settings had been reset to 1280×1024@85Hz. When I tried to launch the Display applet from the Preferences menu to get back to my native resolution, I was shown the following dialog box:

I chose to do so and was able to adjust the settings to my liking with ease. One thing I forgot to do was saving the changes to the disk. That caused my new settings to be lost when the desktop manager was terminated. I then tried to repeat the process, using the save button this time around. Surprisingly, that did not solve the problem; the display settings were still not being kept across system restarts. Actually, that was not so surprising, as there was a message saying that the settings could not be saved. I’m still wondering why I insisted on ignoring it. But anyway, the solution to the issue was simply to run the nVidia applet as root, i.e. gksudo nvidia-settings. And that finally did it.

Catching a New Wave

The next thing I did was choosing the new, fancy New Wave theme. It was the first time I could actually feel comfortable with a so-called dark theme for more than a couple of minutes. This theme seems to have been designed in a way that it won’t hurt your eyes due to the high contrast between the dark areas and the default white background of pages and editors. Or at least, it feels less agressive than its counterparts.

Everything looked really good and I was already thinking about what I would do next in my new Ubuntu. It was then that something grabbed my attention: the menus in Firefox looked out of place, having black text instead of the theme’s default white color. I then realized that the same thing also happened with OpenOffice applications. There is more than on way of working around this problem, but the one I found best was downloading and installing a variation of the New Wave theme including dark menus. Installing a theme is as simple as dragging the theme’s archive onto the theme tab of the Appearances applet. Download the New Wave Pack and extract the darkmenus archive from it.

Flash and Java

I went to Adobe’s website for the latest version of the Flash plugin. After downloading it, I tried to install it with dpkg, but got the following dependency error (snipped):

adobe-flashplugin depends on libcurl3; however:
    Package libcurl3 is not installed.

Simply installing the required libcurl3 did it. The package manager was happy that the dependency of the broken package had finally been met and was able to finish its configuration. I would probably not have gone through any of this if I had used the version from the repositories.

Installing Java went much smoother. I simply installed a couple of packages, namely sun-java6-sdk and sun-java6-plugin and voila.

Multimedia CoDecs

No real surprise here. Due to legal (calling it philosophical too wouldn’t be pushing it, I guess) issues, non-free formats won’t play out of the box. However, the system assists you on fetching the necessary software, not without classifying them as bad and ugly. But nothing to worry. That’s a one-time operation. After the CoDecs are installed, you may play your mp3 (do consider ogg, though) and divx (don’t miss xvid too) files as much as you like.

Brasero Did Bug Me

How about inserting a CD or DVD into your drive only to realize that all your desktop icons have gone missing and that you are no longer able to navigate your files? That’s just what I (and a whole bunch of other people) experienced. It so happens that there is a bug on the setup of the Brasero libs that causes this nasty behavior. The solution, or should I say, a temporary workaround is to simply tamper with the permissions of a dynamic library. I wonder how this situation managed to slip through testing.

Impressions and a Bit of Rambling

To finish off this post, I’d like to say that, despite the few problems I have mentioned, the overall experience has been just great. Jaunty does feel snappier and more polished. I would recommend it to anyone seeking a nice-looking and usable Linux distribution. At the very least, try the Live CD. And, while we are at it, let me add one more thing: when trying a different OS, do try to allow yourself to Think Different™. Don’t just go “How come there is no Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel? Oh, damn! Actually, I can’t even find a Control Panel option!” Or “Where can I find my trusty brown cute little file-retriever puppy? How am I supposed to locate my files without it?” Jokes aside, remember that we humans (as most other animals) have a natural tendency to save energy. We are resistant to change simply because doing things differently require learning and learning requires energy. So, don’t be an animal, or human or anything that fears learning something new!

This is a description of the steps (or at least the initial and most significant ones) I will be taking in order to install and configure Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. Besides serving as a personal record, I am also hoping this will be of help to someone.

Introduction

I have been a Ubuntu user since 5.04 Hoary Hedgehog and currently run 8.10 Intrepid Ibex. I am typing this on OpenOffice Writer 3.0.1, just as Transmission works hard on the background to bring me the freshly released ISO image. I have installed every single release of the OS since 5.04, always choosing clean installations over upgrades. While some might see it as a waste of time, I simply feel it is actually cleaner and, besides, I find that installing most software on Ubuntu is as easy and quick as it gets.

In the beginning, I used to dual-boot, with Windows still being my main OS. This has changed since at least the release of 6.06 Dapper Drake, when Ubuntu became my platform of choice. And I’ve never felt like going back. From that time on, I still have a dual-boot setup, but I now refer to my Windows installation simply as “the videogame”, for that’s the only reason I ever choose it from GRUB’s menu. Hopefully, I’ll be able to wipe Windows off for good someday, without having to give up my taste for games.

The Hardware

While the download is not done, here are some basic details about my hardware:

The “videogame” is left with the 60GB unit. The 320GB HD is Linux-only land. Here’s an overview of its layout:

	ney@nicky:~$ df -HT | grep "Filesystem\|sda"
	Filesystem    Type     Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
	/dev/sda1     ext3      40G   4.1G    34G  11% /
	/dev/sda2     ext3      79G    66G   9.6G  88% /home
	/dev/sda3     ext3     196G   129G    58G  70% /multimedia

I was initially planning to move to ext4, but on second thought I’ve decided to stick with ext3 for now. The only partition that is going to get formatted is the root one, where the OS is to be installed. The bulky partition I call multimedia is where I keep shared media files, including music, videos, movies, books, images etc. I keep a shortcut to it on my Places menu for quick access.

Burning

It has arrived! The Ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso is now lying on my desktop. I inserted a blank CD-R into the CD-ROM drive, right clicked the ISO file and chose ‘Write to Disk…’. I left the speed setting at ‘Maximum’ and that was all.

Wow, that was quick! Before I could finish this part of the description, the drive tray had already popped out. Now, onto the final checks before installing.

Installation

The installation went smooth, as has been the case with all the latest versions of Ubuntu (I remember having some minor ACPI issues with the first or second version I installed.) It took me through the usual steps of choosing language, keyboard layout, timezone and, then, disk partitioning. I chose to manually define the partitioning, since I already had my partitions laid out and only needed to indicate the mounting points, which I did in accordance to the df output shown previously. It’s absolutely important that one makes sure which partitions are marked for formatting. In my case, I only did so for partition #1 (in the end, the swap partition also gets formatted).

After the partitioning is done, the installer asks you for some user information. I filled out the necessary fields, carefully verified the installation summary that is presented afterwards and set things off to start the file copying process.

To be continued…

Having been a Ubuntu user since its 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog) release, I am anxiously waiting for its 9.04 incarnation, the Jaunty Jackalope.