Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Kaola, launched earlier this week. One of the key new features in this release is Ubuntu One. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, this new feature/product launch has been anything but smooth.

Ubuntu One is one of the new ways that Canonical, the creators of Ubuntu, is trying to generate some revenue based on their distro. Ubuntu One is a hosted file storage solution that allows users to keep a folder and all of its content synced between multiple computers. All users get 2GB of storage for free with the option of increasing the store to 50GB for $10/month.

Since this new offering has many Ubuntu users very excited, I thought I’d give it a try as soon as I installed the new release. However, I was instantly met with a very big message telling me that something was wrong.

Launch Day: Problem 1

When I first started Ubuntu One, the following notification appeared:

Capabilities Mismatch
There was a capabilities mismatch while attempting to connect to the Ubuntu One server. You may have installed a newer version of the client, for which the server does not yet provide support. A new version of the server should be accessible soon. Please be patient while we update.

Ubuntu is supposed to be a Linux distro designed for the average computer user. Since this large message appears for a short period of time and it isn’t easily understood, I think that this message could very easily give users a very bad first experience. I believe it would be much more simple to simply say the following:

Server Connection Failed
Please ensure that you have installed all software updates and try again at a later time.

The reason why I believe the software update portion should be included is because the problem wasn’t the server, it was the client. This morning my system told me some updates were available, and a few of these updates got rid of the “Capabilities Mismatch” problem and allowed the software to connect properly.

The packages that fixed this are the following:

• python-ubuntuone-client
• ubuntuone-client
• ubuntuone-client-gnome

Each of these were updated to version 1.0.2-0ubuntu2. After the update, I closed the Ubuntu One software, restarted it, and the folder sync worked as expected. However, this is when another problem became clear.

Houston, We Have a Problem… Again

There are two parts to the Ubuntu One system. The first is the server/client connection that actively syncs the Ubuntu One folder between the computer and the Ubuntu One server. The second is an online system you can access through the browser. This online system allows you to manage folders and files from inside your browser.

When I first started to play with Ubuntu One, even though the folder sync didn’t function, the web access system did. Using this method allowed me to get a feel for what Canonical was aiming to offer its users. As soon as the server/client issue was fixed, I decided to play around with syncing files and then looking at them on the online system. This is when I found Ubuntu One’s second problem.

Disappointingly, as soon as Ubuntu One’s client started to work properly, their online system failed. So, is this out of the kettle and into the fire?

Again, this failed in a manner that is difficult to understand. You set up a Ubuntu One account by using a Launchpad account. I went to one.ubuntu.com, the Ubuntu One site, clicked “Sign In”, input my login details, and was redirected to the home page again with no feedback message. So, I clicked “Sign In” again, and I was once again redirected back to the homepage. Seems like some authentication issues were going on between the Ubuntu One and Launchpad systems.

As with the previous issue, my problem isn’t how the system failed — I’m a programmer, I know how things can go wrong — it’s with the fact that no feedback was given to the user. It simply didn’t work.

Conclusion

As I finish up this post, I see that Ubuntu One’s online system is functional again. However, as I’ve tested this throughout the day, it seems like it was down for at least a few hours. Overall, this is not a bad downtime, but it does tarnish the launch.

To be frank, I feel a bit bad being so harsh to software and services that I am getting access to for free; however, as per Canonical’s own press release, they are extremely-focused on the user experience. As a user, I have to say that my experience with the new Ubuntu One service was less than good.

I know that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, believes that Ubuntu can take on Microsoft’s Windows head on. I also believe that Ubuntu has this potential; however, launch experiences like this aren’t going to win any new fans. One of the biggest disappointments that many people have with Microsoft is that many of their products, Windows included, feel like they were rushed out of development just to get a release.

Considering that Ubuntu One and Ubuntu are both Canonical creations, it looks really bad when Canonical can’t even get their own products to work together properly.

It’s been a month since my last post. For all my regular readers, I’m very sorry for the absense.

There’s a lot of intersting stuff going on right now. Fortunately, with so much going on, I shouldn’t have a lack of topics to talk about.

To get the old post ball rolling again, how could I not start back up with Ubuntu 9.04?

Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, is scheduled to be released on April 23rd. Even though it has been a mere six months since Intrepid Ibex went to release, the Jackalope promises some good stuff:

• GNOME 2.26 -  This latest release of GNOME includes a number of features, such as: better multi-monitor support (I look forward to testing this out), a new tool to handle burning disks (Brasero), a plugin promising easier file sharing (even on Bluetooth connections), UPnP media playback support in the GNOME Media Player, new volume control that supports per-application volume control when using PulseAudio (I love this feature in Vista and am excited to get it in Ubuntu). This is just a few of the features that picqued my interest. For more details, see GNOME 2.26’s release notes.
• X.Org Server 1.6 – This new version of the X server promises great improvements to the free drivers available for a large variety of cards, primarily for Intel and AMD graphics. The AMD deal is very exciting. It’s a big topic though, so I’m going to talk about it in more detail later.
• Linux Kernel 2.6.28 – As with most kernel releases, a lot of things have changed. Some of the changes that I found interesting (and that I could understand the value of) are: stable implementation of the Ext4 file system and improved memory management for GPU memory via GEM (the foundation for improving Linux graphics in the future). For a full list of features, check out the breakdown at Kernel Newbies.
• Eucalyptus – Adds cloud computing capabilities to Ubuntu’s server offering. I’m excited to try this out.
• Check out the release notes overview for more information about the new features.

As with most new software, there are some caveats to be alert of. I recommend reading the release notes if you are upgrading. Pay specific attention to the removal of Ctrl+Alt+Backspace support by default and the change to update notifications.

I hope that you are looking forward to the release as much as I am. When the Jackalope goes golden and I have a chance to test it out, I’ll definitely post about my experiences here.

As I mentioned before, I want to switch from using Subversion for project code collaboration and versioning to Git.

I’m switching not because I have some idealogical dread of Subversion or its methods. In fact, I quite like how much easier Subversion has made handling code collaboration. The problem I ran into is that Subversion has become doggedly slow and bloated.

For example, a simple project with a current working size of 2.9MB has a Subversion repository that is a massive 98MB in size. Furthermore, it takes a full four minutes to commit a change, even a simple one-line change to a text file. During this commit process, my server’s dual quad-core processors are essentially maxed. Why the repository has become so amazingly large and why the commits take so long, I’ll never know. The maxing out of my server for four minutes per commit is also unacceptable since there are times where minor changes will need to be made to more than a dozen repositories at a time. Multiply the number of commits by 4 minutes a piece, and not only is a terminal on my system tied up for more than an hour, but my server’s CPU is maxed for just as long.

Beginning last week, I dug into Git and learned what I needed to know. The initial impressions are great; however, Git is not without its problems either. The primary problem with Git is that its syntax is extremely-obscure, IMHO.

Subversion was my first version control system, and I only started using it a few months ago. Still, I had no problem setting up remote Subversion repositories, properly setting up read-only and write privilege rules for specific people, getting the repositories to work appropriately, writing automation scripts in Perl that linked into the hooks, and wrapping the whole deal in WordPress to allow for easy management of the repositories and quick access to archives. From my initial playing around with Subversion to having a functional system in use complete with custom code supporting it took maybe two or three work days worth of time.

My progress with Git has been much slower. You might wonder why I’m bothering with Git and not looking elsewhere then. Frankly, I have found that Git has everything I want (speed, lack of redundant file stores, hooks, etc). It also looks like Git can offer some nice enhancements to how we develop projects as branches can be used without having severe performance penalties. The only true problem I’ve found with Git so far is the relatively-large learning curve. Fortunately, I’m just about done with reading, and I’ve learned all the basics I need to know to implement a system I want.

I started with Git by jumping into the wading pool at GitHub. My experience was very good. I highly recommend using GitHub if you have a public project, a private project without specific needs, or just want to try Git out. There are a lot of options at GitHub, and they very nearly had everything I wanted. One of the main limitations at GitHub is the inability for an account to allow other accounts to make repositories for it. For many projects/companies, this won’t be a problem. For us, it is a critical issue. I want to allow certain people to create new repositories, but I don’t want to have to give them “the keys” to the main account in order to allow them to do this.

So, I’m sticking with a self-hosted solution for our repositories since I can code up a clean interface that allows anyone with commit access to create whatever repositories they need. I also gain many other customization advantages this way.

Setting up remote repositories, especially private ones with selective access can be a challenge with the tools that come with Git. In fact, they were so much of a challenge that I gave up on them. I ended up using Gitosis which supports multiple “users” that authenticate using their SSH key and allows for selective repository access for these users.

Since Gitosis doesn’t appear to have any official site, it’s use, just like Git itself, is a bit of a difficult thing to grasp. Fortunately, there are some great tutorials on getting starting with Gitosis. I recommend this Gitosis tutorial as it is the main one that I referred to in order to get everything working.

If this topic looks like it is gaining interest, I’ll probably do some follow up post with more specifics of how I set everything up, what config tweaks I used, and maybe details about my custom interfaces.

FYI: I converted that 98MB Subversion repository to Git using the git-svn tool. The same repository with all the tags and history preserved weighed in at a mere 6.9MB as a Git repository.

There’s a very good chance that you have already heard of the game World of Goo. If not, check out this video to get a taste.

This game has a number of great things going for it:

1. It’s a heck of a lot of fun to play.
2. The world if very unique and has a fun feel to it.
3. The music really sets the mood for the different areas.
4. It supports Windows, Mac, and Linux.
5. It’s DRM free.

These days, I find great favor in things that 1) have Linux support and 2) are DRM free. Since World of Goo looked like a ton of fun and had both of those, the $20 price tag was nothing. Frankly, the price is very small when you consider the many hours of fun that you can have with all the goo balls.

I ran World of Goo both on one of my Windows Vista machines and on my Ubuntu machine at home. It worked very well on both platforms. Even the Linux version was very smooth even though I’m running Compiz.

FYI: If you want to run this on Linux, you can get the software as a DEB or RPM package or as a tar.gz archive with all the application files. I recommend usingone of the package files. Since the packages are built for 32-bit, you will need to use these instructions if you have a 64-bit distro.

I highly recommend World of Goo, but you don’t have to have blind trust in my opinion. You can download the demo and try it out for yourself.

You might be interested in their post about the release of the Linux version. The day of the Linux release, sales were 40% higher than their previous highest-selling day. “There is a market for Linux games after all ,” said one of the developers after updating the post.

I recently watched the entirety of the Revolution OS documentary. While it definitely is not a video that can be enjoyed by most people, nor even most computer users, it is a very intersting watch for a number of reasons.

Visiting the documentary’s site, you quickly gain a sense of what this documentary is aimed to be: “… the inside story of the hackers who rebelled against the proprietary software model and Microsoft to create GNU/Linux and the Open Source movement.” However, that’s not what this video is about.

When I first started watching the documentary, I thought I would get this intimate insight into how people made calculated movements against the growing monopoly of Microsoft’s operating systems. In fact, this isn’t anything near what actually happened.

Microsoft and its actions were not the focus of anyone involved in getting the ball rolling on the open source movement. Richard Stallman was motivated to create the Free Software Foundation and started building GNU not because of Microsoft, but because of the actions of administrators that wanted to control access to computer systems, by hardware vendors that didn’t release the source for their drivers, and by a myriad of other things. If Bill Gates and his company, Micro-Soft (as it was called at the time), was any consideration, it was merely another straw on the camel’s back.

There are many other surprises like this in the documentary, and it is why I highly recommend those that are interested watch it and pay attention. You will gain a good beginning understanding of the foundation and history of GNU, GPL, FSF, Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel, how the Linux kernel created the opportunity for today’s Linux distros, how the open source movement began, how the open source business model works, and much more.

The documentary may not be perfect. The creators may not have understood what they actually produced. And the material is actually quite dated by now. Just the same, it’s a very good watch, and I recommend that you check it out.

I’m more or less taking the night off. I’ll leave you some good reading material that should cover just about any reader that comes here.

• Make Linux: Harder – Better – Faster
  This page is a great compilation of links on how to improve security, speed, functionality, or appearance of your Linux system.
• Firefox Minefield
  Very interesting version of Firefox that is in development. Apparently, it is capable of massive speed and gives Chrome a run for its money.
• Conky
  A highly-customizable graphical system monitor for your Linux desktop.
• Armed and Dangerous
  A blog I just happened upon today that has many great reads. The topics are varied, but there should be a little something for everyone. I was hooked with the My comment to the FCC on DRM post, as I share many of the feelings that the author does on the subject.
• Swift Weasel
  This project builds Firefox from source to provide optimized builds for the Linux platform. It’s still in the early stages but has potential.

I hope that my big post yesterday makes up for my weak one today.

I have another great Flash game to share with you today. It’s simply called The Space Game, or TSG by its creator, CasualCollective.

TSG puts you in the middle of asteriod fields. Your goal is to either mine enough minerals or survive enemy attack long enough to pass each mission. This sounds simple, but it is actually quite complex while still being managable.

On the resource side, you have energy and minerals. Energy is provided by solar power stations and is used to power all created buildings. Minerals are mined from the asteroids and are used to build new buildings (as well as creating ammo for missile launchers).

The main building for most missions is going to be the mineral miner. This structure is where you gain minerals which are used to build up everything else (including other mineral miners). Watch out though as the asteroids do have a limited amount of minerals. Don’t let too many asteroids run dry or your supply of minerals will quickly disappear.

To defend your base, you can build lasers that have two different upgrade paths and missile launchers. There are a large variety of enemy units that each have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. You must use your knowledge of the specific types of ships to build the appropriate buildings for defense.

There are also support structures such as energy stores which increase the amount of stored energy (great for weathering large attacks which can cause massive power drains) and the repair station which builds drones that automatically repair damaged structures. These structures aren’t strictly needed, but they can mean the difference between success or defeat.

There is one final building: the energy relay. You can’t build your buildings just anywhere and have them work, they need to be in range of power. Since you won’t want to build power stations everywhere, power relays allow you to bridge the gap between power stations and other buildings. These can be a weak link however as each relay can only connect to a total of five buildings and if a relay is destroyed, the power flow is cut off.

Other than the energy relay, all the buildings can be upgraded. It seems that upgrading a building always produces a better cost/benefit ratio than simply building another matching building.

Not only is this game very well designed, but the visuals are quite appealing. Sure, the enemies may appear retro and the buildings are simple, but the backgrounds are great and the user interface is fantastic. In the reviews, someone mentioned that it should be put on XBox Live. I’m sure that a game like this would do extremely well if ported over.

Great work CasualCollective. I look forward to seeing what else you come out with.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and start mining those asteroids.

It’s been nearly two months since I started posting regularly. I’ve just been throwing whatever content I was interested in at the moment day after day. Now it’s time to check in with my readers to see what you want.

I’d like this post to be an open invitation to have regular and new readers alike share what they think about gaarai.com.

Is there something your really like, don’t like, want added, want changed, want more of? Let me know.

Do you have a tutorial, topic, distro, random other morsal that you’d like me to start posting about? Please leave a comment about it.

I’m very sorry for the late posts the past couple of days. Things have been quite busy, and I just haven’t had enough time to finish things up on time.

Today I’d like to introduce you to Auditorium.

Auditorium is a audio/visual logic puzzle Flash game. In the game, you have to use the different tools given to you to redirect the particle stream. As you begin to redirect the stream into specific collectors, specific sounds start to increase in volume. As you fill up all the collectors, you are rewarded with a beautiful symphonic sound.

Not only is Auditorium an intriguing challenge, it is both beautiful and a pleasure to listen to. There are times where I don’t want to successfully pass the level so that I can keep hearing the symphonic sound unique to that level.

You can play the first few levels for free. For a mere $10.99, you can get access to all the levels.

I highly recommend that all you puzzle and music fans try Auditorium out. I can’t be held responsible for addiction.

Today’s post is just going to be a quick tip since I just finished sitting in the car for about four hours. I spent most of the day with John P, Mrs. P, Cali Lewis, and many other fun people at the AMC Best Picture Showcase at the Northpark AMC in Dallas. Since I live in Oklahoma City, I had to do a bit of driving.

None-the-less, it was a ton of fun. I got to see some movies, get a change of scenery, meet some new people, and even got live video blogged. Anyways, on to the important stuff.

One neat trick I found out about recently when working with Nautilus is how to quickly show and hide hidden files (files or folders that begin with a dot). Simply hit Ctrl+h and the display of hidden files will be toggled. This is great to quickly gain access to hidden folders that you don’t care to type in manually.

Not only does this work in the Nautilus File Browser, but it also works in any file dialog that uses Nautilus. So, next time you are in a save or open file dialog, hit Ctrl+h to show/hide the hidden files and folders. I find this very useful in Gimp which insists on showing me all the hidden stuff by default.