Today Google released an open source version of the Gadgets runtime for Linux!

This is extremely cool, obviously, for two reasons: First, you don’t have  to use Google Desktop if you don’t want to, and I guess there are more people who use Beagle, Tracker or Strigi on Linux.

Second, well I already told you, it’s open source!

So my first reaction to this was to head to the official Google Gadgets for Linux site and download the tarball. I installed the dependencies and compiled it, following the HowTo in their wiki.

After the build and install finished I started Google Gadgets with the -s switch to open the sidebar. After adding some gadgets it looked like this:

As you can see, it is just a subtle, semi-transparent black bar sitting on your desktop. It uses “real transparancy” which means you should be running Compiz or some other compositing manager.

I don’t know how good the desktop integration is altogether, but the Gadgets correctly pick up the time from my system and even the network status. Sound also works using GStreamer. The signal-strength and name of my current wireless network is shown. The source for this is NetworkManager, which is used by default In Ubuntu and other well known Linux distros like Fedora and OpenSUSE, making this a smart choice.

I had to set up the weather gadget manually and it didn’t pick up my location form my weather applet in the Gnome panel.

Other gadgets I tried didn’t show up at all or looked very bad with stretched images and barely readable text, making it clear that this really is alpha quality software right now.

To add more Gadgets, there is a browser application that looks like this:

You can add gadgets to the sidebar like shown above, but you can also keep them like normal applications on the desktop. To do this, just drag them out of the sidebar or run Google Gadgets without the sidebar at all.

On the right side you can see the Google Adsense Gadget I dragged to my desktop.
This shows the incredible wealth I have accumulated with this blog.

So what do I think about Google Gadgets?

Well right now the software quality is pre-beta as I already said, but I firmly believe this piece of software will be great for the Linux Desktop in the future.

Gadgets are not exactly a killer feature, but it’s a nice thing to have around to get information, that often changes, quickly. MacOS X has Widgets, Windows Vista has… whatever they call it, and now Linux has Google Gadgets. Yes I know, there are already other solutions for Linux like GDesklets or Screenlets, but everything I tried felt very rough around the edges and had little to no momentum behind it.

With Google Gadgets, we get the best of both worlds: A solution backed by a big company with many Gadgets already out there and something that is open source. Additionally, it’s the only product right now working on all three major platforms, which might turn out as the feature that makes this the de-facto standard. A sign that Google is serious about this is the fact that you can build this against GTK, like I did, but also against Qt, so there is integration for KDE aswell.

I will closely follow the development of Google Gadgets and I will keep you updated on it. Right now, I’m looking for a .deb file because building this from isn’t exactly nice, so if anyone has a link I will gladly update this post and include it.

Update:

There is a package available at the PPA for the Google Gadget team

Check the feature tour to find out about all the exciting stuff that is new in this release, some of the higlights are

• GNOME 2.22 with GFVS, a new file system abstraction layer that makes many file operations faste
• Xorg 7.3 with a new screen resizing and rotating utility that makes manging mutliple monitor easier
• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• Wubi, a new installer that installs Ubuntu inside a file in Windows without changing the partitions
• Transmission, a lightweight but full-featured BitTorrent client
• Brasero, a disc-burning application
• A firewall called UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) that makes it easier to allow or disallow connections via command-line

Ubuntu is available for download on the Ubuntu website. Alternatively, free Ubuntu CDs can be ordered through Ubuntu ShipIt.

Ubuntu ShipIt is a service sponsored by Canonical where anyone can order Ubuntu CDs free of charge. This is especially useful for people with slow internet connections or restricted transfer volumes.

So to everybody who can’t or doesn’t want to download the next release: head over to ShipIt and order Ubuntu for free.

tim@tim:~$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
89 sudo
42 ls
42 cd
31 rm
18 java
17 unrar
16 wget
16 gksudo
15 ajcore
10 mv

The software isn’t available on the home page of Adobe directly but can be downloaded at the Adobe Labs. The installer is a binary installer that requires root privileges, which were gained after a window prompted me to enter my password. This is the standard way in Ubuntu and therefore handled correctly.

The installation itself is fast and only consists of this window:

After a few seconds, Adobe AIR is installed into /opt and a new menu entry called “Adobe AIR Application Installer” can be found in the menu. All it does is opening a file chooser where you can select and .air file to install it.

The first application I tried to install was the Adobe Media Player.  When I opened the .air file I was greated by this error:

Sorry, an error has accoured

This application requires an update to Adobe AIR but downloading that update on your system is not allowed by your administrator. Please contact your administrator.

I don’t know whether there is a workaround for this problem and I didn’t bother to search for one. Instead, I tried other applications. The next one I tried was a Google Analytics interface, which installed whithout problems. I won’t write anything about that application itself because that’s not in the scope of this review.

There are many more AIR applications on the Adobe marketplace, but they are not installable because the website claims that Air is not available for my system.

I will leave it at that for now and come to my conclusions regarding AIR on Linux:

• Adobe AIR for Linux really is alpha software. If you don’t have strong reasons to install it, don’t
• Adobe should settle on one way to deploy Linux software. Flash is available as rpm and tarball, Reader is also available as deb, now AIR brings its own .bin installer. The right way to do things is to offer packages for the major Linux distributions, like Skype does
• Flash is a core part of AIR and Flash on Linux is pretty bad. For most people, Flash consumes lots of CPU power, crashes Firefox and makes fullscreen video impossible. If Adobe doesn’t fix Flash, Air won’t be any better
• Last but not least: It’s great to see that Adobe shows interest in Linux and a runtime that works on all three major desktop operating systems will probably bring more software to Linux. If, however, Adobe continues to treat Linux as a third class citizen AIR might do more harm than good to Linux because software vendors won’t release native software but only “Airplications” that only run badly on Linux, similar to software running on Wine

The site closely resembles Dell’s IdeaStorm, which incidentally contains a fair share of Ubuntu-related entries itself.

In my opinion, Ubuntu brainstorm is a great addition to classic bug-tracking and specifications, providing a good way to measure the interest in certain features of the Ubuntu community at large. Especially users who aren’t comfortable with diving into Launchpad or other more technical ways will now have the option to make their voice heard with a convenient and easy website.

So go ahead, visit Ubuntu brainstorm, start submitting your ideas and vote on existing ones.

This post is just to inform everyone who is interested that I am not dead and neither is this blog.

I won’t make any promises on how often I will post, but there is one thing you can definitely look forward to: a review of Ubuntu on the Dell XPS M1330.

I ordered the notebook a week ago and according to Dell it will arrive in the fourth week of february. You can expect my review in late february or early march.

Now just a month later there is an open-source implementation and a free GIMP plugin to download.

Here is an example of what can be accomplished with this software:

Picture source: hackszine.com

Port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.

If they really mean games and not game servers this might be a major breaking point for Linux gaming and Linux on the desktop in general.

Valve’s Steam platform is probably the number one way to purchase games digitally, and if it gets ported to Linux it might be a big enough incentive for other game develops to port ther games to Linux, too.

You can see the boot manager GRUB and the list of Kernels to choose from, along with a movie-style “Access Denied” message:

Normally this isn’t the point where you have to authorize in Ubuntu, and you could just use recovery mode to go to a root shell, but hey, it’s free software so they could have just modfied it to act like this.

Google Desktop for Linux indexes the files on your computer which leads to almost instant search results.

The software sits in the tray area and is most easily accessed by tapping the Strg key two times, which will show this search box:

The search results appear as-you-type and the files can be opened by a click on the drop down list. If there are many results they can also be listed in the web browser with an interface that closely resembles Google’s online search.

In fact, most of the software interface, like the preferences is only accessible in a web brower. For example, this is the index status on my computer right now, shown in Firefox:

As of now, I didn’t do a thorough test, but this is what I think of the software so far:

Pros:

• It’s always nice to see a company acknowledging the Linux user base.
• The indexing process is very light and barely noticable.
• Google probably shares the same codebase with the Windows and Mac versions so it is fairly proven software.

Cons:

• It’s closed source. This isn’t a show stopper for me, but it may be for some of you, and in any way, an open source version would be better.
• The Windows and Mac version are much more feature rich, for example the Linux version doesn’t support Google Gadgets at all
• The UI is mainly in the web browser, which means it is rather badly integrated with the desktop. I hope they add a panel applet and other means of integration in future versions.
• The native (GTK+) UI doesn’t fit in very well, the context menu of the tray icon isn’t aligned as it is in Gnome apps and no entries have an icon. The dialogues have the button order reversed:
• Google Desktop creates a top level entry in the Applications menu. I know no other software (including Google’s Picasa and Earth) that does this and I have know idea why they chose to to this.

Conclusion:

Google Desktop is one more of those proprietary applications that is now also available on Linux. Whatever your views on “software ethics” are, you probably should agree that this is a good thing. Many people will oppose to using this software and there is nothing wrong with that, but for other people this will lower the barrier to using Linux, and even if it’s only a tiny bit.

I, for one, will use Google Desktop from time to time, but what I’m really looking forward to is Google Talk for Linux.

Hi Carrie! This is just a note that might convince you that this really is one of my old blogs

Ubuntu, like other free operating systems (including all Linux, BSD and Solaris flavors), is a very modular system. Naturally, the advantage of the modular approach is that you can choose a piece of software based on your needs and preferences. If you don’t like a certain aspect of the software or you dislike the software as a whole: exchange it.

• You don’t like the behaviour or look of your windows? Switch to a window manager that suits you better.
• You don’t like the Gnome desktop? Use KDE.
• You are a command line junkie and don’t want any graphical software? Then whipe it all of your hard drive and enjoy the blinking cursor.

I could go on with this list but I guess you get the idea.

For me, it is important that I use software that I tested and found to be the best, and not because it already came with the computer.

A stable system that doesn’t have to be renewed

I don’t know how long ago I installed Ubuntu on my PC, and that’s a good sign. I just installed the system once and just upgraded when a new release was out.

On Windows a scenario like that is impossible, because the system basically wears out. When you remove applications there are alway files and registry entries that stay on the computer. The system gets slower and more unstable until it reaches a point where you have to reinstall… and its starts all over.

Ubuntu had problems with defective updates in the past, too. The difference is: there is always a solution that isn’t “remove everything and start new”.

Competition is good for technological progress

Vista has been released and the critical consensus seems to be “Oh, that is some nice stuff, but what did you actually do in the past 5 years?”

The answer is: They’ve done everything to maintain their position in the market. And unfortunately, that was significantly less than one would expect from a multi-billion dollar company.

Be honest, If you could sell a mediocre product for a high price, and you know that people will buy it, would you invest more money and time to make the product better? Probably not.

Software is there to do a job, not to benefit a company

If you look at successful open source projects like Firefox or the Video Lan Client and you compare them to proprietary software like Internet Explorer and iTunes you will realize that the former are almost entirely used voluntarily while the latter are often used because the user is somehow forced to do so.

If the user is being told: To watch this you need the Real Player the user will most likely install it. And I think we all agree that it’s not because the Real Player is particularly great.

I’m not claiming that all Ubuntu software has feature parity with their closed-source counterparts but you can be sure that the software is written to do a job that its developer(s) intended it to do, and not because some marketing people decided that it will do great for their company when software forcefully nests itself in the user’s system, overwrites file associations and is nearly impossible to remove.

The many, many little things

The reasons above are very important and they stick out, but there are countless little reasons that, together, are equally, maybe more important.

Be it the way the community interacts, be it the philosophy that drives Ubuntu and the projects that make Ubuntu possible, be it a little feature in some application that you always wanted: Ubuntu has many reasons that speak for it and you are invited to test it for yourself.

If you never had the chance to test Ubuntu, download it right now and run the Live CD. It is free and has no strings attached, so who knows, maybe you will soon find your personal reasons why you want to use Ubuntu.

You can change the color to your liking and even use an image instead, although I’m perfectly happy with the default, which looks like this:

Try it out yourself and download the extension at Mozilla’s Add-ons page.

That means when you buy a Dell with Ubuntu you…

• don’t have to waste your time replacing Windows with Ubuntu
• don’t pay the “Microsoft Tax”
• show your support for Ubuntu and the people and projects that make Ubuntu possible

More information is available in the Ubuntu press release and a Dell Blog Entry that features a video of an interview with Mark Shuttleworth.

To follow which software packages are being uploaded to Gutsy refer to the gutsy-changes mailing list or use the more convenient Gutsy RSS feed provided by Dennis Kaarsemaker of Ubuntu-NL.

As usual, the uploading starts with the tool chain, a new version of GCC, glibc and so on. Naturally it’s very risky to upgrade to an unstable version right at the beginning of the development cycle, but if you don’t mind fixing a broken system from time to time, go ahead, open your /etc/apt/sources.list and change every feisty to gutsy.

I’ll say it again: If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, don’t upgrade to gutsy.

If you are interested in contributing to Ubuntu Gutsy, here are two ways to do so:

• Start working with Launchpad: Launchpad is Ubuntu’s central tool to manage bug reports, translations, feature ideas (blueprints) and more. If you want to help out with any of these, you will need to get an account. The easiest way to get started on Launchpad is probably by taking the tour.
• Participate in the Ubuntu Forums: There is a subforum for Gutsy Gibbon where you can share and exchange your ideas with other Ubuntu community members. The forum staff will try to connect the users with the developers so that everyone can be a part of the development process. Before you start new posts be sure to have read the top (sticky) posts which contain valuable information.