I’ve been very busy with life and work in general and I haven’t blogged for a few months now. I finally get the chance to talk about something I worked on in my spare time.

I use Cryptkeeper to decrypt and mount some encrypted directories that I have in my Ubuntu One space but I noticed that its applet didn’t make use of Ubuntu’s Appindicators. Since the whitelist for old style applets had been removed in Raring, I was left with no way to use Cryptkeeper. For this reason I rolled up my sleeves and I worked on a patch to (optionally) enable support for Appindicators in the program.

The main problem I had to face is the fact that Appindicators don’t support right click gestures, so I had to create an entry in the indicator (labelled “Edit”) to allow users to get information, change passwords or delete encrypted directories. Clicking on that entry pops up a dialog which then hooks into the old dialogs to perform the said operations.

I uploaded my work in Saucy and made packages for Precise and Raring available in my PPA.

I hope you enjoy my work!

On 2 January my father passed away at 63, after a little more than a year fighting (a rather aggressive type of) lung cancer. I won’t go into the details of how it went but let it suffice to say that pain and tears have been our bread and butter.

A little bit of history

My father was an honest and kind man who did everything he could for his family. A big part of who I am today, I owe it to him. Since when I was little he always encouraged me to learn and contributed a lot to my education, ranging from history and science to politics.

He supported my (at the time) crazy idea to pursue my current career (as I graduated in a field other than Computer Science) as he’s always believed in me. My father – an electrical engineer who worked in the world of software development – was more than glad to know that I had developed an interest in programming and supported my early studies. I’ll never forget that time when I was coding my first port of Envy (my first program) to the Python programming language and I was stuck and feeling miserable, almost ready to give up, when he sat down beside me and helped me solve the problem. From that point on, nothing stopped me from learning and from facing any other kind of programming problem, which I always take as a challenge.

The funeral and the support we received

I was really amazed at the warmth of my friends and colleagues, my father’s friends, our relatives and neighbours. Whether through the phone, telegram or in person at the funeral, we felt all the love they feel for us and it was beautiful. We couldn’t have asked for more. I’d like to thank you all.

Conclusions

Despite the tragic conclusion, I can say that I’m a much better and mature man than I was when all this misfortune began. This was my father’s last teaching, how to face your worst fears and how to take care of yourself and of the ones beside you in the face of an adverse destiny. It’s a lesson I’ll never forget.

[ubuntu]
fqdn = upload.ubuntu.com
method = sftp
incoming = ubuntu
login = <YOURUSERNAME>
allow_unsigned_uploads = 0


I’ve found sftp to be much more reliable, at least with my (less than stellar) internet connection.

If you’d like to help us test the new drivers, we have 2 updates available:

Nvidia’s (nvidia-current-updates) 285.05.09 and AMD’s fglrx 11.11 release

Please leave your feedback in the bug reports so that the SRU team can promote the drivers (currently in the oneiric-proposed repository) to regular distro updates.

NOTE: you might also want to keep an eye on this twitter page for more updates.

The main problem I wanted to solve was to allow users to see when hamster has an active task, without having to click on the indicator. I implemented two solutions but I enabled only one by default:

• I added a slight blue glow (which you can disable) to the icon so that you can see when there is an active task in hamster.

• I made it possible to have a text label (disabled by default) with the current activity beside the icon. This is quite similar to how the old gnome applet used to work. You can also set the maximum length of this label (the default is 20 characters).

Finally, as promised, I packaged the indicator and set up a PPA with packages for both Natty and Oneiric.

Note: in Oneiric you’ll also have to install my patched hamster-applet, otherwise hamster-applet will crash looking for gnomeapplet (which we no longer ship).

If you want to configure the indicator you can either open gconf-editor and look for /apps/hamster-indicator/ or follow these steps from the command line:

To enable/disable the icon glow:

$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-indicator/icon_glow" --type bool "false"
$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-indicator/icon_glow" --type bool "true"

To enable/disable the activity label:

$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-indicator/show_label" --type bool "true"
$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-indicator/show_label" --type bool "false"

To set the maximum label length:

$ gconftool-2 --set "/apps/hamster-indicator/label_length" --type int "20"

EDIT: you can launch the indicator with the following command:

$ hamster-indicator

I use Hamster for time tracking at work and the lack of an applet which works with Unity’s panel is my main obstacle to the adoption of Unity (which I love BTW). For this reason I hacked on the applet’s code in my (very limited) spare time at weekends and I managed to get what I needed i.e. a functioning appindicator for Hamster. I wasn’t aiming for the perfect example of usability but simply an indicator which could reproduce the functionality of the old applet, therefore feedback is more than welcome from the design team, design enthusiasts, etc.

Note: I know that there was a discussion about integrating Hamster in the Clock indicator but, as I said, this wasn’t my objective, even though I do not exclude future evolutions of the indicator in this direction. I should talk to upstream too.

Implementation

I adopted a rather opportunistic (call it hackish) approach to the problem. Rather than duplicating code or patching the original code, I chose to create a subclass of the HamsterApplet class (from Hamster’s applet.py) and to override the parts that I didn’t deem suitable for the indicator (such as the panel button and the sticky activity window). Long story short, the code in Hamster does all the heavy lifting while my code deals mainly with keeping the indicator updated. A proper solution would probably involve creating a more generic class which both the HamsterApplet class and my new class can inherit, assuming that this is the path that upstream want to follow (as they might have different plans in mind, especially on the user interaction side).

Results

As you can see, the indicator is very simple. I just re-used the icon from Hamster but I’d love to see a monochromatic one instead.

Click on the “New activity” menu item and you’ll get the old activity dialog near the indicator. I had to make the dialog a decorated window as, otherwise, you wouldn’t have a way to hide the dialog without a panel button, if, for example, you clicked on that menu item by mistake. Clicking “Start Tracking” still hides the dialog.

Personally, I’d like to see something smaller than the following dialog, for example without all that’s below the “Today” expander (included) and with the remaining elements arranged in a more space efficient way. Or maybe we could have something other than a dialog to do this (e.g. integration with the Unity dash?). I’m digressing now…

This is the indicator in action. You can click on the activity name so as to get a dialog to edit the current activity or you can also decide to stop the task from the indicator. Of course the old “Add earlier activity” and “Show Overview” dialogs are still there.

Note: the screenshots in this blog post were taken in Maverick 10.10.

How to try it

I haven’t had the time to package it yet but you can simply download the “hamster-indicator” file from the git repository below, make it executable, double click on it and select “run” (at least in Gnome). You also need to have the “hamster-applet” package installed.

The code is hosted here.

I’ll package it and put it in a PPA soon.

1) compiz needs to be updated so that fglrx can work with Unity. Currently the “Classic Desktop” session works well but the “Ubuntu Desktop” one doesn’t. If you’d like to test Unity with the new driver, you can use Unity’s daily builds from the PPA, as described here.

2) currently the driver is not offered for installation in Jockey. A fix is already available in Jockey’s development branch though. In the meantime, if you wish to install the new fglrx driver, you can do it manually by following these commands:

sudo apt-get install fglrx
sudo update-alternatives --config gl_conf (and select the line with fglrx)
sudo update-initramfs -u

and finally reboot. No xorg.conf is required as the driver will be automatically loaded.

Note: despite what the relevant article from Phoronix claims, the driver doesn’t support AMD’s PowerXpress.

There are 2 options available: either buy a 3G usb key or simply use 3G directly from your phone. In the former case (which I wasn’t interested in) the usb key works with Linux and you can even download a QT based dashboard which is supposed to set up the connection for you and it works on Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. While this definitely was a pleasant surprise, the lack of instructions to configure your phone wasn’t as pleasant. The website suggests to contact customer service so that they can provide you with the right configuration for your phone (but it seems that they’re not ready for Android phones). Long story short, I decided to download the dashboard instead and explore its contents hoping to find something useful to set up the APN myself. My research was successful and I thought I would share my findings with you.

Enter the “Settings” tool, then select “Wireless & network settings” -> “Mobile networks” -> “Access Point Names” and add a new profile with “New APN”.

Fill in the fields below as follows:

Name: CoopVoce
APN: web.coopvoce.it
MCC: 222 (set by default)
MNC: 01 (set by default)
Authentication type: PAP
APN type: default,supl

Note: I’m not really sure if MCC and MNC are actually useful.

Leave the rest unset. Save and select your new profile, then go back to the Mobile networks settings screen and select “Data enabled” to turn on your 3G connection.

Since this is mostly aimed at people who live in Italy, here’s the Italian translation:

Per configurare una connessione 3G con CoopVoce (web 500 mega nel mio caso) su di un telefonino con Android, entrare nel pannello delle impostazioni e scegliere la schermata di configurazione delle reti (“Wireless e reti”), poi quella per le “Reti mobili” e in seguito quella dei punti d’accesso (“Nomi punti di accesso”). Aggiungere un nuovo APN e riempire i campi come segue:

Nome: CoopVoce
APN: web.coopvoce.it
MCC: 222 (impostato di default)
MNC: 01 (impostato di default)
Tipo di Autenticazione: PAP
Tipo APN: default,supl

Nota: non sono sicuro dell’utilità di MCC e MNC.

Lasciare il resto non settato. Salvare e selezionare il nuovo profilo e infine tornare alla schermata di impostazione delle reti mobili e attivare la connessione 3G abilitando il traffico dati (opzione “Dati attivati”).

According to Nvidia, drivers 195.36.08 (i.e. the current driver in the
archive) and 195.36.03 might be affected by the same GPU fan speed
issues which affect the Windows driver:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/announcement.php?a=39

I have been using these drivers for while now without experiencing
that problem but, if you want to be on the safe side, I suggest that
you temporarily switch to the open driver until we’re sure that the
problem is fixed. In order to do so you can follow either point 1 (the
easy way) or point 2:

1) Disable the driver with Jockey (the restricted drivers manager) and
restart your computer.

OR

2) Open the terminal and type the following commands:
sudo update-alternatives --config gl_conf (and select the alternative
provided by mesa)
sudo ldconfig
sudo update-initramfs -u
sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_old

and restart your computer.

Sorry for the inconvenience, I’ll keep you posted on the issue.

• EnvyNG and Envy are no more. I had no time to maintain them and I really prefer to work on Jockey (I had already contributed code to it in the past) as it’s our general purpose driver manager.
• The Nvidia installer from Nvidia’s website won’t work anymore because of the new alternatives system that I have implemented in Lucid. I’ll work on this so that it’s fixed before the final release.
• Thanks to the new alternatives system you will be able to have all of the nvidia drivers and the fglrx driver (when the latter will be compatible with Lucid, that is) installed at the same time but use only one at the time. Switching between drivers will only be a matter of launching Jockey and selecting the driver you need. Ideally (in the future, not in Lucid) you won’t even have to do this and Ubuntu will switch to the right the driver on boot.

I hope to be able to blog more about my work soon.