Ubuntu
Loco Team Contact Change
As Efrain already pointed out I have officially taken over as South African Ubuntu loco team contact from Jonathan Carter(highvoltage) with the other being Morgan Collett.
Hopefully I will have some more great news about Ubuntu-za to blog about in the future.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Jonathan for all his hard work and effort he has put into this team and wish him all the best. The growth over the last year has been inspiring. I would also like to thank him for continuing to host our wiki.
So Shiretoko isn’t Firefox So Why Call It That?
I have been using the standard Ubuntu Jaunty repo version of Firefox-3.5 since before it was in the standard security repo when it was in fta’s ppa With this version I expected it to be buggy or have oddities such as being called Shiretoko. With the standard repository version I expect it to be Firefox
I know the reasoning was mentioned here some of the reasoning makes sense but if a user chooses to manually install firefox-3.5 they expect to get Firefox since this wont ever auto auto-update from 3.0 to 3.5 with out the users expressed permission I see this as an annoyance.
Calling it Shiretoko is annoying. Having the user-agent string below tends to break sites.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090701 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Shiretoko/3.5
Now I am not saying call this thing Firefox if it is really an ubuntu build of Shiretoko but since Shiretoko isn’t a standard or mainstream browser it wont be in any Device Database. such as WURFL or DeviceAtlas I say these because I mostly work with mobile related technology but the reasoning applies for any device db or user-agent checker.
Face Book makes horrid pop-up windows.
Use the Chat list on the right to start a conversation.You’re using an old web browser to browse Facebook. To use the full version of Chat from within a normal Facebook window, please upgrade your browser. Switch to Firefox.
Changing the user-agent of a browser in this day and age severely impacts on a users browsing experience. Since most websites now try to do browser detection (Some better then others) they generate different output for different browsers or even worse sorry this website only works in Netscape Navigator and IE 5 and above.
Ubuntu Pc Badges For ZA
A while ago I read Free Ubuntu Stickers but sadly they weren’t on offer in South Africa and I am sure the import duties would be more expensive then getting them printed locally so I kinda gave up for a while.
Then a few weeks ago I got my Laptop. It came standard with Windows Vista Business (Is that bad link love?) any how I never relisised how annoying it was to have to look at that Vista badge thing right next to where my left hand is support to rest. I got fed up and phoned around about getting my own Powered by Ubuntu stickers printed. You can’t get 1 or 10 printed they wont even listen to you so I decided it would be a worth while adventure to get 1500 printed and share them amoung the Ubuntu-za community.
I don’t actually intend to charge for the stickers that I currently have had printed. If any one from South Africa would like to see what we can do about getting you one please put your name on the Pc Badges page
Please excuse the bad quality photos I am not a photographer and the light was bad (and my gimp skills are shocking)
Before:
After:
Some of the stickers
And for those of you that want svg source this is based on some one elses Ubuntu Case Badges source but I can’t seem to find their blog post right now (I will update to include thanks when I find it).
Link found: http://doctormo.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/zareason-makers-of-swag/ They are based on these Thanks doctormo well actually https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MassachusettsTeam/Projects/AluminiumCaseBadges since here is where the source is located.
Congrats Joeb454
While browsing the forums and noticed that Joeb454 had a shiny new title “Ubuntu Forums Loco Admin” he has become the point of contact for loco team within the forums.
You can see the rest of his contributions here.
Congrats.
Joeb454; Brings new meaning to the term “Jolly green giant” 
Mxit Attempt packaging
Mxit released their open platform a while ago as part of this platform they created an plug-in for libpurple the library that both Pidgin and Adium.
I am very pleased that the code is available as well as deb’s for my ubuntu machine. When running the deb it was presented with
MXit libPurple Plugin
MXit libPurple Plugin
(Converted from a rpm package by alien version 8.72.)
I was under the impression that debs were easier to create then rpm’s? Also why are they making rpm’s as their primary packaging and trying to convert to deb’s also I find it odd that they have had more downloads for the deb platform
- MXit Pidgin Plugin v1.1.1 – Fedora 8/Red Hat (.rpm) (92.3 KiB, 364 hits)
- MXit Pidgin Plugin v1.1.1 – Debian/Ubuntu (.deb) (91.1 KiB, 387 hits)
- MXit libPurple Plugin v1.1.1 – Source Code (.tgz) (64.6 KiB, 446 hits)
Then again why are all those users downloading the source code? Is it because they don’t provide a 64bit arch package? Is it because they are removing the mxit promotional image at startup?
Who knows but I don’t really like to see my debs being created by Alien where there is a perfectly great Launchpad ppa’s Mxit.