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The newest version of Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn, prompts you to install proprietary codecs when trying to play e.g. an MP3 file. It displays the following message:

The use of some of this software may be restricted in some countries. You must verify that one of the following is true:

1. These restrictions do not apply in your country of legal residence
2. You have permission to use this software (for example, a patent license)
3. You are using this software for research purposes only

The reason Ubuntu, and Xubuntu, cannot ship these “codecs” (software that allows you to play media in a certain format) is that several companies claim to own patents over these codecs and have been enforcing these patents. You can read more about these issues concerning MP3 at the Wikipedia page on MP3.

Of course there are alternatives to these formats which, if your preferred media player supports it, I highly recommend you to use. However, to be able to use them, you need to know how to, so in this post, I’ll try to highlight the popular alternatives. Note that I am far from an expert in this area, I’ve just done a little research.

There are two ways to save an audio file: lossy and lossless. Lossy means that, when saving an audio file, everything that the human ear cannot hear will not be saved, resulting in a considerably lower file size. Of course, the quality is reduced a little, and the removed sounds cannot be restored unless you have a backup, but the loss is not noticeable unless you are trying very hard. As you might have guessed, lossless audio formats save the file without any loss. As a result, the file size is much larger than for lossy audio formats, though it can be reduced a little by some lossless formats.

The most common lossless audio format is WAV. As far as I know WAV is not restricted by licensing issues in that it can come default on Xubuntu, but it is not open, as in free do edit. The most popular open alternative is Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC). Another advantage of FLAC over WAV is that FLAC, even though it loses no data, still manages to compress the audio file resulting in a little smaller file sizes.

The most common lossy audio format, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, and which I mentioned earlier, is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3. If you haven’t heard of it, then you probably know it by the name MP3. This one not only isn’t open, but also cannot be supported by default in Xubuntu. The most popular alternative is Vorbis, which is half the size but of better quality, like Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio (WMA). Vorbis is mostly used in combination with another format, within a container format called (thanks Bas) Ogg, and then referred to as Ogg Vorbis. To add to the confusion, it sometimes (mostly) is also referred to as simply Ogg. And it gets worse: Theora, an open video format alternative to MPEG-4 Part 14 (or MP4) which is also used in conjunction with Ogg, is also sometimes referred to as simply Ogg, and both use the .ogg extension!
So, when someone mentions Ogg, it is likely to be Ogg Vorbis when he refers to an audio file, and Ogg Theora when it’s a video file.

The Free Software Foundation recently started the Play Ogg campaign, which promotes the use of Ogg instead of MP3. As you can see on their, they mention “Ogg” all the time whereas they mean “Ogg Vorbis”.

If you want to dig yet a little deeper, you might also want to check out Wikipedia’s article on Speex, another format used with often contained in Ogg… In fact, even FLAC can be contained in Ogg, but this is not that common.

Now, on to converting your audio files to these open formats. The software you can use for this is SoundConverter, which you can install by opening Add/Remove… in the Applications menu under System. Make sure you have selected to Show: either “All Open Source applications” or “All available applications”.

When you start SoundConverter from “Multimedia” under the “Applications” menu, you will be greeted with the following screen:

Before converting, you should check the Preferences under the Edit menu, where you can set the format to convert to, the quality of the newly produced file, and where to save it:

After you have set your preferences, you can start adding files that you want to convert to the format you just selected. You can add whole folders at once, or add files one by one:

When you are done adding files, click “Convert” to start the conversion process:

That’s it, you now have your sound files in a shiny other format!

PS. As I said, I’m not an expert, so if anyone has anything to add (preferably backed by sources) please do so in the comments on this post.

When I found out you could pre-order Ubuntu Feisty Fawn CD’s via ShipIt (Ubuntu’s free-of-charge CD shipping service) I immediately did so. This week they arrived and I took some pictures.

The package immediately reminds me about what an oudsider Xubuntu is:

Ubuntu CD Hosted on Zooomr

There is some information on the back about Canonical, and how its projects include the free and open source Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu. Not a word on Xubuntu

Ubuntu CD Hosted on Zooomr

That aside, the CD looks very slick:

Ubuntu CD Hosted on Zooomr

There are some instructions on how to use this CD and a block describing “The Ubuntu Promise”.

Ubuntu CD Hosted on Zooomr

Oh, and there’s some info on Ubuntu on the back too:

Ubuntu CD Hosted on Zooomr

But this is what I consider the best part: stickers!

Ubuntu CD Hosted on Zooomr

Those stickers will look really nice on my pc

Anyway, the reason Xubuntu is not available for free shipping is, according to Mark Shuttleworth:

i don’t think so. xubuntu, as i understand it, is a more specialist environment, so we probably would not fund cd shipments for it. it’s hard to justify on either philanthropic or business grounds. though it would be nice at least if you could order xubuntu

Well… I don’t know what exactly Mark means by specialist environment, I might ask him some time, but ordering at least would be cool. However, I do hope Xubuntu once becomes available for ShipIt because I use it not because my computer is so slow (it could run Ubuntu), but because it is extremely responsive and has some really nifty features Ubuntu doesn’t have. Let’s hope the folks over at Canonical will also come to realize that I’m not the only one. I’m not, am I?

Update: You can now buy your Ubuntu PCs and notebooks from Dell!

You’ll be reading this a lot the coming days, but I think I’m one of the first: Dell will be shipping Ubuntu! Ubuntu has announced it at their website, Dell at theirs (with a video interview with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu).

I’m sorry that I’m not posting unique content like I normally do, but it’s just very exciting! Perhaps it does not matter that much to you, but look at the average consumer. They can now buy a PC and use Ubuntu without having to install it, and all hardware that comes with that PC will just work with Ubuntu! And if Ubuntu (Linux) becomes more popular, it will probably attract more developers, which means that we end up with an even better product!

This is really cool, and if this helps Dell to regain their #1 PC vendor status, I’d be very happy

Let’s hope that the Linux community will put their money where their mouth is, otherwise it will be another while before another large computer manufacturer will even consider putting Linux on their PC’s.

How did it come this far, you ask?

Good question. Firstly, Dell losts its position as #1 PC vendor on HP. Of course, Dell wanted to take back that position, and thus adopted a new strategy. From now on, it would listen to its customers. They did this with the Dell Idea Storm website. The idea was that visitors could submit ideas for Dell, on which other visitors could vote. This allowed Dell to easily view which ideas were most popular, and thus which idea had most consumer demand.

However, the results were not quite what they expected. The most popular idea was that of pre-installed Linux, closely followed by pre-installed OpenOffice.org, pre-installed Firefox and a whole slew of other open source requests. Well, Dell had asked, and the whole world could see what the answer was. On the Direct2Dell blog, Dell published a Linux survey which, among others, asked those who took the survey which Linux distribution they would prefer. Meanwhile, Michael Dell revealed that he too uses Ubuntu. Apparently, Ubuntu emerged from the survey as being the most popular, as this morning (at least, in the Netherlands) rumours spread Dell would ship Ubuntu. One of Canonical’s employees announced it on his blog but later had to remove that. However, now it has been officially announced and hopefully soon you’ll be able to order your Ubuntu PC’s! Until then, you’ll have to do with the instructions on how to install Ubuntu Feisty Fawn Dell published on its website April 30th.

Do you also sometimes find yourself desperately checking for new emails, afraid as you are to miss anything? Well, that time is over now, with the extremely handy Mail Watcher Panel plugin! If you set it up correctly, you can get it to notify you of new messages in a nice popup balloon and gives you easy access to your email.

Of course, the first step is to add this plugin. Not that difficult: right click a panel, “Add New Item”, then in that window select “Mail Watcher”, then click “Add”.

You then get the “Edit Properties” window. In this window you can select what type of email you want to watch by clicking “Add”.

Now, that’s very cool and all, that it checks your e-mail, but we’d like to go a bit further. First, we want it to open our email when we click the Mail Watcher icon. If you use some kind of web mail, e.g. Gmail, then we can set the “Run on click” command to firefox -new-tab http://gmail.comThat will open a new tab in Firefox that will display your email. If you use an email program like Thunderbird, you can set this command to that program, e.g.: thunderbird

Now that we have that set, let’s set the coolest feature - the notification balloon! First, we will need to have libnotify-bin installed, so fire up the Synaptic Package Manager and install that. Then we can add the “Run on new messages” command: notify-send "New mail" "You have new messages in your inbox" -i xfce-newmail

Tada! Now you are all set and will be notified when you receive a new email.

You can now request your CD’s of Ubuntu 7.07 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), to be delivered free of charge, via ShipIt.

With the previous version of Ubuntu, Edgy Eft, you could only request CD’s of Dapper Drake, an earlier release of Ubuntu that came with Long Term Support.

When, a few days ago, the ShipIt website announced they were preparing to ship Ubuntu Feisty, I had already half expected this: you cannot request free CD’s of Xubuntu.

Too bad, but if you have a slow internet connection, apparently you can’t have your share of fun with Feisty.

Oh, and if you prefer the “Long Term Support” version of Ubuntu, you’re out of luck, because apparently, it no longer is available for shipping.

Ah well, fingers crossed for Feisty+1… (the Gutsy Gibbon)

You guys must remember Jessamyn, the librarian who posted a video about installing Ubuntu at, where else, the library.

Well, by some strange coincidence, which cannot be explained rationally, I ran into her again on the tubes. I followed the user profile link at this comment on Ask MetaFilter to end up at her profile page.

Of the billions of unknown users of the internet, we are two.

What are the chances?, I ask you!! The mind blows.

In other news, there is no news - I’m on the slow track to the Ph.D.

I woke up on Thursday with a left arm more painful than a 100 episodes of Wheel of Fortune. I had almost pulled an all-nighter the night before to finish reviewing/correcting a paper. I went to the doctor, fearing the worst. My left wrist was aching, and no change of position or angle would suppress the hurt.

The doctor said I had tenosynovitis - which is a member of the much talked-about Repetitive Strain Injuries. He advised me against using the laptop on my lap - this keep my hands all hunched up together. He also advised a couple of days of rest. So needless to say, I haven’t typed much over the weekend, though I wanted to write a short guide on implementing a Getting Things Done workflow in Linux. I had set things up for GTD the past week, and the search for tools that work on Linux was frustrating, to say the least. I finally had to narrow it down to an online tool that seems very capable of the task. I have been itching to write the article and yet have resisted.

Monday brought me back to work, and I thought I should look at options to reduce the risk of recurrence of the pain. For two reasons - the pain was real bad, and the doctor said that repeated occurrences of RSI would lead to the much-dreaded Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and perhaps permanent numbness of the digits in my hands.

GNOME is very advanced when it comes to providing methods to save your hands.
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Ubuntu offers a lot of fonts, in addition to the defaults installed, and the MicroSoft msttcorefonts package, in its repositories. All these fonts mentioned here are provided as packages, which can easily installed using command line tools like apt-get or using Synaptic. These fonts will come in handy for designing flyers, or for designing headers and graphics for the web using the Gimp. Also, some of these fonts are pretty commonly used to render pages, like Lucida.

I will save the packages with the biggest collection of fonts for the end here. Since I have included screenshots of most of the fonts, and this article is sorta long, please read on by clicking the “More” link below.

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Via Chris Ilias’ Blog comes this gem of a tip.

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird, and love the threaded view, but hate losing the threaded view whenever you click on “Sender” or “Date” to sort the messages, then this is the tip for you. This helps you keep the threaded view regardless of how you sort the messages.

Go to Tools–>Options–>Advanced–>General, and select the Config Editor option.

In the Config Editor, search for “mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads” by typing it in at the top. When you see the preference, change the value from “True” to “False” by double-clicking on it, or by right clicking and changing the value. This will help you keep the threaded view stuck across the different sorting methods.

I find the threaded view useful when browsing the list of bug-related emails, for one. Of course, I use the Claws GTK email client much more than I do Thunderbird, but I have Thunderbird setup on an infrequently used office computer, and I thought many of you might be using Thunderbird anyways.

The utility “tee” is very useful for plumbing on the command line. Curiously enough, it gets its name from the T-splitter used in plumbing, shown below:

Say you want to run a command, and be able to see the output and errors on the screen, and be able to save them to a file. That’s where tee comes in, so you could do a:
$sudo apt-get upgrade 2>&1 | tee ~/apt-get.log
…to run apt-get upgrade and save the output and errors to the file apt-get.log in your home directory.

Purists please excuse the following explanation The “2″ refers to the “tap” from which the errors pour out (called stderr). The “1″ refers to the tap from which the output pours out. The 2>&1 makes the errors to also pour out of the output tap. So then stderr goes to stdout. The pipe “|” redirects the output to tee. Now tee splits the output of the previous command two ways, and puts it both in ~/apt-get.log and in the standard output, which happens to be your screen/terminal.

tee is also handy when you have a small permissions problem. Say you want to write some text to a file “filename.txt” owned by the “root” user - you would just use something like:
$sudo vim filename.txt
and then change the file, right?

Now suppose you want to echo what you write, and write the file, all in one command, you then can use tee thusly:
$echo "localhost 127.0.0.1" | sudo tee filename.txt > /dev/null

This would write the text “localhost 127.0.0.1″ to the file filename.txt which is not owned by you. The output of tee itself will go to /dev/null (nothingness) instead of the standard output, which is your terminal.

Don’t lose sleep over this, but someday it will come handy, and when you can figure out why the “sudo” does not apply after the “>” in your command, remember tee and come back here.

For all your command line redirecting needs, and to learn to wield pipes and tees like nunchakus read this excellent page.