Smile

Even though I’ll be stating the obvious for so many ubuntu users/developers reading this post, I’d like to post a quick recipe for those who don’t know how to easily install the latest version of epiphany with the WebKit backend, as well as all the needed dependencies, without having to mess with compiling the source code (which is not always an easy nor a quick task, by the way).

So here we go

1. First of all, this only works for Ubuntu Jaunty or Karmic, since there are no PPAs available for previous distros to install Epiphany (WebKit PPAs provided since Hardy).
2. Add the PPA’s from the WebKit Team both for installing latest version of WebKit and Epiphany. So, that is, add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file (replace ‘karmic’ with ‘jaunty’ if needed):

   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
   deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/ppa/ubuntu karmic main 
   
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/epiphany/ubuntu karmic main
   deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/webkit-team/epiphany/ubuntu karmic main

3. Import the GPG key of the repo in APT:

   sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 2D9A3C5B

4. Update APT packages cache:

   sudo apt-get update

5. Install the needed packages:

   sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser epiphany-browser-dataepiphany-extensions

6. Just wait and let APT to do its magic

And that’s all. After those simple steps you should be enjoying the last version of  this great and amazingly fast browser (2.29.6 at the time of writing this post), which is nowadays under heavy development, continuously getting better, better and even better on its roadmap towards GNOME 2.30.

So, what are you waiting for? Just go ahead and give it a try if you haven’t done it yet and make it your default browser . Now you don’t have to manually compile all the needed stuff you just don’t have any good excuse not to do it.

And don’t forget to report any issue you find in the bugzilla. Remember feedback (and patches, of course) is the best way to help with improving it even more!

Ah! by the way, almost forgot to say that…

…as another member of the Igalia gang hanging around there this weekend.

See you there guys!

[Update 2010/01/04] As commented by zerwas, there’s an even easier way from Karmic on:

1. Add the PPA’s from the WebKit Team both for installing latest version of WebKit and Epiphany:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webkit-team/ppa
   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webkit-team/epiphany

2. Update APT packages cache:

   sudo apt-get update

3. Install the needed packages:

   sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser epiphany-browser-dataepiphany-extensions

After coming back from an awesome week of holidays in Paris (lovely city, btw!), today I finally managed to get some time for making up what it became the second upstream release of frogr: frogr 0.2

Just trying to give a brief update on “what is new”, here you have an excerpt from the NEWS file:

• Generate ChangeLog from git log with ‘make dist’
• Added .spec file for fedora 11 packaging system (thanks Adrián Pérez)
• Added drag’n'drop support for loading pictures in frogr
• Added support to add tags to pictures (instead of just replacing)
• Fixed (legacy) support for libgnome2 to compile in debian lenny
• Use accesor functions instead direct access and removed some deprecated GTK+ symbols (thanks Javier Jardón)
• Added i18n support and a es_ES lang file (thanks Alejandro Piñeiro, aka API)
• Support silent build rules with automake 1.11 (thanks Javier Jardón)
• Bugfixes and several minor improvements

Entering in more detail, and as you can easily extract from the list above, the main improvements from the user’s point of view are:

• Drag’n'drop now supported, so having to add pictures through the filechooser is no longer the only method to load pictures in frogr.
• New “add tags” dialog, very handy to add tags to some specific pictures before uploading them.
• i18n support, which should make easier to get more contributions for frogr in further releases, in the form of new translations to make it even more accessible for people all over the world (did I say we’re eager for new language files?)

At last, just to mention that you already can find pre-compiled packages for some distros at the web of the project, as well as the source code tarballs in gzip and bzip2 formats. And of course, get the source code from the git repository at gitorius, in case you prefer to directly clone the source tree to make up wonderful and nice patches to contribute with, or just to provide new pre-compiled packages for your favourite distro

So… what else could I say? Just go and get it… Hope you enjoy it as much as I do

Update [2009/10/14]: It seems the other day my mind was still a bit “on holidays” and I screwed it up when creating both the pre-compiled packages and the source tarballs uploaded to the web of the project, so they would just not  work as they should when installing frogr (basically, they would not install files under the proper path so frogr just would not work).

I realized of this yesterday and now everything should be fixed in packages (and tarballs) uploaded in the “Downloads” section of such a web, so if you experienced any problems two days ago just try now again and everything should be fine.

After perhaps quite a long time since I announced the “pre-release” of frogr, back in June, I’m now happy to tell the world that the 0.1 release is finally here, providing the user a very basic but still useful set of features to upload his/her pictures to flickr. Basically, as it’s told in the NEWS file, most important changes in this first release regarding to the code from almost 2 montsh ago are:

• A better UI. Faster and better user experience.
• Basic configuration management to store account details (auth token).
• Support for editing details of multiple pictures at the same time.
• Added status and improved the progress bar usage to show the status of async operations, giving a much better feedback to the end user.
• A better (and more easily hackable) code and design.
• No more .glade files, no more gtk-builder-convert.
• Avoid libgnome dependency if gtk+ >= 2.14 is present
• Still implemented some parts of the UI (menubar) without GtkBuilder to keep compatibility with Gtk+ 2.12 (least version supported)
• Bugfixes and several (minor and major) improvements

As usual you can get the source code at http://gitorious.org/frogr, where development for version 0.2 has already started, btw. And if you visit the project’s web at http://code.google.com/p/frogr you could even find some packages for you favourite distro there as well (currently only i386 packages for Ubuntu hardy, intrepid and jaunty are available, but more flavours and platforms are coming soon: debian, fedora, x86_64…).

For the special case of hardy you’ll need to install a newer version of libflickcurl0 than the bundled in hardy repositories (0.12), which you can get from here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/libflickcurl0 (yes, intrepid package will work fine on hardy).

At last, knowing that people use to love screenshots, here you have three of them showing the current status and UI for frogr 0.1. Yes I know, still not too ‘eye-candy’ but hey!… it’s the 0.1 release! what did you expect? We’ll have time enough to improve the UI in the future as long as frogr gets more mature and complete. And in the meanwhile I honestly think current UI is not a complete disaster either

Hope you find this interesting.

Have fun!

Just in case you were experiencing, like me, some very annoying problems with your NVIDIA graphic card while using Compiz, here you have a very useful option to put inside the “Device” section in your /etc/X11/xorg.org file:

Option         "UseCompositeWrapper" "true"

After activating this option (available for nvidia drivers >= 169.xx) I found that the problems redrawing windows I was suffering, specially when scrolling (very annoying, for instance, when chatting through pidging), just dissapeared. And it was indeed a very annoying problem, since it used to happen very often and in almost any window (although not in Emacs ) in my system, in a way so any information on it just got screwed up so it was completely unreadable… and the only “manual” workaround I had found so far was just to re-scroll the window or select the text I was trying to read, which seemed not to be a very good idea.

Needed to say that I started to see this odd behavior since I “downgraded” my Ubuntu 8.10 down to 8.04 last week (because of some very specific needs), and this strange problem never happened when using Intrepid, so if you’re now using that version perhaps you can just throw this post away to the trash, because then it would not useful at all for you.

But just in case, here you are my two cents, and to make them even more useful, here you are the full configuration of my “Device” section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, which allows me to use a fully accelerated desktop with no problems at all:

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Videocard0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "Quadro NVS 140M"
    Option         "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
    Option         "UseCompositeWrapper" "true"
    Option         "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"
    Option         "NoLogo" "true"
    Option         "backingstore" "true"
    Option         "TripleBuffer" "true"
    Option         "AddARGBGLXVisuals"  "true"
EndSection

Hope this will be useful for you as well .

Update: If you’re still suffering these problems even after adding these lines to xorg.conf, you could try to install the nvidia driver through Envy. These steps worked for me (at the end, the annoying problem appeared again, although not so often than before):

1. Uninstall any other driver you had installed before (through the ubuntu “restricted drivers” manager, or the .run script downloaded from nvidia.com).
2. Install Envy: apt-get install envyng-core
   
3. Shutdown X and install the nvidia driver from a tty terminal: envyng -t

After following these steps, and the simple instructions on screen, by ubuntu hardy perfectly booted up with the nvidia driver v173.14, which seems not to present the same problem.

Let’s see if these new advice helps you too

Last sunday, going back home after three days of several interesting speechs at the Guademy, I’ve decided to upgrade my ubuntu distribution in my laptop from the 6.10 version (name-coded “Edgy Eft”) to the new beta released version 7.04 (name-coded “Feisty Fawn”) and I have to say that everything is working pretty well: I had no problems upgrading (not even one), my Ati graphics card works with 3D acceleration, and I can enjoy the new Gnome 2.18 desktop… and the new baobab ringschart developed by Igalia, which is included by default in Gnome in the “Disk usage analyzer” application (formerly known as “baobab”).

The only “problem” I’ve found out up to date is that some applications are not translated yet, but that’s a minor problem that will be probably fixed in not much time… so don’t worry and make a dist-upgrade to your cutting-edge distribution or wait a month for the release of the stable version if you don’t want to live “in the limit”

By the way, for all those fans (like me and berto) of the Last.fm client and the packages for debian and ubuntu which are
in the berto’s personal web, I have to say that the .deb for Ubuntu edgy is perfectly working on Feisty, so don’t worry… you’re still able to listen berto’s radio after upgrading your system!