Well Rails 3.0 is finally here. To celebrate I updated my Wrong Side of the Tracks script which brings you from a clean install of Ubuntu to a working Rails development environment in one go. Everything you need to start working with Rails 3.0 is included even the new Netbeans 6.9.1.
Enjoy.
Well I’m not sure why it’s here, but it is. Ubuntu launches its music store with the upcoming release of Lucid Lynx. It’s easy enough to find, as its integrated into Rhythmbox. I was lukewarm on the idea when I heard it mentioned a while back, and after playing with it a little, not much has changed. I hate to rain on the parade because Lucid Lynx is looking like a REALLY good release, but this music store feels really tacked on.
While I was able to find pretty near every obscure artist I searched for, searches for Radiohead and Madonna turned up nothing. Where services like Magnatune and Jamendo definitely reflect the values of the Linux community in the sense that both make their ethical business practices (like how they deal with artists) a centre-piece of their business and offer music in open, unpatented formats (lossless Flac and Ogg Vorbis as well as others), the Ubuntu service seems out of step.
Apart from presumably supporting Ubuntu (a worthy thing in and of itself) you can only guess to whom the money might go when you buy a track. All of the albums I looked at were only available in the patented MP3 format, a very strange choice for a company with such powerful a voice in the FOSS community. Doubly strange when Ubuntu doesn’t even play MP3s by default because of the patents involved.
On top of that, while the quality of the files varied between 320 and 192, the price remained steady at .99 euros. Shouldn’t the price and the quality be connected? My guess is that this is really just an Ubuntu front end on someone else’s music service (it turns out it is). If it isn’t, it sure feels that way. In the end I suppose any revenue stream is a good revenue stream, but in my opinion, Ubuntu really needs to rethink this one and bring it in line both with the values of the community and with the othewise excellent work they are doing in other areas.
Beta 2 was posted 5 days ago and I am just getting to giving it a spin. The amount of polish on this release is looking seriously impressive. There are still issues with ACPI when you run it in VirtualBox though. I was assuming those would be ironed out by now.
The UI design team at Ubuntu caused a bit of a kerfuffle when they chose to move the min/max/close buttons to the left side of the application windows. Its a change that I find somewhat annoying but one that it has been decided that will be included in the final release. Given that it is so easy to change back, its really not worth getting upset about. If you don’t like it, slap this in the nearest command line:
mike@sleepycat:~$ gconf-editor
The Gnome configuration editor will come up and under /apps/metacity/general/button_layout you can set the buttons up any way you like. The old setting was menu:minimize,maximize,close.
The new installer is looking really impressive:
Over all everything is looking rounder, sleeker and sexier. The new purple colour scheme is really nice. I’m not sure yet what I think of the music store that is included in this version or the App store.
While I am happy to see Ubuntu taking this mainstream, I am a little wary of how well some of these commercial ventures will mix with the underlying philsophy. A big part of what makes Linux generally more secure than Windows is the fact that there is no monetary barrier to updating to the lastest version of whatever software. Can you sell applications without losing that? Not sure yet.
For those like myself running VirtualBox OSE 3.0.8; you will need to get a newer version of the Virtualbox Guest additions iso.
I just got finished updating my Rails setup script and testing it on the Alpha 3 version of Lucid. Now that the packages seem to be settling down the the repositories for Lucid suddenly I can find the ones I need for Rails. The script now gets Rails 3 running on either Karmic or Lucid. If you need older versions of Rails just uncomment the lines for the version you need.
You can get the latest version of the script here: http://github.com/sleepycat/wrong-side-of-the-tracks
Everything I am hearing about the upcoming Lucid Lynx release of Ubuntu sounds really great. I just grabbed Alpha 3 from the Ubuntu site and was a little dissappointed to see it hang as soon as I selected “Install Ubuntu”. The fix is to turn off the ACPI option in the system settings for your VM.
The side-effect of this is that the virtual machine will no longer close the window and disappear when you shut it down. C’est la vie.
From there the installer started up fine, but it hung again when I tried to update the installer. When I skipped the update it installed without any other problems. Thats what worked for me on Virtualbox 3.08 OSE.
UPDATE: This issue still seems to be effecting the new Lucid Beta 1…