I recently installed copies of AutoPano Pro and AutoPano Giga, which are some great panorama stitching programs that I would highly recommend, as they work on Linux, Mac, and Windows. After installing these programs, there was a horrible font problem that made all of the text in the application illegible.

The solution I believe was to install qt4-config, run qtconfig, change the font size up to 9, and then back down to the default of 8. When you launch the program again, all of the fonts and text should be fixed and legible. Have fun using this awesome program!

In March I'm going to be giving a talk on Browsers in Linux, with a lot of specific examples and demos from Ubuntu. Hopefully this talk will cover some of the basic things for beginners who need to know things like "What are the options", and "how to install new browsers in ubuntu", as well as advanced options detailing some of the more unique and advanced features of the available browsers, as well how to get started with development for browsers.

This talk will be at the Penguins Unbound Linux users group in Falcon Heights, Minnesota on the last Saturday of the month. I will post additional details and documents closer tot he date.

In a default Kubuntu install, Dolphin is a great file manager. It typically works with many different file types seamlessly. One of the things it doesn't seem to handle out of the box is previews/thumbnails for video files.

How to install video thumbnails

The first step is to install the mplayer thumbnails package. My research indicates that this has been in the standard repos since Jaunty.

This will change dolphin so that that when you click on a video, it will be previewed in the preview panel. To make thumbnails show up in the icon view, you need to do a little more configuration. Go into Settings->Configure Dolphin. Click on the "General" section from the list of sections on the left, select the "Previews" tab, and check the box next to "Video Files (MPlayerThumbs)".

That's it, enjoy your video thumbnails in dolphin on KDE

Google Analytics continues to prove itself as one of the top and most important tools for website analytics today. Recently Google added a new feature for those that use both Google Adsense, and Google Analytics. This feature is the ability to cross-reference data between these two applications. What this means is that not only can you see what visitors are coming to your site, and what they are viewing, but you can cross-reference this data with how much money they are providing you.

As an example, if we look at mortalpowers.com we will see that Google Chrome accounts for around 30% of the traffic. What is odd is that over the past 3 weeks, 100% of adsense revenue has come from Chrome. This strange pattern is again repeated for Linux. Linux makes up around 40-50% of traffic, but ends up providing nearly 100% of adsense revenue.

Keep in mind that for this site, sample sizes are very small. From this type of data and with a larger sample size, it is clear that these new features are going to help those seeking to monetize their web presence and content greatly.

A few weeks ago I installed the Ubuntu Lucid Lynx second alpha. Typically Ubuntu alphas and betas have quite a few bugs, and I have been burned in the past by upgrading Ubuntu versions prematurely. This time I decided to try it out a little early by installing it in a separate partition where I had cleaned up some space and taken it back from my ntfs partition.

Lucid Lynx - Ubuntu Alpha 2

So far, Lucid Lynx has been extremely stable. For the entire release cycles of Jaunty and Karmic, as well as alpha 1 of Lucid Lynx, the Live CD wouldn't work on my system. It wouldn't boot at all, regardless of using the alternative installer, or the live CD with a plethora of boot flags attempted. Lucid Lynx went so far as to work in my system without the Kernel flag acpi=off which I have needed for my entire life with Ubuntu.

The installer was nice, easy to use, and although my Nvidia drivers weren't installed properly by the Jockey (KDE) GUI, they were very easy to install with sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

In addition to this, Kubuntu installed ALSA without PulseAudio by default, which in the past hasn't worked with my microphone, but this install seemed to fix everything I have been fighting with for the past few years. Once again we will see how long it lasts, and I had almost gotten used to the per-application controls of pavucontrol. Who knows, maybe I will install PulseAudio a year from now and everything will just work with ALSA + PulseAudio in perfect harmony. I'm not holding my breath.

KDE 4.4

A couple of the features I was waiting for with KDE have finally landed. The first which I wanted, but I had no idea why I wanted it is a feature that is most easily described as "Windows 7 Snap". This means that I can drag windows to the left or right edges of my screens, and they will "snap" into place at 100% height and 50% width. You can also drag windows to the top of the screen and they will maximize. This hurts my workflow a little bit in that it isn't instant to drag and drop maximized windows between monitors, but I believe I will get used to it. This also works for multiple monitors, which is surprising because as of a week ago (before I ran some package updates) wasn't working for the middle bar between the monitors.

Another improvement that I wasn't expecting is that they remade (or finished) the Add Widget menu. Now when you add a widget, whether to the desktop or a panel, a very nice bar pops out that is easily navigable, and uses drag-and-drop for placement.

The final thing I didn't expect was that moving files and deleting files is much smoother. In Karmic and before, when I deleted a set of files in Dolphin (or sent them to the trash), they would remain on the screen for a few moments while KDE worked in the background. Now these types of processes are instant, as they should be. The notifications for file transfers and activities have also been much improved. Now the useful data is presented first, with the option to expand the notification to show the rest of the information. Biggest of all about the notifications, they actually seem accurate now.

Hopefully I will be able to write more about any new features of KDE I discover as I continue this dangerous journey through the Ubuntu 10.04 alphas.