Curious about adding it to my blog (as you should now see in the right column), I fired him an email. Unfortunately he didn’t have a script prepared, but still offered up the images!

Taking a little time, I grabbed the old script for an Ubuntu 10.04 Banner, made a few modifications (and corrections) and got the banner up and ticking in no time!

If you’re interested in using one of these two banners on your site then you’ll be happy to know I’m posting easily linkable scripts to these two right here!

Orange
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.kyleabaker.com/fun/ubuntu1010banner/orange.js'></script>

Purple
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.kyleabaker.com/fun/ubuntu1010banner/purple.js'></script>

Copy and paste the style that you’d like to use into your blog or web site. If you have any problems just let me know.

Be sure to give Anthony a shout out and thanks if you like his design as well! You can find his email listed on the Ubuntu banners page linked above.

This looks a little cleaner and more professional if you ask me!

Another small update, which I gladly welcome, is the reintroduction of colorful status icons in Empathy so the status of your friends is once again easily recognizable! The previous icons were monochrome and were hardly ideal.

If you haven’t seen the new set of wallpapers for Ubuntu 10.10 yet, head on over and checkout Joey’s post displaying them all. Following discussions regarding the new wallpapers, I’ve had my eyes set for a while now on the Blue building.

The new Ubuntu 10.10 wallpaper, which I predicted here, has also been packaged in LaunchPad and released. Though many have doubts that it is the final and I for one am hoping that they’ve been holding on to something amazing to shock and awe us with later.

If you’d like to take a look at what has been released as the official wallpaper, I’ve posted it here for now and will make sure its properly updated later if it happens to change.

Also, if you’ve been sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to upgrade, you’ll be happy to know that Ubuntu 10.10 goes into Beta status next Thursday. You should realize that betas are not finished products and may contain bugs, but thus far I’ve seen very few major bugs and in a week there should obviously be even fewer.

Here’s a quick preview of the updates to the Radiance theme, image brought to you by the Design Team.

UPDATE:

It looks like the progress bar has also see some slight tweaking to make it look oh so much better. Attention to detail is highly important (as seen by Mac OS X) and this is a great example!

One less menu, yet more control..fantastic!

This is a welcome update for me as it reduces redundancy among the menus and gives the sound indicator menu a little more purpose. Looking through the Rhythmbox Plugins, I’ve also stumbled across the ReplayGain plugin (some how avoiding looking right at it and missing it though I look through the plugins regularly).

This elusive feature is highly valuable!

While this isn’t a new feature to Rhythmbox, or many other media players for that matter, if you’ve never used it then I highly suggest you enable it! If you’ve ever noticed that some of your audio files are just way too loud compared to others and you’re constantly adjusting your speakers then you should look into ReplayGain. I’ve been watching the a couple of Rhythmbox features that I’m highly anticipating as they’ve been progressing thanks to Google Summer of Code. If you’ve not been keeping up with the mailing lists, you’ve been missing out on “DACP in Rhythmbox” by Alexandre Rosenfeld and “Improved Last.fm Plugin” by Jamie Nicol.

Connecting a remote device to Rhythmbox.

The code for both of these is available on Gitorious if you’re looking for a sneak peak. I’m not sure how long it will take before they are packaged with Rhythmbox by default, but I think its fairly safe to say that they won’t make it in time for Ubuntu 10.10. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Sound Juicer 2.28.1 in action..

Though Sound Juicer isn’t an all-in-one ripping and management tool, it is very good at the ripping! For the management and editing of IDv3 tags I would suggest you try EasyTAG which is available via the Ubuntu Software Center or here.

With Sound Juicer, you’re able to rip the contents of a cd in most cases with a single click and no editing since the details for the disc are retrieved from the internet. You can also add information such as disc number, year and genre if you wish.

If you’d like to add more details, like I do such as album art, you may consider using EasyTAG which makes this process a snap.

Sound Juicer doesn’t have a lot of preference options, but you are able to control the format that your music is copied to, being MP3, OGG or what ever your preference may be. You can also easily stripe special characters and control the hierarchy of the folders that your music is output to.

While Sound Juicer may be a tool that is only needed on rare occasions and may never be needed for a second time, it remains to be very impressive with what it does and should find a way into your accepted tools for this sort of task.

The searching problem..

The problem was that, when I quickly search for an artist or album containing an ampersand (the & character), but I use the word “and” instead without noticing, my search turns up empty. Obviously this is a trivial problem and I’m sure its actually quite common.

The search problem is usually easy enough to spot and fix, but its an unnecessary and extra step. Correcting it would be a slight push for Rhythmbox towards the “bit more friendly” side.

I’ve been a Linux user for nearly five years now and a Linux enthusiast for nearly three, so I’m beginning to feel comfortable with providing patches to fix problems like these. I did this with the Microsoft LifeCam VX-1000 patch a short while back and it appears to have benefited more people already than I ever expected.

Taking this problem to the Rhythmbox mailing list for thoughts and suggestions, I was pleased to see a couple of responses in favor of my idea for solving this problem.

I had originally suggested that Rhythmbox simply treat search words “&” equal to “and” as well as other similar examples. This seemed to be a good starting solution, but then the topic of search engines was brought up. When you search for something on Google, these articles (words such as “and”, “the”, “a”, etc) are usually dropped or removed from the search giving it more accurate results.

This would be a much easier approach to fixing these kinds of search problems in Rhythmbox than making (for example) “and” equal to “&”. This would also provide a slight performance improvement since it would be stripping out some of the unhelpful search terms.

I’m hoping to find time soon (when I return home from a short break) to write a patch that will make use of the local system language and drop search terms accordingly to improve the success rate of searches for Rhythmbox users, but I’m interested in finding out what other media players do first.

With a group such as “Angels & Airwaves”, what happens in other media players for Linux, Windows and Mac when you search with the string “Angels and Airwaves”? Are the expected results returned or does the “and” search word throw off the results?

Let me know in the comments if you can! I’m interested in implementing this in the best way possible and following other good media player examples is usually much better than inventing my own implementation.

Early screenshots of the new Ambiance theme.

Several things have been updated in this latest preview into the new Ambiance theme. Scrollbars, scrubbers, buttons, menus, window controls, title bars, GNOME panels and indicator menus…just to name a few. To read about these changes in more detail, you should head over to the article posted by Otto from the design team.

One thing that seems to not be mentioned about the screenshot is the background being used. If you look closely, you’ll notice that it resembles the background released with Ubuntu 10.04 very closely, but there are several subtle differences. Notice the two very orange flares as well as the hyper-white flare on the right. The gradients also appear to be much more refined.

I’ve been using this theme for a couple of days now since it was leaked and I’m in high approval of the changes. Especially those to the window control buttons, which now have a much more pleasant appearance and a better overall feel.

Radiance and Dark themes are also in the works, but (as noted by the design team) are not yet ready to be released. If you’d like to go ahead and test these themes in Lucid or Maverick, they’ve provided the packages at the following link:

http://people.ubuntu.com/~stefanor/light-themes/

Enjoy the new theme updates and let me know if you come across the new wallpaper anywhere!

An actual pause button! Ouuuhh Ahhhh

I would imagine this bug from 2006 was finally fixed so that the sound menu play/pause buttons and Rhythmbox play/pause buttons are consistent.

Either way, its the polishing touches that can really make a product shine.

Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 3 Cluttered Dual Screen

If you’ve been anxiously waiting to test Ubuntu 10.10, but need a stable system then this is not the time to upgrade.

If you’re not worried about a problem here or there on occasion and what to give 10.10 a spin, I would suggest you download the Alpha 3 torrent to install rather than doing a system upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 (at least until the final is released).

If you’re still longing to upgrade your Ubuntu 10.04 directly, you can do so by the following:

1. Press Alt+F2 to launch the Run Application dialog.
2. Type update-manager -d and press enter.
3. When the Update Manager appears, it should alert you of an upgrade to 10.10. Do so at your own risk!

Also, as always, if you’re already running Ubuntu 10.10 whether its Alpha 1 or Alpha 2, applying all updates via Update Manager will give you all of the changes that are to be found in Alpha 3. Continuing this until the final is released will update you to a final version. There’s always confusion from some about this, but updating does indeed keep your system using the latest and greatest!

As of Alpha 3, we’ve still seen no signs of the Windicators that Mark has promised, but the indicator-applets for the GNOME panels are coming along very nicely and adding a great deal of ease and consistency.

Thread me not..

If you’re the ultimate stalker, like my girlfriend, then you’ll most likely find this feature to be very useful. Others may only use it on rare occasions.

New in Gwibber is the ability to expand conversations you’ve directed towards Twitter. With an expand button (currently the somewhat large green plus icon), you’re able to view a conversation you’ve posted to Twitter and (assumingly) the follow up posts from your friends.

At the moment Gwibber only seems to expand your own personal tweets, but it appears to be a feature that will (as a speculated example) help you find out exactly why your friend Kathy agrees with your tweet on the recently hot weather in Raleigh.

Understand that my speculations are just that, speculations, and nothing more. This feature could easily evolve into anything more than I’ve imagined. In the meantime, share your ideas, thoughts and opinions! I’m always excited to hear new speculation and ideas!

Preview of the new Ubuntu Font in action..

If you’d like to test these fonts, then you need to follow these instructions exactly (since the ppa is “private”). I found other site instructions a bit confusing, so if you follow my directions you should have these installed effortlessly and pain free in no time.

Install

1. With your LaunchPad.net account, go to the following “Kubuntu Users” link and Join their team:
   https://launchpad.net/~kubuntu-users
2. Now open a new tab and navigate to the following link. Once there, you should see the PPA listed as “ppa (ppa:ubuntu-font-beta-testing/ppa)” in your list and it may be the only one. There should be a link labeled “View” to the far right of it, click it.
   http://launchpad.net/people/+me/+archivesubscriptions
3. The link that you just opened when clicking view should list software sources for this PPA that are unique to you. Open your software sources list file and copy these two source lines to the bottom, save and close (using the following command to open the sources).
   sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
4. Add the PPA key so the package is authenticated properly when you install:
   sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys 42F834EC
5. Update your software sources. Your new access to the private PPA may take between 5-15 minutes before its processed, so if you see errors for this software source in the terminal, be patient and try updating again in a few minutes.:
   sudo apt-get update
6. Install the font:
   sudo apt-get install ubuntu-private-fonts
7. Now that the fonts are install, apply them by right clicking on your Desktop -> Change Desktop Background -> Fonts (tab):

Applying the new font..

You should now have the new font installed. Good luck and enjoy!