For whatever reason (I can only assume it has to do with the product being released /after/ Ubuntu 9.04 came out) the Ubuntu devs have decided to call Firefox 3.5 “Shiretoko”. You can install alongside your regular Firefox installation by typing aptitude install firefox-3.5 and you can run it by typing firefox-3.5. That’s all well and good, except that the User-Agent string is set to:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090803 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Shiretoko/3.5.2

instead of:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.2) Gecko/20090803 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Firefox/3.5.2

Which breaks sites like Facebook (Facebook chat doesn’t work). To fix this, I installed the “User Agent Switcher” extension, which, after a few days of use, I have decided I don’t like. It doesn’t remember user preferences, and you have to reset your default User-Agent every time you start Firefox.

Looking around on the web, I found a much easier way to solve this problem. Type “about:config” in your address bar, and search for the “general.useragent.extra.firefox” entry, right click on it, choose “modify” and change “Shiretoko” to “Firefox”.

This month is my company’s national convention. This combined with a secret project I’m working on after hours means I basically have no time to work on Exaile until October. So, no thanks to me, Exaile 0.3.0.1 has been released. This one is brought to you by the other members of the team, and is a bugfix release for 0.3.0. This includes fixing the bug that was causing 0.2.14->0.3 migration problems for most people. Enjoy!

Check out our homepage for more information.

Yup, you probably heard it here last. I’ve been super busy irl, and just haven’t had the time to throw up a blog entry just yet, but 0.3.0 final is out and you can grab it from the Exaile downloads page.

I’ll be the first to admit (nothing wrong with being completely honest) that we did rush it out to be in time for Karmic. A true tribute to Linus’ law, “release early, release often”. I, for one, am really stoked that I ca now point new users to our final .deb. We in the dev community and the #exaile channel on freenode have been using Exaile 0.3 betas and alphas and bzr trunk as our main player for so long already. It really is a major upgrade, and we can’t wait to share it with the rest of the OSS community.

No word on whether we made it into Karmic or not, but, even if we didn’t, it’ll surely be in the next Ubuntu release, and I can’t wait.

Check out the release announcement on the Exaile home page!

Yeah, that’s right.

Check out http://www.exaile.org for more information.

I purchased an HP 1030NR, because, IMHO, they are the sexiest netbooks currently on the market. They are sleek, lightweight, and they don’t have a wonkey keyboard layout like some netbooks (I’m looking at you, ASUS).

One problem: the onboard nic controller (Marvell 88E8040 adapter, sky2 kernel module) doesn’t quite work right on a default install of Ubuntu 9.04. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s not even detected (you can’t see it listed when you type lspci). Sometimes it’s detected, and works, but locks the machine up if you unplug your network cable. Not cool.

After some digging around, I found that there is an easy way to fix this. Edit /boot/grub/menu.list, find the line that says something like this: # defoptions=quiet splash, add acpi_os_name=Linux at the end of the line, save the file, and type update-grub. Reboot, and viola, it should work normally from now on.