Gaim is now Pidgin

As I was grappling with some font problems (looks normal size on my screen, but looks huge on my friends’ Yahoo Messengers) with Gaim, I decided to check for latest updates as I found out that my Ubuntu 6.10 packaged Gaim version was a Beta one.

Lo behold!  Gaim has been renamed to Pidgin!   It’s now officially version 2.0.0.

I have no idea when the name was changed.  I couldn’t find that information on its new web site.  But it’s interface looks a lot cleaner and nicer than the beta version that I was using.  Definitely getting classier.   The font size problem was fixed too.  Keep up the good work guys!

Ubuntu doesn’t package Pidgin yet, so you’ll probably have to download the source and compile it.  No big deal if you have all the necessary development libraries already installed…

Flexible Keyboard

I found a flexible keyboard made of silicon at Funan Center’s Challenger shop today. It’s something that I need due to space constrains.

I could only find it in blue. It lies flat on the table. It’s a mini keyboard, hence the extra number pad and the page up/down keys are not included. I won’t miss the number pad, but I do miss the page up/down keys as I use them often to scroll web pages. The silicon keys do need some getting used to because they tilt left/right as you type. But it’s a very quiet keyboard.

The other plus point is that it’s dust proof and spill proof. The keyboard can be cleaned quite easily. No more worries about drinking coffee or eating over your keyboard.

It can be rolled up and it’s light, so you can store it away when you don’t need it or bring it around in your briefcase if need to.

It comes with a USB interface and a PS/2 adapter. Although it stated that it’s Microsoft compatible, but Ubuntu had no problems if it.

I couldn’t find the company name on the packaging. It calls itself the “AirTouch Keyboard, The Strong, Silent Type”. It’s a tacky slogan, but the keyboard works.

You can get one to try if you like. It costs $16.

Update:

I don’t like it.  After using it for 3 days, it drove me crazy.  I realised that I pound on my keyboard, and the see-sawing of the key made it difficult for me to type.  The right shift key has the up-arrow key between the slash key, hence often times, when I tried for the right shift key, I hit the up-arrow key instead.  The space key was the usual long in length design, but due to the material and the spacing of the sensors beneath the key, tapping on sweet spot was the tricky part.  I am back to a normal keyboard and I type a lot faster now with less mistakes.  If you are a sweet gentle person that taps lovingly on a keyboard, I can let you have this keyboard for a cheap price.  That will smoothen away the sharp edges of my wife’s “Check with me before you waste money with lame purchases!”

Enabling SCIM in en_US language environment

When I first setup Ubuntu, and using my X-session in the en_US language environment, the chinese input program SCIM was not started up automatically.

I commonly use the english language for my computing activities, but I use chinese occasionally. Hence I need the SCIM program.

But if I started the SCIM program after the X11 session, I couldn’t trigger the switch to the chinese input interface. Although I could see the icon on my Gnome desktop, but it seems like the SCIM daemon is unable to receive the key inputs to trigger the switch.

Alas! I finally figured out how to start up the SCIM program during the login through the X11 login manager.

Please note that I am doing this in Ubuntu 6.10 and Gnome 2.

Do the following in a terminal shell:

sudo ln -s /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/scim /etc/alternatives/xinput-en_US

sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/xinput-en_US /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/en_US

Logout and login again, and you should be able to switch to chinese input in an english environment. You can do the same for other language environments.

Move over Fedora Core 5, here’s Ubuntu 6.10!

Wahoo! Ubuntu 6.10 installs on my Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, SATA Maxtor 320GB drive, and IDE CD-ROM drive! Now I have Ubuntu running on my system.

I have to give credit to Fedora Core 5 for allowing me to work with Linux when Ubuntu 6.06 couldn’t be installed on my system then.

Ubuntu 6.10 wasn’t that smooth because many attempts saw the Install program freezing at various points during the copying of the files. In the end, I booted the Ubuntu 6.10 with “all-generic-ide” option, and installation managed to complete. I think there was some problem with the data transfer between the IDE CD-ROM and the SATA hard drive. When I tried installing earlier with the IDE CD-ROM and an IDE hard drive, I didn’t encounter problems.

So why am I so excited even though there were some hiccups during installation? Well,

1. it detected my 1280×1024 screen resolution correctly,
2. my sound card worked immediately, with ALSA 1.11 too!
3. usb devices are recognised without freezing the Gnome. FC5 has that problem.
4. it boots up faster,
5. its Synaptic Package Manager runs a lot faster than Yum.

So far, that’s what I observed. I’m pretty happy with Ubuntu 6.10 so far.

Thanks guys! Great job!

Get Ubuntu 6.10 here. 🙂

Amendments:

I neglected to mention that the setting of “On-board SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode” (in my motherboard’s BIOS) is “IDE”.

Update:

Lots of people still reading this article, so I would like to update that Ubuntu 7.04 is now available!