Pidgin 2.0.1 (and Ubuntu repository)

Now that Pidgin 2.0.1 has just been released, the chase was on to grab another .deb for 2.0.1, but was rather enjoyed to find that someone has been thinking about an Ubuntu repository — add the following in /etc/apt/sources.list (for Ubuntu Feisty):

## http://ubuntu.schmidtke-hb.de
# wget ubuntu.schmidtke-hb.de/aptrepository.asc
# sudo apt-key add aptrepository.asc
deb http://apt.schmidtke-hb.de/ feisty main

Source: OShelpdesk.org
Digg this !

Suggested posture while at the computer desk

Washintonpost.com had published some images with suggested postures while working at the computer.

Microsoft fonts for Ubuntu Linux (and others)

In his "great" generosity, at the time they were trying hard to win the browsers war, Microsoft had released a pack of core TTF fonts with a lax license to redistribute them, for "interoperability matters". Times have gone, but the files have remained in various places on the web (e.g. project corefonts on SourceForge).

You can quickly install these fonts in Ubuntu with a command like the following:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

Now either re-login or use the following command to refresh the fonts list:

sudo fc-cache -fv

Tip taken from Ubuntu blog.

Chasing the Pidgin

Recently it came into my attention that the GAIM team has chose to rename the project to Pidgin and checking the new site I saw that Pidgin 2.0.0 release is available for download.

Unfortunately among the offered binary builds there was no Debian package for Ubuntu Feisty (that's what I'm running at work) and neither does the Ubuntu repositories offer a package.

So after some googling I found a few .deb packages (from which I chose one from download.ubuntu.pl). Installing the package, however, was a bit of pain due to the fact that I already had gaim 2.0.0 (beta7) installed and that was generating dependency issues: since nautilus-sendto is (wronly) dependent on gaim, uninstalling it would trigger uninstalling the whole ubuntu-desktop package.

Here is what I needed to do in order to remain with a clean package tree:

1. Forcibly uninstall gaim ignoring the nautilus-sendto dependency:
   

   sudo dpkg --purge --ignore-depends=nautilus-sendto gaim

   
   
2. Uninstalled the gaim-data package:
   

   sudo dpkg --purge gaim-data

   
   
3. Edited by hand the /var/lib/dpkg/status to remove the stale gaim dependency in the nautilus-sendto package
   
4. Installed pidgin package:
   

   sudo dpkg -i pidgin_2.0.0-1_i386.deb

   
   
5. Fix the packaging list (and eventually installing unresolved pidgin dependencies):
   

   sudo apt-get -f install

   
   

I must admit that the fact that the package database being a flat text-file saved the day — otherwise it would have been a tough day for me searching for a fix. Kudos to the dpkg guys for doing this the right(TM) way. ;)