My good old desktop got upgraded to Ubuntu Breezy last night. I  took the oportunity to review and edit the existing partitions and do a clean install from CD — a procedure that always comes with discoveries of new software. And sometimes a problem or two, but I have installed Ubuntu so many times on different computers that I’ve become good at figuring them out.

Gajim quite looks like the ultimate Jabber client for Linux, in particular the Gnome desktop. I’d been using Psi, which is nice, but doesn’t integrate so well, and the focus on the chat windows whenever a new message arrives annoyed me. Gajim is very happy with Google talk — no particular configuration required.

Two excellent short reference articles: on the easiest way to set up a simple home network (two computers, in my case) with internet connection sharing, and on configuring Samba, up to and including mounting Samba shares via smbfs, which is an extremely comfortable way to work on two computers at once.

I work with audio files and use several cross-platform tools like Transcriber and Audacity, which aren’t integrated into the modern desktop environments. Audacity’s Linux/Unix Support Forum is a great help for figuring out what you might have missed. The general conclusion I’ve drawn from fixing Linux (Ubuntu) sound: the error messages are frightening, but the fix is usually easier than you think at first. In my case:

• switch the Multimedia Preferences to “ALSA”, and install the ALSA packages
• make sure not to forget alsa-oss, which allows the old-style OSS applications to use ALSA
• reboot once after having made profound changes to your sound setup
• start the old-style apps with aoss [program]

That’s it. Ploum has written an excellent intro to sound on Ubuntu (in French).

At the same time, the laptop (an IBM Thinkpad T22, not recent, but a reliable workhorse) benefitted. I upgraded Firefox to version 1.5.1. This one isn’t in the repositories yet, but an excellent HOWTO exists on the Wiki. FF 1.5 is sweet. Very reactive. And some of the new extensions are impressive. I’m writing this via Performancing, which is a built-in wysiwyg blogging tool that rolls up over part of your screen. Very pleasant to use! (Let’s see if it posts okay, too.)

Oh, and the Milk theme for Gnome is just beautiful.

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Everyone has their own favourite Firefox extensions — that’s how the browser is designed. I just discovered a small one via idle browsing: Popup ALT Attribute. It was designed to show alt attributes in tooltip-style, but also enables multiline tooltips, usually from the title attribute. You can try it out by mousing over the two links above: the link titles aren’t truncated any longer.

For the record, my lonely-island Firefox extensions are Scrapbook, Tab Mix Plus, Spellbound, and the Web Developer toolbar.