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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Imagine you use Ubuntu Linux, or some similar Gnome (or XFCE) based Linux distro that comes with a useful and all in all well thought-out configuration. Imagine further that you’re a middle-of-the-road-user, someone who knows her way around the file system and masters some basic maintenance tasks. You know that many programs have configuration files in your home directory, with names like .[program-name]rc. Then you might have stumbled upon the same problem that took me weeks to solve, embarrassingly enough.

Say you want make a small modification to a configuration file, or you are switching from Thunderbird to another e-mail client and want to import your Thunderbird mail, which is somewhere in the /home/yourusername/.mozilla-thuderbird/ folder. So you fire up gedit or open the importation dialogue in the e-mail client, click on “open file” or “import mailbox” … and you can’t find the file or navigate to the Thunderbird folder because the dialogue doesn’t show hidden files or folders. Obviously, for editing, you can call your editor from the command line. But not for importing. And not if you want to open a second hidden file in an existing editor.

You might indeed have the opposite problem: your “open file” dialogue, if it points at your home directory, is polluted by loads and loads of files that start with a dot, and you have to scroll through this interminable list to get to your real data.

The solution for both problems is the same: right-click in the file listing inside the “open file” dialogue and choose “show hidden files”. If hidden files and directories (those that start with a dot) were hidden when you started out, a check mark will appear next to this menu entry, and your hidden files will miraculously appear. If you want to get rid of an over-abundance of hidden files, toggle the check mark off. That’s all.