• Open the image you want to tint in GIMP
• Now add a new layer on top of the image
• Select the color you want to tint the image with (R43, G0, B30 for Lucid Purple)
• Bucket fill the new top layer with the selected color
• Set the layer mode of the top layer to Hue

Voila!

The most problematic part of this all, is the notion, it’s all okay, “because it’s easy to change back”. This is the biggest bullshit argument in history. First how easy it is to do anything is very relative… There are lots of computer users which are simply not capable of changing this default, or any default at all anywhere… I suppose this is the audience where they intended to receive this revenue from… Since lots of default-changing-capable folks will most likely be changing back to Google anyway.

And of course there is a bigger point to be made here. I don’t want any external party to have any influence on how my operating system is defaulted. I mean… Will the release after Lucid have the Picasa/SmugMug uploaders disabled in F-Spot, only leaving the Flickr uploader available, because Yahoo paid for it. The other uploaders would obviously be “easy” to add back, because then it would be all okay… And an advertisement here-or-there never hurt anybody too…

While I do get it’s not particularly easy to build a stable company on open source software, and we shouldn’t expect Mark to endlessly pour money into Canonical, but we could ask ourselves, how viable Ubuntu would be in the long term if these kinds of decisions need to be made.

I’d much rather have them cut back on shipments of free CDs amongst other things…

First download the Balder FreeDOS floppy, and save it somewhere convenient on your disk. Then connect your USB stick to your system, make sure you unmount the stick’s filesystems before proceeding:

# sudo umount /media/usbstick

Then wipe the USB stick using dd to make sure it’s completely clean. This step is not really required, but this does make sure you won’t run into any other problems later on. Make sure you know you have the correct device file, making a mistake with this can really screw up your Ubuntu install, as an example I’ll be using sdu:

# sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdu bs=1M

Then we start qemu booting from the Balder boot floppy image:

# sudo qemu -fda balder10.img -hda /dev/sdu -boot a

If all goes well you’ll see FreeDOS booting from the floppy drive.

A:\>fdisk

Then partition a single large volume, the following should have the same effect:

A:\>fdisk /auto C:

Then format the partition and copy system files:

A:\>format C: /V:FREEDOS /S

Then you can copy any other DOS utilities you might need from the Balder image to the C: drive, which in essence is your USB stick. Then close qemu. Then we can verify if the stick boots properly like so:

# sudo qemu -hda /dev/sdu -boot c

If you want to place some extra files on there like a BIOS flash utility and a BIOS upgrade file you issue the eject command, and then disconnect and reconnect the USB stick:

# sudo eject /dev/sdu

I hope this works for you as well. Good luck and be careful!

At this point everything it still a work in progress, but the most important stuff has already been done. I hope you’ll like it, even though most of you will be reading this through one of the Planet’s or maybe an RSS feed reader.

• UFRaw
• TS Client
• Wireshark
• Java (Web Start, Plugin Control Panel, Policy Tool)
• Wine (this is not entirely true)
• Wikipedia (for schools) / generic Encyclopedia
• and there’s probably more to be found…

These applications blemish my pretty Ubuntu desktop. I realize that creating good Tango compliant icons is a time consuming non-trivial pursuit. Though I’d love to see someone creating these icons…

My basic message would be… please do not create another new differently styled icon set… I’d just like for Tango to grow, and get insane complete…

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My sentence went like this:

“This is where we get the term continuous tone.”

I got this from the excellent book “Real World Color Management (Second Edition)” from Peachpit Press.

When running pure-ftpd with it’s password database in a nonstandard location, it’s possible to pass the PURE_PASSWDFILE and PURE_DBFILE variables to all of it’s binaries (including pure-pw). But obviously sudo think it’s all a bit too risky, and throws them away while executing pure-pw as root. Bummer!

Lucky for me, this is easily fixed. You can instruct sudo to keep specific environmental variables, like so (in /etc/sudoers):

Defaults env_keep=”PURE_PASSWDFILE PURE_DBFILE”

Defaults env_reset

The worst of it all was the fact, that I’ve had my own colocated machine available for some time now. Since I had to install everything again, I put the new Ubuntu LTS on my HP DL380 G2 server. Not wanting to clutter up my install with all the crap webhosting brings along, I went with OpenVZ, to virtualize/containerize my webhosting setup. My new setup uses Lighttpd instead of Apache, and thus far I’m loving it. I’m using XCache to accelerate PHP5. Besides WordPress I’ve also installed Gallery2. And with some fiddling, I got everything to look similar including most error pages and automatic directory indexing.

curl -w “%{size_download} div %{time_total}\n\n” -s http://www.example.org/testfile  -o /dev/null | sed ’s/div/\//’ | bc