The problem is that Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) ships with Thunderbird 3.0.x. Normally this isn’t an issue because the newest version of something as big as a Mozilla project is usually in a PPA within a few days of the release .

The Personal Package Archive (PPA)

Personal Package Archives are a service Canonical (the creators and custodians of Ubuntu) provide via their Launchpad website. Basically it allows Ubuntu users that know what they’re doing to upload packages (such as applications like Thunderbird or Firefox) which can then be relatively easily installed by other Ubuntu users.

No PPA package for Thunderbird 3.1 existed within the first few days of launch and the “official” Ubuntu Mozilla Daily Build Team PPA hadn’t received a new version of Thunderbird since February.

Ubuntuzilla

People running 32bit versions of Ubuntu can use Ubuntuzilla, which usually has Ubuntu/Debian packaged versions of the latest official binary releases of Firefox, Thunderbird and Seamonkey.

They also have their own repository that you can point your package manager at so you don’t have to manually check for updates. It’s no PPA, but Ubuntuzilla probably has Ubuntu/Debian-compatible packages up before anyone else can (since they don’t try to compile the apps from sources but rather just repackage the binaries Mozilla themselves release).

Without a convenient PPA or being able to use Ubuntuzilla, I decided to try and figure out how to build my own Thunderbird package for Ubuntu which I could then provide to others in my position via Launchpad.

Building Thunderbird from source

If you don’t know anything about compiling software on Linux, don’t worry… Mozilla does things completely differently from the average Linux application.

Two guides that cropped up on forums while searching for information was the Debian New Maintainers’ Guide and the Ubuntu Packaging Guide. I can’t recommend the Debian guide for anyone trying to get anything done on any kind of deadline. It seemed to provide a totally different set of instructions from the Ubuntu Packaging Guide. Another useful guide is Mozilla’s Thunderbird Build Instructions.

First order of business is to grab the Thunderbird 3.1 source and extract it somewhere. You should get a comm-1.9.2 directory from the tarball (archive).

Before you can actually build Thunderbird you need to build the sources from which you’ll build Thunderbird. It sounds complicated, but it’s just one relatively simple extra step.

Before you can do any compiling, however, you’ll need to install the build pre-requisites as laid out in the Ubuntu Packaging and Simple Thunderbird Build Guides.

It should be as simple as running two apt commands on Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get build-dep thunderbird
$ sudo apt-get install mercurial libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnotify-dev libiw-dev autoconf2.13

From here you need to set up a mozconfig file before you can generate the source files necessary to build Thunderbird. For a detailed explanation of how to set up a mozconfig file, see the Configuring Build Options guide. There are a number of places mozconfig can be created. I chose the root of the comm-1.9.2 directory as it seemed the most straightforward. The contents of my mozconfig file were as follows:
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/thunderbird-3.1
ac_add_options --enable-application=mail
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=mail
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-static
ac_add_options --disable-tests

Once you’ve configured the build options you’re ready to Build an Install, for which Mozilla also have a guide. It boils down to a single command:
@ make -f client.mk build

This will produce a Thunderbird build in the subdirectory specified in the first line of the ‘mozconfig’ example given above.

From here you could do a make install, but that isn’t recommended. Mozilla has a tarball package generation feature built into their make system, so after changing into the subdirectory (./thunderbird-3.1 in the example here) you can simply run:
$ make package

This will produce a self-contained package you can extract anywhere and run.

An alternative option I used to test my build came from a thread on the Ubuntu forums which suggested (thanks cYbercOsmOnauT) you run
$ make -j4
$ sudo checkinstall -D --install=no --pkgname='thunderbird' --pkgversion='3.1'
instead of ‘make package’.

Checkinstall is capable of generating binary packages in Debian (.deb), Red Hat (.rpm), or Slackware (.tar.gz) format. In the single test I ran, however, it seemed to produce a sub-optimal package which installed files all over the filesystem (including the root, for some reason).

Trying for the Right Way™

What I really wanted, however, was to make a package I could upload to a PPA for others to use. Following both the Debian and Ubuntu packaging guides, this means the creation of a ‘debian’ directory somewhere which must contain the information necessary to build an Ubuntu package.

This post has grown too long already, however. Suffice it to say that at the time of writing I hadn’t yet succeeded in creating a package I could upload to a PPA yet, but I haven’t hit a wall either.

Expect a post in the near future about using `debuild` to compile a Mozilla application (Thunderbird in this case) for Ubuntu.

Even though I could cop out at this point and just grab Thunderbird 3.1 off Eugene San’s PPA .

Firstly, I wanted to draw a chart of data that wasn’t located in contiguous regions of the spreadsheet. That is, the cells weren’t next to one another. Step one: Create a blank chart. Step two: Right click in the chart and select “Data Ranges.” So far, Excel and Calc work exactly the same.

OpenOffice.org Calc Data Range selection dialog for charts

Step three: After clicking on Y-values, click the little “sheet with arrow” (or “Go To Sheet”) button under Range for Y-Values.

OpenOffice.org Calc Data Range selection dialog for charts

Still, so far so good. But step four is where the wheels come off: Select the cells containing the data you want to display (bold in the picture above). Psych! In Calc you can’t do the usual CTRL+Click you’re used to. It only lets you select a contiguous area of cells. The second you click it goes back to the dialog in the first picture with the cell(s) you selected. In Excel this is obviously not the case otherwise the topic of this post wouldn’t be what it is.

Another thing Calc’s charting feature lacks is the ability to use different types of graphs in the same chart. For instance, drawing a line graph over a bar graph. With OpenOffice charts have to be homogeneous. Hopefully this is just for the time being.

Going back to Office for the first time in years, and trying Excel 2007 at the same time, I have to say that while I love all things open source, in fairness, you get what you pay for when it comes to office/productivity software. If you don’t need all the features and the slick interfaces then there’s no reason to fork out the big bucks for Microsoft Office. If you do need and/or want those things then sadly, you need to pay for them.

The graph I wanted to draw can be seen at the top of my latest article at Hellforge: Recession finally catching up, or do the new games just suck? I’ll syndicate it to Entropy eventually, but I would still like to do a post where I compare GNOME and KDE as shipped with Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.04. I was pleasantly surprised by how well GNOME shapes up.

I recently upgraded from Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) to Intrepid Ibex (8.10) but I was certain that the old pppd configuration I had for just this situation must have survived the upgrade. It was painstakingly put together from searches conducted over GPRS with Opera Mini on the self-same phone I wanted to connect with in a situation not unlike the one I found myself in – removed from all semblances of civilization (i.e. cabled broadband).

Just for fun I decided to check if there were any significant changes to nm-applet (or NetworkManagement Applet). There hadn’t really been any changes to it worth writing home about in the last 3 versions of Ubuntu (at least) but for some reason a force, perhaps even the Force (the one without midi-chlorients), reached out from within the Ether(net) and compelled me to right click on the applet icon and click “Edit Connections…”

And lo the clouds parted, choirs chanted, and a beam of white light shone upon the lowly notebook (specs to come later). Or the light shone upon the roof that protected the notebook from the wonderful summer rain falling outside at least.

For the Network Connections dialog had indeed evolved, nay mutated. Here we gazed upon the new “Mobile Broadband” tab (though this connection is anything but broad) and all was at once well with the ‘Tubes. For from within this tab one could click ‘Add’ and a pretty clickety-click Wizard adorned the desktop. And with the simple selection of country and service provider, alteration of the arbitrary contents of a descriptive text box, and the click of an ‘Apply’ button a connection capable of making use of a GSM modem was created.

But surely it couldn’t be that simple? Where do you tell it which modem device to use? Upon connecting the phone to the notebook all was revealed… nm-applet now automatically discovered modem devices. Connecting was as simple as clicking the correct radio button in the left-click drop-down menu of nm-applet. I could cry.

A part of me is sad that another aspect of Linux’s divine complexity has gone the same route as the ill-supported wireless networking drivers. Whatever will the geeks of tomorrow do to get their kicks from computing? Imagine your children never having to ever compile their own kernel? My blood runs cold. And yet I’m joyed that the illustrious Mark Shuttleworth (or his team at Canonical and the brave me and women of the Ubuntu community to be exact) has brought Linux yet another step closer to the mass market.

Screenshots and more to follow upon my return to the arms of DSL, my mistress. Apologies for the current lack of bling but this post is being written from an old laptop running Ubuntu, connected to the Internet via a Sony Ericsson W850i which is paying premium rates for bandwidth.

Sequels can be such a messy business.

Crytek, the studio that brought us the original Far Cry and the more recent Crysis, isn’t developing Far Cry 2. The game won’t be built on CryEngine 2 (the engine behind Crysis) but on Dunia, a custom-built engine that re-uses only 2-3% of the original CryEngine code. Lush island forest landscapes have been exchanged for 50km² of African savannah. The story is quite different from the original and Jack Carver won’t even be reappearing as the protagonist.

So what about the game makes it Far Cry 2? Using the original CryEngine, Far Cry showed us that games could have great graphics and be set in a large open-ended environment that can be explored non-linearly without pausing to load. Far Cry 2′s game mechanic centres around this concept and it promises to push the envelope of open-ended first-person shooters.

Fairly little is known about the characters or story. Apparently our hero is the “strong, silent type” and seeking to rid the world of a filthy literary critic slash warlord. You find yourself in a fictitious African country, bed-ridden with malaria and this man has the gall to enter your hotel room uninvited, read your memoirs, and mock them. He also happens to supply both sides of a faction war with weapons.

Malaria is one of the biggest killers on our continent so what better choice of handicap mechanic for a game set in Africa? Peter Redding, narrative designer of Far Cry 2, revealed at the Game Designer’s Conference earlier this year that the disease is also used to force the player to interact with the non-threatening characters. The friendlier NPCs have access to medicine without which you will die.

The depth of the interaction with NPCs promises to give more scope to the open environment than just being able to wander wherever you want. Your path to the kingpin is not pre-determined by a set story but guided by an intricate progression mechanic. To get to him you must advance through the ranks inside the factions. This you earn with your reputation.

Your reputation is based on how you do a mission and who you do it with. Walking the fine line of fame and notoriety within the factions gives you access to different missions, each of which can be approached in a variety of ways.

Ubisoft Montreal have gone to great lengths to immerse the player in the game world. They use new ways of graphically depicting game mechanics as Far Cry 2 will forego a classic heads-up display. Mission briefings, healing and even viewing the map are seen from the first-person perspective.

Far Cry 2 promises much, the hype machine stands poised and the fans have high hopes. It’s a little sad that the studio that was responsible for the original Far Cry has had no hand in it’s sequel but (dare I say it) given how Crysis turned out… maybe that’s a good thing.

Flash out!

How many First Person Shooters can be praised for its compelling single-player storytelling? How many of those boast a multiplayer component potentially capable of displacing the most entrenched shooter in competitive gaming?

The single player game seizes your attention from the first mission and the intensity doesn’t let up until the closing credits roll. It’s almost like playing a blockbuster movie. Cinematics are in the style of Half-Life’s interactive tram ride but are more visceral, more engaging. The fierce pace of the action combined with the amazing interactive cinematics makes for a single player campaign that does justice to the Call of Duty franchise.

It took about 9 hours to finish the single player game the first time. This includes replaying certain sections a few times as well as stopping to admire the scenery. If you knuckle down and play the game through on the easiest difficulty setting don’t expect anything more than five or six hours of entertainment. You can replay the game at higher skill levels (which only makes the AI more accurate) or take on Arcade Mode where you rush against a timer. This doesn’t make up for the short single player, though.

Occasionally your team mates seem completely useless while other times it’s as if you’re just along for the ride. As with its predecessors, COD4 focusses on infantry combat. You can’t commandeer vehicles, though you do ride shotgun (in a helicopter and Spectre gunship!).

Similar to Battlefield 2142, Call of Duty 4 uses a persistent online profile that stores your rank and accolades. Instead of choosing which new equipment and skills to unlock, players of equal rank have access to the same weapons and perks. You are awarded XP for your performance in every multiplayer match. After amassing enough XP to gain a level you are granted access to new weapons, new perks and new challenges. Weapon attachments (such as sights and silencers) are unlocked by getting kills with the weapon. The weapons themselves are well balanced, but realism is sacrificed at times in favour of balance.

Sometimes you win but it sure doesn't look that way...

When you create a new profile you’ll have access to three of the five basic classes. Each class represents a weapon group and is unmodifiable. As soon as the Create a Class feature becomes available the basic classes become redundant, though only five custom classes can be created.

If ranks, levels and unlocks don’t appeal you can always play ModWarfare, a mod that installs with the main game. All equipment and perks are then available but at the cost of fame and glory. The game didn’t ship with bots, so you won’t be able to play  multiplayer game modes unless at a LAN or connected to the Internet.

A multitude of configurable multiplayer game modes are available to suit every occasion. Modes like Free for All and Team Deathmatch are there for those that enjoy the classics. The objective-driven game modes (Headquarters, Domination, Search and Destroy, Sabotage) play best. Headquarters, a capture-and-hold derivative that allows respawning, is a LAN favourite. Search and Destroy features as the equivalent to Counter-Strike’s bomb defuse maps. Depending on the mode you can have a fast paced, no down-time game or a tactical one where death means you’re out for the round.

Infinity Ward has taken what they and others have done well in other games and combined them into a shooter with an excellently told story and multiplayer that just plays well. The graphics and sound are excellent, providing the atmosphere for a truly engaging tale and immersive gaming experience. Call of Duty 4 doesn’t revolutionise the genre but it certainly comes near to perfecting it.

Before...

After

How many dirty bombs does it take to change a lightbulb?

By the measure of Picasso (and Jobs) I am the Leonardo da Vinci of the blogging world. If you would dare to call blogging art.

But I digress. Only those gamers who played Diablo for the first time in 1996/97, fell in love with it, and were then forced to wait from 2000 to 2005 for Diablo 2 to be released would understand this fully. Remember the excitement when you were invited to the closed beta? What about the horror of the 100MB beta client download? I was on dial-up at the time so let me assure you that it wasn’t fun.

Now imagine that times 4 gajibazillion. Hellgate: London promised even more than Diablo 2 did (aside: and even D2 disappointed the followers of The Great Hype Machineâ„¢ back then).

Then imagine this in your inbox.

Congratulations! You’ve been selected to be part of the very first group to help test Hellgate: London, the highly-anticipated Action-RPG from Flagship Studios!

Well I nearly died. And then I was incredibly happy that I was in Sweden because I could download the game without having to worry about a cap.

So for the last 3 weeks or so I’ve been trying to test Hellgate: London on this shocking laptop I’m stuck with for the duration of my stay in Sweden. That’s not entirely fair… The only thing keeping me from a more enjoyable alpha experience is the graphics card really. It’s pretty impressive that the good ol’ integrated Intel 945 is managing so well.

As the discerning have probably… um… discerned from my cunning reference to Fight Club, testers were subject to an NDA. This means that I’m basically not allowed to say anything except that I’m in the Alpha. I have another cunning plan, though. I’m going to keep a record of my alpha wanderings and post them the minute the NDA is lifted.

For now check out the Hellgate: London site and view some of the official trailers.