If you use Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10) or earlier you need to download the GNOME Gmail .deb but in Natty Narwhal (11.04) you can install it directly from the unsupported universe repository.

Maverick feels a bit faster than Lucid, so I’m really happy.

First of all, when I have the USB cable for my LG L1510SF touch screen, X crashes in xf86findOption. I have submitted bug reports via Apport, see Launchpad bug #657895.

Second, Spotify crashes on certain mouse events with the newer Qt version. More information:

• Spotify for Linux segfaults under Ubuntu Maverick beta (upcoming 10.10)
• Seg fault after upgrading to qt 4.7 and kde 4.5.1

Don’t upgrade if you want any of the above to work!

Spotify acknowledges this:

Spotify uses the system-supplied MP3 decoder on all platforms, and during our limited testing we found the Wine decoder to be excessively unstable on quite a few MP3 files, including some from our purchase partners. We are therefore blocking codecs with the identifier “WINE-MPEG3″ until the Wine system works satisfactorily.

One workaround I found involved recompiling or binary-patching WINE. Not so fun.

The official support forum contained a solution based around installing Windows Media Player 10. I have downloaded and installed it now according to the instructions, but already the playback froze once. Well, Spotify isn’t perfectly reliable in WINE anyway, so this is probably Good Enough.

The Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device [PCI 8086:3582] needed Workaround A: Re-enable KMS found on Lucidi8xxFreezes to start X.

My Huawei E620 USB Modem [USB 12d1:1446/12d1:1001] for mobile broadband worked after removing the /etc/udev/rules.d/15-huawei-e1551.rules file I used to get the same device working in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

After that I added AAAA records for the .se domains I buy through Loopia, including this one. Some of my domains are on easyDNS and they do not appear to support AAAA records until the new member interface launches. According to 1,5 years old information it should add AAAA support.

For testing I added an IPv6-only record for this server: ipv6.divideandconquer.se

It’s actually just a page showing a screen shot and the name of the file that is currently playing, together with some commands to remote control XBMC.

Available commands are pause/resume, stop, play another file, and shutdown.

I also implemented support for showing notifications on the XBMC screen, which gave me an idea:

The Google Calendar can e-mail reminders for appointments. If XBMC is running, the reminder could be shown as a notification on the XBMC monitor.

I was just about to start implementing this calendar-reminder-in-XBMC when I reminded myself that there are many other small and big projects that would be more valuable for me. But instead of throwing this idea right down the trashcan I decided to blog about it first. Done!

Now I’ll spend some valuable time with my son!

#!/bin/sh

if [ `whoami` != 'root' ]; then
  exec sudo $0 $@
fi

find ~david/Maildir -name dovecot-keywords | (
while read keywords; do

  DIR=`dirname $keywords`
  #echo $DIR >&2
  # XXX only supports 10 keywords
  CHAR=`awk '$2 == "Junk" { print $1; quit;  }' $keywords |
    tr '0-9' 'a-j'`

  if [ "$CHAR" ]; then
    find $DIR/cur $DIR/new -regex "[^,]*,[^,]*$CHAR.*" |
      xargs sa-learn --dbpath /var/lib/amavis/.spamassassin/ --spam
  fi

done
)
/etc/init.d/spamassassin reload

Helpful pages: Maildir format used by Dovecot, Spamassassin with amavis: Tips and tricks.

Due to the Big Corporate Firewall all Internet access must go through the the Enterprisey Proxy so I immediately suspected a firewall/proxy issue. However, Update Manager, apt, etc have worked fine for a long time, so it must be something upgrade-specific.

Some debugging and googling led me to the url_downloadable ignores proxy settings bug report. Maybe I should have enabled jaunty-proposed but to get going I simply applied the attached patch and was able to get started with the upgrade.