As promised, I’ve uploaded a new Ubuntu package to the PPA that is compatible with Ubuntu 10.04. This package doesn’t have any new features, but does remove the dependency on the python-gnome2-extras package that was removed in Lucid.

The new package hasn’t been extensively tested, so file a bug report if there are any installation bugs.

UPDATE (6/14/10): A minor bug slipped in with the last update, so there’s a new package available on the PPA. It should be posted within the next few hours.

Here’s a quick update on the state of BloGTK.

Lucid Packages: Sorry for the delay in packaging. I will have packages for Ubuntu 10.04 on the PPA up shortly. I will post an announcement here when they are available.

The new packages should eliminate the errors about the python-gnome2-extras package not being available. Ubuntu changed their packaging of certain GNOME libraries, and the new BloGTK packages will work with the changes to Ubuntu.

WebKit and BloGTK: BloGTK 2.0 uses the pywebkitgtk library to embed WebKit in the application. This library has caused many problems and is no longer in active development. So this means that the WebKit rendering code will have to be rewritten – and there’s a lot of code. The good news is that using PyGI introspection should give BloGTK closer access to the latest and greatest WebKit features. The bad news is that it may take some time to get it all working. Hopefully the change will be straightforward and BloGTK can leave behind all the bugginess.

Future Releases: The current plan is to move BloGTK 2.1 into being a largely under-the-hood release. The focus of that version will be on moving to WebKit introspection instead of pywebkitgtk and fixing bugs. Other features I want to implement are better error handling (with a GUI telling users how to turn on XML-RPC for WordPress), and better internationalization support.

After that, there will be a major feature release. BloGTK will move to WYSIWYG editing, with the optional code view still available. Image support will happen – either uploading the image to your blog or using Flickr/Picasa. There will be other cool stuff too. Thankfully, some of this code has been written, so it won’t be too difficult to implement.

BloGTK 1.x (2003-2010), RIP: The 1.0 series of BloGTK is not going to be developed further. Getting BloGTK 2.1 pushed out to all the major distros will be a priority. BloGTK 1.x had a much longer life than I would have expected. Thousands of people have used it, and it’s done better than I could have hoped. But it’s not worth maintaining anymore now that BloGTK 2.0 has taken off.

Thanks to everyone who has supported BloGTK – it’s appreciated! The upcoming architectural changes should remove one of the more frustrating roadblocks to making BloGTK what I always wanted it to be, and will hopefully lead to another major leap in open-source blogging.

The next version of Ubuntu, 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” is only a few weeks away, and it’s looking to be a very impressive release. Ubuntu has always seemed to be the Linux distro with the most sense of polish, and 10.04 seems to be the the most polished version of Ubuntu yet. Even though Lucid is just in beta, it seems to work incredibly well.

To get this out of the way, yes, BloGTK 2.0 appears to run flawlessly on Lucid, at least as far as I can tell. I’ll have to create some packages of 2.0 especially for Lucid, but just a repackage appears to be all that’s required.

I’m currently testing Lucid on my netbook (an older Acer Aspire) — and if Lucid can perform well on a machine with a paltry single-core Atom processor and 1GB of RAM, it should perform quite well on better hardware. And indeed, Lucid is plenty fast even on an older netbook.

And Lucid is fast. The boot sequence is the most rapid I’ve ever seen — it’s just a few seconds between the BIOS going through POST and hitting the login screen. There has been a lot of work involved in optimizing Ubuntu’s boot process, and it shows. The fact that it can boot so quickly on a netbook is a testament to how finely optimized the system is.

I’ve never been a fan of Ubuntu’s previous brown and yellow color scheme — it just didn’t strike me as aesthetically pleasing. Lucid features a much nicer theme by default. The default desktop is a bit plain, but it gets the job done. The default GTK theme is pleasing to the eye and features some nice rounded scrollbars.

But for some reason, the window controls are to the left, Mac-style. Except not quite Mac-style, as the order of the buttons is the same as Windows, with the close button on the far right. While Ubuntu head honcho Mark Shuttleworth thinks this is a grand idea, it just seems odd. It’s not a major thing, but it does throw you until you get the hang of it.

Lucid tries to integrate social networking throughout, using Gwibber. It’s a little rough around the edges as is, but this is still a beta, and there’s time to get it right. Social networking is the killer app for most users now, and having an OS that does it out of the box is nice.

Lucid is already looking to be a great step forward for Ubuntu, especially after 9.10 led to many complaints. Even on less powerful hardware, the improved boot times are nothing short of amazing. There are still a few rough edges in this beta, but that’s to be expected. Some of the changes may not appeal to everyone, but overall Lucid provides a very polished experience.

A polished experience is what Linux has been lacking for a long time. The entire Ubuntu team has been focusing on making Linux more usable from the ground up, and their efforts show. The competition is heating up – Mac OS X still provides an incredibly polished experience and Windows 7 sucks less than Vista did. (Damnation by feint praise indeed!) Lucid is a great advance to an already-great Linux distribution, and well worth the upgrade when it becomes final next month.

Ubuntu blog OMG! UBUNTU! has a nice review of BloGTK with some great constructive criticism.

For example, they note that the buttons on the editor toolbar can be difficult to understand. 2.0.1 will feature tooltips for all the buttons to make them easier to figure out. Plus, the insert link icon will be the system standard icon.

The review also notes two feature requests: WYSIWYG editing and Blogger tags. WYSIWYG editing is being experimented with for 2.1, and Blogger tags will come once Ubuntu updates the python-gdata library to support them. Hopefully both will be coming soon.

Thanks to OMG! UBUNTU! for the nice review.

<professor>Good news, everybody!</professor>

It appears that the infamous segfault bug in Karmic has been vanquished, and BloGTK 2.0 no longer tends to fall down and go boom when editing posts. Apparently the WebKit view does NOT want to die, and will decide to take down the entire app if you try. This behavior is more than a little strange, but thankfully there’s a workaround that appears to kill the bug.

The trunk branch on Launchpad has the fix. Hopefully this will fix some other bugs on other platforms.

At this stage, once the fix is confirmed not to cause massive breakage, there will be a point release (2.0.1) with the fix.

From here on out, the next step will be squashing additional bugs, making sure that i18n will work out, and then planning for some new features.

As always, please keep sending bug reports and ideas my way.

For those of you using BloGTK 2.0 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic, you’ve probably noticed a few problems with crashes. Like, a lot of crashes.

From what I’ve been able to tell, BloGTK will crash when more than two windows have been opened. Why, I’ve no idea. My guess is that there’s some garbage collection problems that are causing problems. Whether that’s due to something in BloGTK itself or the underlying Python libraries isn’t known yet. Given that BloGTK works just fine on Jaunty, my guess is that there’s a bug with one of the libraries.

A bug report has already been added to the Launchpad project. If anyone has a better idea of where the problem may be, please post the information either in the bug report or on this blog.

I apologize for the problem, and hopefully the bug will be fixed as Karmic heads towards formal release.

UPDATE: It appears that the crash is related to the WebKit bindings. Investigation into this bug is continuing.

UPDATE – Sept 24: Some more digging has revealed that the crash happens when one editor window is closed and then another is opened. There is a bug report filed with the pywebkitgtk package that seems to deal with a similar issue, if not the same one. I will continue to see if there’s anything I can do with the BloGTK codebase to prevent the crashes.

I apologize for the problems, and hopefully this issue will be resolved before Karmic is formally released next month.

UPDATE: Nov. 5: Still testing this crash on Karmic. I’m hoping to be able to either find a fix or a workaround shortly. Thank you for your patience.

Also, keep the bug reports coming—there are definitely outstanding issues that need to get fixed with the 2.0 codebase, and the more that get squashed, the better BloGTK 2.0 will be.