It's free.

Give me the endash!

For some reason, I had some keyboard problems again* with my clean Oneiric installation. For some reason AltGr+- did not produce endash**, like it did in Natty. There is a fix to this, and this time the credits go to Radomir and Jere. The fix is applied as follows:

  1. Run xmodmap -pke > ~/.Xmodmap in terminal or TTY.
  2. Open ~/.Xmodmap in a text editor, and find a line similar to:
    keycode 61 = minus underscore minus underscore hyphen dead_macron
    The most important and distinctive mark should be that you have minus and hyphen in the definition. The keycode number (and the other key bindings) can be different.
  3. Replace hyphen with endash and save the file.
  4. Run xmodmap .Xmodmap to get the new settings applied right away. If you have chosen to use system settings in the Layout tab of the Keyboard settings in Xfce Settings Manager, this will work automatically on next boot. If you haven’t, or if there is something else weird going on, you might want to add the command to your autostart.

* The previous problem with Ctrl and Alt being switched head-by-head in VirtualBox disappeared with Oneiric.
** Endash is a longer dash which is used when denoting a scale like “13–15 year old boys”.

Nominated for Xubuntu Project Lead

It’s official now. I have been nominated for the new Xubuntu Project Lead and I’ve confirmed that I am willing to fill the position too.

The vote is on the 23rd of October at the Xubuntu Community Meeting, at #xubuntu-devel at the Freenode IRC network. Feel free to join us and cheer for me, as well as vote. The requirement to vote is to be a member of the Xubuntu Users Launchpad group. The group is open to join for anyone with a Launchpad account.