LottaNZB

In the past months, I kept promising that I would eventually write a blog post about about what has been going on related to the development of LottaNZB and what you can except in the next couple of months.

More than a year ago, I announced that we’re evaluating SABnzbd as the new LottaNZB backend, replacing HellaNZB that hasn’t been developed for years. Although we’re not close to a release of LottaNZB 0.6 yet, I’m glad to tell you that the migration went really well so far and many things have already been accomplished.

SABnzbd 0.5, which LottaNZB 0.6 builds upon, has been released today. Congratulations to the whole SABnzbd crew who’ve made this possible! They’ve also revamped the project homepage and a wiki provides detailed information for anyone who’s interested. I’m also grateful that the SABnzbd developers (especially ShyPike) were so open to suggestions regarding API improvements by third-party developers like me. LottaNZB will directly profit from this healthy collaboration. Fortunately, JCFP has already set up a PPA, making it easy to install SABnzbd on Ubuntu machines and automatically keep SABnzbd up-to-date.

While I’ve been focusing on carefully creating a new modular and extensible backend for asynchronous communication with SABnzbd, allowing access to all interesting data in a convenient way, handling configuration files etc., we’ve now moved on to the UI that makes use of all the new infrastructure. The screenshots below showcase the current code in the main branch (already more than 1000 revisions) as well as several experimental branches by me and Marcel. Everything is still work in progress and many things are still incomplete and subject to change. Of course, we always appreciate fresh new ideas regarding UI design.

Right now, we’re only working on getting the basic features in place that are essential for the release of LottaNZB 0.6. With all the handy features SABnzbd provides (RSS feeds, categorization, scheduling, sorting, etc.) we won’t run out of work for later versions of LottaNZB.

At this point of time, it’s impossible for me to say when LottaNZB 0.6 will be released. 2010 is definitely a target though.  As soon as LottaNZB 0.6 reaches something between alpha and beta quality, we’ll provide a PPA with daily builds of the latest LottaNZB code and some source tarballs now and then so that courageous people can give LottaNZB 0.6 a spin and provide us with valuable input in the form of bug reports and feature requests.

Stay tuned!

It’s a pleasure for me to announce another maintenance release in the 0.5 series. Clear the stage for the first LottaNZB release in the new decade: LottaNZB 0.5.3! This release both features some new bells and whistles, making the application ready for future releases of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, but also includes numerous bug fixes.

I’d like to present you the most important changes.

Ubuntu 10.04 is going to introduce a new approach to the notification area, making it consistent so that each icon would behave identically, allowing people to use them in an easier way. LottaNZB 0.5.3 also uses a so-called application indicator, given that the “Panel menu” plug-in is activated in LottaNZB’s preferences. Users of other Linux distributions or older version of Ubuntu have no reason to worry: LottaNZB will still work like before.

Thanks to Chris Conway, the “Show main window” checkbox has become much more intuitive, as it will not only bring LottaNZB back on the screen if the window has previously been closed, but also if the window has been minimized to the window list.

In this version of LottaNZB, the icons have undergone a minor update, making them a bit cleaner. The warmer color palette fits much better into a desktop that uses the Humanity icon theme introduced in Ubuntu 9.10, but will hopefully also look friendly on any other GNOME desktop. The rightmost column shows you the new icon set:

Apart from that, two severe crashes have been fixed that only affect machines with new development versions of GTK to be included in distributions like Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.04. We’re glad to get these fixes out in time so that the people (like me) who prefer to always be on the bleeding edge will still be able to use LottaNZB.

You can get LottaNZB 0.5.3 in the download section. As always, we’re grateful for bug reports, translations, as well as ideas for new features!

I still owe the readers of this blog a sneak preview of the upcoming LottaNZB 0.6 release based on SABnzbd. We’ve made some great progress and I’d like to share that with you.

It’s a pleasure for me to announce the release of LottaNZB 0.5.2!

While one’s been working mostly on the upcoming LottaNZB 0.6, we spent some time fixing a few remaining bugs and giving translators the time to update the translations. We’ve never had more complete translations of LottaNZB! Thanks to all who have contributed to it. Also, an objective was to prepare the LottaNZB 0.5 series for the upload to Debian and Ubuntu.

An important change is that the proprietary unrar application used to extract completed archives isn’t automatically installed anymore together with LottaNZB. For those who are interested, we made this change to prevent the LottaNZB package from being moved to the “contrib” repository in Debian and “multiverse” repository in Ubuntu. However, installing unrar is as easy as clicking on a link and LottaNZB 0.5.2 will display a useful hint if the application cannot be found.

This version of LottaNZB also works around a bug in HellaNZB that causes post-processing of certain downloads to stop. Marcel did a great job locating the bug in the HellaNZB’s code and providing a true fix that has already been uploaded to Debian.

In Ubuntu 9.10, all application toolbars are now more compact, which saves space on the screen. We made sure that LottaNZB will also look great on Ubuntu 9.10. Here is what it looks like:

You can get LottaNZB 0.5.2 in the download section. Packages for Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10 as well as Fedora 11 and 12 are ready for you to install. Unfortunately, as some Fedora users might already have noticed, HellaNZB isn’t part of the official Fedora 12 repository. That’s why you’ll need to download and install the package we provide in our download section.

As always, we’re grateful for bug reports, translations as well as ideas for new features!

After the release of LottaNZB 0.5, we promised you a 0.5.1 version with bug fixes and updated translations. Here it is! The new version even comes with two new features, which I’d like to present you here.

Support for backup servers

Some of you use more than one Usenet server, for various reasons. While it has always been possible to mark servers as backup servers (aka fillservers), until now, it required you to edit the HellaNZB configuration by hand. Starting with LottaNZB 0.5.1, you can do that from within LottaNZB. Backup servers are servers that are only used if a certain file cannot be downloaded from all other servers. It would be interesting for us to know how many people actually use more than one server. You might want to tell us in a comment.

More accessible SSL feature

These days, most paid Usenet servers offer SSL encryption support at reasonable prices. It’s now possible to directly enable SSL while setting up LottaNZB for the first time.

Fixes for severe bugs

Adding NZB files directly from Firefox hasn’t worked properly for a long time. You were required to download the files to the desktop or somewhere else instead and clicking on it. Not anymore! We also fixed crashes that occurred when starting LottaNZB for the first time on newly installed systems and when adding a NZB file.

Also, it’s a pleasure for me to announce that Marcel de Vries from the Netherlands and Eran C. from Israel have joined the development team! Marcel is responsible for half of the new feature and bug fixes. Both Eran C. and Marcel intend to help with all the work that will be necessary to finally present you LottaNZB 0.6.

Welcome aboard!

Unfortunately, there are a few untranslated strings in LottaNZB 0.5.1. This is because the Launchpad import feature doesn’t seem to work at this point of time. We’ll make the new strings available to all translators as soon as it works again and will therefore release LottaNZB 0.5.2 with updated translations.

As always, we’re grateful for bug reports, translations as well as ideas for new features!

You can get LottaNZB 0.5.1 in the download section.

This is a response to the three comments on the How not to release software post. I originally intended to write this as a comment, but as more as the text grew, the more I thought about turning it into a stand-alone post:

Thanks alot everyone for the kind words.

It’s probably not right to say that LottaNZB is my very own project since Sander is the original author and is still part of the development and also pays the bills for lottanzb.org (big thanks to him for this). Being involved in several other interesting programming projects (mostly Android-based) he hasn’t been contributing to the code base for a while. I really hope that I didn’t scare him away because of my tendency to rewrite code over and over again, may be because I’m an aesthet both when it comes to code and UI design.

This leads me to history of me and Linux. It started when I switched from Windows Vista to Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 2 about one and a half year ago. I never looked back. The free software community has turned out to be the world I was looking for and didn’t know of for years! A world of openness, collaboration, sharing and friendship. After I started to work on LottaNZB as a complete beginner to Linux programming, my knowledge about the whole Linux ecosystem grew as LottaNZB as an application got more professional… and vice versa. And it even greatly improved my English.

It’s great to see that people appreciate ones work and it’s a terrific feeling to see people contributing translations, filing bug reports, writing patches and sharing their ideas about new features with us.

I’m afraid that after some investigation, I figured out that getting LottaNZB 0.5 to work on GTK < 2.16-based systems like Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 would in fact mean to revert the migration from the deprecated libglade to GTKBuilder. I know that there are quite some LottaNZB users who would have loved to run the version of LottaNZB 0.5 on such systems but I must say that it’s probably not worth the effort. LottaNZB 0.4.1 turned out to be a quite stable release and comes with most of the features LottaNZB 0.5 has to offer. Because of that, I changed the download pages accordingly. I really hope that you understand this decision. This might even provide you with a reason to upgrade the system.

SABnzbd is definitely a nice piece of software with lots of potential. I really look forward to the day when we’ll be able to announce the release of the first version of LottaNZB based on SABnzbd, but there’s still a long way to go. While the new backend has mostly been written already, what’s left to be done is the UI and all the glue code that’s necessary to keep everything together. What I have in mind is to turn LottaNZB into an application that is as powerful as SABnzbd’s web interface, but with less clutter and the clean and welcoming GNOME/GTK look I love so much.

Thanks again for all your support. It’s a pleasure to write software for you.

I generally tend to be nervous when releasing a new major version of LottaNZB and I always ask myself if we really catched all nasty bugs or if I’m going to wake up with my inbox full of bug reports. This time, I was pretty confident that everything went reasonably well, considering that I hadn’t added any new features for several months and only focused on making the software to run as smoothly as possible. We even had a public beta test this time, which helped to track down a few bugs I weren’t aware of before.

I should’ve known better. Soon after the release, Marcel de Vries reported that he was unable to launch LottaNZB 0.5 on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 9.04 due to missing directories. A fix was quickly developed and scheduled to be included in LottaNZB 0.5.1. Things got serious when dasbooter reported that it wasn’t possible to launch LottaNZB 0.5 on a machine with GTK 2.12 (may be Ubuntu 8.04).

I confirmed this issue after having set up a virtual machine running Ubuntu 8.04. The problem is that the migration from the deprecated libglade to GTKBuilder didn’t went as smoothly as I expected. While Ubuntu 8.04 comes with support for GTKBuilder (GTK 2.12), the support isn’t as complete as I expected it to be. For GTK 2.14 the problem is the same.

The release announcement has been changed quickly as well as the download page so that people running older distributions don’t end up with an installation of LottaNZB that simply won’t start. People how experience this problem are asked to remove LottaNZB 0.5 and go back to 0.4.1. They’ll probably need to reconfigure LottaNZB.

Where do we go from here? It’s clear that the lion’s share of all LottaNZB user tend to use the latest version of their distribution. Since it’s not even been a year since the release of GTK 2.14 (Ubuntu 8.10) and the fact that Ubuntu 8.04 is an LTS version, it’s clear that it would be desirable to have support for those versions. If it’s possible to get back the support for LottaNZB 0.5 for those versions using a reasonable amount of work, it should be done. LottaNZB 0.6 on the other hand will definitely depend on GTK 2.16.

I’m afraid I can’t give you a date when and if the LottaNZB 0.5.x series will support GTK 2.14 (or even GTK 2.12).

What is left to be said is that I’m sorry for the troubles that this release might have caused for some LottaNZB users. There’s a positive side to the whole episode: I definitely learned alot and it tought me to avoid such things in the future, by testing ones code more extensively and on more platforms.

The wait is finally over. Six months after the release of LottaNZB 0.4.1, I’m proud to announce LottaNZB 0.5! Let’s have a look at all the awesome new stuff in this version.

Plug-ins

We want to keep the default user interface as clean as possible, while making it easy for you to activate extra functionality if you need it. In LottaNZB 0.5, we turned both the categorization and Newzbin support into plug-ins. You can also hide the LottaNZB icon from the notification area if you want to.

More GNOME-ish

We want LottaNZB to look and behave exactly like the other GNOME applications you love! LottaNZB 0.5 instantly applies changes to the preferences. There’s no need to press a “Save” button anymore.

What took you so long?

There are some issues that should have been tackled much sooner. It’s now possible to open the preferences window also if LottaNZB is connected to another computer and makes it possible for you to change the bandwidth limit. You can finally enqueue NZB files over the network! Have you ever wondered why NZB files just vanish as soon as you add them to LottaNZB? Now you can choose whether you’d like to keep them or not.

Hail GNOME 3.0

GNOME 3.0 is on the horizon and some technologies are being replaced by new and better ones. This is why we migrated from the deprecated libglade to GTKBuilder. Unfortunately LottaNZB 0.5 only runs on distributions not older than half a year (those that come with GTK 2.16). For example, if you use Ubuntu 8.04 or 8.10, please don’t upgrade to LottaNZB 0.5 or go back to LottaNZB 0.4.1 if you’ve already done so.

The configuration has been moved from ~/.lottanzb to ~/.config/lottanzb, making it easier for you to take all your desktop configuration with you, including LottaNZB’s.

Consider your days counted, bugs!

As always, several bugs have been fixed thanks to reports by various LottaNZB users! A special thanks to those brave people who have participated in the successful public beta test.

Thanks go out to all who have contributed to this release in some way, no matter if by contributing code, reporting bugs or translating the application to all kind of languages. We will probably release LottaNZB 0.5.1 few weeks after this release, giving LottaNZB users (you!) the time to update the translations and report bugs we haven’t catched during the public beta.

The LottaNZB 0.5.x series will probably be the last one that’s based on HellaNZB. You might want to read more about what we have in mind for LottaNZB 0.6.

Now go to the download section and get it while it’s hot!

UPDATE: Marcel de Vries reported a bug which causes NZB files not to be associated with LottaNZB during the installation on Ubuntu. I just uploaded new Ubuntu packages (built by Launchpad instead of my computer), which are available at the download page or the LottaNZB PPA. Instead of a single Ubuntu package, we now have a package for each Ubuntu version. Please note that you will be told (erroneously) that the new package is in fact older than the installed one. This is not the case. If you want to use the new Ubuntu package, you will need to remove the installed one first.

It’s been a long time since the last release of LottaNZB and many things have happened since January 2009. LottaNZB has been uploaded to Debian and Ubuntu, we introduced a fresh new design for this homepage and finally wrote about the major changes planned for LottaNZB 0.6. We also promised to release LottaNZB 0.5 soon, which we’ve been working on mostly in winter and spring. Due to exams and other work and because I’ve already been working on LottaNZB 0.6, LottaNZB 0.5 waited for a long time to be released. During the past days I’ve done some final polishing and can tell you that it’s really close to a release, finally.

I hereby announce a public beta test for the upcoming release of LottaNZB 0.5! All the new features of LottaNZB 0.5 are already there. Among them is the support for plug-ins, the possibility to enqueue files over the network and a couple of UI improvements. Additionally, from a technical point of view, LottaNZB has been made ready for future versions of GNOME by porting it from libglade to GTKBuilder. And of course several bugs have been fixed thanks to reports by various LottaNZB users. The release announcement of the final version will contain some more information about what’s new along with some shiny screenshots.

The reason for this beta test is that we’d like to catch bugs we might have missed as well as give you the opportunity to update the translation of the application!

We only provide the source package as well as the package for Debian/Ubuntu. Packages for Fedora will be created once the final version of LottaNZB 0.5 is released.

• Ubuntu/Debian package
• Source package (new build dependency: intltool)

We really look forward to your feedback in the form of comments and bug reports. Contributions to the translation are also highly appreciated. If no major bugs show up, the final version of LottaNZB 0.5 will be released in a few days.

Thanks for your patience!

UPDATE: I just uploaded a new LottaNZB beta version (0.4.96) which fixes a severe bug reported by Frank Zwart which caused LottaNZB to crash on startup when installed using the Ubuntu/Debian package. Also a minor preferences UI issue has been fixed. The above links now point to the updated files.

When I started the LottaNZB project a couple of years ago, it was basically because I didn’t really like working from the command line at that time. Since HellaNZB was lacking a graphical user interface, I decided to create one for myself. When I considered LottaNZB to be good enough for my personal usages, I thought that other people might benefit from it as well.

The project I’m going to tell you about in this post came from the same need: Android was lacking a nice client which interacts with LottaNZB. As you might have guessed from the title of this blog post, LottaNZB mobile is a work-in-progress app for Android. It is a remote front-end to either a running HellaNZB daemon, or a running LottaNZB process (which launches the HellaNZB daemon).

The application supports pausing and removing downloads and it allows for rearranging of the download queue. Adding nzb-files sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, but well, as I said, it’s a work in progress.

More »

The Fedora packages for LottaNZB on this website never had a high quality due to the fact that I didn’t know much about RPM packaging and personally didn’t use Fedora. Whenever a new version of LottaNZB was released, I fired up VirtualBox and launched the virtual Fedora 9 installation in order to build the RPM package and give it a quick try (which was overall quite annoying). There were several problems: For instance, it wasn’t possible to install the LottaNZB package on the recently released Fedora 11. Additionally, the Fedora download page asked users to grab the HellaNZB and unrar package and install it. I didn’t even notice that the newest version of HellaNZB has been part of Fedora’s repositories for quite a while and unrar packages can be found in the RPMFusion repositories.

I’m happy to announce that the situation is going to be much better starting today! In collaboration with PabloTwo and leigh123linux, two awesome guys on the Fedora Forum, a proper SPEC file was created for LottaNZB, which is used to build RPM packages from source tarballs. Next, I learned about Koji, a Fedora service similar to Ubuntu’s PPA feature that makes it possible to build RPMs for different versions of Fedora on their servers. It turned out to be incredibly easy to use! I also created a Fedora-specific patch for LottaNZB that makes sure that LottaNZB plays nicely with the HellaNZB package shipped with Fedora. This package doesn’t depend on unrar, which means that the automatic extraction of downloads is not enabled by default.

Using Koji, I created one LottaNZB package for Fedora 9, one for Fedora 10 and one for the latest release, Fedora 11.

Get the one that fits you from the Fedora download page now and tell me if it works for you!

Packagers of other RPM-based distributions are recommended to use the SPEC file that can be found in LottaNZB’s code repository. It probably won’t require much changes to adapt it to your distribution!