LottaNZB 0.5.4 released
Written for LottaNZB by Severin H on 2010-05-23
It’s a pleasure for me to announce another (and may be the last) maintenance release in the 0.5 series: LottaNZB 0.5.4! This release features not only a few minor bug fixes, but also a brand-new plug-in and a bunch of new and updated translations. Let’s have a look at the changes in more detail.
In order to save energy, some people prefer their computers to suspend themselves if no input is detected within a certain time interval. However, this behavior is not desirable if the computer is left running, allowing LottaNZB to finish its downloads. When the new plug-in infrastructure was set up last year for the release of LottaNZB 0.5, a plug-in has been written that prevented the computer from being suspended as long as there were active downloads. However, this plug-in was based on deprecated software, namely HAL, which caused the plug-in to stop working on Ubuntu 9.10 or any other GNU/Linux distribution shipping GNOME Power Manager 2.26 or newer. However, due to a bug in this new version of GNOME Power Manager (now based on DeviceKit), it was impossible to port the plug-in. This is why the plug-in went to the virtual attic for a while. Earlier this year, I gave it another shot and traced down the cause of the bug and reported it to the developers of GNOME Power Manager. I was delighted to see the bug being fixed in GNOME Power Manager 2.29.2 shortly after by Chris Coulson. However, the plug-in was not released as part of LottaNZB 0.5.3 because Ubuntu 9.10 still used the old version of GNOME Power Manager. Now that Ubuntu 10.04 has been released, the plug-in works out-of-the-box again and is waiting for you to give it a try!
You might ask what the future of this plug-in is with relation to the transition to SABnzbd. Well, preventing the computer from being suspended is not actually the job of a front-end application like LottaNZB. In the case of the HellaNZB backend, we didn’t have a choice because HellaNZB doesn’t offer this functionality on its own. However, this implied that the plug-in would only work if LottaNZB was connected to an instance of HellaNZB on the very same computer. SABnzbd has recently gained a new functionality (thanks to Marcel!) that serves a similar purpose, but takes a different approach. It allows the user to select the action to be performed by SABnzbd after all downloads have been completed. For instance, the computer may be shut down, hibernated or suspended. These two approaches could be combined, which is why I might provide the SABnzbd developers with the code the plug-in is based on.
The number of people who have contributed to translations of LottaNZB keeps surprising me. I wrote a simple script that collects the list of all translators, which currently contains 114 names! The work of each one of you is highly appreciated! In this release of LottaNZB, translations to Hungarian, Occitan (post 1500), Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish have been added and other translations have been improved significantly. The current status of individual translations is shown below.
In the coming months, the translation focus will shift to LottaNZB 0.6, as soon as the code gets more stable and fewer strings are being added. I’ll let you know when this happens.
In this version of LottaNZB, the Newzbin plug-in has been removed. This decision is justified because firstly, the Newzbin.com service is no longer operational to our regret and secondly, the plug-in was never that user-friendly, as copying a report ID into a LottaNZB dialog isn’t much faster than just downloading the actual NZB file and adding it to LottaNZB’s download queue.
Besides, a bug has been fixed that caused LottaNZB to crash on startup and the order of the menu entries in the panel menu has been improved.
I really hope that you don’t mind the frequency of how Ubuntu is mentioned in this blog. Even though I exclusively use Ubuntu at this point of time, it’s really important to me that LottaNZB runs equally well on any GNU/Linux distribution such as Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo or Arch Linux. Any help with packaging or suggestions regarding a better integration of a particular distribution are always welcome!
You can get LottaNZB 0.5.4 in the download section. As always, we’re grateful for bug reports, translations, as well as ideas for new features!
