Ubuntu barrel scrapings

I'm working on a couple of killer blog entries, one about Xubuntu and the Aspire One, and the other about the Data Cloud. Alas, neither project has reached fruition, so I am having to stave off the entries and scrape the barrel for some Ubuntu Goodness.

Thus, I bring you getdeb.net, a place where you can get the latest and the greatest software in Debian package format for Ubuntu. I came across the site as I was looking for the latest (0.15) version of the Geany text editor, which isn't in the mainstream Ubuntu package repository. Buyer Beware though, as the software isn't so thoroughly tested. YMMV etc.

I've also been missing Marc Gueury's HTML Validator Firefox extension, which unsurprisingly checks the HTML validity of a page and even more unsurprisingly has compatibility problems with Firefox on Ubuntu. It's brilliant for web building, and I happenstanced across Will Bond's fix over at iMarc. This is for an old version of Firefox though luckily he gives the following advice in the last comment on the page:

The official XPI from http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/download.html works perfectly on 8.04 with Firefox 3 if you install http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/libstdc++5. You can install libstdc++5 through the command line by running sudo apt-get install libstdc++5.

Three cheers for everyone!