Liferea
May 6th, 2008
I get a lot of my news via rss feeds. For that purpose, I really like Liferea. Liferea is a consistently good feed reader and aggregator for Linux. I have used it since the 1.0 series and have always been pleased.
There is a stable version out that has been available for about a month, 1.4.15. Usually I can find a deb for new versions within a week or so from places like GetDeb, but this time around I can’t find one. The Hardy repos have 1.4.14, but it has a problem that causes the program to run away with my cpu, causing weird usage spikes and slowing down my system until I kill it. The Debian Sid repos have the new version, but it requires other dependency updates, and I’ve had my fill of mixing repos (I used to do that a lot in the Hoary Hedgehog - Ubuntu 5.04 days, mixing in Debian repos for the occasional program).
There is a bug report on Launchpad for the runaway CPU behavior. Anyone have any ideas on what we might be able to do to fix this, other than the obvious “download it myself and compile it,” which I may do anyway.
Entry Filed under: Linux / Ubuntu
8 Comments Add your own
1. David McKendrick | May 6th, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Liferea is a great little app. — my only complaint at this point is that the ‘feedbug’ (or feedbag, can’t recall to be honest) plugin that links it to firefox doesn’t have a version out for firefox 3 yet.
It’s almost making me consider switching to Epiphany or another browser that supports liferea almost ‘natively’. Can’t help much with that cpu bug, you’re on your own!
2. Chris Conway | May 7th, 2008 at 12:27 am
The liferea packages in Ubuntu always lag the point releases, and it never seems to get prioritized for backports. On the upside, it’s pretty easy to compile it yourself… You may need to chase down some dependences (e.g., libxul-dev) and the Makefiles have trouble finding Lua on Ubuntu installs. I configured with:
./configure LUA51_CFLAGS=-I/usr/include/lua5.1 LUA51_LIBS=-llua5.1 –disable-gtkhtml2
3. João Pinto | May 7th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Liferea 1.4.15 was published on getdeb today.
4. Emilio Pozuelo Monfort | May 7th, 2008 at 9:06 am
@Matthew: I’ve passed the merge to a contributor who said he would do it this Thursday, so I expect it to be in Intrepid this week if everything goes fine.
@David: Liferea works fine with FF3… I use it everyday. But feedbag is deprecated long time ago (only useful for firefox 1.5)! Just go to preferences>applications>web feed, and select /usr/bin/liferea-add-feed, and you are done (yes, there’s no better way of doing it)
@Chris: I take care of Liferea for Ubuntu and I do my best. Of course any help is appreciated, so if you are interested in maintaining it contact me. Regarding the point releases, I keep it up-to-date while Ubuntu repositories aren’t freezed, but when we are close to a release, I ask the upstream author and other Ubuntu developers what’s their opinion about updating the package, and given their opinion and my criteria, I act. For 1.4.15, the upstream author said it was too risky as it introduced too many changes, so I backported two fixes from 1.4.15 (look at the Ubuntu changelog).
5. matthew | May 7th, 2008 at 9:10 am
João and Emilio: thanks for the good news and information, gentlemen!
EDIT: I downloaded and installed the version currently on GetDeb and it is working beautifully. Yay!
6. matthew | May 7th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Update: bad news, I just experienced the runaway cpu bug on 1.4.15 when I closed Liferea. Bummer.
7. Roger Lancefield | May 7th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
OT but… Just wanted to fire a “Thank you!” to Emelio. I’ve been using Liferea on a succession of Ubuntus for the last year and a half, at least, and I can’t imagine life without it now. I fire it up every day, learn loads from the collective wisdom it delivers and yet just take its availability for granted.
This latest glitch-ette notwithstanding, thanks for all your hard work, it’s really appreciated!
8. matthew | May 7th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Roger: I totally agree!
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