Starting Ubuntu Linux 12.10 'Quantal Quetzal' updates

It's that time again to leave behind the stable version and start upgrading packages. Hopefully no breakages along the way. Have to be careful!

KDE 4 Beta 1 in Gutsy

KDE 4 beta 1 uploaded to Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu next release) repos. Downloading.

Free and Open Source Software I use on Windows

1. Firefox 2.0.0.3 (Web Browser)
   
2. FreeBurner Free (CD/DVD Burner)
3. CCleaner (File and application cleaner)
4. Picasa 2 (Photo management)
5. Google Earth (3D Earth Viewer)
6. VLC (Multimedia Player)
7. Ad-Aware SE Personal (Antispyware)
8. Spybot (Antispyware)
   
9. AVG (Antivirus)
10. Open Office (Office Suite)
    

Wine 0.9.34 Released

Another Wine update. This version hasn't landed in the Feisty repositories yet, but I have a feeling it will before the final version of Ubuntu 7.04 is released in late April. I have had some success in running some of my Windows applications with Wine. I'll be covering Wine in more detail in a future post. Some features of this Wine update include :

• Support for Xcursor.
• A range of fixes for various installers.
• New builtin xcopy tool.
• The usual assortment of Direct3D fixes.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Visit http://www.winehq.com/ for more details.

Astronomy Software Part I : Celestia

I like Astronomy and there are some good Astronomy packages for Linux. In Ubuntu these can be found in Add/Remove under the Applications menu. I believe most are under the Education category. The first one is called "Celestia Space Simulator". After installation, it will appear under Applications > Education. When I ran it, it didn't come up full screen, so I hit the maximize button. The planets and stars will be display and you can pan and zoom in and out. The first thing to do is run the demo by pressing the "d" key. You can also click on the stars and planets and information will appear in the upper left corner. The "w" key will label asteroids. "i" will show cloud cover on Earth. "p" labels the planets. "b" labels major stars. "n" shows the locations of spacecraft. "?" turns on constellations. The arrow keys pan and rotate. the "<" and ">" keys let you zoom in and zoom out.

More information about Celestia at http://www.shatters.net/celestia/

Removing Accessibility Options

If you don't need to have the Accessibility options installed, it's easy to remove them. Go into Applications > Add/Remove > Accessibility. Uncheck the boxes for the packages you don't need and click Apply.

Customizing Firefox Part I : Themes

The default Firefox theme is pretty good, but there is also a way to make it look more like your Ubuntu desktop theme. If you launch Synaptic and search for "firefox themes", you will see a package called "firefox-themes-ubuntu". This package contains the Human, Tangerine, and Tango icons sets for Firefox. Once installed, close Firefox and then restart. You can now go into the Firefox Tools menu, select Add-ons, themes, and now you can choose which one you want. After selecting a theme, you'll have to once again close Firefox and restart to see the new theme. Of course, there are many more themes available at:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:2

Open Office 2.2 Released

Just a quick note. Open Office 2.2 was released and is already in the Feisty repositories and available as an update.

Reconfigure ALL installed packages without messing with your home dir

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a -pcritical

Ubuntu Keyboard Shortcuts

These work in the default desktop manager of Ubuntu which is Gnome.

F1 : Launch Ubuntu Help
F5 : ?
Ctrl-b : edit bookmarks
Ctrl-a : select ?
Ctrl-s : select pattern
Ctrl-f : Search
Ctrl-h : ?
Ctrl-l : Open Location
Ctrl-r : ?
Print Screen : Screenshot

Add your local weather to the Gnome panel

To add your current weather conditions, forecast, and radar to the Gnome panel, follow these steps. Right click on either the top or bottom panel. Click Add to Panel. A menu will come up wil various applets. Under accessories, there is an applet called Weather Report. Click on it and then click Add and then close the Add to Panel menu. You will see the applet appear in the panel where you right clicked. Now, right click on the applet icon, select preferences, customize the units for temperature, wind speed, pressure, etc. Under the location tab, find your nearest city. After closing the screen you should see the temperature and conditions update in the panel.

How to quickly change your password

System > Preferences > About Me

The default Ubuntu 7.04 Desktop

Click to enlarge

Easily find and install new backgrounds and themes

By installing the Gnome Art Manager, it makes it easy to find and install new backgrounds, themes, and Splash screens. This package can be installed by using Add/Remove under the Applications menu. Just search for "art" with "All Available Applications" displayed next to Show. After it's installed you can find it under System > Preferences > Art Manager. Run the application and click on "Art" to see what you can add. There are over a thousand backgrounds so it may take a few minutes to display them all.

Playing DVD's and other multimedia

Disclaimer : Playing DVD's on Linux in some countries may be illegal

Despite all the good things that Linux brings, there are certain licensing restrictions that do not legally allow true Open Source (GPL) software like Ubuntu to contain certain drivers and codecs out of the box. The newest version of Ubuntu (7.04) will make it a little easier. I'm sure this is a FAQ for new users to Linux.

How to play DVD's. This is a two part question. There are regular DVD's and there are encrypted DVD's. Most are encrypted today.

Here's what happens if I insert a DVD into my player with "out of the box" Ubuntu : The Totem player comes up automatically but an error that says "The playback of this movie requires a DVD source plugin that is not installed". So, what is this plugin they refer to? Ubuntu calls these drivers/plugins restricted. Now, you can go into Add/Remove under the main menu to get some of these. In Add/Remove type "restricted" in the search box and select "All available Applications" besides Show. You will see "Ubuntu Restricted Extra" popup in a few seconds. Click the check mark and click install and apply. This will install things like Java, Flash, Microsoft True Type fonts and some other plugins/codecs. Click the "Agree to license terms" for the Java installer and click forward.

Now back to trying to play that DVD. If the DVD isn't encrypted, you should be able to eject it and push the cdrom tray back in and now it should play in Totem. Mine didn't. One more thing (easy) to do to play encrypted DVD's is to install libdvdcss2. Bring up the Synaptic package manager under System > Administration. In Synaptic, go under Settings > Repositories. Click the "Third Party Software" tab. Click "Add" and copy and paste this line into there.

deb http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/ edgy free non-free
(you can change "edgy" to "feisty" if your running feisty)

Click "Add Source" and then Close. Click the Reload button in Synaptic. Ignore the
error for now. Click the search button in Synaptic and enter libdvdcss2.
Click the libdvdcss2 and select "Mark for Installation" and Apply. After the installation, eject your DVD and pop it back in. Totem should run and the DVD should play. Mine does.

Flash and Java should now also work after installing the "Ubuntu Restricted Extras"

Ubuntu 7.04 default software

What comes "out of the box" with Ubuntu 7.04? Well, there are hundreds of packages that get installed but not all are applications. Most are pieces of the operating system and a lot of supporting libraries. These are some of the notable default applications and most can be found in the menus.

1. Mozilla Firefox Web browser
   
2. Gimp Image Editor
3. Open Office (Office suite)
   

Is there a need for anything else? This depends on what your going to do with Ubuntu and there are hundreds of other useful programs.

My Fresh Ubuntu 7.04 Beta Install

I have been just updating versions by changing my sources.list file to the new names. This doesn't allow me to see the new installer options and the such, so I have decided to start clean. My system configuration is basically a AMD Duron 1.8 Ghz, 1.0 GB RAM, 128 MB ATI Radeon 9200, a 30 GB Western Digital primary drive, and a 80GB Western Digital data drive for documents, pictures, and music. My goal is still to dual boot on the 30GB drive with Windows XP, but only allocating 15 GB to Windows as I'm using it less and less. So here we go.

Step 1. Download Ubuntu 7.04 Beta ISO.

Step 2. Burn the ISO to a CD.

Step 3. Restart computer with CDrom set to bootable

Step 4. When menu comes up, select Install (First Option)

Step 5. After the Ubuntu screen comes up, double click the Install icon on the desktop.

Step 6. Choose your language, timezone, keyboard layout

Step 7. Step 4 of the installer is the disk partitioner. There are 3 options but I'm going to select Manual since I want full control of this process and I want to keep my Windows partition intact. The Prepare Partitions screen comes up. First I'm going to resize my Windows NTFS partition. I click on it and click the "Edit Partition" button. I encountered a problem trying to resize my Windows NTFS partition on hda1. I will therefore just check the box to format my existing 8 GB EXT3 partition (hda2) and then try to resize after install is completed. So, I edit the EXT partition and make the mountpoint root (/), click the format box next to it and click the forward button.
If you don't have Windows on the hard disk your going to install Ubuntu on then proceed to use the entire disk.

Step 8. The next step is an optional Migrate Documents and Settings. This will migrate your Windows settings to Ubuntu if Windows is found on your system. You can drop down specific options by clicking the triangle. I'm just going to select Firefox since that's all I want to move over. The fields listed below are for creating an Ubuntu user to migrate the settings to . Fill them in and click forward.

Step 9. Now your going to create your user profile. If you created a user on the previous screen to migrate settings to, then create the same user here. Also, select a computer name for later use on a networked system.

Step 10. Ready to Install! Verify the listed information is correct and click Install. It took me about 15 minutes to install.

Step 11. Click the Restart Now button to reboot. You will see the system shutting down and then a prompt at the bottom of the screen will ask you to remove the install CD from the drive and then click return.

Step 12. When your system restarts a menu will be presented to give the option of which Linux kernel to boot or to boot into other Operating Systems on your computer.

Step 13. Next, the login screen will be presented. Log in with the username and password you entered in the install process.

Step 14. The Ubuntu default desktop will load. If the screen resolution doesn't look correct, then click System > Preferences > Screen Resolution. Select an appropriate resolution and refresh rate and click apply. If the screen looks good, click keep resolution.

Step 15. You will now notice that an orange asterisk shows up at the top of the screen. This means that updates are available. Right click on the icon and select "Show Updates". A menu will appear that shows available updates. Go ahead and leave all check marked and click the Install Updates button. The updated software will now download and install to your system. After the software installs, a blue revolving arrows icon may display on the top panel indicating that you need to reboot. Click the icon and select "Restart Now"

Step 16. One last recommendation after installing Ubuntu is to enable all the software repositories for future updates. This can be done by launching Synaptic and going into the Settings > Repositories. Under the Ubuntu Software tab make sure all boxes have been check marked except for Source Code. Under the "Updates" tab, check mark all the boxes.

The previous steps were the main steps to getting your Ubuntu Operating System installed. Future posts on this blog will address many other aspects of Ubuntu and Linux/Open Source Software details.

How to manually reconfigure X

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Ubuntu 7.04 Beta Released

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the beta release of Ubuntu 7.04.

Ubuntu 7.04 is the most user-friendly Ubuntu to date and includes a ground-breaking Windows migration assistant, excellent wireless networking support and improved multimedia support.

Ubuntu 7.04 server edition adds support for hardware facilities that speed up the use of virtual machines as well as other improved hardware support, making it an excellent choice as a web, database, file and print server, the fastest growing area of Linux server use.

Rest of Story

The 7.04 Beta Wiki Site

Native Linux Apps not in Ubuntu default Repositories

1) Opera
2) Realplayer (install binary)
3) AVG Antivirus

Windows Apps that can work in Linux

First, install WINE. You can find Wine with Synaptic. Just download the Windows EXE and click to install.

Verified to work in Ubuntu Feisty running newest version of Wine.

1) Google Picasa 2 (Picasa version 1 runs natively in Linux)
2) AdAware
3) Spybot
4) CDex (WAV to MP3 converter)

My current desktop

Click to enlarge

Ubuntu.com migrates to Drupal CMS

The new site is very clean and organized.

Video showing Gnome 2.18 & Beryl 2.0 running on Feisty

Notice, it's running on a laptop...

What's your source.list look like?

Here's mine as of this minute:

deb http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/ubuntu/ feisty restricted universe multiverse main
deb http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/ubuntu/ feisty-updates restricted universe multiverse main
deb http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/ubuntu/ feisty-security restricted universe multiverse main
deb http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/ubuntu/ feisty-proposed restricted multiverse universe main
deb http://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/linux/ubuntu/ feisty-backports restricted multiverse universe main
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu feisty-commercial main
deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org feisty main

Beryl Manager 0.2.1 today

Beryl Manager 0.2.1 landed in the Feisty repos today.

Ubuntu 411 Companion Ubuntu PDF Reference Guide & Wiki in the works

This Draft version soon be coming in next few weeks. It will be a living document. The Wiki will be set up over the next month or so.

Synaptic Tip

You can optimize package download performance by selecting the fastest server available.
Settings > Repositories > Download From > Other > Click Select Best Server > After it's done click Choose Server

Welcome to Ubuntu 411

As Windows equates to Linux, XP and Vista equate to Ubuntu or other Linux distro.