Ubuntu Tutorials

The topic of installing Adobe products in Ubuntu has both been loved and hated by reader since the first time I outlined it. Some very much appreciate the clear steps outlining installation of the PDF reader application. Others despise the idea of proprietary software intermingling with their otherwise open source desktop. However you feel about Adobe Reader, love it or hate it, it is a popular application and in many cases required by users for work or otherwise. With each new Ubuntu release I outline how to install and update your Adobe Reader installation.

Repository Requirements (Optional)

Canonical, the parent company behind Ubuntu, has provided a repository to distribute Adobe Reader and similar applications. The method of installing Ubuntu by way of a repository is more automated than a direct download from the Adobe website. I’ll outline either version, but keep in mind that I prefer (and suggest!) the first. Configuring the partner repository is a requirement for the first option.

Canonical Partner Repository – Option 1

Installation of Adobe Reader 9 requires the activation of the Canonical Partner repository. You can add the Partner repository by following the steps outlined below.

1. Navigate to System > Administration > Software Sources
2. Select “Third Party” or “Other Software”
3. Select “Add” and enter: deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner

You should now be able to install the latest version of Adobe Reader on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS by using the following command, or clicking the embedded link:

sudo aptitude install acroread

Direct Download: Adobe.com – Option 2

The alternate installation solution is to download Adobe Reader directly from the Adobe website. As a disclaimer, I should warn you that this method will not receive automatic updates and it is left to the user to download and install any future releases of this application.

If you understand these requirements, continue to install Adobe Reader using the following steps:

1. Visit this page: http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions/
2. Select “Linux – x86 (.deb)” from the drop-down menu
3. Select your preferred language
4. Download the package

Depending on your browser you may be prompted to open the package with the package installer, or it will simply save it to disk. If it saves to disk, you’ll simply need to double-click the archive for the installation to begin.

Conclusion

Most of my dealings with PDF files is managed by Evince, the default GNOME pdf reader. Occasionally however I need the Adobe-specific application. As with many of the readers here, I prefer the free software solution where possible, but sometimes it just isn’t possible. Love it or hate it, Adobe Reader is sometimes part of our lives.

Again, I would suggest the first solution toward installing Adobe Reader as it will automatically manage security updates for you. The packages are provided directly from Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, and managed by Ubuntu staff. I trust these packages just as much (if not more) than the direct-from-adobe packages available in the secondary solution.

If this article has been helpful, please consider linking to it.

I recently wrote an article outlining how to remove the login screen user list in the KDE login screen. This article outlines the same steps, but specific to the GNOME login screen. The instructions here have been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as well as Ubuntu 9.10. If you would prefer to remove the user list from your login screen and require the username be entered in combination with the password, these instructions will achieve just that.

GDM Changes

I believe it was with Ubuntu 9.10 that the GDM login manager was rewritten and the previous configuration options removed. I know there was a lot of upset about that when it happened. The functionality seemed to be the same, but the configuration options that users had grown used to were now gone. It seems, however, that there are still some settings that can be changed. Perhaps not quite as many, but one of the important ones is still available. If slightly obscure.

Updating Configuration

There are two methods of updating this configuration. There is the command-line one-liner, which I like for it’s quick and easy use. There is also the graphical method. I’ll outline both below. You can follow whichever you feel most comfortable with.

Command Line : gconftool-2

To disable the login screen user list in Ubuntu 10.04, simply run the following command, entering your password when prompted:

sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true

The next time you log in you’ll be prompted to enter your username and password, instead of selecting your username from a list.

Graphical Method : gconf-editor

To disable the login screen user list in Ubuntu 10.04 graphically, run the following command and then navigate to the proper key=value pair setting.

sudo -u gdm gconf-editor

Navigate to /apps/gdm/simple-greeter.

Check the box that says “disable user list”, setting the value to true.

disable ubuntu login user list

Whichever method you choose, you’ll end up with the same result. Disabling the list of users at the login screen. I prefer my machine to require the username + password combination. No reason in telling everyone who the machine belongs to, and removing half of the security of the login mechanism.

I am interested in hearing your thoughts on the security vs usability of a user list at login. Do you agree with me or disagree?

I thought I would share a little bit more from the book I reviewed, “VirtualBox 3.1 Beginners Guide“. This book outlines the process of installing Guest Additions on your virtual machines. Guest additions allow you to greatly improve your experience when working inside virtual machines. Improved mouse and keyboard integration, improved video resolution and more! VirtualBox Guest Additions are a basic requirement for anyone wanting to properly run virtual machines in a graphical environment.

In this article I will outline how to install VirtualBox Guest Additions on Windows and Linux virtual machines. If you have not previously run a Virtual Machine with Guest Additions, you’ve been missing out!

Prerequisites

This article assumes, of course, that you already have VirtualBox and a Virtual Machine installed. You’ll find instructions below for both Windows and Linux guests.

Install VirtualBox Guest Additions on Windows

To install VirtualBox Guest Additions, you’ll first need to boot and log into your Virtual Machine. In this case, launch your Windows Virtual Machine and follow these steps:

1. In the VirtualBox menu of your running Virtual Machine, under Devices, select “Install Guest Additions”.
2. Follow the prompts for the VirtualBox Guest Additions Setup.
3. Reboot the Virtual Machine when prompted.
4. Enjoy!

You can always verify whether or not VirtualBox Guest Additions are installed in your Virtual Machine by looking in the system tray. If you see a small VirtualBox icon, VirtualBox Guest additions is installed an running properly.

Install VirtualBox Guest Additions on Linux

These instructions should apply to most Linux distributions. It is not limited to Ubuntu Virtual Machines.

To install VirtualBox Guest Additions, you’ll first need to boot and log into your Virtual Machine. In this case, launch your Linux Virtual Machine and follow these steps:

1. Ensure you have the ‘build-essential’ and ‘dkms’ packages installed in the Virtual Machine. This is required to compile the kernel modules required.
2. In the VirtualBox menu of your running Virtual Machine, under Devices, select “Install Guest Additions”.
3. This may prompt you with an auto-run prompt as it loads the CD image. You can skip this as you’ll need to run the installer from the Terminal.
4. Open a Terminal and navigate to the VBOX* directory under /media.
5. * Run: sudo ./VboxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
6. If everything runs according to plan, you’ll be prompted to reboot your Virtual Machine.
7. Enjoy!

* Note: step 5 allows for 32bit or 64bit installations. If your Virtual Machine is a 64bit, run the ./VboxLinuxAdditions-amd64.run instead.

You can always verify whether or not VirtualBox Guest Additions are installed in your Virtual Machine by looking in the system tray. If you see a small VirtualBox icon, VirtualBox Guest additions is installed and running properly.

Conclusion

After installing VirtualBox Guest Additions you’ll notice a great improvement in your Virtual Machine experience. You’ll have much better mouse and keyboard integration, improved video resolution, the ability to run in Full Screen and Seamless Window Integration, and much more. VirtualBox Guest Additions are required for anyone regularly running Virtual Machines, whether Windows or Linux.

Note: I found this for those wishing to install VirtualBox Guest Additions on Fedora.

I am a big fan of VirtualBox as a desktop virtualization technology. I have it installed on my machine and I’m constantly using it to try out new distributions and learn new technologies. It really is a great tool! I have seen it grow from a new project into the fully featured, efficient virtualization competitor that it is today.

I was recently sent a copy of the newly released “VirtualBox 3.1 Beginner’s Guide“, which outlines deploying and managing a cost-effective virtual environment using VirtualBox. I want to thank Packt Publishing for sharing a copy with me, and I’d like to share my review of the book here. I hope some of you will take the time to check out the Packt Publishing website as a resource for technical books.

VirtualBox 3.1 Beginners Guide

The first thing I have to say about this book is that it is very detail oriented.  It truly is a beginners guide. I’m positive I could give this book to my father and he’d be able to install, configure and run VirtualBox on Windows or Linux. It outlines, in step-by-step detail, everything you’d like to know about VirtualBox. Even though I consider myself a Virtualbox veteran, I followed along with some of the tutorials and was impressed that no detail was left out.

One of the things that really stands out about this title is that it includes a huge number of screenshots. The number of screenshots in the book provide any beginner with the visual roadmap they need to complete the task at hand. It covers installing VirtualBox on both a Windows and Ubuntu host, as well as installing and configuring the reverse as guests. If you’ve never installed VirtualBox before, you’ll have an installation up and running in just a few minutes.

Beyond installation and configuration, this book goes into detail regarding the command line options (I learned quite a bit from this chapter!) as well. VirtualBox provides a full set of command line tools for starting, stopping, configuring, cloning and creating virtual machines. This makes it a perfectly reasonable candidate for a headless server virtualization solution!

This book covers guest additions, disk and image creation and management, all networking options and how they differ, using and creating virtual appliances, using snapshots and even remote management. It really is a good resource for getting started with Virtualization. I’m glad to have a copy of this book in my collection.

The sections that were the most useful for me were the networking and command line chapters. I was not familiar with any of the command line tools, and the networking was a little blurry for me. Before getting a copy of this book I was unfamiliar with virtualized networking beyond NAT and Bridged. This book went into enough networking detail that I’m very comfortable with each of the networking options and in what situations each might apply. This will really boost my efficiency and productivity with VirtualBox.

For anyone wanting to learn more about virtualization or doing research into cost-effective virtual environment solutions, I would highly recommend VirtualBox 3.1 Beginner’s Guide.

I’ve written quite a bit on this blog regarding Virtualization in the past. I think I’ve covered VirtualBox as well as VMware. If you haven’t noticed, I prefer the former. Free Software vs non-free is a big win, plus the performance gain that I’ve seen in VirtualBox has been great. For testing other distributions and doing simple work (non-server) installations, I think VirtualBox works the best.

I was recently sent a copy of “VirtualBox 3.1 Beginners Guide: Deploy and manage a cost-effective virtual environment using VirtualBox” by Packt Publishing. I’ll have a full review out soon, but I wanted to share this sample chapter that they have published as a .pdf.

The sample chapter is a 42 page chapter outlining getting started with VirtualBox. This includes installation, configuration and even outlines the installation of a simple Linux distribution as a guest, DSL (Damn Small Linux). For a “sample” it is actually quite impressive, and goes into a great amount of detail.

I’ll have a full review of the book here soon, but in the meantime have a look at the sample chapter and let me know what you think.

Another KDE related post. How ’bout that. This article outlines how to disable the user list and/or the preselect user feature of the KDM login manager. The end result here is for the Login Manager to not display a list of users or pre-populate the username field with the previously logged in users. If you are the type that dislikes Face Choosers and the like, you’ll appreciate these changes.

Login Manager – KDE Control Module

The configuration for the Login Manager are found in the System Settings menu. Launch or navigate to the System Settings. Click the “Advanced” tab, and find the Login Manager button. This should prompt you for administrative privileges.

Once in the Login Manager configuration you’ll be presented with a number of tabs. The tabs we’ll deal with here are the “Users” and “Convenience” tabs, on the far right.

To disable the list of users (this really only applies to machines that have multiple users), uncheck the “Show list” button in the left-hand pane of that window. Once you apply these settings a list of users will no longer be displayed at login.

To disable the “convenience” of auto-populating the username, you’ll need to select the “Convenience” tab. Again, in the left-hand pane of this window you can check the box “None” in the “Preselect User” section.

On next login your username field will no longer be populated with the username from the previous login.

It seems that every major desktop environment is defaulting to Face Choosers and making it easier to login to your machine. Maybe I’m old-school, but I prefer to not present would-be-attackers with any information about my machine, including my username.

If you have any other tips regarding the Login Manager, please share in the comments section.

I’ve been spending some time recently in KDE 4.4.x. It seems with each new release it gets more and more polished, and I want to thank the dev team for their hard work. Some of the oddities that I find in KDE though, I think, are based on my familiarity to GNOME. This post outlines how to change the Run Command Keybinding (ALT-F2) to match that of GNOME-Do (Super-Space). This gives you basically what GNOME-Do does (granted not quite the same, but good enough for quick-launching apps), without installing GNOME-Do and its dependencies.

System Settings – Global Keyboard Shortcuts

1. To quickly get to the System Settings and the Global Keyboard Shortcuts configuration, use the Run Command interface by pressing ALT-F2 and enter “Global Keyboard Shortcuts”.
2. In the drop-down menu labeled “KDE Component”, select “Run Command Interface”.
3. Select “Run Command” in the Action (left) column.
4. Click the “Custom” box.
5. Click the input box to the right of “Custom” and press the key combination “Super-Space” (Super is the Windows Key).
6. Click Apply.

General Usage

I admit that the Run Command interface doesn’t give all of the same options as GNOME-Do, but it does do quite a bit. You can, of course, quickly launch applications. You can switch between applications (type the name of a currently running app, and select it. It’ll switch focus, or switch to the desktop running that app). Do you have any suggestions on how to use the Run Command interface for more efficient desktop usage?

Conclusion

If you’re trying out KDE and want your transition to be a little smoother, try changing some of the little things to make you feel more at home. Changing this keybinding, for those used to GNOME-Do, is just one small step along the way.

I wasn’t going to write this post. I was going to get used to the idea of my window buttons being on the left, instead of the right where I’m used to them. I was really going to try and use the Ubuntu “standard”. Well, after a little more than a month, I give up. If you’re the same and you’d like your window buttons back “where they belong”, this post will outline how to move window buttons back to the right.

For those in a hurry,  I’ve outlined the quickest way known to man to move the window buttons back to the right. Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), and paste in the following command:

gconftool -s /apps/metacity/general/button_layout -t string menu:minimize,maximize,close

Magically your window buttons will be back to the “right” place.

For those that are afraid of the terminal and their copy-paste functionality, you can follow these steps:

1. Press ALT-F2 to open the application launcher.
2. Enter ‘gconf-editor’
3. Navigate to Apps > Metacity > General > Button Layout
4. Change the string value to ‘menu:minimize,maximize,close’
5. Exit gconf-editor

Those steps aren’t too bad either. I prefer the first, of course, but perhaps it has a little too much “magic” to it.

In conclusion I think the move is still controversial. I would have expected some of these controversial changes in a development release, but not an LTS (Long Term Support) release. In any case, I’m not here to make decisions.

There have been a number of reports regarding blank screens at startup pre and post installation on the new Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid” release. It seems there are some incompatibilities with some video drivers, particularly (not surprising) some ATI and nVidia. Also in the mix are some older Intel cards. This post outlines a workaround you can try in order to get your video working properly again.

Booting from CD

This section outlines how to workaround the video issue while booting from the CD. Your mileage may vary, depending on your video card, but hopefully this steers you in the right direction:

1. At the install screen press ‘F6‘ and insert one of the options below, depending on your hardware.
2. On first boot after install, press e to edit the GRUB menu.
3. Using the arrow keys to navigate, delete quiet and splash and again insert one of the options below.
4. Press Ctrl and X to boot.

The suggested options that I have found are hardware specific. Here is a list:

• Older Intel video card: i915.modeset=1 or i915.modeset=0
• nVidia: nomodeset
• Generic: xforcevesa

Hopefully one of these options will get you up and running. Keep reading now to make these changes persistent!

GRUB

You’ll want to change these settings in GRUB so they’ll automatically be applied on each reboot. To do so, follow the steps below:

1. Edit the /etc/default/grub file. You will need Admin privileges to do so (sudo)
2. Find this line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”
3. Replace with: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash <option>”

For example, if I had an older Intel model, my GRUB configuration would read:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash i915.modeset=1″

Save your changes and you should get proper graphics on each reboot.

UPDATE: Based on a lot of user feedback I am reminded that you need to run ‘update-grub’ after you make changes.

Feeback

If you have any additional suggestions, please leave them as comments here. Different hardware often needs different options, and it would be nice to cover as many as needed in a central place. Good luck!

I know I’m a few days behind, but I finally upgraded this morning to 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” LTS release. So far my impression is that it is very well polished and has a professional look. I’m not referring to the “purple vs brown” change in look, but the overall polish of the interfaces and integration of tools.

I did a fresh installation, which took a little bit longer than I remember previous versions taking, but it wasn’t bad. The introductory slideshow was nice as well. I can definitely see that as aimed toward new, non-technical adopters.

I’m impressed to see the Ubuntu One integration into many of the applications. I’ve long been a “cloud user”, but usually those “clouds” are my own file servers stretched out here and there. It is nice to see Ubuntu One so seamlessly integrated into the applications so I don’t really have to think about it.

I hope to have some new posts here coming up soon. I’d love to hear your thoughts and impressions on the new release as well. Drop by, leave a comment and tell us what you think!