Dec
31
Top Ten Ubuntu Tutorials : User Voted
Filed Under News | 5 Comments
Well its the end of another year and this blog has been through some ups and downs. I wanted to put together a quick post outlining the top ten most popular tutorials of late. Many of you have showed your support by submitting tutorials to Digg and leaving comments. I thank you for your support in helping get this information to as many people as possible. Education is going to be the key for Ubuntu to continue to rise. If you’ve missed any of these previous posts take a minute to catch up. As always, if you enjoyed the post consider giving it your vote on Digg or share it on del.icio.us!
10. How to Install Flock Web Browser on Ubuntu - Digg’d with 15 Votes
9. Google Toolbar Fix Instructions For Firefox 2 - Digg’d with 14 Votes
8. Setting up gaim for use with gmail chat (Jabber) - Digg’d with 17 Votes
7. Alternate Desktop Managers - Xfce / Fluxbox / Enlightenment / Blackbox / Openbox / Afterstep / FVWM / WindowMaker - Digg’d with 18 Votes
6. DOS Emulation with DOSBox - Digg’d with 22 Votes
5. How to clone an Ubuntu installation - Digg’d with 28 Votes
4. XGL on Dapper (nVidia) - Digg’d with 32 Votes
3. How to install & Play World of Warcraft - Digg’d with 45 Votes
2. How to Enable DVD Playback - Digg’d with 852 Votes
1. Ubuntu Tutorials - Digg’d with 979 Votes
2007 is going to be a great year for Free & Open Source Software. I promise to continue blogging if you’ll promise to keep coming back!
Update: This top ten was taken from this blog alone. If you have a tutorial that has seen some success (Digg, del.icio.us, etc) please share the link as a comment. Thanks!
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Dec
30
I’ve been reflecting this past week on what we have (and haven’t) yet accomplished this year with open source and free software. I think we have made some great strides but we also have a long road ahead of us and it will continue to take hard work from all of us. In reflecting on some of our future goals I also began to consider some of our potential shortcomings. What is it about this community that people don’t understand? Before we can answer that I suppose we would need to define what we are so that we can communicate that idea to the public. Being able to communicate better with the people we’re trying to reach will be a big step in helping them understand who we are and what we do. I think the current terminology that we use causes the issue that we face here.
I would first define what we are with the term Freedom. Freedom of speech. Freedom of communication. Freedom of creativity. Freedom of creation. Freedom from restriction. Have I missed anything?
As I mentioend I think our current terms fall short of communicating this. For one we use the terms “open source” or “free software”. What do these really mean to an outsider? What does “open source” mean to your parents or neighbor? What does it mean to someone who does or does not understand computers or operating systems? I think it tries to clearly define what we as a community stand for but , as much as I use it, I think it falls short. Simple for the fact that it doesn’t clearly communicate our ideals to the general PC using public.
The other term that many of us stand on is that of “free software”, but I think this falls shorter than the “open source” term. For one how do you define “free software”? (yes, this is mainly revealing a weakness in the English language) Is it simply “software that is free”? I think that is the first thing that would come to mind for most people. Would you believe that I have spoken with people that honestly believed Windows XP was free of charge? “It comes on the computer when you buy it. I didn’t pay for it.” ..as if Bill Gates became the richest man in the world by giving a product away.
Also, on this definition anything that wasn’t for-pay could be considered “free software”. This would include shareware, freeware, freely downloaded components of any OS. While this again tries to communicate the idea of “freedom” I think the weakness in the English language is the shortcoming here. (yes we could use the term “software libre” but I don’t know how well that would be adopted.)
Now what other suggestions do you as the “open source / free software” public suggest? Do you use alternate terms to describe what we are about? Do you communicate the idea behind the revolution in a different way? What are your thoughts on adopting something more along the lines of “Freedom Software”? That is what we are about isn’t it? Software for freedom. It began as a movement to gain freedom and now we are in a fight to retain our freedom (DRM, etc).
I’d like to get some of your thoughts on this. How can we better communicate the importance of what we all fight so hard for to the public? Can we use different terms to better communicate the critical need that we so desperately try to fill? The floor is yours.
Technorati Tags: software, linux, oss, foss, freedom, open source, software libre
powered by performancing firefox
Dec
30
Based on some recent requests over at Daniel Robitaille’s blog he outlined a few tips on how to manually keep up to date with Firefox. Now, Ubuntu normally is pretty quick on keeping critical system parts up-to-date but for those of you that want a little more manual control here are some steps.
(I don’t mean to duplicate instructions that he’s already posted–these steps are slightly different, and I want to reach anyone else that isn’t familiar with his blog. I’m basing these closely on my instructions on Installing Flock on Ubuntu. You might want to visit his post to see the differences.)
- Download Firefox 2.0.0.1 (Save to Desktop)
- Unpack the archive using:
sudo tar -C /opt -xzvf firefox-*.tar.gz - Update the symbolic link to the executable:
sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/local/bin/firefox - Synchronize any existing plugins (see my previous post on synchronizing plugins between browsers) from the default version:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/* /opt/firefox/plugins/
Upon each new release of Firefox you can just repeat these steps and quickly make sure you’re up to the latest and greatest. Thanks again to Daniel for originally laying out the basics of these instructions.
Remember, if you’re not comfortable on the command line or don’t know exactly what you’re doing you might want to just wait for the official updates. As usual it is generally a better idea to use the central maintained packages as customizing your system too much could cause issues. Make sure you know what you’re in for if you follow these steps.
Dec
29
Most of you have probably at least heard of “grub” but may not be completely familiar with it. What it does or how to make it work for you is quite another story for most people. I’d like to outline a few minor tweaks that anyone can make to grub to update their boot-time options.
Your grub config on an Ubuntu system is outlined at /boot/grub/menu.lst. There is quite a lot of commenting in that file so, if you take the time to read through, you’ll should be able to figure out quite a bit on your own. I want to outline a couple things that I often tweak within grub.
First and foremost you should make a backup of the file before you make any changes. As always, there is a chance that you could make errors in your changes and it’ll save your day if you’ve made a backup. Make a backup using a command like:
sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst /boot/grub/menu.lst-backup
After you’ve made your backup copy you’ll want to edit the file to make a few changes. You would do that using the following:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
Now we get to the fun stuff! What to look at and what to change? So many questions. Below are some of the settings that can be changed within grub and what they do.
default - allows you to specify the default grub listing. This defaults to 0 and you generally don’t need to change this.
timeout - allows you to change the countdown before grub automagically boots into the default listing. By default it should be set to 3 (seconds). If you need more time to choose the kernel or OS to boot into you can change this. Simply change the entry from:
timeout 3
to something like
timeout 10
or, of course speed things up, setting it at
timeout 1
hiddenmenu - allows you to specify whether or not your grub menu will be hidden at boot time. By default it is hidden and prompts you to press ESC to see the menu. If you would prefer to see the menu each time you boot simply comment out the line. Example, you would change:
hiddenmenu
to
# hiddenmenu
The file then moves into some commented code to show you examples of listing and the style and options you can set. Below that underneath
## ## End Default Options ##
you’ll see the kernels or OS’ that you have listed for your system. These break down into four main options. This is an example of my current listing for the 2.6.17-10-generic kernel:
title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.17-10-genericroot (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.17-10-generic root=/dev/hda1 ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-10-generic
quiet
savedefault
boot
A few of these settings are optional but the required options are:
title - this is the menu listing you will see at boot. You can change this to whatever you’d like. An example could be:
title Ubuntu - The best distro ever! (2.6.17-10-generic)
(the reason that I listed the kernel version is so I can tell future updates or other customizations apart from this. You generally want to run the latest kernel and, in certain situations, run a previous. It is generally a good idea to list the kernel version in whatever “nickname” you set for your grub listing title.)
root - this is where the root of the file systems is located. Your partitions may be someplace on hda, but hd is the very root. You won’t want to change this but you might notice a difference if you’re running a dual-boot system.
kernel - the kernel option is where to find and what kernel to use for this option. If you create a custom kernel you’ll need to specify the path to that file. Or, in some situations you might be booting multiple distributions and in that case you’d need to specify the path to each kernel.
Also, the root option specifies the partition to find the distribution or OS files. This must be set correctly in order to find the kernel and other options.
ro, quiet and splash - these are optional but load the pretty splash screen that you see at boot time.
initrd - this loads the image that goes along with the kernel option above. The kernel (vmlinuz) and initrd (img) file are generally stored in the same place. Make sure that your paths match the exact file if you are customizing your menu.lst.
savedefault - this refers to the default option listed above. As this is our default option and latest kernel it is specified as such. If you take a look at your file you’ll notice the first listing is the only one with the savedefault option.
You should be a little bit more confident in tweaking your grub listing at this point. There isn’t a lot to it but it is one of the most critical system settings. If you ruin your grub file your system (or any system on your machine!) will not boot. Be careful with it but, as usual, your system is only as powerful as you are educated so take the time to know how your system runs. In most cases you wont need to edit grub, but for those of you feeling adventureous perhaps try to change the timeout setting or change the title for your options. Best way to learn is to try!
technorati tags:grub, boot, linux, ubuntu, breezy, dapper, edgy
Dec
29
Right-Click to Launch Custom Scripts with Nautilus : Ubuntu (6.06.1 / 6.10)
Filed Under GNOME | 7 Comments
You might remember my previous post about how to actually use the Create Document option on your desktops right-click menu. Today I’ll go over how to create custom scripts to launch from that same panel. This can go for any frequently used program, custom scripts that you’ve written, etc. This tutorial is rated E for everyone! 
First of all let me have you navigate to
~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/
Currently this folder is probably empty (if it isn’t you’ve probably already accomplished the purpose of this tutorial). This simple, seemingly insignificant folder can house any program or script you’d like to run. Below are a couple of examples of applications or scripts you could add to your nautilus right-click menu.
gedit Terminal
#!/bin/sh
gnome-terminal
Saving this file with these contents will allow you to launch a terminal in your current directory. (ie; if you launch it from the Desktop it will open a terminal in your home folder. If you launch it from within ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/ it will open a terminal in that same folder.)
You will also need to set any script that you create as executable. You do that, after creating the file, by running the following command:
chmod +x [filename]
Enjoy and, as usual, enjoy your rise to world domination!
Update: There are also a few pre-made script packages that you can install for a few commonly used things. Search via Synaptic or on the command line for:
sudo aptitude search nautilus-script
technorati tags:gnome, nautilus, ubuntu, dapper, edgy
Dec
28
How to setup gnump3d for a streaming media server : Ubuntu (5.10 / 6.06.1 / 6.10)
Filed Under Media | 10 Comments
One of the first things I setup long ago when I first switched to Ubuntu was a streaming media server. I decided early on to just dive in and see what I could (and couldn’t) do. I had an extra machine lying around so I thought I would give it a try and setup gnump3d.
At this point (years later) I have a dedicated media server running on my fiber connection to offer me access to my music collection from any available internet connection! It’s beautiful! All you’ll need to set this up is an Ubuntu machine (desktop, server, laptop–anything you can store media on) and an internet connection. It can also simply be used on a local network to share music with other users or between computers in your network or home.
sudo aptitude install gnump3d
(as always you can also install that from Synaptic Package manager or Adept).
After this is installed you might want to change a few settings (although it will work just “out-of-the-box” as well).
http://localhost:8888 (access to the media is web-based. this should work if you’ve just installed it on your local machine)
I changed a few settings to customize things to my use and you might want to do the same. Basically we’re just going to make sure that it knows where to find the media files and what port you’d prefer to use.
sudo gedit /etc/gnump3d/gnump3d.conf
Find the line that says:
root = /var/music
and update it to the location of your media. (ie; in my situation I store the music in /media/music)
You might also want to find the line:
port = 8888
and update it to the preferred port. You most likely do not need to change this. It’s personal preference for your network and settings.
A couple of other things you might want to setup. Gnump3d offers a list of themes for the interface. The default is ok, but I prefer another that ships with it. If you’d like to change the theme you can select the “Preferences” option in the menu system and try a few out. If you’d like to use the theme that I prefer you’d want to change the default by editing the line:
theme = Tabular
to:
theme = BlueBox
Ooh, and one more tip that you might be interested in. It is very easy to setup user access to your new media server. If you don’t want someone to have access to your music simple don’t give them a login username and password. To create a list of usernames and passwords for your server simple use the following. (If you do not set any users or passwords anyone will have access):
sudo gedit .password (this file should be located in the root folder of your media. ie; My path is /media/music/.password)
create a username and password pair using the syntax:
username:password (ie; joe:secret, or johnq:denzel)
Each new user and password should be listed on a new line. Enjoy your new musical goodness. Share the love around the network, around the office or around the world!
(I originally found these instructions as part of the Ubuntu Guide. You’ve got to give credit where credit is due.)
Dec
27
Flock 0.7.9.1 Available : Ubuntu (6.06.1 / 6.10)
Filed Under Ubuntu | 2 Comments
Many of you might be familiar with my previous posts concerning the Flock browser. I had completely switched to Flock until Firefox 2 released and I’m still back and forth quite a bit. For those that haven’t seen my previous posts on installing Flock you might want to see these:
- Flock on Ubuntu
- Install Flash 9 Beta on Flock
- How to Speed Up Firefox or Flock
- Synchronizing Firefox and Flock Plugins
For those of a little more active with Flock this might be slightly old news. I’m not as regular in keeping updated with releases (again, since Firefox 2 release) but I do check periodically. Below are a few of the release notes for Flock 0.7.9.1
- Mozilla’s 1.5.0.9 patch for FireFox
- Support for Blogger Beta
- A stability upgrade in Flock’s indexing code
- A fix for displaying Flickr’s favicon
- Fix small picture DnD feature of photo bar
- A fix for better cleanup of the image cache
Again, to install the Flock Browser on your Ubuntu machine please see Flock on Ubuntu for instructions to install 0.7.9.1.
Dec
27
Back when I was a windows user it was a constant struggle to keep ahead of the horde of viruses and malware dead-set on exterminating my computing existence. I tried many programs, from McAfee to Symantec, from FreeAVG to Avast! There are dozens of options available for the windows crowd. Luckily, as Linux users it isn’t something that we need to worry about very much.
Despite the very low number of viruses existing for Linux there are still antivirus solutions for Linux. One of them (which just happened to be my favorite Windows client) is Avast! Now, why would I bother installing antivirus on my Linux machine if viruses are a non-threat? Well, do you ever communicate with Windows based machines? I’d be surprised if none of us ever come into contact (via email, IM, file-sharing, etc) with a Windows machine. Having said that how many of these machines would you say are infected? My guess is more often than not is a Windows machine infected with some sort of malware.
So, in an attempt to keep the network clean and make sure we’re not passing on infection it wouldn’t hurt to occasionally scan our machines. This would go double for any Linux machine that acts as a server (email or IM especially!)
To install Avast! for Linux simply visit the Avast for Linux download page and download the Avast debian file. After downloading this file you can double-click to install or use the following command within the terminal:
sudo dpkg -i avast4workstation*.deb
Once this is installed you can run the program by doing:
ALT-F2 : avastgui
Avast! is free for home use but you do need a registration key that is valid for one year. It only takes a few minutes to generate a home license registration and you will be prompted to do so when you first start the program.
At this point you now have (optional) antivirus on your Ubuntu machine to scan for all that nasty malware out in the wild. Do your part here and there to protect your neighbors. If they aren’t quite ready for Linux yet the least we can do is fight-crime (so to speak) in our virus-proof vests.
Dec
26
I have been using Skype for the past few months to take advantage of the promotion they had of “free calls to the US & Canada until 2007″. It has been nice to use a free phone service while my cell-phone battery has been dead. Starting Jan 1, 2007 however Skype will begin charging $14.95 / year for unlimited calls. While it is very convenient and a very competitive price I will no longer use Skype at the end of the year.
My reasons are not the price. Yes, free is appealing and $14.95 / year is by no means a large expense to anyone. My main reason is that Skype does not use a standard protocol for its communication. There are many other SIP options available, most of which use an open communication protocol.
What does that mean? This means that whether you use Gizmo, Ekiga or Wengo, Linphone, Kphone or gphone you are using a “free” open protocol. This does not apply to Skype.
I’ll admit that Skype is a very nice option with a clean interface. It has worked very well for me in the past, but it is the open protocol that is more important to me. It comes back down to freedom. Freedom to choose your own program. Freedom to communicate with whomever you please. Freedom to, if you so pleased, create your own VOIP program and interface using the open protocol. Skype uses a proprietary protocol. My Skype days are done.
I should mention that I have only recently started investigating alternate options to Skype recently. I wasn’t using Skype merely for the free calls. It was the only option I knew was available. Now we know better.
Dec
25
Happy Holidays!
Filed Under News | Leave a Comment
Just a quick note to wish everyone a Happy Holiday (for those on this side of the planet, belated to the rest of you). We’ve had a great year and made some amazing strides in Open Source and Free Software, especially Ubuntu. It has been quite a ride!
I hope we can continue making the same great progress. I will keep writing tutorials and I hope you keep coming back into the new year. Remember, if you have a tutorial that you’d like to request on any level (beginner to advanced) check out the contact page and drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you.
See you back here tomorrow!
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