I’ve run into a couple of weird issues this week and I thought I would bounce it off the group here. If you’ve got any suggestions or fixes for these issues I sure would appreciate it.
- I run a proxy over ssh and squid for privacy-sake (and so IT at my office minds their own business!) I use the command “ssh -C -L 8080:localhost:3128 my.remote.squid.proxy”. This works great, and I’m planning a tutorial for a more detailed outline, but the odd thing is when I disconnect and exit the terminal it doesn’t close. The terminal (both gnome-terminal & konsole) just sit there and I have to kill it by clicking the X. If I simply connect via ssh without the port binding everything closes as normal. Is this based on one of my arguments? Anyone else seen this?
- I’ve been trying to remove the fade-out effect (such as when prompted for a password, logging out, etc) but keep the “grab” feature where the box demands focus. I’ve been able to remove the fade, but this also removes the focus grabbing which is a big security problem. Does anyone know a way to remove the fade effect but keep the focus grabbing for the dialog box? Previous suggestions found here on the ubuntuforums.
I know the both of these are a little off the wall but I appreciate any feedback. The first is a little annoyance for me while the second has been a long-time concern for a friend of mine. I hope we’ll be able to solve it for him. Thanks!
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For those of you using some of the default Ubuntu themes (Human, Tango or Industrial) there is a package that will match those same themes for your Firefox browser for a more consistent overall look. I’ve got a screenshot below and how to install. Lets get started!
To install these themes you will want to install the following package via command line or your favorite package management tool:
sudo aptitude install firefox-themes-ubuntu
After the quick installation you’ll need te restart firefox for any changes to take effect. Afterwhich you’ll see be presented with options such as these within your Tools > Addons > Themes menu.
Adding this package is a really easy way to get your browser to match the same look and feel of your desktop. Of course there are many more themes available via the mozilla themes website, but this package is ubuntu specific to match the ubuntu default themes.
I have used the Tango and Industrial theme for quite some time. Not too shiny–nothing fancy, but a nice change from the brown / orange default.
That actually raises a question for me. I think one of the number one complaints that I hear about is the default brown desktop. Is it just me and my area or does it seem to be the same across the board? If it isn’t popular why is it still there on the sixth release?
This is just a quick note to welcome the Ohio LoCo Team to the list of approved local community teams! Great work Vorian and the rest of the crew. You’re doing a great job and I’m excited to be working with you on expanding Ubuntu in the US.
Again, if you’re not part of a LoCo Team feel free to contact me and we’ll get you plugged into the right place. Nothing more fun than building Ubuntu where you live! Congrats again team!
I love this blog. As far as my projects go this is one that I enjoy quite a bit, and I hope you do as well. Based on those of you that are brave enough to stop lurking and leave comments make me feel like you do. My main goal is to help educate the world on how to best use, tweak, customize and make-efficient their Ubuntu machines.
While I feel a blog is one of the best ways to bring this information to the masses I also agree that we should have top-of-the-line centralized documentation. The Docs team is doing a fantastic job on putting this together and I hope we all recognize their hard work. For those of you that aren’t aware I’ve included a few links below to the centralized documentation.
Ubuntu Community Help
Ubuntu Development Wiki
This is where my call for a (or a few) volunteers comes in. Based on the work that I’ve been doing here I have been contacted a few times by the documentation team to help on the centralized project. I have tried to contribute where I can, and I want to oblige to their requests, but I just do not have the time. I have done a bit of work on the wiki, I have ported a few of my tutorials to the Community help page, but I simply don’t have the time to continue with both. In my mind it came down to only contributing to the central docs or trying to do both (as the central docs are more important than my blog). I realize, based on my time constraints, that I simply don’t have the time to do both and you’d all be a little upset if I closed up shop here. Thats when the idea hit me. Why not ask you for help? (Isn’t our community great!)
If any of you want to find a worthwhile cause to contribute to and want to work along side me (sorry, maybe not the best selling point) please contact me. I’d love to get a few of you to help me in this project. Mainly it would entail combing through my previous tutorials and verifying that the information is in the docs, and contributing where needed. Also keeping up with me in the future on new tutorials. Long term I see it as a one-person job, but initially a small team would be great!
I’m excited to get it going. I’m excited to meet some more of you. Lets do a good job, improve the documentation, and educate the planet all at the same time! What do you say?
Hit my contact page for all the places I hang out and we’ll talk.
It looks like all of those posts to the planet concerning LoCo teams have found their way into my brain and taken over control of my body. Err, I mean, uhm.. you get the idea.
I want to add my +1 to the call for volunteers for LoCo Docs day (March 3). I know all of you are inspired by Ubuntu and want to give back to the community. We all do. One of the best ways to do that is help spread localized support through building and working with LoCo teams.
If you currently are not part of a LoCo Team I urge you to consider becoming active. All you need is a love for Ubuntu. You don’t need to have advanced programming skills, any kind of certs or recognition. Team building is simply about working with people and spreading Ubuntu as best we can. To see a list of LoCo teams and find one in your area see below:
Full List of Teams Worldwide
US Teams (I have to put in my pitch here, its one of my pet projects)
Again, we need your support to better build the Ubuntu community around the world. Whether you’re in a small town in the US or part of a thriving international city we need your help! Please come hang out with us on LoCo Docs day and share your local community building experiences.
Find us in #ubuntu-locoteams on IRC anytime, day or night, especially March 3rd. You can also find us, for US specific teams in #ubuntu-us. I’m always in there.
I hope to see as many of you there as possible. If you appreciate Ubuntu and want to be able to contribute back in some small way this can be a fantastic start!
Who is the LoCo fever going to hit next? Spread the word!
Update: as pointed out by SFA_AOK in the comments two more shortcuts have been added.
For ages man has toiled with pasting data into a terminal window by using the mouse. Right-Click, paste. Middle-click, Paste. Its all very tedious for all of us keyboard warriors. Those of us that are slowed down by the mouse and its pagan graphical goodness. No more! I present to you keyboard shortcuts that work within the terminal!
ctrl-insert : copy
shift-insert : paste
shift-delete : cut
shift-ctrl-C : copy
shift-ctrl-V : paste
Really. Give it a try. Copy something. Open a terminal. Paste. Mouse not required. What a beautiful day it is to be a keyboard warriors. You learn something new everyday.
(queue the small print) yes it is a little weird to get used to new shortcuts but it’ll be worth it. Plus, for those of us using Dvorak anyway the old-fashioned ctrl c v x aren’t in optimal positions anyway. Thanks goes to Aaron for sharing this tidy little nugget of keyboard goodness.
Today was a day full of meetings so I have been on this machine pretty much non-stop. It is even nearing one AM and I’m still here.. what a day.
During my full day on the computer things just didn’t feel right. I kept feeling restless, like I needed to tweak something or configure something but didn’t even know where to start. After the whirlwind of suggestions everyone had I just had so many options.. and it was all a little overwhelming. In any event I have decided that I am going to return to gnome when my term is done this week. Below I have some of the key reasons:
- No sound. I could not figure out why, and perhaps it is a limitation of Feisty + Kubuntu but I never could get more than the system speaker to come through. Trying a side-by-side installation of Feisty + Ubuntu and the sound works just fine. Also works in Xubuntu Feisty. Same machine. Same version. No sound.
- Garbage. Can someone tell me where in the world the trash is stored on KDE? I swear I looked all over the place and never could find it. I’d have deleted a few things, realize I need them again and have no idea where to go. The small trash icon in the gnome menu makes that pretty simple.
- Too Much. Everyone was quite right. You can tweak *everything* in KDE and for me that became a distraction. Do I want this little (read: insignificant) style / tweak / theme here? Maybe there? Maybe rotating. So many choices. I guess I’m just a simple guy. I like my desktop environment the way I like everything else. Not a lot of frills. Just effecient.
I know some of you will be disappointed that I didn’t stay. You all tried very hard to keep me there and I do appreciate all of the help that you offered. Without the help and suggestions I would have had a much more difficult week. Thank you.
Here are a few of the lessons that I learned over the past week:
- Integration. KDE has a very mature integration system in place for apps to communicate with each other. I think this is very nice and helps make for a good overall experience one app to the next.
- Development. KDE apps really opened my eyes to some cool features and options that I hadn’t ever dreamed of. Things like katapult, klipper, yakuake (say it with me, Yet Another Kuake–that’s the only way I could ever remember!) were all very cool and I hadn’t used anything like them before. Thanks to your suggestions I have found the gnome counterparts with glipper and tilda.
- Simplicity. In seeing how the other half live for a while I have realized what it is that I like. I like simplicity. I don’t like a lot of frills or a long list of options. I like to have choice, but not feel like I have to choose.. if that makes sense.
- Kmail vs Evolution. I did realize that I really like the way Evolution handles my email vs Kmail. Kontact did make a very good effort but it just wasn’t everything I wanted.
I am going to put myself to bed now but I wanted to get this out first. Day 6 with KDE was the day I realized what I really like, and I didn’t truly appreciate it until I saw how the other half live for a week. The best part of this whole experiment? I’m reminded again why open source is so amazing. It offers you choice. It gives you the freedom to do things the way you want, whatever that might be. With that I hope we all remember that we use what we do by choice and so does the next guy, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to tear down one vs another if you remember that. G’night.
Inspired by this previous post to the Planet I realized something that more of us could be doing in our Ubuntu advocacy that we might not. Welcoming new users into our worldwide and local communities early on. This can be a great way to keep them excited and keep them going with Ubuntu. I honestly see each new “convert” as a huge success and we have hundreds of these each day! The more of these we can retain the more Ubuntu will grow.
Think about it for a moment. When you first switched to Ubuntu were you new to Linux? Perhaps a little experience here and there? I know I was a recent convert from XP although I had some previous experience with Red Hat 9 and I had tinkered on a few other distributions. When I switched I had a little difficulty (remember, this was two years ago now!) and it was the active community that really welcomed me in. Primarily the Ubuntu Forums but then later the teams, chat rooms, etc. The Ubuntu Community has always stood out as more welcoming (in my experience) than any other distro.
Without that help early on I might not have stayed, might not have continued to learn and… I don’t even want to imagine how things would be different. I have no idea the number of people I have been able to help since making the switch, but if the traffic to this blog is any suggestion it seems to be quite a bit. What if I never switched? What if the person who helped you find Ubuntu never switched? Where would you be?
Just one user can make such a difference. One user can recruit hundreds more. One user can write that sweet new application. One user can change the world (sabdfl)!
What I propose is that we keep an eye out for new users and more actively reach out to them. I have setup a few Google Alerts to help me find new blog posts of users making the switch. I want to be able to leave a quick comment on their sites offering a few tips, or post a weekly linkblog here for some of you to visit and help make them feel welcome. I can think of nothing more that would make a new, possibly nervous, user feel more welcome and excited than a few community comments on their blog welcoming them aboard.
It is the amazing Ubuntu community that makes us what we are. Please try to reach out more actively to those users blogging about making the switch. You never know what that one user might do!
I have yet again wrapped up another day using KDE as my main desktop environment. Everyone has had some appealing arguments (and a few were heated enough to the point of deletion). I have to say that both camps really do have quite a lot to offer. I have come to appreciate some of the KDE apps very much–klipper is very convenient so far. Yakuake is something I would have never found without your suggestions. Konquerer has far more than I ever expected! I do think, on the application level, that many of the KDE packages have more features and seem to be more mature than the gnome applications. The system integration seems a little better worked through as well.
Currently my mood is that of going back to gnome however. I will stay with it until my week is through, as promised. I feel like, despite the many features of these applications, there is not anything that I’m missing within gnome. I suppose we could argue that I have not used KDE long enough to learn some of the tools to the point of missing them, but those tools that I have used seem equal to what I find that I prefer in gnome. Perhaps I do need to stick with KDE a while longer to make it a fair comparison.
I’m not going to do anything drastic yet. I’m still going to keep using it through sunday at least. Perhaps we’ll find something more yet. I will say that the KDE crowd seems more vocal and proud than the gnome crowd (based on comments). I wonder why that is…
Well I have survived yet another day of KDE and I’m still going strong. It’s not so bad once you get used to it 
I will say that I would not be having such a positive experience if it weren’t for all of your reader comments. I really do appreciate it. I feel a bit like I’m on the other side of the tutorial this week! No worries though, for those of you jonesin’ for a tutorial I’ll have some good ones coming up soon. I’ve got some in the works that I’m pretty excited about. Just let me catch up on this weeks workload and I’ll be ready to roll again.
A few more thoughts on todays usage.
- I did not get a chance to check out Amarok last night (just too busy!) I hope to be able to sit down to some tunes after this post is done and relax.
- I do like the suggested app yakuake but I can never remember the dumb apps name! lol — its frustrating to try and remember the app name to launch it. I’ll make sure to write it down this time
- Still not able to get wireless working in Feisty, even using the updated broadcom driver, but I’ll keep working on it. Other than that Feisty has been more than stable, very reliable and I say will shape up to be a very nice release. I’ve actually seen that it has resolved a few issues from Edgy that I have been dealing with.
No issues tonite to gripe about. Status is still the same as yesterday. No real preference for either WM at this point other than a slight lean toward gnome based on familiarity only. The KDE apps rock my socks off though…
We may just need a tie breaker in the next few days. With that I invite any of you to sell me on gnome or KDE in one sentence. Commenting is now open, hit me with your one-liner sales pitches to make or break this current tie-breaker. (no flaming allowed!)