Ubuntu Tutorials

Based on a comment I had last week concerning the Wacom Tablet support and having done a little research I wanted to offer some resources for getting these tablets going on your Ubuntu machines. Much of this information comes from the Wacom Ubuntu Community pages so please refer to that for more information. It sounds like many of these fixes are very simple and could be updated fairly easily (from what I can tell). If you are having trouble with such a tablet take a look at these suggestions and see if you can get them going. If you are a developer with access to the Wacom packages perhaps you could dedicate a bit of time looking at getting these slightly better supported?

There is a huge amount of instruction on the community page for using these tablets within Ubuntu and its applications. Please refer to the Wacom Support Page for all of those details. Here are also a few links on troubleshooting and seemingly simple fixes:

Wacom Tablet Issues

Wacom Troubleshooting

Install Linux Wacom Drivers

I hope this’ll help some of you Tablet users get things going better out of the gate. Big thanks go to the Community Docs team and volunteers for getting those steps and fixes documented.

Based on some recent feedback and questions from the blog-reading community I thought I would announce a few things.  Don’t worry, this’ll be pretty short and painless.

1. I have decided on a Creative Commons license based on a recent comment.  Basically anything on this blog falls in the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.  Use that link if you want to know more details.  If you’re like me and hate reading legal license crap it breaks down like this: you can copy, distribute and share this. The only limit is for non-commercial purposes. (ie; don’t make money directly from this but please share it and improve it.)
2. I have received quite a bit of feedback regarding the RSS feed snippets.  I wanted to see what the general feeling was for a week of use and, thanks to those that contacted or commented, that will be going away today as well.  Full feeds again. yay!

See, I told you it’d be quick and painless.

Last year I wrote a tutorial on the Ubuntu Wiki for using the Jigdo (Jigsaw Download) tool for incremental CD updates. I had forgotten about it until I got into some recent testing for Feisty 7.04. I thought I would revisit my old tutorial and share it with the rest of you. Jigdo is really nice for rebuilding daily CD images without downloading the entire CD again, which can waste bandwidth and time when the latest daily build may have only updated a handful of packages. Here is what you’ll need to setup and use Jigdo.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install the needed jigdo packages.

sudo aptitude install jigit jigdo jigdo-file

It should be noted that Jigdo is a console based application so if you’re afraid of the terminal it might not be the best for you… but I suppose if that were the case you might not be downloading daily builds for testing either.

After the installation finished you’ll want to start Jigdo and you’ll also need a .jigdo file available from the cdimage download page. If you’re interested in the daily builds you can find them here.

Start the application using the command:

jigdo-lite

This will prompt you for a .jigdo URL, as mentioned above. Here is a dump of the initial prompt and message:

To resume a half-finished download, enter name of .jigdo file.
To start a new download, enter URL of .jigdo file.
You can also enter several URLs/filenames, separated with spaces,
or enumerate in {}, e.g. `http://server/cd-{1_NONUS,2,3}.jigdo'

You can simply paste in a URL from the above link. This will then dowload the .jigdo file, which is basically a collection of packages and versions included in that image.

After it has an idea of the packages and version numbers that are available in the daily build it’ll prompt you for a current or previous image for comparison. You can supply a mounted CD here if you have one. Here is a dump of the message prompt for the comparison CD.

If you already have a previous version of the CD you are
downloading, jigdo can re-use files on the old CD that are also
present in the new image, and you do not need to download them
again. Mount the old CD ROM and enter the path it is mounted under
(e.g. `/mnt/cdrom').
Alternatively, just press enter if you want to start downloading
the remaining files.

Jigdo then scans the existing files and compares them with the latest copies from the .jigdo template. This way it is able to find and update only the packages that have been changed since the latest cd image build, cutting down your download time significantly.

You’ve heard me talk about Feisty before and how it is turning out to be a really impressive release. Why don’t you lend a hand, use Jigdo to help test the daily builds and make it absolutely the best release Ubuntu has offered to date!

I realized the other day, based on repeated questions, that many people don’t know which CD is the best to download. When looking at a list of CD options from a download page the options can be very overwhelming. I thought I would break things down for everyone today. Hopefully this’ll help new users find the right CDs, leading the fewer installation problems, better hardware support and a better overall experience.

First you need to decide whether you want the Desktop, Alternate or Server CD. After you’ve made that decision you’ll need to make sure you get the right architecture for your machine. Here is a breakdown:

The Desktop CD

The Desktop CD allows you to preview Ubuntu before you install anything. It’ll boot into a LiveCD with full functionality with an option to install during this preview. This installer seems to install things more quickly than the Alternate (below) and walks you through the installation in just a few steps. This is the suggested method for most new users. If you want to see what Ubuntu has to offer with no strings attached you’ll most likely want the Desktop CD.

The Alternate CD

The Alternate CD can be a bit intimidating to some users, although many of the options are the same as the Desktop CD. This installer is completely text-based and does seem to take a bit more time to install the system, but it has a few better support options when compared to the Desktop CD. A few things that I have found better supported on the Alternate CD are things such as RAID, LVM and boot-loader functions such as bypassing the grub installer or working with other boot loaders such as Acronis. I, personally, prefer using the Alternate CD installer.

The Server CD

The Server CD is for installation on server machines such as web or mail servers. It has a server-specific kernel, smaller memory footprint and only takes about 500M for a full installation. This website is hosted on an Ubuntu run web server based on this Server CD. To give you an idea, the server is a Pentium III 500mhz with 256M total memory and the Ubuntu Server CD keeps it running like a champ! If you need a home or office based server this would be the right CD for you.

Now for the architecture. You need to make sure that you’re installing the CD that best supports your computer architecture. Whether it is a Mac (old-school or Intel), Intel based PC or AMD based PC. You’ve got to make sure you’re getting the right version for your hardware for best support and performance.

i386

Here is a quick breakdown of some of the major machine types that are best suited for the i386 download. This is generally the most widely used / most popular hardware type. If you’re not sure what you have this is probably the safest guess.:

Intel Pentium (1-4)
Intel Celeron
Intel Pentium M
Intel Mobile Pentium 4
Intel Celeron M
Intel Core Solo, Duo (Not Core 2)
AMD Geode (GX, LX, NX)
AMD K6/K7 (Duron, Athlon)
AMD Sempron models without AMD64 support

AMD64

Here is a quick breakdown of some of the major machine types that are best suited for the AMD64 download:

AMD Athlon 64
AMD Turion 64
AMD Opteron
AMD Sempron models with AMD64 support enabled
Intel processors that support EM64T: Intel Core 2 processors, Pentium D, Pentium Extreme Edition, some versions of Pentium 4 and Celeron D
Intel Xeon

PowerPC

This architecture is best for those of you with the old-school Mac machines. Anything pre-Intel on Mac hardware is best suited for this installation. These are usually referred to as G3, G4 or G5. Note: This architecture is still available for download but will not be available or supported in future Ubuntu releases.

I hope this helps people find the right fit for the right machine. I want to make Ubuntu a pleasant experience for everyone and I believe making sure you know the right installation options for the right machine is the basis of it all. If you have any hardware or installation type suggestions please leave a comment and it may be added to the post.

I have decided that it would be beneficial for all of us to learn more about the applications that we have as part of our Ubuntu / Kubuntu systems. I have primarily focused on general tutorials, although primarily pointed at the Ubuntu gnome community (as that is the desktop I am using), but I would like to be able to expand that. I would like to hear from you on what applications you would like to know more about, what applications you develop and want to bring attention to, etc.

If you are a package maintainer for an application available within the Ubuntu repositories (main restricted universe or multiverse) and would like more people to be aware of your project please let me know. I would accept short writeups along the following outline:

Application Name

Package Name

Basic Package Features

Features you're particularly proud of

The best thing about the open source community that we’re all a part of is that we have access to packages and programs from developers around the world. Everything from text editors to games, browser extensions to system monitoring applications. It’s a worldwide community of free software and I’m sure there is a whole list of applications that most of us don’t even know about. Lets share the knowledge. Education is the key for us in our continued growth.

I hope to hear some application requests from some of you and I’d love to see some package outlines from others. I’ll try to do an application outline roughly once per week.

Yesterday I wrote about some of the options inside Text Editor that you might not know about. Today I wanted to outline just a few more things that can take this editor to the next level. Plugins.

Who would have thought that a text editor–a basic text editor–would need something like plugins? Well I guess the gedit devs did and from the default list of plugins that I see these can add quite a bit of functionality to your editor.

Read more…

I have been using Text Editor (gedit) for quite some time to take simple notes and write basic documents. Sometimes I’ll write a blog post in Text Editor to save for later, or when I’m actually able to get online. Today, however, I found that Text Editor has some great features that I was never aware of. I may even come out of my hermit-like use of vim and use this as a replacement.

/me ducks and hides from the barrage of vim lovers.

At first glance Text Editor (Applications > Accessories > Text Editor) looks like a basic text editor. Nothing fancy, nothing out of the ordinary. Some of the base features that are lacking in other editors (or have been lacking) are:

• Tabs and Tab re-ordering
• Spell Check
• Document Stats (number of words, characters, etc)

Some of the awesome features that I wasn’t previously aware of however are outlined below. I hope I’m not the only person that has been in the dark about these or else I’m going to feel like quite the idiot. In any event, to find some of the cooler features you can navigate to Edit > Preferences.

The first tab you’ll see is the View tab. The default settings here are:

• Enable Text Wrapping
• Do not split words over two lines

The other options, and I think these would be really useful if you’re working with code are listed below. I now have activated these options:

• Display line numbers
• Highlight current line
• Highlight matching bracket

It is always nice to know the line numbers within your file, particularly if you’re doing any kind of coding. Errors come up in code even for the best of us and finding the guilty line number is the key. Displaying or highlighting the current line is nice, for me, to know where my cursor is. After hours of staring at text and code some days things can become a bit of a blur. Also,highlighting matching brackets sure is nice to make sure you’ve closed that last div or ended that if statement.

The next thing that I’m really excited about is the Syntax Highlighting tab. This is on by default but you can define the language that you’d like it to specifically highlight. I saw just about everything in this list from Ada to XML. Perfect for when I’m working on PHP or perl (which I’ve just decided to try and learn).

Tomorrow I’ll outline one more of the features that really bring this editor above the rest. Enjoy the editor you never knew you had… and great work to the dev team for gedit. This is far more than I expected in a tiny, lightweight package.

Utah Open Source Conference 2007: The Convergence…

September 6-8, 2007 – West Valley Cultural Celebration Center

Call for Papers

The Utah Open Source Conference is a gathering of prominent Utah computer experts and business people with a common goal of applying open source technologies to create real world solutions.

This conference is looking for presenters who wish to share their experience and/or expertise with the community. Any subject associated with the implementation or use of open source technology is welcome, whether targeted at the business case, the geeks from the computer room, or anywhere in between. We are looking for innovations and solutions that can inspire and encourage others in their application of open source in the real world.

Topic ideas include:

• Business solutions (process, applications, infrastructure)
• IT management and implementation
• Web development
• Language skills (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby)
• Emerging technologies

Presentations should be prepared for a 90 minute class.

All submissions are due by April 30, 2007.

To submit papers for this conference please send an outline to participate@utos.org.

Example Outline:

Title: Leveraging Open Source for Billing Infrastructures
Keywords: Open Source, Billing, Accounting, Finance, Postgres, Perl
Audience: Businesses wishing to learn about a new open source billing system
Overview: Billing is a basic need of every business, but accounting is missing from most programmer's educations. Learn about available tools for the small business that have the right mix of accounting and geek.

The Utah Open Source Conference is shaping up to be the key event for Utah Technology. Whether you are presenting, or simply attending, there will be something for everyone. Learn more at http://www.utosc.org.

If you know anybody who would be interested in presenting, please forward this message.

My post yesterday on how to speed up the nautilus file manager mentioned turning off the audio preview feature. Based on a few comments I realize that I have never mentioned how to turn this feature on in the first place. It is pretty simple really, and I’m surprised that I’ve overlooked it thus far–I always install it first thing. It is actually part of another previous post, 5 steps to a new installation, but not in detail on its own.

To setup audio preview within gnome and nautilus you’ll want to install the following using your favorite package manager or command line:

sudo aptitude install mpg321 vorbis-tools

These simple packages should give you audio preview when you rest your mouse on an audio file. It should work for .mp3, .ogg, etc.

I think its so simple that I never really thought about blogging it. Thanks to the commenters yesterday for bringing it up and enjoy! I love being able to preview an audio file without actually having to open it. Makes my world a wonderful place to live

I ran across a few settings the other day that can help speed up your Nautilus file browser within gnome. This would work for those of you on older machines, of even those that want to get a little more out of your newer machines. My production machines are all about three years old so these few settings pull a little speed out of them. Yes, I know it should be time for me to get a new machine but since I use Ubuntu it still runs as well as it did the day I bought it!

Here are a few things you can configure to speed up Nautilus. First you’ll need to open a Nautilus browser by selecting Places > Home or by opening any other folder that you have available. You’ll then want to navigate to Edit > Preferences and look for the Preview tab.

Read more…