Ubuntu Tutorials

Not long ago I blogged about using KDE again to help squash bugs and expand my Kubuntu desktop knowlege. Well, turns out apparently a few people actually read that post and it was pointed out to me here at UDS that I was not currently using it..

So, being reminded of my promise I have reinstalled with Kubuntu 7.10 and will try to use this for the life of 7.10, until 8.04. Why do I have a feeling this is going to be a long 6 months?

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How many of you have played Neverball raise your hands? If you actually raised your hand you get a cookie. If you haven’t played Neverball and you have a Macbook you’re going to start playing because this tutorial makes it *so* much more fun! We can make use of the motion sensors built into the Macbook hardware to allow us to play physical neverball.

Activating the driver

We’ll need to load the proper module into the kernel for this to work. We can do that using this command:

sudo modprobe applesmc

If you want this module to automagically load at boot time you can also use this command:

echo applesmc | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

Launching Neverball

You’ll now want to pick up a copy of the game Neverball which is available in the repositories.

sudo aptitude install neverball

Now launch the game (you’ll find it in your Games menu, or via the command neverball). Select “Play”, select your difficulty level and start the game. Now, here’s the best part, pick up your Macbook to play. Trust me, pick up the macbook and tilt the actual laptop to control tilting the floor within the game. Now that’s playing games with your laptop!

For the rest of you that want to play but don’t have the motion sensors you can just use your boring old mouse to play. Enjoy!

On May 9, 2007 RedHat released a set of free fonts called “Liberation” at the RedHat Summit.  This font set includes a Sans, Serif and Mono set, and I have been using these fonts for quite some time.  I realize I enjoy these fonts but have never shared the steps needed to install them for the rest of you.  If you want some new fonts (and these look pretty clean if you ask me!) read on.

Installing RedHat’s Liberation Fonts in Ubuntu

Installing this new font set in Ubuntu can be done two ways.  One method is system wide so any other user on your machine can enjoy them.  The other method is just for your user.  I will break down the two methods below, so while the fonts are downloading in the first step think about which method will be right for you.

1. Download the Liberation fonts from RedHat.  (For Ubuntu you’ll want the TTF Files .tar.gz option)
2. Open With… Archive Manager will probably be the simplest method here.
3. Extract the contents to your /tmp folder.

The following steps are broken down to System Wide and Personal.  Follow just the section you feel would be best for your setting.  If you are the only user on your machine the Personal steps will probably be just fine.  If you share the machine with others, System Wide will allow all users access to the fonts.

System Wide (Graphical Method)

1. Launch your file browser with admin privileges (ALT-F2 “gksudo “nautilus”).
2. Navigate to File System > usr > share > fonts.
3. Create a folder called “liberation”.
4. Copy your unpacked fonts from step three above into this folder via drag-and-drop.

System Wide (Command Line Method)

1. sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/liberation/
2. sudo cp /tmp/liberation-fonts-0.2/* /usr/share/fonts/liberation/

Personal (Graphical Method)

1. Launch your file browser (Places > Home Folder)
2. Press ctrl-h or select “View > Show Hidden Files”
3. right-click within the window and select “Create Folder”
4. Create a folder called “.fonts” (yes, dot fonts)
5. Copy your unpacked fonts from step three above into this folder via drag-and-drop.

Personal (Command Line Method)

1. mkdir ~/.fonts
2. cp /tmp/liberation-fonts-0.2/* ~/.fonts/

I hope between all the options on installation above that everyone can successfully get these fonts installed that is interested.  I really like these fonts and, like I say, wanted to share the steps that I use to get them installed on my systems.  As I am usually the only user on the system I use the command line personal method, but any of the above should work.  You may need to logout and back in again for the new fonts to be available to your applications, or in some cases simply restart the application itself.

I finally have a few minutes to blog about the Ubuntu Developer Summit now on the morning of the second day.  The first day was a blast and a *lot* of information!  Basically, as someone described it at the beginning of the day, is its like “speed dating for ideas”.  We’re basically sitting around tables with the best minds in the Ubuntu community and hashing out ideas for Ubuntu 8.04.

I’ve focused my time on the community path here, but also sat in on some security related sprints.  One that I’m particularly excited to see get off the ground is SELinux Compatibility for Ubuntu.  It seems like I was one of the few people that has tried fighting with SELinux on Ubuntu so far but a few of us will be getting together to try and make it work.  If you’re interested in SELinux security for your Ubuntu machines consider joining the ubuntu-hardened mailing list.

We’ve got a lot of cool things in the works for Ubuntu Local Communities as well.  Some ideas discussed here are things like better integration in the install / installer about promoting awareness of localized support.  Ideas that were tossed around are offering links or suggestions on localized support based on the time zone you select during the installer.  There really are a lot of things that we can add here, but the basic is that we want to make more people aware of LoCo during the installation and post-installation.

It’s really great to be able to meet a lot of these people and I’m sure its going to be a great week to get a lot of things done.  it is a lot of work, but building the most popular distribution on the planet doesn’t just come out of thin air.

I’ll have more to report tomorrow and, as usual, for more information please visit the Fridge.

I’ve been seeing a number of comments on this blog lately concerning the compiz fusion “cube” effects only setting up two workspaces and therefore only allowing more of a toggle option instead of a cube.  I thought I would throw out the method I use to make sure I get the four-panel cube functionality.

Prerequisites

Of course you’ll need to already have 3D effects enabled on a compatible video card.  You may want to see my previous tutorials on using Envy for non-free drivers or Compiz-Fusion on Ubuntu 7.10 for more details.

Configuration

Once you successfully have the 3D effects enabled and have compizconfig-settings-manager installed navigate your way to “System > Preferences > Advanced Desktop Effects Settings”.  Click on “General Options” at the top of the list and select the “Desktop Size” tab.  The first slider on that tab is for “Horizontal Virtual Size”.  Change this from two to four and close the window.  You should now have four desktop panes for use with a cube vs the two desktop panes as default.

I hope this works as easily for you as it does for me.

UPDATE: Install Adobe Acrobat Reader 8.1.2 on Ubuntu 8.04

It was recently pointed out to me on one of our local mailing lists that my previous tutorial on installing Adobe’s Acrobat reader for Firefox no longer worked. It seems that those packages have been pulled from the repository since that writing. I wanted to take a few minutes and give an update on a different method of installing Adobe’s Acrobat reader.

Installing Adobe Acrobat

It appears now that the simplest way to install the Adobe Acrobat Reader is to get the package directly from Adobe’s website. Try following these steps to find the .deb package and install that.

1. Visit the Adobe Reader download page.
2. Select “Linux”, Select “Linux – x86 .deb”, Select your language.
3. Click the “Continue” button.
4. Click “Download Adobe Reader” to begin the download.
5. You can then “Open with…” to open it with the package installer directly, or “Save as” to be distributed to your other machines and installed manually via double-click on the package.

If you’re going to call the reader directly you’ll also need to configure two more items within the Adobe Reader preferences.  Open the reader via “Applications > Office > Adobe Reader 8″ and it should give you a message concerning a libgtkembedmoz.so.  After you click OK it’ll give you a blank window with no options.  Switch back to the previous window and select “Edit > Preferences > Internet” as suggested by the previous notification window.

In the “Select Browser” area near the bottom put in the following two paths to pacify the Adobe Reader:

/usr/bin/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox

At this point you can save and close your changes and restart the application.  This time you shouln’t see any errors and it should work as planned.  I have noticed that no errors are reported when directly opening a .pdf from the web–everything just opens.  This seems to only happen when launching the reader directly.

Personally I prefer the installed .pdf reader, Evince that already comes with my installation. I haven’t personally had any need to run the non-free Adobe version, but apparently some do. I hope these steps work for you and thanks again for reminding me that my previous steps don’t work.

I’m about to head to bed for the nite.  First thing in the morning I’m getting on a plane and heading out to the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston.  I’m excited to be spending a week planning Ubuntu’s next release, 8.04 “Hardy Heron”.  I feel very privileged to be invited and hope to help get a lot of work done while I’m out there.

This next week will probably include a lot of play-by-play on the conference but I’ve got some tutorials pending as well.  See you in Boston!

Update : Since this was written Sunbird 0.7 has been released. The package in the Ubuntu repository is 0.5. Here are steps for manually installing the latest.

Manually Installing Sunbird 0.7

1. Download the latest version of Sunbird at Mozilla. “Save to Disk”
2. Unpack the archive into the /opt folder. (sudo tar -C /opt -xjvf ~/Desktop/sunbird-*.tar.bz2)
3. Create a link: sudo ln -s /opt/sunbird/sunbird /usr/bin/sunbird
4. Create meu item: sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/sunbird.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Sunbird
Comment=Sunbird Calendar
Exec=sunbird
Icon=/opt/sunbird/icons/mozicon128.png
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Applications;Network

Installing Sunbird 0.5

Ubuntu 7.10 now has Mozilla Sunbird Calendar version 0.5 in its repositories. This can be installed using the command:

sudo aptitude install sunbird

For those of you that do a lot of calendaring you may also be interested in Mozilla Calendaring with Lightning, which also supports tie-ins to Google Calendar and seems to be a more popular solution.

I have done a bit of testing for Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” on some of our classroom machines this week. These machines are Dell Dimension 4600 with ATI Radeon video cards. Well, as has been my experience with ATI and nVidia with Linux they are a pain in the butt. …all ranting aside I wanted to share how I got them to work on Ubuntu 7.10.

Restricted Drivers Manager

My first attempt was to use the Ubuntu Restricted Drivers Manager that pops up when I first logged into the new installation. This offered, installed and configured an ATI driver… but it didn’t give me direct rendering or allow me to configure the compiz fusion fanciness.

Envy

I was then reminded of a little tool we call Envy (Thanks again Alberto!) so I figured I’d give that a try. I figured one way or the other this machine is going to have to get the non-free cooties, so I may as well go all out and use Envy. I am happy to report that a simple installation of Envy gave me all the effects that I needed and was *so simple*!

If you’re having some trouble fighting with your non-free video card I would suggest trying the Envy tool.

Here are the steps I took:

1. Download Envy
2. Open with GDebi Package Installer
3. Check for 3D rendering (glxinfo | grep ‘direct rendering’)

I don’t know how much simpler it can get than that.

Update: If these minimal steps do not work for you (which I’m finding is the case on more cards than the ones I initially tested on you’ll need to do a few more things:

1. Launch the graphical Envy installer tool (ALT-F2 “gksudo envy -g”)
2. Select the driver you need installed (ATI on nVidia)
3. Follow the steps toward installation
4. Check for 3D rendering (glxinfo | grep ‘direct rendering’)

If all of these steps don’t work I’m not sure what to tell you.  They’ve worked on the cards that I’ve personally tested but I’m sure there are far more cards out there than I can get my hands on.  The best bet at that point is to probably check out the Ubuntu Forums for support.

I ordered a new monitor the other day to replace my aging 20″ CRT beast. The thing still works pretty well but I swear it weighs one-hundred pounds. So, I broke down and bought a 19″ LCD that does 1440×900. I figure if I can extend the display that I currently have to an additional 1440×900 I’ll have plenty of screen real-estate to work with.

The thing is I’m having a bit of trouble getting this to do a dual-monitor setup with my macbook. It uses the onboard intel chipset, which I would think would support this type of thing.  I’ve never done much with dual-monitor or even video out for that matter so its all a bit new to me. I have tried the screens and graphics application, which really didn’t do what I expected.

If anyone has any tips or links that they can share that will allow me to extend my display (not mirror output) to this device when connected I would be very appreciative.