Ubuntu Tutorials

There was some recent discussion on one of the local User Group lists this week about “What is your favorite underdog OSS application?”  This discussion brought out quite a few of the little never-heard-of applications, yet many of them have proven to be really useful!  If you’ve never spent an hour or two poking around the less-popular section of the repositories you’ll be surprised what you find in there!

Auto-Hide Your Mouse Pointer with Unclutter

The purpose of Unclutter is very simply.  From the man page:

unclutter removes the cursor image from the screen so that it does not obstruct the area you are looking at after it has not moved for a given time.

Not anything too complicated about that.  Now lets get it installed!  Installation can be done by issuing the following command or clicking the link.

sudo aptitude install unclutter

Now that we have it installed the one last thing we’ll need to do is configure it and have it automagically start at boot time.  We’ll do this by way of “System > Preferences > Sessions”

The “sessions” for your Desktop controls what applications and services are auto-started when you login.  This way unclutter will start up automatically.  You’ll want to click “Add” and populate the three fields.  For name “Unclutter” should be fine.  For the command field you’ll want something like:

unclutter -display :0.0 -idle 5

And you can populate the comment with whatever you like.  I used “Remove the cursor image after mouse inactivity.”

You can find more options in the man page (man unclutter), but this should basically hide the mouse pointer after 5 seconds of inactivity on your default display.

Yesterday I outlined how to install and play StarCraft and the BroodWar expansion on Ubuntu 8.04.  Today I’ll build on that by outlining how to install the 1.15.2 “no CD” patch available from Blizzard Entertainment.

Installing the 1.15.2 “no CD” patch

One thing we quickly realized after installing was that it was a bit annoying to require the CD to play. After some quick searching we found that Blizzard had released a patch that would allow the game to play minus the CD. To install that patch you’ll need to follow a few more steps.

You’ll need to copy some of the CD contents into your StarCraft installation directory. Each CD (StarCraft original and / or the BroodWar expansion) has a file called “install.exe”. This file needs to be copied into your StarCraft installation directory. The file also needs to be renamed according to which it is. This means if you are copying the contents from the StarCraft original game CD the resulting file needs to be renamed “StarCraft.mpq”.  If you are copying the install.exe from the BroodWar expansion disk you’ll need to rename that file “BroodWar.mpq”.

The following two commands will properly copy and rename the files on both CDs. If you only have the original and not the BroodWar expansion you only need the first command.

Copy the install.exe file from the StarCraft original installation CD:

cp /media/cdrom/install.exe ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/StarCraft.mpq

Copy the install.exe file from the StarCraft BroodWar expansion CD:

cp /media/cdrom/install.exe ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Starcraft/BroodWar.mpq

One last step is to install the patch itself available from Blizzard. Download the appropriate .exe file for your Starcraft installation (ie; original or BroodWar), run it via wine and you’re done. You can now enjoy playing StarCraft on Ubuntu 8.04 without requiring the CD.

Over this last weekend I went to spend some time with my parents and little brothers that still live at home.  My youngest brother, Dan, was playing that old-school strategy game StarCraft.  After watching him play for a bit and remembering the good ‘ol times I had playing StarCraft back in the day I thought I’d give it a try in Wine.  Just as I expected it worked perfectly and before we knew it we had a three player deathmatch going on!

Yes, StarCraft is non-free software in both senses of the phrase, but if you’ve got an old copy lying around you’ll be able to play it just fine on your Ubuntu 8.04 installation.

Install StarCraft on Ubuntu 8.04

To install StarCraft (and, yes, this also applies to the BroodWar expansion), you’ll first need Wine.  Wine can be installed using this command:

sudo aptitude install wine

Once you have wine installed you’re ready to get going.  I did not have to tweak anything in my wine configuration to get StarCraft working.  If, however, you find any wine tweaks that make game play more enjoyable please comment.

At this point simply pop in your StarCraft CD and nautilus should open the CD folder contents for you.  Get the installation started by opening the “install.exe” file with wine.  If your “right-click > Open With” does not offer or suggest wine you can do it manually with this command:

wine /media/cdrom/install.exe

If you have the BroodWar expansion repeat the above step for that CD as well.

Tomorrow I’ll outline how to install a patch that will allow playback without requiring the game CD.  With or without the patch you should now have StarCraft available in your menu in:

Applications > Wine > Programs > StarCraft

Enjoy some old-school gaming fun with StarCraft on Ubuntu 8.04!

Today, considering it is a holiday here in the US, I figured I’d take a day off from the tutorials and ask a question of you.

All of my servers run logwatch (which will make for a great tutorial coming up soon), and I pretty regularly see something like this in the daily output:

--------------------- Kernel Begin ------------------------

1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1898670412:1898670413. Repaired.
1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1911943385:1911943386. Repaired.
1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1922304386:1922304387. Repaired.
1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1922444120:1922444121. Repaired.
1 Time(s): TCP: Treason uncloaked! Peer XXX.XX.XX.XXX:XXXX/XX shrinks window 1949802160:1949802161. Repaired.

———————- Kernel End ————————-

I’m not really sure what that means, but if anyone can offer me some feedback I’d appreciate it.  So far I’ve seen conflicting answers from basic Googling.

In a release long, long ago and in a galaxy far, far away I blogged about how to configure Ubuntu to print directly to a .pdf file.  Looking back to this article it appears to be outdated an in need of some corrections.  This tutorial will outline how to use and, if needed, configure your Ubuntu 8.04 machine to print directly to a .pdf file.

Verifying Setup or Print to PDF Configuration

My Ubuntu 8.04 installation was already configured, out of the box, to print to .pdf.  This means, without any additional configuration I could select “Print” from an application and the output would be generated into a .pdf file and saved to disk.  You can verify whether or not your machine is configured the same way by Navigating to:

System > Administration > Printing

If you already see a Local Printer listed as “PDF” then your machine is already configured as well.  If, for whatever reason, this is not the case for you this can be configured as follows.

1. Install the cups-pdf package using: sudo aptitude install cups-pdf
2. Select “New Printer”
3. Select “Print into PDF file” with the device URI of “cups-pdf:/”
4. Select “Generic”
5. Select “PDF file generator”
6. Assign a name.  “PDF” should be sufficient.
7. Select “Apply”

Again, I would be surprised if this is not configured on your machine by default, but I never can tell what some of you have done to your machines

Printing Directly to PDF

Once you have verified your machine is configured properly you should now be able to print documents directly to a .pdf file.  This should include text documents, web pages, etc.  Simply select “PDF” as the printer when you want to print a document.

After a print job has been sent you can find the generated .pdf file in your users Home folder within a new directory called “PDF”.

I’ve blogged about this in the past but it seemed to be overlooked.  I blame the poor choice of title.  In any event, I figure it would be worth revisiting as I’ve had a few suggestions on it being a good topic.

note: Your mileage may vary.  I’ve seen these steps suggest a much faster repository and in other cases they can end up being slower.  Perhaps try two or three until you find a good one.

Updating Your Repository Server

Software packages and security updates are made available in Ubuntu by way of a software repository.  These repositories are mirrored all over the world, many times very close to where you live.  I, for example, have three mirrors within 50 miles of my house.  These are generally much faster than the core Ubuntu repositories.

To find a repository near you, or have your system scan for the fastest (which may or may not be local to you), you will need to launch the Software Sources tool.  This can be found in:

System > Administration > Software Sources

This administrative menu will allow you to change the location of your repository, and which items within the repository you want to subscribe to.  You will have the most software available if all boxes are checked.

From here we’ll want to select “Other” from the drop-down menu and we’ll be provided with a list of available servers.

To have your system try and find the fastest server you can select the “Select Best Server” option, which will try to connect to each repository mirror and track the fastest responses.  The location selected when this process is done should be the fastest available mirror at that time.

Remember, repository mirror speeds can fluctuate based on traffic and other factors.  For best results you might try this scan periodically and find which mirrors are consistently the best for your location.  Enjoy!

I realize it has been ages since I first wrote on this topic so I figured I’d revisit it again.  If you’ve ever found yourself unable to playback a DVD on your Ubuntu system, this post will outline the reason and the fix.

The Reason

At first you might wonder why this bug hasn’t been fixed.  If, as I say, I wrote about this long ago why hasn’t it been fixed?  The problem is not in the code, but in the software patents involved.  For the same reason mp3 support is not enabled out-of-the-box, neither is DVD playback.

I should give the obligatory disclaimer about checking your local law and all that jazz.. but I wont.  Just know that you can blame the DCMA and ridiculous US patent law for this restriction.  If you are outside the US you are likely fine.. lucky bastards.

The Fix

As I mentioned above, Ubuntu can’t include the code for DVD playback by default, but it is very simple to add after-the-fact.  It takes all of one command to get it working (and will generally require a reboot), but afterwards you’re set.  I’ll outline two methods you can use to enable DVD playback on your Ubuntu system.

Method #1:

The first method toward enabling DVD playback on Ubuntu 8.04 is to simply run an included script that will automagically fetch, configure and install the appropriate code for you.  This can be done by issuing the command below:

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

Method #2:

The second method (both are not required) toward enabling DVD playback on Ubuntu 8.04 is to install it in its packaged form, which is available from Medibuntu.  The following three commands will add the Medibuntu repository, install the security key and then add DVD playback support.

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

Either of these methods will likely require a reboot.  From here on out DVD playback should work just fine on your machine.

You may be interested in the No Software Patents website, which is an advocacy group with the goal of removing or at least improving the ridiculous, out of control software patent system.  Remember, this doesn’t only affect the US.  It could happen in your country too!