I am happy to announce that GNOME 2.32 has now officially been released! This release is a bit smaller than what you’ve come to expect, but that is simply because most of the focus is on the upcoming GNOME 3.x series! I want to congratulate the entire GNOME team for all of their hard work and for yet another improved and polished release.
Be sure to check out the GNOME 2.32 Release Notes for more details.
I mentioned a week or so ago that I would be having another article published in the near future. I’m happy to announce that the article is now available. I hope you’ll take a few minutes and head over to have a read. If you have any comments, or suggestions on accuracy or improvements please do let me know and I’ll update where necessary.
This evening I got to thinking about web browsers and privacy. Privacy is, of course, a regular concern for many of us and there are many different “solutions” out there. Recently web browsers have been adding privacy modes, which allow us to browse the web without storing a lot of cookies, history, etc. Google Chrome (or Chromium) provide the “Incognito” mode, which allows for private browsing. This mode can be launched using the key combination “shift-ctrl-n” or selecting “New Incognito Window” from the menu. The only missing piece is until recently there hasn’t been a way to launch this mode by default.
In this article I will outline how to update your system to launch Google Chrome’s Incognito mode by default. This includes launching it from the Applications menu as well as making it the default when opening new links.
Step 1:
Edit your Application menu entry for Google Chrome (or Chromium) using the ‘alacarte’ application. You can launch this command directly or right-click on the Applications menu and “Edit Menu”. Navigate to “Internet” section and select the Google Chrome (or Chromium) entry.
Once selected, simply double-click the item to open its properties and update the command, description or title.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the addition you’ll want to make is the “--incognito” between the existing chromium and %U. This will update the Applications menu, essentially setting Incognito mode as the default when launching this application new.
Step 2:
In addition, if you want links to be opened in Incognito mode you’ll also need to update your Preferred Applications configuration. This is done in the Preferences > Preferred Applications. This is assuming that Google Chrome (or Chromium) is set as your default. In the screenshot below, you’ll see that we’ll essentially make the same change as we did above.
Conclusion
These two simple steps will configure your browser to perpetual private mode. From my searching, I couldn’t find any documentation specific to Linux, so here it is. I hope you find it helpful!
I took some time today to check out Ubuntu 10.10 Beta. So far I’m impressed with some of the improvements, and I’ll blog about those later, but in the meantime I thought I’d share a workaround I came across in getting Guest Additions working when running Ubuntu 10.10 inside VirtualBox.
My first attempt at getting Guest Additions installed was by mounting the CD and running the command:
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run
While this attempted to compile the drivers necessary for Guest Additions, it never seemed to work. After repeated reboots and rebuilds, I could never get a better resolution. After a little searching I came across a solution that seems to take care of the problem.
To install Guest Additions in Ubuntu 10.10 Beta, you’ll need to install a pre-packaged version available through the repositories. You can run the command below, or click on the URL:
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-guest-x11
After a quick reboot you should be set.
I hope you enjoy Ubuntu 10.10 Beta (and forward). It’s the little things like this that make testing it in a virtual machine worthwhile.
I know I haven’t been blogging much lately. I’ve been occupied with other responsibilities. Besides work and school I’ve been dedicating a lot of time volunteering on the GNOME Sysadmin team, trying to make sure that it remains a well-oiled development machine! I had a few minutes this evening however and I thought I would give you a heads up on an article I’m waiting to have published.
As some of you know, I have been writing off and on for Packt Publishing‘s online Article Network. I’ve covered a number of Ubuntu related topics such as: “What’s New in Ubuntu 9.10“, “Network Based Ubuntu Installations“, “Ubuntu 9.10: How to Upgrade“, “Creating Local Ubuntu Repositories“, “Five Years of Ubuntu“, “Ubuntu User Interface Tweaks“, “Install GNOME-Shell on Ubuntu 9.10“, “Securely Encrypting Removable Media“, and “Folding @ Home on Ubuntu“.
My latest article, which should be published this week sometime, is a quick-install guide to Ubuntu Server 10.04 toward the goal of a “LAMP” web-server. The article includes screenshots for installing Ubuntu Server, installing the Apache, MySQL and PHP components, and installing a WordPress installation, managed by subversion. It probably sounds like there is quite a bit to it, doesn’t it?
The best part of the article is that you can go from zero to WordPress in fifteen minutes! I’ve timed it. Twice. I setup a virtual machine and by following these instructions I can go from no operating system to a working WordPress installation in under fifteen minutes. It’s really quite amazing! Ubuntu Server is so user friendly, and they’ve put in enough attention to the little details, that really anyone can set up a web server and start publishing content in no time!
I have a follow-up article in the works (still a few weeks out, at least) which outlines expanding your web server to include SSL, virtual hosts (multiple sites), managing and upgrading your WordPress engine using subversion, and more.
I’ll post links when both of these publish. Until then…
Christer