Ubuntu Tutorials

I have been trying to come up with some more ways to make this site and the content more helpful for the community.  In my searching for new “features” I came across the Firefox feature of “Smart Keyword Search”.  This post is two part.  One, I’ll outline how to create a Smart Keyword Search item in Firefox specifically for this site and second create Smart Keyword Searches for any website.  This will allow you to quickly and easily search this sites contents anytime you need instruction on a topic!

Smart Keyword Search for Ubuntu Tutorials

To create a Smart Keyword Search for this site you’ll need to first right-click on the blog search field.  The search field is found on the top left above the Donate button.

The resulting window will ask for a name and a keyword.  The name is just for your use, allowing you to organize multiple keyword searches.  The keyword field is the keyword you’ll need to use to quick-search the site.  In the example below I used “Ubuntu Tutorials Search” for the Name and “ut” for the keyword.

Click “Add” to save the changes.  You can now quick-search this site for whatever it is you’re looking for by entering “ut <search term>” in your address bar.  To search for posts related to vmware, for example, you’d use:

ut vmware

Searching can be done from any tab, so you don’t even need to pull up the site first.  Quickly find the tutorials you need, simply and easily.

These steps work for any search form you can find on the web.  Right-click, “Add a Keyword for this Search…”, enter the keyword, and you’re done.

If your computer habits are anything like mine you probably have a set of applications that you use nearly every time you log in to the machine.  Let me guess.. Firefox?  Pidgin perhaps?  Thunderbird or Evolution?  You may have more or less, but it is common for a user to use the same applications regularly.  Wouldn’t it be nice if those commonly used applications could startup faster?  That is possible with a tool called “Preload”.

Installing Preload

The preload service is available through the main Ubuntu repositories, and can be installed by clicking the link below or running the command:

sudo aptitude install preload

A few things to note now about using Preload.  First, this will not improve boot time.  Preload monitors recurring applications and, after establishing a pattern, will preload those binaries into memory at startup.  Given that it also has to establish a pattern you may not see a performance increase immediately.  Give it some time though, you’ll start to see a difference soon enough!

I recently blogged about installing the Adobe Acrobat Reader on Ubuntu 8.04.  For those that followed that tutorial you may also be interested in adding the Firefox plugins for Adobe Reader as well.  These will also require the Medibuntu repository, which I’ll review quickly here.

Configuring the Medibuntu Repository

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

Installing the Mozilla Acroread Plugins

sudo apt-get install mozilla-acroread acroread-plugins

The acroread-plugins package will provide support for completion of fillable forms and javascript.  The mozilla-acroread package will provide support for mozilla, firefox, galeon and konqueror.

Enjoy!

Not long ago the USB mouse that I’ve been using with my laptop finally died.  Granted it may have been due to me stubbing my toe on my backpack and crushing it during the middle of the night.  In any event, I’ve become pretty proficient in the use of keyboard shortcuts in Firefox at this point.  I thought I would share a few with you.

Navigation Shortcuts

Forward, backward, home, address bar and search bar can be done via keyboard shortcuts:

alt+Left Arrow : back

alt+Right Arrow : forward

alt+Home : Home

ctrl+L : address bar

F6 : address bar

ctrl+K : search bar

ctrl+K+Down Arrow : toggle search engine down

ctrl+K+Up Arrow : toggle search engine up

Tab Shortcuts

Opening, closing and navigating your tabs can be done via these shortcuts:

ctrl+t : new tab

ctrl+w : close tab

ctrl+Page Up : previous tab

ctrl+Page Down : next tab

ctrl+tab : next tab

alt+num (1, 2, 3, etc) : tab number

ctrl+shift+T : open recently closed tabs

ctrl+r : refresh tab content

ctrl+shift+r : force-refresh tab content

ctrl+u : view tab source

Are there any shortcuts that I’ve missed?  If you’ve got anything to share, comment.

I have been tunneling all of my web traffic over an encrypted SSH connection for some time now. Considering the fact that I travel a lot, I’m very regularly on untrusted, insecure networks. I prefer to secure those connections (web, IM, email, etc) by creating an encrypted SSH connection and pushing the traffic through it. Today I also found a method for also pushing DNS requests through the same tunnel. This ensures total privacy between yourself and the SSH dedicated server.

Step 1: Creating the Tunnel

Creating this private connection you’ll need a remote SSH server to connect to. Mine runs at home in my garage on an old Pentium III 500MHz box (yeah, the kind most people threw away long, long ago!). I connect to this tunnel using:

ssh -D 8080 -fN user@server

This creates a SOCKS compatible proxy, which is a requirement of the DNS forwarding. Other methods on the interwebs suggest using ssh -L or similar, which are not SOCKS compatible proxies.

Step 2: Forwarding DNS

If you’d like to also forward your DNS requests (ie; the site addresses you type into your browser), you’ll need to change a setting in Firefox. This can be done by accessing the address about:config, and entering this string into the configuration:

network.proxy.socks_remote_dns

Change this value to “true”.

Step 3: Using the Tunnel

The last step is to configure your browser to use these new settings. In Firefox 3 (I hope you’ve upgraded by now), you can activate/toggle these settings via:

Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network > Settings

Select “Manual Proxy Configuration” and add localhost to the “SOCKS Host:” field, followed by port 8080 (assuming you’ve used the port in the example above).

This will then forward your web traffic through the SSH tunnel and DNS requests will also be forwarded.

You may want to check out the FoxyProxy plugin for a simpler way of toggling this on & off.

To deactivate the tunneling and use the local DNS again simply revert Step 3 back to “Direct Connection to the Internet”.

I ran into some Mozilla Firefox easter eggs this afternoon.  Do you have any more that I don’t know about?

Visit these addresses in Firefox 3:

about:mozilla
about:robots

Also some other interesting things to find:

about:config
about:cache
about:credits
about:license
about:buildconfig

(Reference to the “warranty” is a warning message and I’m sure its a joke.  Refer here to previous warning messages prior to this one.)

update: I have also found that prefetching is active in the Epiphany browser as well. The instructions to de-activate it are the same, see below.

I recently found out that Firefox has a feature called “prefetching” that tries to pre-download items that it suspects you might click on soon.  This could help in pre-downloading content that you would visit next (ie; it is linked on the page you are visiting therefore you might access it next), but it can also have the nasty negative effect of wasting your bandwidth on items you don’t ever want.  This can also download cookies from sites you haven’t visited, etc.  Seems like a nasty feature to me!

I also found that this prefetching feature will cause your connection to the ubuntuforums.org (and a few other sites) to be refused if you are also going through a squid proxy.  So, this is a quick suggestion on how you can disable prefetching in Firefox.

Disable Prefetching in Firefox

In your browsers address window enter the address:

about:config

This will pull up your browser settings (in FF3 it will warn you that there be dragons ahead!  Just accept the warning.)  You’ll now want to search for the following string, which you’ll toggle off:

network.prefetch-next

To toggle off this setting simple double-click the listing and it will set to false.  Prefetching items that you might download is now disabled.  Your machine will now kindly only download the content, cookies and images that you actually access directly.

Today’s tutorial might be a bit quick, but that fits along with the tips included. Speed up your work by using keyboard shortcut keys. Below I’ve listed some of the shortcut keys I use within during my day-to-day. If you have any more to offer please drop in a comment or blog about them yourself and ping back here.

nautilus / gnome:

ctrl-h : show hidden files

ctrl-t : move to trash

f9 : toggle side-pane

alt-home : jump to home folder

alt-enter : file / folder properties

alt-f1 : launch applications menu

alt-f2 : launch "run application" dialogue

ctrl-alt - right/left arrow : move to the next virtual desktop

ctrl-alt-shift - right/left arrow : take current window to the next virtual desktop

firefox:

ctrl-k : firefox search field

ctrl-l : firefox address bar

ctrl-pgup : next tab (left to right)

ctrl-pgdn : previous tab (right to left)

ctrl-t : new tab

ctrl-r / f5: reload page

ctrl-u : view page source

If you see any that I’ve missed share them below. These are the main ones that I use on a fairly regular basis and I’m sure the list isn’t complete.  I know it isn’t an all-encompassing list of shortcut keys, just those that I have found the most helpful.  Anything you can add?

The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is required if you need to run any java-based applications on your Ubuntu machine. Many times this is required for certain websites and is always a good addition to your installed package base. To install the Java Runtime Environment including the plugin for Mozilla Firefox simply run the following command. (note: you will need to have additional repositories enabled. See How to add extra repositories.

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-bin

You will have to agree to the DLJ license terms to install this package. To find out more about the terms of the DLJ visit the DLJ FAQ.

I have been using the Tor privacy network for quite some time now and I really appreciate the anonymity it allows me. It is very easy to setup on Ubuntu systems and basically offers you the freedom to surf and chat anonymously. No more tracking by marketers or wondering if someone can find you based on your IP. Of course always remember to use your powers of invisibility for good! Here you can find out more about the Tor Network.

1. sudo aptitude install tor
2. sudo vim /etc/tor/torrc
3. sudo vim /etc/privoxy/config
4. comment out: “logfile logfile” and “jarfile jarfile”
5. find: listen-address 127.0.0.1:8118
6. add (on next line): forward-socks4a / localhost:9050 . (including the period)
7. sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart && sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy restart
8. configure your network to now use Tor and Privoxy.

That is a pretty quick setup for getting the engine to work, now to actually use it. This can be used globally if set in your network proxy config (System > Preferences > Network Proxy) or individually by program that allows proxy configuration.

Firefox Setup / Global Network Proxy Settings:

1. Edit > Preferences > Advanced > “Connection”
2. HTTP and SSL Proxy: localhost: 8118
3. SOCKS Host: localhost 9050

Or for an even simpler method simply download the Tor Plugin for Firefox. It allows you to turn on / off the Tor proxy with a click of a button.

For gaim:

1. Edit any account (Jabber, MSN, etc)
2. “Advanced” Tab or “Proxy Settings” (depending on your version of gaim)
3. Proxy Type: SOCKS 5
4. Host: 127.0.0.1
5. Port: 9050
6. Done

For IRC (freenode) over gaim:

1. Edit your IRC account settings
2. change “irc.freenode.net” to: mejokbp2brhw4omd.onion
3. “Advanced” Tab or “Proxy Settings” (depending on your version of gaim)
4. Proxy Type: SOCKS 5
5. Host: 127.0.0.1
6. Port: 9050

Enjoy using the Tor Privacy network. If you enjoy it, consider hosting another private node on the network to expand its reach and bandwidth. It is very easy to setup (outside of the scope of this tutorial) and you can limit the bandwidth available. Those instructions (hopefully) coming soon.