Ubuntu Linux, an upgrade for Windows

Apple application bar

2009-03-13T17:55:00.008+01:00

Introduction

A nice feature of Apple's OSX is definitely the app dock. And if Apple can make it, then the Open-source community can do this as well! There are two application docks I have tried so far, Avant Windows Navigator (AWN) and Cairo Dock. I will describe both shortly:

- AWN is a easy to use and install application dock. It's available from the Package Manager or you install it yourself. There is only one but, I tried AWN a couple of time now on different distro's and it's not one of the very stable dock around. For some reason, it never work flawless and that's why I have looked around for a good alternative.

- Cairo Dock was the alternative I have been looking for. It's made by some French developers and the whole website is in French, except for the Wiki page's. But still, even for a French site, you will succeed with finding the right package. After you have installed the software, you can find the program in the System Tools section. I will now describe how to install this great program and some nice features I came across.

Cairo Dock installation instructions

The best way to install Cairo Dock, is using the Package Manager. Before you can find this software in the Package Manager, you'll have to do the following from the Terminal or add the "deb http://" lines in the "repositories" section in the Package Manager:

Edit your sources.list (sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list) and add the following line:

For Gutsy Gibbons

deb http://repository.cairo-dock.org/ubuntu gutsy cairo-dock

For Hardy Heron

deb http://repository.cairo-dock.org/ubuntu hardy cairo-dock

For Intrepid Ibex

deb http://repository.cairo-dock.org/ubuntu intrepid cairo-dock

Ok, now every thing is setup to install Cairo dock. You can decide for your self how you want to start the installation:

Package Manager
Lauch the Package Manager and click on "refresh". Now you can search for "cairo". Select every package which has to do with the CairoDock (cairo-dock and cairo-dock-plug-ins)

Command line
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins or if cairo-dock-plug-ins can't be found, try cairo-tdock-plugins

After installation has been completed, go to he Ubuntu menu in the "System Tools" section. Here you will find CairoDock. Launch it and you will see something that looks like the following screenshot. The LaunchBar on the screenshot has already been customized.

Ok, now the question is: Does CairoDock automaticaly start up? In my case, the answer was no. And I think I was not the only one, but the solution is very easy though. Like everything in Linux ;-)

Go to the "Preference" section in the Gnome menu. Here you will find a option "Sessions". In this screen you will be able to add CairoDock. Have a look at the screenshot and copy the settings.

Network light blinking

2009-02-22T14:09:00.006+01:00

For some reason, some person decided that it's very nice to see your network light of your Wifi blinking. Every laptop user should know that this can be very irritating because usually this light is in front of you.

There are ways to solve this problem, I know one of the solutions and I will explain it here.

First of all you need a network manager which is able to run a script after the connection has been made. Because I use Wicd Network manager which you can download from this location: http://wicd.sourceforge.net (follow the installation instructions from there website)

Now we have to create script which can be run by Wicd. Open a Terminal and type the following: > sudo gedit /etc/network/if-up.d/noblink

After you have typed your password, a file editor will open. Paste the following lines in the file and save and close it:

#!/bin/sh
echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0:RX/trigger
echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0:TX/trigger
echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0:radio/trigger
echo none > /sys/class/leds/iwl-phy0:assoc/trigger

Now we are almost finished, the only thing we have to do, is telling Wicd that it should run this file after the connection has been made. Open Wicd, and go to the Wireless network connection which you want to use. Click on the white arrow which will collapse the advanced settings of the Wifi connection. Here you can click scripts, and after you have entered your admin password you wil be able to tell which script has to been run and when. Have a look at the screenshot and do the same.

To test if this works, disable your Wifi and enable it. Now try to make the connection to your Wifi network and if everything works fine, you will see that the blinking has been stopped. The only problem with this setup is, that you have to specify for every Wifi connection that this script should be used.

Easy to use bittorrent client

2009-01-28T22:06:00.004+01:00

I'm using bittorrent for many years now, and I have used many different clients as well. But as you probably know, you will always stick to one client after a while. There can be many reasons to do so, and for me, performance and easy to use interface was the main reason. So on Windows I used Bittcomet for a while, but when I changed to Linux, there was no Bitcomet available anymore.

But, as we all know, in the open-source community there is always a decent replacement for almost everything. So I stumbled across Deluge bittorrent client. It has every thing you need, easy installation and the software is well maintained. There are many options to choose from, and even if you don't really know how bittorrent works, the default settings should be enough for almost everyone.

Just have a look at the following screenshot, you can download the software from http://deluge-torrent.org/downloads.php and select the appropriate Ubuntu package.

Reduce power consumption on Linux

2009-01-25T14:38:00.004+01:00

If you have a desktop, power consumption shouldn't be a real issue if you're not a environmental activist. For Laptop users, power consumption is always an issue and in Ubuntu, there are several ways to reduce this.

The easiest way is to change the power options from the menu, go to the Ubuntu menu, then to Preferences and Power Options. Here you can do some common changes which you also find in Windows for example.

But there is a difference between laptops and desktops, therefore you can change a parameter in a configuration file where you can tell Ubuntu that you're working on a laptop. You have to do the following:

Open a terminal and type: sudo gedit /etc/default/acpi-support

Now you will see an editor, look for ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=false and change this to ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE=true

Reboot your laptop to make sure that the configuration has been loaded properly.

Random links

2009-01-22T18:00:00.002+01:00

When surfing on the web, I find some useful links once in a while. I will put them in this post with a description, if you think you have some useful links as well, just drop me a message.

http://www.linuxalt.com - Alternative software for Linux

Installing Office 2007 on Ubuntu Linux

2009-01-22T16:51:00.007+01:00

In the previous post I explained how to install the latest version of Wine. The minimum requirement is Wine version 1.1.13 and it's still a development version. But it's working fine so there are no arguments to not to install this. Actually, you need the latest version to fix the problem with numbering and bullets.

Make sure you have done the minimum preparations. We start with starting up "Configure Wine" and you will see the following. Make sure that your Wine settings are the same.

You can easily use "Add application" and just type in the name you want to add. It's not necessary to search for the EXE file. Make sure that the Windows version is Windows XP. That's all!

For the people with a dual boot setup like me, you can change the default "My Documents" location in the "Desktop Integration" tab to your "documents directory" on the Windows partition.

Now we are going to install the software. Because it's your first time MS Office installation on your computer, you don't have to delete old MS data to make the installer work. Ubuntu tries to use an "the Archive Manager" to open EXE files. We don't want this, so we are going to change this first. The easiest way to do this, is going to the properties of an EXE file (right mouse click -> Properties) and change the following so it will look like this:

After you have changed these settings, you can just double click the setup.exe file and install Office like you always have done with Windows!

Keep in mind that Wine is still in development, even after version 1.0. This means that not ever Office program is working. Word and Excel works, but expect to experience problem with the other Office programs like Outlook. When there is a fix, I will put the instructions in this blog. Read further for instructions how to run PowerPoint.

For PowerPoint, you have to change a dll setting, not to difficult. First you add powerpnt.exe in the "Application" tab like you did with the setup.exe. Make sure that powerpnt.exe is highlighted. Now we go to the "Libraries" tab and make sure you have the same setting for the riched20.dll as shown on the screenshot:

After this, you can normally startup PowerPoint.

The Ubuntu basics

2009-01-22T15:53:00.005+01:00

Okay, now you have installed Ubuntu 8.10. Not so hard I think, the installation is pretty straight forward.

While developing Ubuntu, they had the security in mind. One important thing of Ubuntu you should know, is that you can't use the Root user. Maybe you haven't heard of a Root user ever, in that case you don't have to worry. If you ever did hear of a Root user, then you also know that you can do more with a Root user then a Windows Administrator account. You can fuck you whole computer up in seconds!

Usually people with basic or no knowledge at all of Linux, are able to delete files without knowing what the are doing. I have been there, believe me.

So, our friend from Ubuntu have decided that you can't use the Root user and you have to type SUDO before every command where you need Root privileges for. Just remember SUDO as SuperUserDO. In this case, the Root user is the Super User.

I bet you have already logged in your fresh installed Linux machine, and you maybe have already explored the menu's as well. You probably already have realised that it's looks quit similar to Windows. But I will tell you a secret, the screen you are looking at is called a Gnome desktop, which is used in many other Linux distributions as there default desktop manager. The other one which is used a lot is KDE which is the default desktop manager for Open SuSE for example. Fedora Linux (sponsored by RedHat) is using Gnome as there default window manager. Just have a look at Google Pictures and look for Gnome screenshots. Some are really beautiful.

On your desktop, in the bottom left corner you will a button to open the default Gnome menu. There are different options which you can explore. A nice section is Office for example. You will notice a fresh installation of OpenOffice (version 2) which can you can use as a MS Office alternative. To bad that version 2 comes with the default installation of Ubuntu and not the latest version (version 3). If you start up Writer you will notice a Word processor which looks a little bit like the old MS Office versions. It's free software, so don't expect to much of it, in my future blogs I will explain how to install Office 2007 for example on Linux.

You will also notice other software in various sections. Even software which you will never use. So, we are going to start with installing some software, deleting is not up to me and something you can do easily yourself.

Go to the Gnome menu and then go to Administration, here you will see Synaptic Package Manager. This tool is going to be your biggest friend. This is the graphical interface for the "sudo apt-get" command which is still widely used by many people who are working on a Debian distro.

If you start the tool up, you will have to enter the Root password first. If you left every setting default, you will notice different software sections on the left side, and a "Quick search" box in the top middle. Now we are going to search for the following software to spice your fresh installation a litte bit up ;-)

When you select a package, you can select install. If the package manager want's to install aditional software, say yes. Or cancel the installation if you don't want this additional software. To make software work, you don't always have an option.

sun-java (select the latest package, at this time it's sun-java6-jre)
awn-manager (you can use this program to get this OS X bar on the bottom of your screen)
deluge-torrent (the easiest bittorrent client at the moment available for Linux)
screenlets (nice program to show Widgets in Linux)
adobe-flashplugin

After this, we have to change some settings as explained on the following website to make the latest installation (version 1.1.13) of Wine possible: http://www.winehq.org/download/deb

Now we say apply and the software should be installed when everything is finished. At the various software sections you should be able to see the new installed software. Just start it up and play around a bit to get used to Ubuntu a bit.

Another important thing you should keep in mind, is that Linux doesn't use a C or D or whatever drive Windows uses. Linux is just using "/" (root) and a swap partition which you don't see in your file browser anyway. So we don't work with drive letters any more. Your user data in Ubuntu is stored in the home folder which you can find in "/home/[username]/"

Now we want to get rid of the old OpenOffice 2 installation. Use the package manager and search for "openoffice.org-core" and select remove. Make sure you also delete all of the other files which has to do with Openoffice.org 2. In my situation some files are mixed up, and that can be anoying. After the removal you should see that the programs in the Office section like Calc or Writer are gone. Now, go to www.openoffice.org and download the latest version for Ubuntu. The file should be a DEB file which is the installer file for Debian distributions like Ubuntu. You can find the file you need on the following location: http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US

After the download is finished, you can dubble click the file and it should install OpenOffice 3.

Now the basic setup is done. Just click around and customize your desktop whatever you like. This is the fastest way to learn the basics of Linux. In the following blogs I will give more indept information about how to use Ubuntu at work for example.

Getting started with Linux

2009-01-22T15:37:00.005+01:00

First of all you have to decide what you want to do with Linux, because Linux is perfect for servers and workstations. If you'd like to use Linux as replacement for your Windows workstation then this is the place to be. People who want to install a Linux server have to look elsewhere.

Because this blog is mainly for beginners, I have decided to stick to one Linux distribution only, which is based on Debian Linux. It's called Ubuntu, and I'm using version 8.10 (Intrepid).

Ubuntu is one of the most user friendly Linux distributions with excellent hardware support and a large worldwide user network. This means that getting support is very easy, and getting updates and fixes don't take to long.

You can get a free copy of Ubuntu 8.10 at the following location: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

When your copy has been downloaded, you should have an ISO file. Burn this ISO file to a CD. You can also decide to install Linux first in a virtual environment and then you can just mount the ISO file to your virtual image. It's up to you.

The installation is pretty straight forward. I don't think it's necessary to explain the installation. Do have in mind that the installation can remove your whole Windows partition, so be careful! Installing Linux on a dual boot computer works with me, but you have to know what you're doing. Formatting the hard disk is usually easier. Also keep in mind that Linux will ask for a Swap partition. Usually this is the size of your RAM. So for the average users it should be aroung 2GB until 4GB. Linux will manage this anyway, so it's better to make it a little bit bigger then necessary.

Introduction

2009-01-22T15:02:00.000+01:00

Hi,

My name is Rogier, I'm a Senior System Adminstrator who has to start working with Linux. Sounds familiar? I think it does. This blog is made for everyone who likes to use Linux, but don't know how and where to start.

Before you continue reading, I want to make some points clear ;-)

1. Linux is not for nerds or geeks.
2. Linux is stable.
3. You don't have to shutdown your linux pc after a day of work.
4. Linux is not hard to learn, it's just different then Windows.
5. There is enough software available, and in 99% of the cases it's free!

If you have other points, drop me a post and I will add them.

Okay, if you're still exited, continue reading and get started!