^txt2regex$ is a lifesaver. It helps you create regular expression strings in a step by step process, by describing what your regex pattern should do in English (or your own language). The tool can create RegExes for use with 23 different programs, including sed, vim, mysql, and procmail. When you start the program, it will ask you a series of questions like “ 1. do you want to start matching at the beginning of lines? or 2. search anywhere?” and “this is followed by…. A specific character…” etc… download it and run it and you will see. Anyone who has worked with regular expressions for searching and optionally replacing stuff in files knows what a godsend then can be if you get the regex down pat – but they would also know what a time sink they can be if you can’t whip up exactly what you want. In the past, when faced with this kind of a situation, I would read man pages, books, experiment, fail and then, finally, succeed after a good half hour or so. txt2regex is a tool that eliminates the confusion. Totally. You can install txt2regex on Ubuntu by doing a: Among its features include the ability to print a list of characteristics of the regular expression syntax for various tools, a history tool which keeps track of you past regexes, and some pre-built regexes that are often used – for dates, times and numbers. For example, will create the regex for all supported tools. The regex will match a number of the form “34,412,069.90″ Here’s the output: carthik@milan:~$ txt2regex --all --make number3 ### number LEVEL 3: level 2 plus optional commas, like: 34,412,069.90 RegEx awk : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)? RegEx ed : [+-]\?[0-9]\{1,3\}\(,[0-9]\{3\}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2\}\)\? RegEx egrep : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx emacs : [+-]?[0-9]!!\(,[0-9]!!\)*\(\.[0-9]!!\)? RegEx expect : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)? RegEx find : [+-]?[0-9]!!\(,[0-9]!!\)*\(\.[0-9]!!\)? RegEx gawk : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx grep : [+-]\?[0-9]\{1,3\}\(,[0-9]\{3\}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2\}\)\? RegEx javascript: [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx lex : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx lisp : [+-]?[0-9]!!\\(,[0-9]!!\\)*\\(\\.[0-9]!!\\)? RegEx mawk : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)? RegEx mysql : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx ooo : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx perl : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx php : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx postgres : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx procmail : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)? RegEx python : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx sed : [+-]\?[0-9]\{1,3\}\(,[0-9]\{3\}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2\}\)\? RegEx tcl : [+-]?[0-9]!!(,[0-9]!!)*(\.[0-9]!!)? RegEx vbscript : [+-]?[0-9]{1,3}(,[0-9]{3})*(\.[0-9]{2})? RegEx vi : [+-]\{0,1\}[0-9]\{1,3\}\(,[0-9]\{3\}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2\}\)\{0,1\} RegEx vim : [+-]\=[0-9]\{1,3}\(,[0-9]\{3}\)*\(\.[0-9]\{2}\)\= prints out a short help message and gives some more info. What would be handy is if txt2regex had an extension that allowed one to deconstruct a regex – give it a regex and it tells you what it does in plain English. Also, I cannot seem to create regexes for the mod_rewrite module in apache. I suspect that since mod_rewrite supports POSIX regexes, I could just run with one or the other of the regexes created by txt2regex. Since I haven’t tried it, I can’t say which one of the 23, just yet. Gutsy Gibbon Archives Open Sure as clockwork, work on the next version of Ubuntu has started. I was wondering what the collective noun used for the testing releases would be. We’ve had an “Array” of Hedgehogs, a “Herd” of Fawns, a “Knot” of Efts, a “Sounder” of Warthogs, a “Colony” of Badgers, a “Flight” of Drakes. I was hoping they would choose a “Machination” of Gibbons (“a machination of monkeys” exists), but no, we have the simpler, more functional “tribe”. So the testing releases will be called Tribe 1, Tribe 2 etc… FC6 on desktop PC But sakes alive! There is repository livna.org which includes compiled binary ‘nvidia’ modules for different Fedora Core versions and kernels: to enable this repo just execute the following command with root rights: su -; rpm -Uvh http://www.fedorafaq.org/yum http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm sudo rpm -Uvh http://www.fedorafaq.org/yum http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm After this tons of additional software for your FC6 are available for downloading! To install nvidia Geforce4 support you can do: yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx Please note that Geforce4 and Geforce2 aren’t supported by latest 1.0-97xx nvidia driver series and you should install 96xx one. That’s why I installed kmod-nvidia-96xx and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx instead of kmod-nvidia and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia. Hope it helps somebody! Aver Media 305 works fine under FC6 too: Debug web application by showing web server headers Fedora Core remote installation howto To get it done it’s enough to ask somebody who has physical access to server to boot up with Fedora Core installation compact disk and type one command. All the rest you can do by yourselves from any PC located at the same network. When Fedora CD is booted above mentioned person will see at the following screen: Ask him (or her) to type command at “boot:” prompt (in one line): text telnet ip=[ip.address] netmask=[netmask] gateway=[gateway.address] ksdevice=[ethernet.device] For example: text telnet ip=192.168.0.123 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.0.1 ksdevice=/dev/eth1 Where IP address 192.168.0.123/24 will be assigned to eth1 NIC of server you’re going to install. ksdevice refers to your Ethernet network card (NIC) designation (if there only one NIC just omit ksdevice). After it’s done you can connect to server via telnet command, for example: telnet 192.168.0.123 and proceed installation. Please note that it would take some time before you can login as Fedora’s anaconda installer will be loading telnet server. During remote installation it’s impossible to switch consoles. Make sure you’ve set proper settings for your NIC(s) as after reboot previous IP settings will be lost. After installation is finished and server is rebooted you can login to fresh Fedora via ssh (with root login). You may also be interested in: Fully automated Fedora Linux installation manual (create custom installation cd) Make a copy of virtual machine with Vmware Server First of all, we need to find where all our virtual machines are in our system. After small search I’ve found vmware files in /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines. There are some set of directories each corresponds to some of your already created virtual machines. In my case I was interested in cloning virtual machine with name db1 to new machine db2 and then to db3. Continue reading about virtual machines cloning with Vmware Server… Probably you’re interested also in: Vmware Server at Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 Web server cluster with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Our examples are based on standard SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES10) installations, but savvy users of other distributions should be able to adapt the methods shown here. Continue reading… Keep contacts and calendar/datebook of Motorola Razr V3 saved I’d like to mention that advantage of this method is that it doesn’t matter what operating system you use, it can be Linux, Apple Mac or even M$ Window$. All operations are done with any browser you use. First of all register new account at ZYB or login to existing one at www.zyb.com. After first successful login you’ll be suggested to register your mobile phone model with the online system. Just choose your model in a wide phone models list. In my case I choose Motorola Razr V3. In order to upload your phone contacts to your contacts and calendar/datebok data to ZYB perform the following operations with your Motorola Razr v3: When sync is done you’ll see your contacts at your personal ZYB page. It’s very comfortable to edit them online and then sync with your Razr V3 by performing 13 step of above operations list. ZYB provides a feature that allows to sync data between many mobile phones you own. Many phone models are supported, so it would be useful to check if it is supported by ZYB before buying it You may also be interested in: EV-DO Internet access with Ubuntu Linux Download and convert YouTube video online and offline Inimitable wallpapers, icons and themes for Linux Web server on bash (in one line!) You can download it here. Just run it and then load web page http://192.168.0.7:8080, where 192.168.0.7 is IP address of the Linux machine you’ve started above mentioned bash script. You’ll see links to files located in directory the script was started at. My respect to Alexey Sveshnikov. P.S. Script was tested at Ubuntu and Debian Linux. Simple way to transmit files over network (nc utility) But here is useful tip on how to transmit files over network with no need to install and configure any service at server: just run at Linux or Unix server simple command: nc -l -p 12345 < /etc/apache/httpd.conf After this file /etc/apache/httpd.conf will be available at 12345 TCP port at any server’s IP address. To get it just load http://192.168.0.7:12345 with any browser you like (192.168.0.7 is server’s IP) at client’s PC. After file is downloaded it’s impossible to download it again without restarting nc command. Here are the results of my example: Theoretically it shouldn’t work as there are no web server headers like Content-type or Status. But it works. Ideas why it’s so are highly appreciated You might also be interested in: Web server on bash (in one line!) Linux pop-up terminal/console utilities All of them are included into Ubuntu apt repository and can be installed by corresponding commands: sudo aptitude install yakuake sudo aptitude install tilda sudo aptitude install yeahconsole At the next screenshot you can see all three utilities run at my laptop. Of course I don’t them all at once but prefer Tilda as the most comfortable for me. YaKuake is designed for KDE and uses konsole to emulate terminal. Tilda and YaKuake have GUI configuration tool when Yeahconsole is configured by editing configuration file /usr/X11/Xresourses. openSUSE 10.3 is released On the desktop
  • Beautiful Green Artwork
  • KDE 3.5.7
  • GNOME 2.20
  • GTK YaST
  • 1-Click Install
  • Multimedia
  • New/Redesigned YaST Modules
  • Compiz and Compiz Fusion
  • Virtualisation
  • OpenOffice.org 2.3
    • Behind the Scenes
  • New Package Management
  • Greatly Improved Boot Time
  • Linux 2.6.22.5
  • GCC 4.2
  • libZYpp 3.26.2
    • Downloadable CD and DVD images are here. Screenshots are here. Useful links (for newbies and not): openSUSE Community Nvidia Graphics Driver Custom Install ATI Graphics Driver Custom Install Intel Graphics Driver under openSUSE Checking for hardware compatiblity under openSUSE Wireless under openSUSE Installing a Webcam under openSUSE Scanner working under openSUSE Basic openSUSE concepts for the Windows users migrating to openSUSE NTFS under openSUSE Guidance for printing under Linux Two desktop apps you must know about Nice and powerful MSN client. Among it’s features I would mention the following ones:
  • Support for multiple operating systems (you can run the same Mercury version on Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux and Windows)
  • USB Stick Support (all settings, chat logs, etc… will be saved on your USB stick)
  • Be online with several MSN addresses at the same time (without starting a new program for every account)
  • Login with your status on ‘Invisible’ or any other status you want.
  • Have a different MSN name in every conversation (Personal name)
  • Send screen shots to your contacts
  • On screen display of events
  • Movable event box (the window that shows events at the right bottom of your screen in MSN)
  • Avatar scroller, automaticly change your avatar every 5 minutes
  • Override someones avatar
  • Enter notes while in a conversation you might need later (date of birth, last name, phone numbers
  • And many more…
    • Download it from here. 2. aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like systems. It’s features list is impressive, you can get it here. Download latest version from this page. Fun: Linux, Unix, Windows, OS X and DOS airlines Different styles. This humorous analogy, applying operating system philosophies as if they were airlines, is a long-standing much-circulated amusing story! UNIX Airways Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building. Air DOS Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on… Mac Airlines All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don’t need to know, don’t want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up. Windows Air The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever. Windows NT Air Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes. Windows XP Air You turn up at the airport, which is under contract to only allow XP Air planes. All the aircraft are identical, brightly colored and three times as big as they need to be. The signs are huge and all point the same way. Whichever way you go, someone pops up dressed in a cloak and pointed hat insisting you follow him. Your luggage and clothes are taken off you and replaced with an XP Air suit and suitcase identical to everyone around you as this is included in the exorbitant ticket cost. The aircraft will not take off until you have signed a contract. The inflight entertainment promised turns out to be the same Mickey Mouse cartoon repeated over and over again. You have to phone your travel agent before you can have a meal or drink. You are searched regularly throughout the flight. If you go to the toilet twice or more you get charged for a new ticket. No matter what destination you booked you will always end up crash landing at Whistler in Canada. OS X Air You enter a white terminal, and all you can see is a woman sitting in the corner behind a white desk, you walk up to get your ticket. She smiles and says “Welcome to OS X Air, please allow us to take your picture”, at which point a camera in the wall you didn’t notice before takes your picture. “Thank you, here is your ticket” You are handed a minimalistic ticket with your picture at the top, it already has all of your information. A door opens to your right and you walk through. You enter a wide open space with one seat in the middle, you sit, listen to music and watch movies until the end of the flight. You never see any of the other passengers. You land, get off, and you say to yourself “wow, that was really nice, but I feel like something was missing” Windows Vista Airlines You enter a good looking terminal with the largest planes you have ever seen. Every 10 feet a security officer appears and asks you if you are “sure” you want to continue walking to your plane and if you would like to cancel. Not sure what cancel would do, you continue walking and ask the agent at the desk why the planes are so big. After the security officer making sure you want to ask the question and you want to hear the answer, the agent replies that they are bigger because it makes customers feel better, but the planes are designed to fly twice as slow. Adding the size helped achieve the slow fly goal. Once on the plane, every passenger has to be asked individually by the flight attendants if they are sure they want to take this flight. Then it is company policy that the captain asks the passengers collectively the same thing. After answering yes to so many questions, you are punched in the face by some stranger who when he asked “Are you sure you want me to punch you in the face? Cancel or Allow?” you instinctively say “Allow”. After takeoff, the pilots realize that the landing gear driver wasn’t u FAQ: How to install and configure MySQL cluster? By the way a cluster in IT field is a group of linked computers, working together so they form a single computing system. The components of a cluster are usually connected to each other via fast local area networks. Clusters are usually deployed to improve performance and/or availability over that provided by a single computer, while typically being much more cost-effective than single computers of comparable speed or availability. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-cluster.html MySQL Cluster is a high-availability, high-redundancy version of MySQL adapted for the distributed computing environment. It uses the NDBCLUSTER storage engine to enable running several MySQL servers in a cluster. This storage engine is available in MySQL 5.0 binary releases and in RPMs compatible with most modern Linux distributions. Mysql Cluster: The definitive HOWTO How To Set Up A Load-Balanced MySQL Cluster This tutorial shows how to configure a MySQL 5 cluster with three nodes: two storage nodes and one management node. This cluster is load-balanced by a high-availability load balancer that in fact has two nodes that use the Ultra Monkey package which provides heartbeat (for checking if the other node is still alive) and ldirectord (to split up the requests to the nodes of the MySQL cluster). MySQL Cluster Server Setup MySQL Cluser Server is a fault-tolerant, redundant, scalable database architecture built on the open-source MySQL application, and capable of delivering 99.999% reliability. In this paper we describe the process we used to setup, configure, and test a three-node mySQL cluster server in a test environment. Install Windows after Ubuntu Lucid Lynx I have to install Windows as the second operating system along with newly installed Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (it rocks but this is for another post) to run iTunes. For rather long time I’ve been using gtkpod, amarok, banshee, exaile or rhythmbox to sync my ipod under Linux/Ubuntu and load my music collection there. As we all know The Elder Brother Apple fights with interoperability and makes ipod/iphone users to use iTunes only. Any other applications that can read/write to ipod data format are prohibited by Apple. This also concerns Rockbox and ipod4linux alternative firmwares — once Apple encrypted ipod firmware it became impossible to use them. It definitely sucks. At least due to the fact there are millions of Linux users who are real or potential customers of Apple products. Anyways these facts have been discussed in various forums, blogs like this and similar but this post about how to install Windows as the second operating system along with Ubuntu or any other Linux. The first that we need to do is to create new partition for Windows and format it to NTFS. Exact steps to accomplish this depend on your HDD partition table e.g. there is one large ext3/ext4 partition for Ubuntu or there are several partitions for various distributions or mount points. Anyway you should use partition manager to create and/or format NTFS partition. I use gparted. It is graphical and it just works (use ‘ ‘ if you run Ubuntu/Debian). Second you should backup your MBR record and restore it after Windows installation that silently erases existing bootloader and installs windows one, use “ ” to save MRB into mbr.bin file and “ ” to restore it from file to HDD. To sum everything up here is the algorithm: BACKUP ALL YOUR DATA! 1. Create NTFS partition using gparted. Backup MBR using dd command e.g. “dd if=/dev/sda of=/mbr.bin bs=446 count=1″ (/dev/sda means your HDD). Boot Windows installation CD and install it onto newly created NTFS partition. Boot into Linux live CD e.g. Ubuntu Live CD. Restore MBR using dd e.g. “dd if=/media/sda/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda bs=446 count=1″. Reboot. Select Ubuntu in grub menu and boot it. Setup grup for Windows booting. In order to accomplish the last 8th item you should add the following text block to the end of grub config (read this article for detailed information): Good luck! P.S. |If something goes wrong or you need more details you can take a look at the following article at ubuntu.com: Recovering Ubuntu After Installing Windows. It’s written in rather tangled manner but still informative. X.org 7.1 Daniel writes about the new X.org blue spark hotness. So how about some Edgy packages next Friday, Daniel? And if 7.2 can come forward a month, it’s also Edgy material… Gobuntu is… go Thanks to Colin and Evan’s efforts we now have daily images of a freedom-focused flavour of Ubuntu, “Gobuntu”. This is a call for developers who are interested in pushing the limits of content and code freedom – including firmware, content, and authoring infrastructure, to join the team and help identify places where we must separate out pieces that don’t belong in Gobuntu from the standard Ubuntu builds. http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/gobuntu/daily/current/ At the moment this primarily addresses hardware drivers but as the team grows we will be able to maintain a bigger delta between Ubuntu and Gobuntu. The goal is to provide a cleaner and easier to maintain base for projects like gNewSense. Bug reports are welcome, but patches and offers of help will get better results. Thanks guys! Update: a number of comments have asked what Gobuntu is. It is a flavour of Ubuntu (like Kubuntu or Xubuntu) that is basically the same desktop environment as Ubuntu (a GNOME desktop) and a very strict set of restrictions on the licences of code and content. This means that we try to strip out ANYTHING which is not modifiable and redistributable, including firmware, PDF’s, video footage, sounds etc. We are trying to apply the FSF “rights” definition to everything in the platform. Gobuntu will not correctly enable much hardware today – but it exists as a banner for the cause of software freedom and as a reference of what IS possible with a totally rigorous approach. The goal is to make it a real point of pride to be able to run Gobuntu on a laptop or desktop or server, because it means that all of the stars have aligned to ensure that you have complete freedom to use that hardware with free software. Joining: there is now a gobuntu-devel mailing list for folks interested in Gobuntu development. Morphing dialogs and the AJAX roadmap for Launchpad The user experience and design team at Canonical includes a few folks dedicated to web technology. At the moment, there is a substantial effort under way to reshape the Launchpad UI now that we have the core capabilities for cross-project bug tracking, code publishing and translation in place. We want to make it more obvious how to get something done – especially for new users – and we want to make it feel snappy and responsive when making small changes to your project data. In the design discussions, we spent a lot of time working on a new approach to “dialog boxes, wizards and workflows”, trying to solve a thorny problem in user interaction: how do you make it easy to do something complex? There are lots of cases in Launchpad where you need to get lots of ducks in a row before you can do something. For example, you might need to make sure there is a team with specific people in it before you subscribe that team to a bug. Or you might need to create a new milestone while triaging and scheduling work on bugs in your project. Currently, that means jumping all around Launchpad in a way that assumes you know exactly how those pieces work. You need to go to one place to register a team, and a completely different place to setup a milestone. That means that lots of people don’t use capabilities in Launchpad, because they need to understand the whole system before they can get something small done. Every time someone bumps their head on that, we fail! And that’s the problem we set out to solve. We came up with a nifty approach, which we call morphing dialogs, that ensures the user always has the minimum number of choices to make, and still allows for complex variations on a process in a way that feels quite natural for users. The key ideas behind morphing dialogs are:
  • Only show one primary decision at a time, and make it obvious what that is. Sometimes, there are several directions you could take in order to get something done, but there is usually a single normal path for users to follow, and we always want users to be able to do the easy things easily.
  • Give users a sense of how far they are in the process, but don’t be too dogmatic about that, since getting one thing done often involves stepping off to the side to take care of preliminary business and those detours can also require several steps.
    • Here’s an example movie, which shows a person linking a blueprint to a bug. They need to search for the right blueprint, which they can do across a couple of projects simultaneously. In this mockup, they add GNOME to the list of projects that they look for the blueprint in, and when they can’t find it, they go to register a new blueprint for what they want. In the end he decides to go back and pick one from the search results. None of this involved a page load, and the round trips to the server are much cheaper than loading full pages, since we can just get what we need in highly optimized way. You can see a couple of the key ideas coming through in the movie. Note the “progress bar” – the green line – is not particular large or obtrusive. It’s also not obviously a progress bar, until one has done a few multi-step processes. Note also that you can have detours; you can step off to one side to get something done, like register a team or register a new blueprint, and those detours get their own progress indicator which is separate from the main one. We had a major sprint recently that brought the whole Launchpad team together for two weeks while we did a deep dive into JavaScript and AJAX. We picked YUI 3, the next version of Yahoo’s UI toolkit for the web, as a foundational layer for this AJAX effort, and we wanted to bring everyone up to speed on the processes for designing, building and testing web client apps. It was a lot of fun. In particular, we wanted to unify the web service API’s that we already publish with this AJAX work, so that it would be easy to write web browser code that could talk to the exact same API’s we publish for developers who are integrating with Launchpad. That’s now possible, which means that any API we use for AJAX work will also be available to developers writing their own tools to access Launchpad directly through the web services. Thanks to the awesomeness of YUI 3, the team is now hard at work turning those ideas into reality. Given that YUI 3 is right on the cutting edge (some would say bleeding edge!) we’re focusing on pieces that don’t depend on complex widgets – those will only start to fall into place next year as YUI 3 emerges from development. Over the next couple of months you will see pieces of this puzzle land in successive Launchpad monthly releases (or daily, if you’re on edge.launchpad.net and a beta tester). Initially, the AJAX bling will just enable inline editing. In six to nine months, the more complex pieces should have land. And by then Launchpad’s web front-end will also be open source. Less is more. But still less. One of the driving mantras for us is “less is more”. I want us to “clean up, simplify, streamline, focus” the user experience work that we lead. The idea is to recognize the cost of every bit of chrome, every gradient or animation or line or detail or option or gconf setting. It turns out that all of those extras add some value, but they also add clutter. There’s a real cost to them – in attention, in space, in code, in QA. So we’re looking for things to strip out, as much (or more) as things to put in. I’m not sure we’ll go as far as Microsoft has with their new Windows Phone 7 UI (links to .PPTX), which uses a design language called Metro. It’s radically pared back, and very cool work. It will be interesting to see if they’ve gone too far, or if users take to the more abstract feel of it. It’s not hard to get people enthusiastic about the idea that less is more. However, it’s quite hard to get people to agree on which bits can be less. It turns out that one person’s clutter is another person’s most useful and valued feature. Less, it turns out, is still less. So, for example, consider tooltips on the panel. In bug #527458, there’s some discussion about a decision I made to deprecate tooltips on panel indicators. For quite a lot of people, that’s a little less too far. On that particular decision, we’ll have to let time tell. For the moment, the decision stands. I’m the first to admit fallibility but I also know that it would be impossible to get consensus around a change like that. If those tooltips are, on balance, really just clutter, then unless someone is willing to take a decision that will be unpopular, they will be clutter forever. And it’s easier for me to make a decision like that in Ubuntu than for virtually anybody else. I apologise in advance for the mistakes that I will certainly make, and which others on the design team may make too, but I think it’s important to defend our willingness to pare things back and let the core, essential goodness shine through. We have to balance innovation and change with clarification and focus. We can’t *stop* innovating and changing, and we have to be willing to remove things that someone will miss. The bug is a good place to continue the discussion about that particular issue. But I thought it would be useful to issue a call to arms, and invite suggestions from people on the Ayatana list as to what elements of the existing Ubuntu desktop can be trimmed back, on balance making the whole better. There’s a growing awareness and excitement about the importance of design in free software. A few years ago, folks laughed out loud when it was suggested that design is a good thing for the free software community to build expertise in. And it’s been slow going, admittedly. It’s hard to bring clarity in a crowd. Or mob. We’ve been doing our part to lead that at Canonical and in the Ubuntu community, both through internal work and through public forums. If you’re interested in design and Free Software, then Ubuntu and Ayatana and related forums are great places to participate. And your participation is welcome! Something New and Beautiful: Ubuntu, distilled, in type Marcus and Ivanka in the Canonical Design team sat me down for some words of wisdom a few months ago. “You think you need a logo, but what you really need is a new font. One that sets the standard for both professional design, and embracing the values of Ubuntu in the way it’s produced.” And how right they were. Figuring that we wanted to do this once, properly, we said we’d build a complete family: various weights, variable-width and mono, across some of the key language groups of our community. We knew we couldn’t do everything but we figured we could establish a rigorous core upon which everything could be done. We’d fully hint and kern the work too, so it’s good enough to be a default interface font for something we all use all day long. A huge project, one that will take some time to finish. But today we’re publishing the first source for Ubuntu, the font, a milestone worth celebrating. Marcus introduced Bruno Maag of Dalton Maag, who expressed a willingness to engage around an open font, and we agreed to buy the rights to the work completely, so that it could be licensed freely. Bruno pulled together a very energetic team of typographers: Lukaz, Amelie, Shiraaz, Malcolm and more, all folks who live and breathe type and typography and keen to explore this rather crazy idea of inviting crowds into the inner sanctum of type design. We knew at the start we were bringing together two very different worlds. We wanted a process which would ensure participation without drowning out the clear leadership needed for a coherent result. Bruno steered Marcus, Ivanka, me and others through a core initial process where we defined the range and scope of what we wanted to take on, and the values we wanted reflected in the result. I learned that a font is grounded in real values, and fortunately we have a strong expression of the six attributes that we value in Ubuntu and Canonical: collaboration, freedom, precision, reliability, adroitness, accessibility. That small team was best positioned to distill those into the typeface, and shape the broad strokes of the work. Ubuntu is a global phenomenon, and we knew at the start we didn’t have the breadth of eyeballs close at hand to keep the font on track as it expanded. So we planned a process of expanding consultation. First within Canonical, which has folks from nearly 30 countries, and then within the Ubuntu community. We published the font to Ubuntu Members, because we wanted folks who participate and contribute directly to Ubuntu to have the strongest say in the public process of designing the font. We heard from Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, Chinese and many other cultures. Not everyone has glyphs in this first round, but everyone has had a hand in bringing us to this milestone. The design team needed help with this outreach program, and it turned out that a longstanding member of the community, Paul Sladen, has a personal interest in typography. We noticed a marked uptick in the pace of bug triage when Paul got involved, and it was going so well we asked him to tackle it semi-professionally. The result has been really fast feedback to people making comments. I’d like to thank Paul for bringing that crucial stewardship to bear on the community engagement process, we would not have made it to the deadline without him. We also had the benefit of a tool produced by Richard Lee and others in the design team, which lets people identify specific issues in the font, particularly as rendered in various web browsers on various platforms. fonttest.design.canonical.com is very cool: it lets you pick the characters, weight and size, takes a screenshot for you in most browsers, or helps you capture the essential details for the bug report. Fonts are software, but they are not software as we know it, Jim. So the tool helps us keep track of all the tricky details that might help debug a problem someone’s having. A key open question, of course, was licensing. There are two obvious candidates, among quite a large field: the OFL, from SIL, and the GPLv3 with a font-specific clause added. Digging into this in more detail turned up a tricky situation: both approaches have issues which precluded us from adopting them immediately. We started speaking in some detail with Nicolas Spalinger of SIL, and Dave Crossland, who has done extensive analysis on the libre font process and dynamics. We offered to underwrite an SFLC review of the OFL, and SIL has expressed a willingness to participate in that, with a view to finding common ground that would bring Dave, ourselves, and many others under one common font licence, but we were running out of time. So we came to the compromise of an interim license, which you can find at bzr branch lp:ubuntu-font-licence While licence proliferation sucks, I’m optimistic we’ll converge in due course. James Vasile from the SFLC will help ensure the final result is wiser with the help of all the experience the SFLC gained in stewarding the GPLv3, and SIL and Dave will bring deep typographic industry insight. Dalton Maag have started talking more widely about their experiences so far in the process. I was worried that they might be put off by the rowdy nature of open commentary, but I would credit them with a sterling constitution and thank them for the way they stepped up once the bug tracker really started to hum. There are few issues that are escalated which don’t get a rapid response and framing. Of course, there are differences of opinion, but in many cases genuine issues have been identified and handled. The team at DM have gotten into a great cadence of weekly iterations, and Paul has been ensuring that work makes it into the hands of Ubuntu users. As of today, *all* Maverick users have it installed by default (I believe this is true for Kubuntu as well, at least I answer questions in support of that goal). What’s really interesting is that DM have said there is world-wide interest in the project. Many professional typographers are starting to think about open fonts. Now is the time to set a very high standard for what is achievable. There are hard questions to be answered about how the business of typography will evolve in the face of open and free type, but historically, those questions have best been answered by the bold: those who get involved, those who put themselves in the front line. Going forward? In due course, we’d like the Ubuntu font to reflect the full, extraordinary diversity of the Ubuntu community. We can’t do it all at once, and so we’re proposing a process for communities and cultures that feel part of the Ubuntu family to participate. If you want the Ubuntu font to speak your language, you need to do a few things to prepare for it. The hard, hard part is that you’ll need to find a qualified, local typographer who is interested in participating and in leading the design of your glyphs. You may need to find several, as we won’t necessarily embrace the first candidate. This is a serious matter: we welcome the crowdsourcing of bugs, glitches, rendering problems, hinting and kerning issues, but we want coherent, professional contributions on the core design. If that sounds exclusive: yes it is. Quality takes time, quality takes precedence. There are other fonts with lots of coverage, we have only one shot to get your glyphs done really beautifully then freeze them, metrically, for all time in the Ubuntu font. The broader process looks like this. First, you need to create a wiki page for your language / culture / glyphset (could be Klingon! Phoenician! Elvish ) on wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFont/Coverage. There, you need to document the glyph set you think is required, and any historical quirks that are peculiar to doing it well, such as OpenType features or alternative approaches. Second, you need to file a bug on launchpad.net/ubuntu-font-family called “Ubuntu Font should support [Klingon]“. If you want, you can invite members of your community to note that they are affected by the bug. We’ll be looking for ways to prioritise communities for attention. Third, you need to contact local typographers, and tell them about Ubuntu, open content, open typography. If they are still listening, you have just opened the door on the future for them and given them a big head start . They will need to be willing to contribute to the font. They will know how much work that will be. They won’t be paid to do it, unless the local community can find a way to raise the funds, but since there is a genuine sense of excitement in the air about open typography and this project in particular, we think you’ll find bold and insightful typographers who are keen to be part of it. Add their details to the wiki page, especially details of their typographic portfolio. Update the bug with that information. The tools used for open font design are in a state of flux. There are some exceptional technical pieces, and some dark swampy bits too. Dalton Maag will be leading sessions at UDS with folks from the open typography community, with a view to producing what Dave Crossland described as a “lovely long list” (I’m paraphrasing) of bugs and suggestions. Be there if you want to get a professional typographers insight on the toolchain today and what might be possible in the future. All of the Ubuntu font sources are published, though the license does not require source to be published. Nevertheless, the process for designing your community glyphs will likely involve a mix of free and proprietary tools, at least for the next months. We’ll ask DM to review the portfolios of candidate typographers, and make recommendations for who should be given the go-ahead to lead the work, language by language. Once core glyphs are designed, we’ll facilitate LoCo-based community feedback, much as we did for the main font. We want local Ubuntu members to have the strongest public voice in feedback to their typographer. And Canonical, with DM, will provide feedback aimed at keeping the whole consistent. Once the glyph design process is wrapped, the typographer will lead hinting and kerning. That’s the tough, detailed part of the job, but essential for an interface font that will be used on screen, everywhere on screen, all the time. And at that point we’ll start automating feedback, using fonttest, as well as starting to integrate those glyphs into the main Ubuntu font. We’ll publish point releases to the main Ubuntu font, with major releases designating points where we update the set of “fixed and metrically frozen” glyphs, point releases denoting occasions where we add or update beta glyphs in the public test font. In each point release, we’ll include perhaps one or two new glyph sets for beta testing. We’ll prioritize those communities who have followed the process, and have the most substantial community interest in testing. Phew. If you got this far, you’re interested . This is going to be one of those things that lives a very long time. It will take a long time to get everybody represented. But we’re going to do it, together. Network traffic analyzers for Ubuntu System Darkstat is a network statistics gatherer. Effectively, it’s a packet sniffer which runs as a background process on a cable/DSL router, gathers all sorts of useless but interesting statistics,and serves them over HTTP. Install Darkstat in Ubuntu sudo apt-get install darkstat This will complete the installation. Once you finish the installation you need to edit the the file located at /etc/darkstat/init.cfg sudo gedit /etc/darkstat/init.cfg # Turn this to yes when you have configured the options below. START_DARKSTAT=no START_DARKSTAT=yes Now you need to start the darkstat using the following command sudo /etc/init.d/darkstat start This will start the darkstat process Now if you want to see your network stats go to http://youripaddress:666 Darkstat Screenshots Here you can see some of the screenshots for darkstat Once you open the http://youripaddress:666 you should see the following screen Hosts Screen Hosts screen you can see all the machines which take part in the communication. These can be arranged by the caused traffic or their particular IP address. Ports Screen Ports Screen you can see the port numbers which are used by server and client applications. You can immediately recognize the port numbers which are used by the following daemons: 666 (darkstat), 80 (http) Protocols Screen Protocols Screen protocols ICMP,TCP,IGP and UDP for the file transmission, which were involved in the communication event. Graphs Screen Graphs Screen screen shot shows a summary of the collected time periods as graphs This tool is really useful if you want to check your ubuntu system traffic details like incoming and outgoing ports and communication to outside world There are other tools which you can use as follows Wireshark (Old Name Ethereal) Wireshark® is used by network professionals around the world for troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education. It has all of the standard features you would expect in a protocol analyzer, and several features not seen in any other product. Its open source license allows talented experts in the networking community to add enhancements. It runs on all popular computing platforms, including Unix, Linux, and Windows. If you want to install wireshark in ubuntu use the following command For Ubuntu Edgy users sudo apt-get install Wireshark For Ubuntu Dapper Users sudo apt-get install ethereal If you want to open go to Applications--->Internet--->Wireshark (If you want run as root select root option) Once it opens you should see the following screen If you want to see the available interfaces for capture click on the icon bottom of the file tool option Capture Network Interface eth0 details Wireshark Version Details Etherape EtherApe is a graphical network monitor for Unix modeled after etherman. Featuring link layer, ip and TCP modes, it displays network activity graphically. Hosts and links change in size with traffic. Color coded protocols display. It supports Ethernet, FDDI, Token Ring, ISDN, PPP and SLIP devices. It can filter traffic to be shown, and can read traffic from a file as well as live from the network. If you want to install Etherape in ubuntu use the following command sudo apt-get install etherape If you want to open go to Applications--->Internet--->EtherApe(as root) Once it open the application you can see the network activity with all the protocols and locations Ethstatus Console-based ethernet statistics monitor. Ethstatus is a console-based monitoring utility for displaying statistical data of the ethernet interface on a quantity basis. It is similar to iptraf but is meant to run as a permanent console task to monitor the network load. Install Ethstatus in Ubuntu sudo apt-get install ethstatus If you want to see your your network card status from command line just enter the following command ethstatus you should see the following screen with all the details potion IP Flow Monitor. This is a console utility which will listen on an interface using libpcap, aggregate the traffic into flows and display the top (as many as can fit on your screen) flows with their average throughput. A flow is identified ip protocol, source ip, source port, destination ip, destination port, and type of service flag. Install potion in ubuntu sudo apt-get install potion This will complete the installation potion Usage potion [options] interface [expression] Example potion -a eth0 1 Firefox 3.0 (still in Alpha) Installation in Ubuntu Feisty Firefox 3.0 is the next generation release of the award-winning Firefox web browser from Mozilla. This article describes how to install fiefox3.0a1 in ubuntu linux system. The development name for Mozilla Firefox 3 is Gran Paradiso (a national park in Italy) and final version will be released in May 2007. Gran Paradiso Alpha is an developer milestone for the next major version of Firefox that is being built on top of the next generation of Mozilla’s layout engine, Gecko 1.9. Gran Paradiso Alpha is being made available for testing purposes only, and is intended for web application developers and our testing community. Current users of Mozilla Firefox should not use Gran Paradiso Alpha. Install Firefox 3.0 (Alpha) in Ubuntu Feisty Fawn First you need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list add the following lines deb http://gnomefreak.youmortals.com/mozilla-testing feisty main deb-src http://gnomefreak.youmortals.com/mozilla-testing feisty main Now you need to update the source list sudo apt-get update Install firefox 3 using the following command sudo apt-get install firefox-trunk firefox-trunk-gnome-support This will install all the required packages for firefox3 The Firefox 3.0 runs next to your original Firefox and can be found in your menu as “Firefox Web Browser (Development Version)”. Both Firefoxes cannot run at the same time. If you want to open Firefox3 go to Applications--->Internet--->Firefox Web Browser(Development Version) Once it opens you should see firefox 3 in action Firefox 3 Version Details Firefox3.0 Addons If you want Firefox3.0a1 addons list check here Troubleshooting If you want to troubleshoot any problem with firefox3.0a1 check here Monitoring Real-time user logins in ubuntu Whowatch is an console, interactive users and process monitoring tool. It displays information about the users currently logged on to the machine, in real-time. Besides standard informations (login name, tty,host, userâs process), the type of the connection (ie. telnet or ssh) is shown. Display of users command line can be switch to tty idle time. Certain user can be selected and his processes tree may be viewed as well as tree of all system processes. Tree may be displayed with additional column that shows owner of each process. In the process tree mode SIGINT and SIGKILL signals can be sent to the selected process. Killing processes is just as simple and fun as deleting lines on the screen. Install whowatch in ubuntu sudo apt-get install whowatch This will install all the required packages for whowatch Using whowatch Whowatch has no command line options or configuration file. If you want to open the whowatch you need to run the following command whowatch Now you should see similar to the following screen All actions are performed in real time by pressing following keys up,down - cursor movement i - toggle between user command line and idle time c - full command line on/off. Disabling full command line can save CPU time. It can give you also some additional information about process executable. enter - view selected users processes tree. t - all system processes (init tree) Tree mode: up,down - cursor movement enter - go back to users list o - show processes owners c - full command line on/off. Disabling full command line can save CPU time. It can give you also some additional information about process executable. Ctrl-I - send INT signal to selected process Ctrl-K - send KILL signal to selected process s - It will provide the system details d - Details about the user Howto setup Database Server With postgresql and pgadmin3 PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others. pgAdmin III is the most popular and feature rich Open Source administration and development platform for PostgreSQL, the most advanced Open Source database in the world. The application may be used on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSUSE, Solaris, Mac OSX and Windows platforms to manage PostgreSQL 7.3 and above running on any platform, as well as commercial and derived versions of PostgreSQL such as EnterpriseDB, Mammoth PostgreSQL, Bizgres and Greenplum database. pgAdmin III is designed to answer the needs of all users, from writing simple SQL queries to developing complex databases. The graphical interface supports all PostgreSQL features and makes administration easy. The application also includes a syntax highlighting SQL editor, a server-side code editor, an SQL/batch/shell job scheduling agent, support for the Slony-I replication engine and much more. Server connection may be made using TCP/IP or Unix Domain Sockets (on *nix platforms), and may be SSL encrypted for security. No additional drivers are required to communicate with the database server. Install Postgresql and pgadmin3 in Ubuntu PostgreSQL 8.2 version will be installed in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.2 postgresql-client-8.2 postgresql-contrib-8.2 sudo apt-get install pgadmin3 This will install the database server/client, some extra utility scripts and the pgAdmin GUI application for working with the database. Configuring postgresql in Ubuntu Now we need to reset the password for the ‘postgres’ admin account for the server sudo su postgres -c psql template1 template1=# ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD ‘password‘localhost’ listen_addresses = ‘*’ and also change the line #password_encryption = on password_encryption = on Then save the file and close gedit. Now for the final step, we must define who can access the server. This is all done using the pg_hba.conf file. sudo gedit /etc/postgresql/8.2/main/pg_hba.conf Comment out, or delete the current contents of the file, then add this text to the bottom of the file DO NOT DISABLE! # If you change this first entry you will need to make sure that the # database # super user can access the database using some other method. # Noninteractive # access to all databases is required during automatic maintenance # (autovacuum, daily cronjob, replication, and similar tasks). # # Database administrative login by UNIX sockets local all postgres ident sameuser # TYPE DATABASE USER CIDR-ADDRESS METHOD # “local” is for Unix domain socket connections only local all all md5 # IPv4 local connections: host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5 # IPv6 local connections: host all all ::1/128 md5 # Connections for all PCs on the subnet # # TYPE DATABASE USER IP-ADDRESS IP-MASK METHOD host all all [ip address] [subnet mask] md5 and in the last line, add in your subnet mask (i.e. 255.255.255.0) and the IP address of the machine that you would like to access your server (i.e. 138.250.192.115). However, if you would like to enable access to a range of IP addresses, just substitute the last number for a zero and all machines within that range will be allowed access (i.e. 138.250.192.0 would allow all machines with an IP address 138.250.192.x to use the database server). That’s it, now all you have to do is restart the server sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.2 restart That’s it you can start using postgresql in Ubuntu Create a Database from command line You can also use pgadmin3 for all postgresql related To create a database with a user that have full rights on the database, use the following command sudo -u postgres createuser -D -A -P mynewuser sudo -u postgres createdb -O mynewuser mydatabase How to Enable Automatic Login in Ubutnu By default, Ubuntu requires that you login each time you run the operating system. If you are the only person using the computer and aren’t worried about security you can enable automatic login. If you want to enable automatic login in ubuntu follow this procedure Go to System--->Administration--->Login Window. Now it will prompt for root password enter your root password and click ok In the Login Window Preferences window, select the Security tab. Check the Enable Automatic Login checkbox and Select your username from the User dropdown. Click the Close button. How to install KDE 4.1 in Ubuntu/kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) On 29th July 2008, The KDE Community released KDE 4.1.0. This release is the second feature release of the KDE 4 series, sporting new applications and newly developed features on top of the Pillars of KDE4. KDE 4.1 is the first KDE4 release to contain the Personal Information Management suite KDE-PIM with its E-Mail client KMail, the planner KOrganizer, Akregator, the RSS feed reader, KNode, the newsgroup reader and many more components integrated into the Kontact shell. Furthermore, the new desktop shell Plasma, introduced in KDE 4.0, has matured to the point where it can replace the KDE 3 shell for most casual users. Like with our previous release much time has been devoted to improving the framework and underlying libraries on which KDE is built. .If you want to know more features in KDE 4.1 check here KDE 4.1 Highlights
  • Greatly expanded desktop shell functionality and configurability
  • KDE Personal Information Management suite ported to KDE 4
  • Many new and newly ported applications
    • Install KDE 4.1 in Ubuntu/Kubuntu hardy You need to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list For Kubuntu Users use the following command sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list add the following line deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main save and exit the file Update the source list using the following command sudo apt-get update For Ubuntu 8.04 users use the following command to install sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop For Kubuntu 8.04 users use the following command to install sudo apt-get dist-upgrade Note you may need to install kdebase-runtime-data-common in order to get Application directory icons under the Kickoff menu. To install the KDE 4 PIM packages,use the following commands sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install kdepim-kde4 Enjoy your new KDE 4.1 desktop Host interface networking made easy in VirtualBox 2.1.0 We have already discussed how to install VirtualBox 2.1.0 in ubuntu one of the important change is Host interface networking made easy with Host Interface Networking, VirtualBox uses a device driver on your host system that filters data from your physical network adapter. This driver is therefore called a “net filter” driver. This allows VirtualBox to intercept data from the physical network and inject data into it, effectively creating a new network interface in software. When a guest is using such a new software interface, it looks to the host system as though the guest were physically connected to the interface using a network cable: the host can send data to the guest through that interface and receive data from it. This means that you can set up routing or bridging between the guest and the rest of your network. VirtualBox needs a device driver on your host system. The way Host Interface Networking works has been completely rewritten with VirtualBox 2.0 and 2.1, depending on the host operating system. From the user perspective, the main difference is that complex configuration is no longer necessary on any of the supported host operating systems. With the new mechanism, to enable Host Interface Networking, You need to follow this procedure. 1) Go to Applications--->System Tools--->Sun xVM Virtualbox 2) Once virtualbox opens you need to open the Settings dialog of a virtual machine, go to the “Network” page . 3) Select “Host Interface” in the drop down list for the “Attached to” field. Finally, select desired host interface from the list at the bottom of the page, which contains the physical network interfaces of your systems. 4) Once you selected you should see similar to the following screen click on ok On Linux hosts, functionality is limited when using wireless interfaces for Host Interface Networking. Currently, VirtualBox supports only IPv4 over wireless. For other protocols such as IPv6 and IPX, you must choose a wired interface. Also, setting the MTU to less than 1500 bytes on wired interfaces provided by the sky2 driver on the Marvell Yukon II EC Ultra Ethernet NIC is known to cause packet losses under certain conditions. If you want to know how to setup host interface networking in VirtualBox 2.0 check here Fix for rhythmbox not playing mp3 in Ubuntu karmic My Rhythmbox won’t play my music anymore after upgrading to 9.10 so here is what i did i hope this helps for some users Following Procedure worked for me First i removed Rhythmbox using the following command sudo apt-get remove rhythmbox purge Update the sourcelist sudo apt-get update re-installed Rhythmbox sudo apt-get install rhythmbox Now you try to open mp3 file Rhythmbox and it will ask you to install additional plugins install them Now restart Rhythmbox it should work without any problem How to install Nvidia Graphics Drivers 195.22 in Ubuntu Karmic/Jaunty/Intrepid/Hardy This tutorial will explain how to install Nvidia Graphics Drivers 195.22 in Ubuntu Karmic/Jaunty/Intrepid/Hardy 195.22 (beta) Release highlights * Enhanced the VDPAU blit-based presentation queue to provide values of “first_presentation_time” that have less jitter. * Add support for R16F and RG32F GLXFBConfigs when using GeForce 8 series and higher GPUs. * Added support for NVIDIA 3D Vision Stereo on Linux with Quadro GPUs. See the “Stereo” X configuration documentation in the README for details. * Added support for A2BGR10 32-bit GLX visuals on 30-bit X screens. These allow some level of window transparency when using 30-bit visuals with GLX and Composite, but they may cause problems with older X servers and/or applications. ARGB GLX visuals can be disabled by adding: Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “False” to the X configuration file. * Fixed a problem that caused DisplayPort devices to behave incorrectly when DPMS power saving mode was triggered. * Updated VDPAU to improve thread concurrency. See the README for details. * Altered NVIDIA X driver behavior in the case that no display devices are connected to the GPU. Previously, in this case, the NVIDIA X driver would pretend a CRT was connected to the GPU. Now, the NVIDIA X driver will not automatically pretend that any CRTs are connected. If the X driver does not detect any connected display devices, the X server will fail to start. To restore the old behavior, use the ConnectedMonitor X configuration option; e.g., Option “ConnectedMonitor” “CRT” Alternatively, if display is not desired, Quadro and Tesla GPU users can enable “NoScanout” mode, which bypasses any mode timing validation or use of display devices; this is configured with: Option “UseDisplayDevice” “none” * Disabled software cursors when the driver is operating in “no scanout” (UseDisplayDevice “none”) mode. The software cursor image is not visible in remote desktop applications or screenshots anyway, so having software cursor enabled was unnecessary. * Changed glXSwapBuffers() behavior for a pixmap such that it is now a no-op in the direct rendering case in order to match the indirect case and comply with the GLX spec. Previously, calling glXSwapBuffers() on pixmaps in the direct case would swap the pixmap’s buffers if the pixmap was double buffered. * Modified the installation location and names of internal VDPAU libraries to conform to conventions and Debian packaging guidelines. New versions of libvdpau expect this layout. Compatibility with old versions of libvdpau is maintained with symlinks. * Fixed a bug that could cause errors in graphical applications run after a previous application using VDPAU and OpenGL. This behaviour was observed when running Gwenole Beauchesne’s hwdecode-demos application. * Modified vdpau.h to increment VDPAU_VERSION, to reflect the fact that new features have been added in the past. Also, add the new define VDPAU_INTERFACE_VERSION. * Fixed a periodic temporary hang in the VDPAU blit-based presentation queue. * Fixed a problem that caused resolution limitations or corruption on certain DisplayPort devices such as the Apple 24″ Cinema display or some DisplayPort to VGA adapters. * Disabled the UseEvents option for GeForce 8 series and higher GPUs due to a problem that causes occasional short hangs. It will be re-enabled when that bug has been tracked down and fixed. * VDPAU now allows multiple streams to be decoded at once, without the need to set any environment variables. The 195.22 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver Set for Linux/x86 is available for download via FTP. The 195.22 NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver Set for Linux/x86_64 is available for download via FTP. Please see the README (x86, x86_64) for more information about this release. Please note: This NVIDIA Linux graphics driver release supports GeForce 6xxx and newer NVIDIA GPUs, GeForce4 and older GPUs are supported through the 96.43.xx and 71.86.xx NVIDIA legacy graphics drivers. GeForce FX GPUs are supported through the 173.14.xx NVIDIA legacy graphics drivers. Note:- This is still in beta stage so it is not recommended to install on production systems For Ubuntu Karmic Users Use the following command to add PPA sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa Other User First you need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list file sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list add one of the following lines For Jaunty users deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main For Intrepid Users deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main For Hardy Users deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu hardy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/nvidia-vdpau/ppa/ubuntu hardy main Save and exit the file Install GPG key using the following command sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys CEC06767 Update source list sudo apt-get update Install beta drivers sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-195 nvidia-195-modaliases Simple Nautilus Flickr Uploader This is a simple GUI to upload pics to Flickr from Nautilus file browser (should work with KDE though). This application is Free Software (GPL version 3) and uses the Flickr API, but is not endorsed or certified by Flickr. How to use it Select the pictures you want to upload to Flickr on you file browser and right click to open them with this application, and you’re done. Easy and neat. Install Nautilus Flickr Uploader in Ubuntu First you need to download .deb package from here or using the following command wget http://www.usebox.net/jjm/nautilus-flickr-uploader/deb/nautilus-flickr-uploader_0.03-1_all.deb Now install this .deb package by double clicking or from the terminal run the following command sudo dpkg -i nautilus-flickr-uploader_0.03-1_all.deb Screenshot How to install globalmenu in Ubuntu 10.04(Lucid)/9.10(Karmic) Global Menu is the globally-shared menu bar of all applications launched in your desktop session. There are several advantages by adopting a shared global menu bar in Gnome (thanks Matthew for organizing these): * It works better with narrow windows, because the width of the menus isn’t limited to the width of the window. (This is a problem for Gimp and Inkscape especially.) * It’s less confusing -- when two menu bars are visible on-screen at once, sometimes people choose the wrong one. * Global Menu is the first step to move toward a Document Centric Desktop Environment which is, according to us, a long-term trend in DEs. Install globalmenu in Ubuntu 10.04(Lucid)/9.10(Karmic) Open the terminal and run the following commands sudo add-apt-repository ppa:globalmenu-team/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install gnome-globalmenu Add globalmenu to panel - right click on a panel, select Add To Panel - choose Global Menu Applet from the list - logout, and back in again Installation Video Download 3 Java Script Tutorial guides (Free PDF Guides) Title: The JavaScript Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks - Free 158 Page Preview Get the most out of this complete question-and-answer book on JavaScript. The JavaScript Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks is a collection of over 100 thoroughly–tested, customizable and elegant solutions that will show you how to add usable and accessible interactivity to your site: from slick drop-down menus, to style sheet switchers, to AJAX applications, and much more.

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    Download Now Ubuntu Linux Command Line Reference cheat sheet Here is a nice Linux command line cheat sheet you can grab here its in pdf format. Also a great place for learning bash/command line is here this site allows you to download the whole site as a tar.gz so you can read offline on a live cd or whatever 50 Things You Need to Know About Ubuntu (10-1) Sorry for this belated post. Here is the final part of TechIQ’s five-part countdown, highlighting 50 trends and takeaways from the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Oregon. Some of the items are closely related to earlier portions of the list. Here we go… 50-41: Part One of the List 40-31: Part Two of the List 30-21: Part Three of the List 20-11: Part Four of the List 10. Winning On Alfresco: Roughly 22 percent of Alfresco developer downloads occur to the Ubuntu platform, a dramatic increase from last year, according to Alfresco GM Matt Asay. 9. Don’t Betray Your Audience: One speaker conceded that he was nearly booed off stage during another open source conference. The reason: He used PowerPoint rather than OpenOffice for his presentation. 8. Two Unsung Heroes: Two small PC suppliers, ZaReason and System76, won praise for their early commitment to the Ubuntu movement. 7. Play to Your Strengths: Instead of competing head-on against Microsoft, several speakers suggested that the Ubuntu community needs to continue exploiting niche applications and collaboration to attack market voids left by Microsoft. 6. Printer Drivers: It sounds so basic. But printer drivers are the number one problem university professors seem to complain about when they’re using Ubuntu, according to several speakers. 5. Repeat Performance: Canonical feels pretty confident about its prospects and is already planning next year’s event. 4. Global Focus: Rather than playing regional favorites, Canonical is striving to enhance its localization, training and certification initiatives across the globe. Traditional closed-source software companies simply can’t complete with the global network of developers who are committed to tweaking code for use in hundreds of countries. 3. Novell Is Worse Off Than Expected: Sure, Novell has gained some momentum with corporate customers who embraced the Microsoft-Novell relationship. But imagine if the American Red Cross lost all of its volunteers. That could be the situation facing Novell if it doesn’t take steps to win back open source developers who despise the Microsoft deal. Throughout the event, Novell’s “betrayal” of the open source movement was raised by multiple speakers. 2. Small Business Push: Watch for Canonical to work with at least one major hardware developer to promote an integrated small business server package. The suite will likely be based on the LAMP software stack, The VAR Guy hears. One suggestion: Partner with Zimbra or another open source email provider on this project. 1. The Numbers Don’t Lie: Some nuggets of info worth repeating: Ubuntu now has 6 million to 12 million users and Canonical’s staff has doubled to 100 employees since January. Impressive growth, to be sure... oh if you search google for "linux" Ubuntu is on top! check it out here Read and write filesystems (ext, xfs, jfs,zfs) under Windows) The Idea: Windows XP install a VMware workstation, make a new Ubuntu virtual machine with NAT networking, install Ubuntu onto the virtual machine, stop it, go to the virtual machine's settings, connect your HDDs which contains Linux-like partitions and You want to use them to Your virtual machine. Then boot it up, locate the drives, than put them into the fstab. After that setup a SAMBA server, and share your drives. Now you can discover your drives via windows networks. What you need: - Microsoft Windows XP SP2 - VMware Workstation (You can download and use it for 30 days for free. When You finetuned your virtual machine You can change workstation to player which is full free.) - Ubuntu 7.04 - Linux like partitions connected - Time Tested with: - Windows XP Professional SP2 (With fresh drivers.) - Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 Desktop - VMware workstation 6 - My config is: Intel Hyperthread 3.0ghz +, 768GB RAM, WD HDD with XFS partitions Howto: 1. Boot up Your Windows. Be sure, your Linux HDDs are connected. Check in Device Manager. The HDDs must appear there. (Not the partitions.) Download VMware workstation, get a registration key, and install it. Create a new virtual machine for Ubuntu or 2.6 Linux OS. I recommend 6-8GB virtual drive, half of your system RAM, and NAT networking. Insert Your Ubuntu CD, and start the virtual machine. Install a normal Ubuntu system. Shutdown Your installed virtual machine, open its settings, add your HDDs to the virtual machine. Then start it again. Be careful! After the previous step your partitions are online, and accessible, writable etc... So look after your important files! 6. Locate the names of your partitions device name. (Tip: You can find it at System->Settings->Hardware information find your HDDs with them volumes, than click on Advanced. There you can see the device name.) Insert your partitions into fstab: You must know the filesystem's name. (You can get this information from Hardwareinformation too.) Open a new folder in /media as a mounting point for the partition and set its permissions. Open a terminal: Code: su mkdir /media/*mountpoint chmod 777 /media/*mountpoint Replace *mountpoint with the directory name what you want. (But I recommend the device name. For example: hdb1, hdb2, hdc1 etc...) Now open the fstab for editing. Code: gedit /etc/fstab Open a new line, and insert your partitions data like that: Code: *devicename *mountingpoint *filesystem defaults 0 0 (* You must replace with the correct data.) For example: Code: /dev/hdb1 /media/hdb1 xfs defaults 0 0 Save it, than reboot, and check how is it works. Install, and configure Samba. When you finished installion, and added yourself to the server, open System->Administration->Shared folders Set the workgroup, and check in "The computer is a WINS server." Now You can share your partitions. You can permit write permissions if you want. 10. Minimize the virtual machine's resurces. Decrase the shared RAM. Exactly I didn't finish that point. You can dull the system. I think you can stop gdm and other unnecessary services. 11. I recommend a windows reboot, than start the linux virtual machine. Now you can discover your partitions in the windows networks. Video Howto: Ubuntu Terminal Commands: MAN rtfm! Nice lil video for newbs out there... This video clip shows you how to use the man (manual page) command to view the manual pages for terminal commands. A manual page includes a brief description of the command as well as outlines the various options that may be used with the command. Howto: Setup Vidalia TOR GUI with Ubuntu Linux, Tweak Tor for Speed and surf anonymously! [updated] - Added ppa archive, Updated Tor to latest Version, Updated To latest Vidalia Version and added Tor speed Tweaks! Do you want completely anonymous internet access? For Free? Tor is the open source leader to anonymous connections on the internet, you can anonymize your internet presence from AIM/ICQ/MSN/ Jabber/IRC/WWW/FTP and you can even issue a torify command at the command prompt to anonymize your wget/ssh/lynx/ftp/perl or whatever. Basically tor is for the people by the people, it is only alive because we make it so, we can choose to use it freely or use it freely and help it out by running a server on your computer to make the internet safer. Basically tor encrypts your data communications through chained/linked proxies all over the internet. Vidalia is a cross-platform controller GUI for Tor, built using the Qt framework. Using Vidalia, you can start and stop Tor, view the status of Tor at a glance, and monitor Tor’s bandwidth usage. Vidalia also makes it easy to contribute to the Tor network by helping you set up and manage your own Tor server. Vidalia runs on most platforms supported by Qt 4.1 or later, including Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux or other Unix variants using the X11 window system. Here is how to set it up First things first lets get the latest tor and its dependencies then install Tor This post may be outdated, here is the latest src Ok now tor should be installed... Now lets Install Vidalia GUI I prefer to grab the latest version and compile to source but I will give you the quick and easy way and then how to compile from src Open up System->Preferences->Software Sources and enter these repositories into 3rd Party Repositories: Then apt-get: Alternatively you can install this package by compiling it from source, here is how: This will apt get tor and the dependencies, wget vidalia, extract and cd to the directory and configure for you. This vidalia package may be outdated, check here for the latest version! Now the latest vidalia and Tor are compiled and installed! Once installed press alt F2 and open the run prompt and type in “vidalia” without the quotes, this will start tor, vidalia and you can configure tor/vidalia by right clicking on the tray applet and click on settings, right there you can view all the nodes and choose what to connect to, see node uptimes, os’s and locations with a graphical map. For web browsing in firefox I prefer using an extention named FoxyProxy it works well with firefox and swiftfox, you can grab this extention directly from here If you prefer stronger anonymity & protection I strongly Suggest Torbutton for firefox Direct Download NOW Install the addon and go through the Tor wizard and it will set you up for you and you can view which tor nodes you connect through actively via vidalia I hope you enjoy my first tutorial on ubuntu privacy concerns. I hope many more people use tor and set up a server to anonymize the world. [updated] Speed Tweaks for tor: Ok we all know tor can be slower than a turtle so, lets get to editing our torrc so we can improve the speed! Paste this at the beginning of the torrc: Now ctrl-s Save and exit, and restart tor/vidalia Howto: Setup Compiz Fusion with open source ati radeon drivers Older ATI cards have been blacklisted for Compiz Fusion because of a bug in the driver, but there is an easy workaround for many cards that use the open source ati drivers. Radeon 9500 are the oldest cards to support the restricted "fglrx" drivers, so everything older requires the open source drivers to function properly. First edit the launcher for Compiz Fusion: Near the top, add the line I added it under VERBOSE="yes" You may also need to install the Compiz settings manager program that you can access from System->Preferences->Advanced Desktop Effect Settings | 1-click install or: You can now load Compiz Fusion with and revert to Metacity (the basic window manager) with I suggest making launchers in a panel for this. Remember that this is a workaround and may not work for everybody. If you have further problems, you should consider running a forum search and then posting on one of the main support forums if you still need help. For the record, my card is an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000. This Article was found here Howto: Easily Setup DVD Playback in Ubuntu with 1 Click Here is the easiest way to get dvd playback in Ubuntu Hardy Heron! Open the Terminal and paste these commands: Click here to install DVD playback from your browser! If the above does not work simply: Now startup your favorite media player and it *should decrypt the dvd* :) The Platinum Top 10 Wine Game List Im not a big fan of wine games but I thought I would share the progress of the wine developers in getting these hot games to work with it. I am still hoping gaming developers create linux clients for these games, leave direct x and start using opengl... Here is the current top 10 platinum wine games. Guild Wars - All Versions Counter-Strike Retail - Steam Half Life 2 - Retail SilkRoad Online Day of Defeat: Source Steam Watchtower Library 2007 Call of Duty 2 1.0 - Retail Live For Speed S2 Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal v2.5.26498 Tales of the Sword Coast: 1.3.5512 Here is the rest of the Platinum List Here is the Gold List Release Candidate for Ubuntu 8.10 is Out The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop and Server. Codenamed "Intrepid Ibex", 8.10 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. New Features since Ubuntu 8.04 These features are showcased for your attention. Please test them and report any bugs you find on Launchpad: http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu . GNOME 2.24
  • Ubuntu brings you the newest GNOME 2.24 desktop environment with tons of bug-fixes and new features, some of which include:
  • Nautilus file manager has tab support (by Christian Neumair) and Eject icons for removable drives in Places sidebar (by Stefano Teso, Cosimo Cecchi, Christian Neumair, and others).
  • File Roller archive manager now supports ALZ, RZIP, CAB, TAR.7Z file types also (by Paolo Bacchilega and Changwoo Ryu).
    • X.Org 7.4
  • X.Org 7.4, the latest stable version of X.Org, is available in Intrepid. This release brings much better support for hot-pluggable input devices such as tablets, keyboards, and mice. At the same time this will allow the great majority of users to run without a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. A new failsafe X is introduced, to give better tools for troubleshooting X startup failures.
  • The fglrx and two of the older nvidia binary drivers are not available for X.Org 7.4 yet, so users of these drivers will be automatically switched to the corresponding open source drivers.
    • Linux kernel 2.6.27 Ubuntu 8.10 Beta includes Linux kernel 2.6.27, a significant release with better hardware support and numerous bug-fixes. Encrypted private directory The ecryptfs-utils package was recently promoted to Ubuntu main, with support for a secret encrypted folder in your Home Folder (by Michael Halcrow, Dustin Kirkland, and Daniel Baumann). You can help test this new feature by going to Applications → Accessories → Terminal and typing: Guest session The User Switcher panel applet (package fast-user-switch-applet) now provides an extra entry for starting a Guest session (by Martin Pitt). This creates a temporary password-less user account with restricted privileges: the account cannot access any users' home directories, nor permanently store data. This is sufficiently safe to lend your laptop to someone else for a quick email check. Network Manager 0.7 Ubuntu 8.10 Beta ships Network Manager 0.7 (by Dan Williams and others), which comes with long-expected features, such as:
  • system wide settings (i.e., no need to log in in order to get a connection)
  • management of 3G connections (GSM/CDMA)
  • management of multiple active devices at once
  • management of PPP and PPPOE connections
  • management of devices with static IP configurations
  • route management for devices
    • More information can be found on the Network Manager wiki. DKMS DKMS (by Dell) is included in Ubuntu 8.10, allowing kernel drivers to be automatically rebuilt when new kernels are released. This makes it possible for kernel package updates to be made available immediately without waiting for rebuilds of driver packages, and without third-party driver packages becoming out of date when installing these kernel updates. Samba 3.2 A lot of new features have been added in Samba 3.2 amongst them:
  • clustered file server support
  • encrypted network transport
  • ipv6 support
  • better integration with the latest version of Microsoft Windows™ clients and servers.
    • PAM authentication framework Ubuntu 8.10 Beta features a new pam-auth-update tool, which allows simple management of PAM authentication configuration for both desktops and servers (by Steve Langasek). Packages providing PAM modules will be configured automatically, and users can adjust their authentication preferences by running sudo pam-auth-update. More information can be found in the Ubuntu wiki. Totem BBC plugin Ubuntu 8.10 Beta features a new plugin for the Totem movie player that fetches free digital content from the BBC. To enable it, start Totem (Applications -> Sound & Video -> Movie Player), enable the plugin (Edit -> Plugins -> BBC content viewer) and select "BBC" from the drop-down labelled "Playlist". The feed is fetched from a staging server at the moment so there may be a delay while it is downloaded. Thanks to the BBC and Collabora for their work developing this feature. To upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04, press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager -d" (without the quotes) into the command box. Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '8.10' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions. Get it while it's hot. ISOs and torrents are available at: http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.10 (Ubuntu) http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/edubuntu/8.10 (Edubuntu add-on) http://releases.ubuntu.com/releases/kubuntu/8.10 (Kubuntu) http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/8.10/beta (Xubuntu) http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/8.10/beta (UbuntuStudio) http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/mythbuntu/releases/8.10/beta (Mythbuntu) Local mirrors are also available: Africa * http://bw.releases.ubuntu.com/ (Botswana) * http://ls.releases.ubuntu.com/ (Lesotho) * http://mz.releases.ubuntu.com/ (Mozambique) * http://sz.releases.ubuntu.com/ (Swaziland) * http://ubuntu.mirror.ac.za/ubuntu-release/ (South Africa) * http://zw.releases.ubuntu.com/ (Zimbabwe) Asia * http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/Linux/ubuntu-releases/ (Japan) * http://ftp.cse.yzu.edu.tw/pub/Linux/Ubuntu/ubuntu-cd/ (Taiwan) * http://ftp.daum.net/ubuntu-releases/ (Korea, Republic of) * http://ftp.tcc.edu.tw/iso/Ubuntu/ (Taiwan) * http://ftp.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/pub/linux/ubuntu/releases/ (Japan) * http://tw.releases.ubuntu.com/ (Taiwan) Europe * http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/ (Sweden) * http://nl.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/ (Netherlands) * http://es.releases.ubuntu.com/ (Spain) * http://ftp-stud.hs-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/releases.ubuntu.com/ (Germany) * http://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/ubuntu.iso/ (Germany) * http://ie.releases.ubuntu.com/ (Ireland) North America * http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs/ (United States) * http://linux.nssl.noaa.gov/releases/ (United States) * http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/ (Canada) * http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/ (United States) * http://mirrors.gigenet.com/ubuntu/ (United States) * http://ubuntu.cs.utah.edu/releases/ (United States) Oceania/Australia * http://ftp.citylink.co.nz/ubuntu-releases/ (New Zealand) * http://ftp.netspace.net.au/pub/ubuntu/releases/ (Australia) * http://nz2.releases.ubuntu.com/ (New Zealand) * http://ubuntu-releases.optus.net/ (Australia) * http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ubuntu/releases/ (Australia) * http://planetmirror.com/pub/ubuntu/releases/ (Australia) South America * http://mirror.globo.com/ubuntu/releases/ (Brazil) * http://ubuntu.c3sl.ufpr.br/releases/ (Brazil) * http://espelhos.edugraf.ufsc.br/ubuntu-releases/ (Brazil) New: Pidgin 2.5.3 Released! Noteworthy in this release are that 58 bullet points are in the ChangeLog (not counting the headers for libpurple, Pidgin, Finch, and the protocols) and 85 tickets were closed, 40 of which were marked in trac as patches. Also of note is the insane amount of work Mark Doliner put into our MSN and MySpace plugins, which should resolve a number of crashes and the MySpace "doesn't sign off" issue. A few big items to summarize:
  • Mark did massive code cleanup in MSN
  • Mark fixed a number of shortcomings in the MySpace IM protocol as well as doing code cleanup.
  • We accepted a ton of patches.
  • ICQ typing notifications should work for some third-party clients now.
  • XMPP resources now default to the empty string, causing modern servers to assign us a resource via a bind. In the event of an ancient server, such as the one DreamHost runs, we will detect the lack of this capability and enforce the default "Home" resource if a user hasn't set a resource.
  • XMPP resources can now include __HOSTNAME__ as a special token that will be replaced with the hostname of the machine being used. For example, if I run Pidgin on my MacBook and configure the resource on an XMPP account to be __HOSTNAME__, the resource sent to the server will be "macbook", since this is the hostname of my MacBook.
  • Some long-outstanding patches have been applied for Gadu-Gadu, implementing IM images.
  • Apply some patches for Zephyr, enabling autoreply when away to emulate zaway and some bugs with the 'use tzc' option.
  • We no longer get certificate errors for rsi.hotmail.com when logging into MSN and retrieving offline messages.
  • Many, many other things best read about in the ChangeLog.
    • Enjoy this release, which I'll call the "Thank-a-patch-writer" release! Download Here Ubuntu Remixes: 4 Of The Best Alternatives to Ubuntu - Our recent article entitled Ubuntu As Intended drew in a fair amount of discussion about the base software and configuration in the default Ubuntu install. Some readers pointed out a few alternatives that aim to take the standard Ubuntu desktop and give it more polish than the original. Some of these projects just include a few extra packages, some replace the standard software suite, and others are complete makeovers. Today we aim to sift through a few of the more popular Ubuntu variants to find the best ones of the bunch, and see what they can offer.

    Linux Mint

    Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. Linux Mint is an extremely popular Ubuntu variant, and for good reason. Mint provides several desktop solutions including Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox and XFCE, and what they all have in common is a solid software base with several of Linux’s “trickier” packages already installed. This includes some non-free software so that you have support for MP3, DVD, and Flash right out of the box.

    Saner Defaults Remix

    This is a fairly new project, but it’s beginning to gain a following. The basic idea of the Ubuntu SDR is that the stock Ubuntu is great, but some of the decisions regarding included software may not be ideal. While that is of course subjective, it’s hard to argue with some of the enhancements found in SDR. Some of the changes you’ll find include:
  • Empathy IM replaced with Pidgin
  • Min/Max/Close buttons moved back to the right
  • Evolution mail replaced with Mozilla Thunderbird
  • Simple clean blue (Clearlooks) theme
  • Gufw firewall included and activated on install
  • All Mono-based apps removed (includes GThumb for photos and Gnote for notes)
  • Multimedia repos enabled by default
    • and more

    Ubuntu Ultimate Edition

    While some (including this author) find the intensity of the color scheme to be a bit jarring, Ultimate Edition does have a bit working for it, and one of those things is speed. Several of the existing applications have been removed in favor of smaller and faster alternatives. Additionally, UE gives you some help with a few of the more legally or technically complicated packages like Flash and DVD support, either by bundling in to the default system or providing install helpers. Ultimate Edition is clearly the most “home made” of those on the list, but if you’re willing to tolerate or change the visual theme, it can quickly become a useful desktop.

    Lubuntu

    One common complaint about the normal Ubuntu release is that can sometimes be a bit slow, especially on older computers. Lubuntu aims to solve that by replacing the normal Gnome desktop with LXDE. Gnome apps like Nautilus and Gnome Terminal have been replaced with the liked of PCMan File manager and LXTerminal. The system is also designed to reduce power usage over the standard install, making Lubuntu and excellent choice for laptops. There are certainly several other Ubuntu forks worth checking out, including Super OS, gOS, andwattOS. There’s certainly no shortage of high-quality Ubuntu variants out there, so if you’ve got any others to recommend, let us know in the comments!