Kubuntu is a Ubuntu based distribution that opened it’s doors seven years ago with version 5.04. It has often been on the bleeding edge of KDE development. Featuring KDE 3.4 in it’s initial release and KDE 4.7 in the current 11.10 release, Kubuntu has garnered a large community following during the last several years. It is due to this simple fact that I doubt we’ll see the ditribution disappear entirely.

One of many advantages that Linux has over “pure” commercially developed OSs, such as Windoze, is that you’ve got the community there to assist and pick up the pieces if the financial backing goes south. I would see this as a challenge and a excellent chance for the Linux community to really shine after the hand-off has taken place.

Strangely though, all the news posted today paints a picture of the sky falling and the end of days. Kubuntu is a distribution that I think you’ll see propped up by the community and it’s loyal followers. I’m sure that a group of community developers and maintainers will pick up the pieces after the release of 12.04 LTS and it will continue to be a highly respected distro.

Already there is some rallying to be had on the Kubuntu forums.

Simply put, if your a fan of Kubuntu, don’t give into the doom and gloom. Go out there and save your distro!

Updates and Proprietary Drivers

When I have Installed a fresh copy of any Operating System the first thing I do is install any updates that are required.

You can either use the GUI Tool for this or as always the command line.

then

Once this has finished I head over to the Additional Drivers program and install any needed proprietary drivers.

Extra Needed Settings

I have a Packard Bell TK87 Laptop which uses the Intel Integrated HD GPU. The brightness function keys do not work on a fresh install so I have to edit some grub parameters.

To edit Grub I do

This will open the Grub configuration file. Grub is the initial boot selection software.

find the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

and change it to -

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="quiet splash pcie_aspm=force i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"

Once you have done this you need to update Grub to take on the new settings.

then

Once you have rebooted you should now find that your brightness keys are working, again this might be specific to the i915 chip-set which my PB TK87 Uses.

Startup Applications

As I previously posted here, Ubuntu now auto hides some startup programs. I like to change what starts such as bluetooth daemon (My laptop has no bluetooth module) I don’t need this.

To unhide all of the applications that auto start do the following.

then

You should now be able to see all of the application entries via the “Startup applications” in the system cog menu.

Change that Cursor

This has been a bug for me in the past two releases of Ubuntu. When I use the GUI to change the cursor from DMZ-White to DMZ-Black it does nothing what so ever.

So I have resorted to doing it by hand, to do this you need to edit the index.theme like below.

Just change DMZ-White to DMZ-Black or whatever cursor you have installed. I like the plain black one

Changing Desktop Font

I like a nice small font for my desktop and gnome tweak tool doesn’t have the option of changing the size yet.

Just issue -

substitute Ubuntu 8 for the font and size you would like.

Eye Candy

Now for that eye candy goodness!

Everyone should have heard of the Faenza Icons by now. They are about the nicest looking Icons you can get. You have to install them via the PPA.

Like so -

then update and install

sudo apt-get install faenza-icon-theme

Spotify

I couldn’t live without this. It’s so much easier than clogging my hard drive up with MP3′s

The only downside of using Spotify’s native linux client is that you need a Spotify Premium account but I think it’s well worth it.

Firstly lets open up our apt sources list

now add this line to the bottom of the file

deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free

Now lets verify the packages by grabbing the key

Refresh APT’s cache

Install it!

This guide is just something I do that might help others.

Coming Soon – Smittix’ Top Applications

CentOS tends to follow the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) source tree that it’s based off of. Thus, when a major release of RHEL stops getting updates, the associated version of CentOS stops getting updates. So, that rock solid, super secure, server you have running in your brother’s basement as an offisite backup location, is no longer “super secure” as there will be no more critical and/or security patches released for it as of Feb. 29th.

Time to update to ver. 5 or 6!

Official notice here.

We all know that /bin directories are used as a location for executable files. Well back during the early days of Unix development the makers ended up having to deal with two 1.5MB hard drives (Yes….MB) as opposed to just one, as they needed more space than they had available to them. So, as the OS grew they split the directories among different physical drives and mount points, and it’s been that way ever since. Surprising right?

I thought so!

Read more about it here!

Red Hat has increased the release life cycle of RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 to 10 years. This is significant to the enterprise mainly due to the fact that upgrades due to “end-of-life” software and, therefore, lack of official support, will be less of an issue. Organizations can take a little extra time to upgrade to the next major release.

This may cause one to be concerned that this will cause Red Hat to have slower release cycles and thus fall behind the bleeding edge on software packaged in their OS. Thankfully Red Hat has that covered as most of the active development for RHEL happens within Fedora prior to syncing the changes to the RHEL source tree.

Read more here!

The Unity Developers have readied their latest version of Unity with the release of version 5.2 for the 12.04 version of Ubuntu.

So What’s New?

A couple of major things in my eyes, See below.

• Multi-monitor support
• You will now see launchers on each of your monitor, and when you scroll across a monitor, you should feel some resistance in order to allow for you to use the launcher on that screen.
• New screen edge detection
• To invoke the launcher, you now need to push (or “scroll into”) against the left of the screen, rather than hover for X seconds. No more hitting the back button in firefox and having the launcher pop up in your way!

New Screen Edge Detection! Yay! – I know a lot of people that will welcome this new feature including me!

Ok how do I install it?

Firstly you need to be running (Testing) Ubuntu 12.04 and add the Unity PPA by doing

Then update your Apt cache and run a distribution upgrade by doing -

Then reboot or log out and back in again and Enjoy the new features.

If you do encounter any bugs the developers want to know about it either head on over to the launchpad page or get them in the #ubuntu-unity channel on the Freenode IRC network.

OpenShot the Open Source video editing software has found itself with a new 1.4.1 release!

Originally according to the developers it was only supposed to be a quick bug fix release, but that changed and they crammed it with new features such as new titles and effects.

Highlights of The 1.4.1 release include:

• New 3d Animation (Wire frame text)
• New Titles (gold)
• New Effects (fish eye)
• New Animation Presets
• Support for Blender 2.6.x
• Localization fixes (seg faults, audio volume, rotation effect)
• UI Bugs (disappearing icons using some GTK themes)
• Improved Help Manual
• Improved Title UI (interactive font list)
• Improved Precision (clip length, default image length)

CentOS is quickly becoming the preferred Linux server OS of choice for many people as it is exactly the same as RHEL, just without all the Red Hat branding. The developers that provide CentOS can do this as Red Hat is built on Open Source software, and the only copyrighted material is their branding and some of their documentation and knowledge bases. Thus they remove these items, re-brand the packages from the RHEL source tree under CentOS and viola, CentOS is born in all it’s glory.

Now, getting back to the talk of the RHCE.

Those that have researched it know that the RHCE is one of the most respected and thus, difficult, certifications in the industry. So, to really know your stuff you’ve either got to take the Red Hat led training classes (Expensive) or, self-study your butt off.

The latter obviously takes more time than 30 days unless you have nothing else to do with your time, so this is where CentOS is a huge advantage. As opposed to the 30 day trial you get with RHEL you can run CentOS as long as you want.

Pair this with the RHCE Exam Objectives, and a decent training book from Amazon such as this one, and you have the foundation to begin teaching yourself RHEL.

You can also setup several virtual machines using a hyper visor, like Virtualbox, to simulate an entire environment.

Virtualbox can easily be installed on most distros with the built in package manager.

Happy trails!

The humble bundle provides a ‘bundle’ of great cross platform games for a price which you choose!

This time round you get -

• Anomaly Warzone Earth
• Osmos
• Edge
• World of Goo*

These bundles are fantastic so don’t be a cheapskate get on over to http://www.humblebundle.com/ and get your bundle!

I’ve recently become an Openbox refuge as Gnome 3.2 is still just too buggy for me. Even though I’ve come from a very “functional” desktop (Depends on your opinion), I find that Openbox is a VERY flexible and powerful window manager. You can very easily make it what you want it to be.

During this segment I’ll show you how to get Openbox installed with it’s basic configuration/looks (as seen below) and quickly cover some utilites that make customization a bit easier.

Openbox "Out of the Box" config and looks

The above image is vanilla openbox with the menu open (achieved by right-clicking on the desktop) and xterm running. Overall it’s consuming around 170MB of memory, which is good news for lower end PCs, or servers with a lot of resource overhead where a basic GUI is still desirable.

I know it doesn’t look like much now, but you can easily tailor the toolset and looks to your liking as I have in a recent forum post of mine here.

This basic install can be achieved on most distros using the built in package manager.

Openbox can be install on Debian (and similarly on Ubuntu and it’s derivatives using sudo) by running the below command in a shell.

Obmenu and Obconf are two basic configuration utilities that are shown in the images below.

Obmenu allows you to edit the right click menu that you saw in the first image, thus you can make custom launchers, and run scripts from your Openbox menu.

Obconf is a tool that lets you tailor Openbox’s actions and feel to your liking. It comes with several built in theme options, and you can change things such as the virtual desktop behavior and mouse and window behavior.

Before I conclude this segment I would like to point out a few key points when working with vanilla Openbox.

• Applications that are not located in the menu will have to be launched from a terminal emulator like xterm (remember to append & to the end of the command so the application doesn’t close when you kill the terminal window!)
• you can change desktops much like Gnome 2 by holding alt+ctrl and pressing the left and right arrow buttons, or you can scroll your mouse wheel on the desktop as well.
• There is no task manager/open window list by default in Openbox (lightweight remember?), but you can still alt+tab through your open windows.

So, this concludes our very first segment of Openbox 101. Don’t worry, there is more to come!

See you next time!