Ubuntu will not be upgrading the default Firefox package to 3.5 until Ubuntu 9.10. However, the universe repository in Ubuntu 9.04 includes a special firefox-3.5 package. At the time of writing this package contains an old beta release. It should be updated soon, but here’s a workaround if you can’t wait any longer.

Before you update, consider backing up your Firefox profile if you may want to go back to Firefox 3 after trying 3.5. Running the command below will backup your Firefox profile to firefox_profile_backup in your home directory. To restore from the backup, replace your .mozilla/firefox folder with the backup.
cp -r ~/.mozilla/firefox/ ~/firefox_profile_backup

Open the Synaptic package manager and select Settings->Repositories. Select the Third-Party Software tab and add the APT line for the Mozilla Security Team PPA, which has Firefox packages which are undergoing testing prior to wider release:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-security/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Return to the main Synaptic window and click the Reload button to download the repository listings. Find the firefox-3.5 package and mark it for installation. Click Apply to install.

After Synaptic is done working, you can remove or disable the Mozilla Security Team PPA if you don’t want to get any more untested updates.

Unfortunately, this package is still branded as Shiretoko (the codename for this Firefox release). Start Firefox 3.5 from Applications->Internet->Shiretoko Web Browser.

As always, the latest version of Ubuntu, 9.04, was released on time. It offers faster boot time, ext4 support, and many other minor updates and tweaks that makes the system better. Unfortunately, in addition to the updates, there’s a fairly serious (aka, annoying) bug in Ubuntu 9.04 that causes a certain combination of buttons–most commonly, the Fn+UP/DOWN and volume buttons—to render the keyboard completely dead, as well as the system menus and the right-click menu that appears when using the mouse. This bug appears in many different ways, as evidenced by the varying bug reports, but it always has the same symptoms.

While there’s no reported cause for the bug—only acknowledgement that it exists—users are forced to hard reset their system to correct the problem; restarting the X server is impossible, due to the lack of keyboard, and the system menus disappear, preventing a simple log in/log out fix.

Because a hard rest is not a viable option when using the system for work (or at all, for that matter), it would seem those plagued with this bug are forced to install 8.04 or temporarily abandon their system for a different one. Luckily, if you’re willing to stick it out for awhile until the coveted bug fix is released, there is a simple solution to unlocking the keyboard that does not involve a hard reset:

CTRL + ALT + F3

Or any other key F1-F12. The screen will temporarily turn black, and a system beep might occur, and then the keyboard and menus will continue working as normal. The buttons that trigger the bug will continue to act poorly, however.

If you’re experiencing their bug with your system, be sure to report it so that a solution can be found as quickly as possible.

With previous releases it has been necessary to install a customized Linux kernel to add support for wireless networking, Ethernet, and more. In Ubuntu 9.04, everything is supported by default with the exception of some of the keyboard function keys.

The system feels much more responsive than it was with Ubuntu 8.04. Booting from bootloader to the login screen takes 20 seconds (35 seconds in 8.10). Battery life is approximately 4.5 hours (same as 8.10).

Installation is pretty straightforward, but here’s how I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my Eee PC 901:

1. Unless you have an external CD drive, you will have to run the Ubuntu installer from a USB drive (or SD card). The easiest way to create a live USB system is using Ubuntu’s USB Startup Disk Creator tool. If you don’t have another Ubuntu system, or the tool doesn’t work for you, UNetbootin is another option.
2. To boot from a USB drive, press escape after starting your Eee PC to open the boot menu. Select the USB option and press enter.
3. You can run Ubuntu’s installer normally, but pay attention to the partitioning step. The Eee PC has two solid states drives: a faster 4 GB drive, and a slightly slower 16 GB drive. Select the manual partitioning option and put your root (/) on the smaller drive and home (/home) on the larger. I also chose the Ext4 filesystem to get more performance out of the SSDs. You’ll be warned if you don’t create a swap partition, but I’d recommend not using swap to avoid shortening the life of the SSDs.
4. Boot into the newly installed system and everything should be working. If Ubuntu doesn’t see the Bluetooth radio or webcam, these may be disabled in the BIOS. Install Cheese to take advantage of the webcam. If you’d like to be able to control the CPU scaling like in the default Xandros distribution, add the CPU scaling applet to your GNOME panel.

You may also be interested in my article on tweaking Ubuntu for SSD drives, although I haven’t felt the need to apply these tweaks myself yet because the system seems so much more responsive.

• Boot performance has been improved, even without Ext4 you should notice a speedup.
• The slick new notification system is enabled.
• The latest version of the GNOME desktop environment is included.
• OpenOffice has been updated to version 3.0.
• Ext4 filesystems are now supported (but Ext3 is still the default for now).

If you’ve installed from an alpha, beta, or release candidate CD all you need to do is install any available updates to get the final release version. If you need a CD, be sure to use the Bit Torrent downloads.

Install VirtualBox
VirtualBox offers Ubuntu package downloads as well as a software repository from their Linux downloads page. Neither of these options have been updated for Ubuntu 9.04 yet, so I just downloaded and installed the 8.10 package for now.

Start VirtualBox from Applications->System Tools->Sun VirtualBox.

Install Guest Additions
Here’s how I installed the VirtualBox guest additions in an Ubuntu 9.04 guest. Start up your Ubuntu guest OS. In VirtualBox, click Devices->Install Guest Additions.

Click Run when the autorun prompt opens in the guest. The installation could take a minute while kernel modules are being built. When it’s finished, the installer should prompt you to reboot the guest.

Shared Folders
I wanted to copy some files into my Ubuntu 9.04 virtual machine using VirtualBox’s shared folders feature. It isn’t obvious how to do this, and a bug also complicates things.

Set up a shared folder in VirtualBox and make sure you have the guest additions installed in your guest. In the guest, open a terminal and use this command to mount the share:
sudo mount -t vboxsf shared_folder_name mount_point

If this gives you a protocol error message, you’ll need to get a root prompt to work around this bug. Use the commands below to do this:
sudo -i
mount -t vboxsf shared_folder_name mount_point

Press Ctrl-D to exit the root prompt when you’re done. Your shared folder should now to available from the mount point you specified.

3D Acceleration
To take advantage of 3D acceleration in your guest operating systems, you’ll need to first install the VirtualBox guest additions. Then, open the settings for your virtual machine and enable the 3D acceleration option.

I tried out the 3D acceleration with an Ubuntu 9.04 guest running on an Ubuntu 9.04 host with the Nvidia graphics driver. After enabling 3D, the guest detected it and started up Compiz.

Compiz runs smoothly on the guest, including intensive effects such as wobbly windows. I encountered a few graphical glitches. As seen below, transparency seems to be a problem for some windows:

I tried the 3D game Nexuiz, running the game just produced a blank screen. Google Earth was sluggish at first, but after turning down the graphics settings it was completely usable.

I have had one virtual machine crash when pasting text copied from the guest, but no stability problems with the 3D acceleration so far.

If you’re interested in trying out this beta release, remember that it’s intended for testing and not mission-critical systems. The release candidate is coming on April 16, and the final on April 23. Use the Bittorrent downloads to get your disk ISO the fastest!

Installing
I always perform a clean install of new Ubuntu releases to completely remove old software and configuration files that have built up over the last six months. I use separate home and Ubuntu system partitions so it’s easy to install Ubuntu without wiping out my files. However, once I’ve booted the live CD I use the file browser to archive all the hidden application configuration files in my home directory so I get the new default desktop.

The new ext4 filesystem is now stable and included in Ubuntu but will not be the default for this release. After reading about the problems with ext4 wiping out files, I decided to play it safe and stick with ext3 for now.

The first problem I ran into is one I’m familiar with from past Ubuntu installations. The software repository mirror for Canada is so slow to respond that updating the package listings takes longer than the actual installation. I just browsed the Internet from the live CD and waited for this step to finally complete.

Issues
After logging in to the new system I tried to enable the proprietary Nvidia driver with the hardware drivers utility. I forgot about the unusably slow repository, so the driver download would not progress. I had to kill the driver utility to stop it from trying forever to download the driver, and then kill the backend process separately. After selecting a faster repository mirror I was able to install the drivers and download updates.

Since installing Ubuntu 8.10 I’ve never been able to work out the audio glitches. Things don’t look much better in 9.04 so far. Firefox will randomly stop playing sound, and then hang when I close it to restart. Also, the first time I logged in I got crackling and static sounds and restarting PulseAudio fixed it. I’ve never had this particular issue before, and it hasn’t happened again, so I’m hopeful that it was a one-time problem.

Ubuntu doesn’t crash often for me, but when it does it’s usually caused by a 3D application. I’ve played Civilization 4 via Wine on Ubuntu 8.10 for a long time without a problem, but the first time I started playing in 9.04 ended with a crash. My monitor actually lost it’s signal after the crash, which would suggest that the Nvidia driver is to blame. The magic SysRq key combo, Alt+SysRq+REISUB, allowed me to safely reboot. I hope that the newer Nvidia driver isn’t less stable than the old one.

Minor tweaks that I like:

• The Transmission Bittorrent client’s interface has been tweaked in a few places. It’s now easier to select which individual files to download and set their priority.
• gedit has controls in its status bar for selecting a highlighting mode and tab mode. These two controls mean I don’t have to dive into the preferences to change the tab mode to spaces for working with Python files, and I can turn on syntax highlighting before I save my file.
• The default version of Compiz now recognizes GIMP’s toolbox windows and keeps them floated above the image window like Metacity.
• Synaptic includes a Get Screenshot button in package descriptions. This could be useful, but the button is shown even when no screenshot is available (which seems to be the case for most packages right now). It seems to me that this should be something built into the Add/Remove application rather than Synaptic.
• Multiple monitor support has supposedly been improved. I haven’t tested this but was impressed that the display preferences utility offered to open Nvidia’s utility:
  

  It appears that your graphics driver does not support the necessary extensions to use this tool. Do you want to use your graphics driver vendor’s tool instead?

• Ubuntu chooses font settings automatically depending on your display hardware. For me, this meant that subpixel smoothing was turned on for my LCD like it should be. Previously I’ve used a custom font configuration, but the defaults look acceptable now. [update] Mackenzie has pointed out in the comments that these font DPI adjustments are now back to their defaults.

If you’ve tried the beta, how’s it been for you? Any new features in particular you like?

Here’s how you can easily install Google Earth on Ubuntu.

Install Google Earth

1. Download and save the Google Earth installer for Linux.
2. The file you downloaded should be called GoogleEarthLinux.bin. Find this file, right mouse click on it and select Open with Other Application.
3. Click to expand the Use a custom command section of the Open With dialog. Type sh, and click Open.
4. The Google Earth installer will decompress itself, and in a few seconds the Google Earth Setup window should open. The default options should be fine, so click Begin Install to continue.
5. Once the installation is finished, click Quit to close the installer, and press return to close the terminal that the installer opened. Start Google Earth from the Applications->Internet->Google Earth menu.

Troubleshooting
If Google Earth opens, shows the splash screen, and then crashes, you’re probably experiencing a common issue. Running ~/google-earth/googleearth in a terminal will show this error:
./googleearth-bin: relocation error: /usr/lib/i686/cmov/libssl.so.0.9.8: symbol BIO_test_flags, version OPENSSL_0.9.8 not defined in file libcrypto.so.0.9.8 with link time reference

To fix this, browse to the folder you installed Google Earth into. By default this will be google-earth in your home folder. Find the file libcrypto.so.0.9.8 and rename it to something else, like libcrypto.so.0.9.8.bak. Google Earth should now start correctly. [related bug report]

dzen2 is a general purpose statusbar; it can display anything you like from standard in and integrates easily with xmonad or your own scripts. dzen2 is even capable of displaying icons and advanced text formatting.

If you’re not familiar with xmonad and configuring it, see my post on getting started with xmonad on Ubuntu.

Install dzen2
Install dzen2 from the package dzen2 (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install dzen2

Configure xmonad
My xmonad configuration file is based off this template from the xmonad wiki. I’ll show the required changes to this configuration, and hopefully explain well enough what’s going on that you’ll also be able to make the correct changes to a custom configuration.

xmonad’s behavior needs to change in two ways: layouts need to not cover up the dzen2 statusbar and status information needs to be printed to standard out.

These two new imports are required (add them after any existing imports):
import XMonad.Hooks.DynamicLog
import XMonad.Hooks.ManageDocks

Your layouts need to be changed to add the avoidStruts modifier. This will cause the layouts to make room for any statusbars like dzen2. If you’re using the template file, you’ll need to change this line:
myLayout = tiled ||| Mirror tiled ||| Full

I chose to have four layouts: the three default ones with avoidStruts, and an additional full layout without it. This way I can hide the statusbar for fullscreen applications if I want. Here’s the line for this configuration:
myLayout = avoidStruts (tiled ||| Mirror tiled ||| Full) ||| Full

Lastly, a logging hook needs to be added. In the template, no logging takes place:
myLogHook = return ()

dynamicLogDzen will print workspace, layout, and window title information formatted nicely for dzen2. (Use dynamicLog to get the same thing minus the formatting.) In the template, replace the line above with this one to enable dynamicLogDzen.
myLogHook = dynamicLogDzen

Starting dzen2 and xmonad
xmonad and dzen2 need to be started when you log in so that xmonad’s logging is redirected to dzen2 to be displayed. This is easy to do with a pipe.

Create a small shell script that starts xmonad and pipes its output to dzen2:
#!/bin/sh
xmonad | dzen2

Don’t forget to add the execute permission to the script:
chmod +x start_xmonad.sh

This is the script that will be run when you log in. You can also add any other applications you want started with your session to this file.

GDM uses a desktop launcher to run xmonad. This launcher needs to be modified to run your script instead. Open the /usr/share/xsessions/xmonad.desktop launcher in an editor (this will require root privileges). Change the file’s Exec= line to point to your script instead of xmonad.

That should be it! Log in using the xmonad session, and dzen2 should be running at the top of the screen displaying your active workspaces, the current layout, and the title of the focused window.

Advanced statusbars
If you’re comfortable with Haskell programming, you can customize the information that xmonad passes to dzen2 right from your xmonad configuration file.

Another option is to use multiple dzen2 statusbars positioned to look like a single bar. The extra instances can have a shell or python script supplying information like the time, unread email, and weather.

Right now I’m working on a python script that takes xmonad’s status, adds the time and date, formats everything, and passes it on to dzen2. It uses a command like this: xmonad | ./dzen_xmonad_status.py | dzen2.

Have a look at the statusbars in some of these xmonad setups to see what’s possible.

Hedgewars is open source, and packages of the latest version are available for Ubuntu at GetDeb.

From Hedgewars’ setup interface, you can jump right to quick game against an AI team, start a multiplayer custom game, connect to a network game, or host your own Hedgewars server.

One feature I really like is the teams setup. You can create your own teams, name their members, choose from a selection of hats for the hedgehogs to wear, and even choose what voice your team will have.

Here are the in-game controls you’ll need to get started: move the current hedgehog (right and left arrows), aim weapon (up and down arrows), control power and fire (hold left mouse button and release), open weapons menu (right mouse button), jump (return key). See the Hedgewars FAQ page for more controls.

A tiling window manager arranges your windows in a grid. This maximizes window sizes and prevents any window from obscuring another.

Installing xmonad
xmonad is available from the Ubuntu repositories. Install xmonad from the package xmonad (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install xmonad

A number of dependencies will be installed with xmonad. They are needed because reconfiguring xmonad requires recompiling it. (Don’t worry, this is handled automatically.)

I’d also highly recommend installing dmenu, a simple application launcher that integrates with xmonad. Install dmenu from the package dwm-tools (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install dwm-tools

From the login screen, you should now be able to select an xmonad session and log in to start xmonad.

The basics of using xmonad
Note: All the keyboard commands you’ll use with xmonad begin with what’s called the mod key. The default mod key is the left alt key.

If no windows are open xmonad will just display a blank screen. Open a new terminal window with mod+shift+return. With only one window open, xmonad will let it use the entire screen.

Instead of running more applications using the terminal, let’s use the dmenu launcher. If you have dmenu installed, pressing mod+p with open it on the top of the screen. Start typing to find an application, use the right and left arrows to select a result, and press return to run the selected application. Press escape to close dmenu if you decide not to run anything.

Open some applications so you have more windows to experiment with. Notice how xmonad splits the screen down the center. On the left side is the master pane by itself. On the right side all the other windows are displayed stacked on top of each other.

Press mod+space to cycle though different tiling algorithms. By default there are three: tall (vertical split with master pane on left), mirror tall (horizontal split with master pane on top), and full (one window displayed full screen).

The currently focused window is displayed with red borders. You may have already noticed that you can focus a window by moving the mouse over it. On the keyboard, switch focus using mod+j (focus next window) and mod+k (focus previous window).

Perform the equivalent of clicking a conventional window manager’s close box for a window by pressing mod+shift+c.

What if you want to move a window into the master pane? The simplest way to do this is mod+return, which swaps the currently focused window into the master pane. For finer control of where windows are displayed use mod+shift+j (move the focused window up) and mod+shift+k (move the focused window down).

If the master pane is not the right width (tall mode) or height (mirror tall mode), you can resize it using mod+h (smaller) and mod+l (larger).

Like most window managers, xmonad offers multiple workspaces. By default you get nine workspaces, each corresponding to a number key. Pressing mod+[num], where [num] is from 1 to 9, will switch you to that workspace. Use mod+shift+[num] to move the focused window to the specified workspace.

You may have noticed that some applications and dialog windows are not tiled normally. These are floating windows, which you can move and resize like windows in a conventional window manager. To float any window yourself, hold down the mod key and drag the window with the left mouse button. Once a window is floated you can move it around the screen in the same manner. Use the mod key and right mouse button to resize a floated window. Tile a window normally again by focusing it and pressing mod+t.

With these basics, you should be able to start using xmonad.

Reconfiguring xmonad
xmonad is configured using a Haskell source file (~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs); you will need to create this file for your user:
mkdir ~/.xmonad
touch ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs

The easiest way to get started customizing xmonad is using a template configuration file containing all the default settings and comments explaining what they do. Such a template is available on the xmonad wiki. Paste it into your ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs file. You’ll probably want to change the myTerminal setting back to gnome-terminal (or your own preferred terminal) instead of xterm.

The mod+q key combo will reconfigure xmonad with your settings, and restart it. This process happens very fast and nearly seamlessly, you might miss it! If there’s an error in the configuration file, xmonad will fall back to the previous settings and display an error dialog.

Read though the template configuration file and have fun customizing it to your tastes!

These are only the basics, you can do much more with xmonad than what I’ve covered. The xmonad documentation is a good resource if you want to learn more.