Linux Mint 15 "Olivia" is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Linux 13.04. Mint is intended to be easy to install and easy to use for desktop users who prefer a traditional desktop layout. It is available in for both 32 bit and 64 bit Intel architectures. It's also available with two different desktops; the MATE desktop which is a fork of the GNOME 2 series, and the Cinnamon desktop which is based on GNOME 3 and is a fork of GNOME shell to give it a more traditional desktop layout. For this review I'm running the 64 bit Cinnamon edition on my desktop PC with an Intel Core i5 2500k CPU.

Linux Mint 15 Desktop

 First Impressions

Downloading the 64 bit Cinnamon Edition DVD took about 35 minutes for me over bittorrent. After creating a bootable USB stick, I booted into the Linux Mint 15 Live environment and after a short time exploring the system, I chose to go ahead with the installation. Install time was quite fast and within about 10 minutes I was prompted to reboot the system.

On the first boot I was quite impressed with how fast the system started up. I didn't time the first boot, but subsequent boots on my system take about 30 seconds from the boot loader to the log-in screen. After logging in to the system the desktop loaded up and I was shown the Mint Welcome Screen. This is a feature I've come to expect of Linux Mint and provides links to useful documentation and tutorials about the release.

Mint 15 Welcome Screen

System Updates

Taking a look around I noticed the Update Manager notifier in the System Tray telling me that there were 30 updates available to install. Clicking on the Update notifier launched mintUpdate and downloading the updates took less than a minute. Installing them all took only an additional 30 seconds. With my system up to date I was on my way.

Mint 15 Updates

Screen Layout

The default screen layout for Linux Mint 15 is a traditional desktop setup. There is a panel at the bottom of the screen that features the main menu at the leftmost side followed by some quick launch icons and then the window list. The far right side holds the System Tray with network and sound controls followed by the clock/calendar and finally a window quick switcher.

Linux Mint 15 automatically detected my monitor and set the screen resolution to my monitor's native resolution.

Hardware Detection

All of my computer's hardware was properly detected and worked on the initial boot. My Nvidia graphics card was detected and the open source Nouveau graphics driver was loaded by default. This allowed for a pleasant boot animation experience showing the Linux Mint logo. Unfortunately, Nouveau suffers compared to the proprietary Nvidia driver when it comes to displaying 3D content. The Linux Mint 15 Driver Manager makes installing the Nvidia driver a snap. Go to the Menu->Preferences->Driver Manager and select the new driver you want to use. Then click on Apply Changes and the system will download and install the selected driver. Once the process completes you are running the new video driver. No need to reboot.

This is an awesome step forward in video driver management. Most distros tell the user to reboot in order for the new driver to work. If you were handy with the command line you could kill the X Server, remove the kernel module for the old video driver, add the kernel module for the new driver, then restart X and you were back in business without a reboot. All of that is gone with the new Driver Manager. Bravo to the Linux Mint developers!

My wired network card was properly detected and worked without any additional configuration as well as sound and the multimedia keys on my keyboard. Setting up my HP printer was as simple as going to System Settings->Printers and clicking on Add. From that point I just selected the printer from the list and clicked Forward. I was then given an option to provide a name and a location for the printer. With that done, I clicked Apply and then was given an option to print a test page. Done. Rarely is it this easy to install a printer on a proprietary operating system.

Media Formats

Perhaps the thing that Linux Mint was best know for in its earlier days was that it ships with codecs for proprietary media formats by default. That means the whether you click on a sound file in an open format like FLAC or Ogg Vorbis or one in a proprietary format like MP3, the file will play. The same is true for video files. Linux Mint 15 was able to play any video file I threw at it.

Installed Software

Linux Mint 15 comes with a broad selection of software pre-installed on the system. For Internet we find Mozilla Firefox for web browsing and Mozilla Thunderbird for email. We also find the Transmission bittorrent client, Pidgin instant messenger and XChat for Internet Relay Chat communications.

In the Office menu we find that the Libre Office Suite is installed along with the Evince document viewer for handling PDF's and Postscript files.

In the Graphics area you will find the GIMP Image Editor, gThumb, and the GNOME Image Viewer for handling photos and images. Simple Scan is also included in this section for image and document scanning.

Under the Sound & Video section you'll find Banshee for managing you music library, however double clicking a music file will launch it into the Totem Video Player instead. This section also includes the aforementioned Totem under the label of Videos, as well as the VLC media player for playing music and videos, and finally, Brasero for copying, authoring, and burning CD's and DVD's. I inserted an encrypted DVD and initially had difficulty getting it to play. I eventually had success with VLC, but I was not able to get it to play in Totem. I installed the Xine media player and it played my DVD without a problem.

In the Accessories section you'll find a collection of miscellaneous tools. You'll find an archive manager, calculator, the gedit text editor, and the obligatory terminal emulator. You'll also find the Nemo file manager in this section. Nemo is Linux Mint's fork of the Nautilus file manager. The reason I mention this is that Linux Mint 15 introduces a new feature for Nemo; Nemo Actions. If you've been a GNOME user you may be familiar with the Nautilus add-on called Nautilus Actions. Well, Nemo has now included similar functionality into the base build. You don't need to add a package to use Nemo Actions, it's already there. Right now there's no graphical configuration tool for Nemo Actions, but it's not too hard to edit the well documented example file to create your own action.

The Administration menu contains items to control your system and to keep it up to date. It contains mintBackup for creating and restoring backups of either files or installed software. There's the mintNanny Domain Blocker if you want to restrict access to certain websites. And there's also Gufw for configuring Uncomplicated Firewall. For package management you'll find Software Manager which is a category based package manager, as well as the more powerful Synaptic Package Manager. You'll also find the Update Manager in this section. Of course you can also handle package management from the command line with apt-get and the aptitude package manager is also available.

System Settings

Linux Mint 15 now has all system configuration items included in the System Settings tool. In this section you'll find items for Appearance, Preferences, and Hardware. By default the tool comes up in Normal Mode which limits the selections to the more basic items. You can switch it to Advanced Mode and some additional items appear for further customization if you choose.

Mint 15 System Settings

One little thing I noticed, I don't know if I'd call it a bug or not, but in Regional Settings I had United States (English) selected. It showed times displayed in a format I'm comfortable with, but those settings did not affect the way the clock in the system tray displayed. I had to go into the Calendar settings and manually set the date format for the panel to show in the format that I wanted.

Mint 15 Region Settings

Another problem that I encountered was that none of my other disks or partitions appeared available to mount through the file manager. When insterting a USB drive, there was no apparent change shown. A quick check with

Games

Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon did not include any games in the default installation. There's no need to worry if you're a gamer though. There are 1883 packages listed in the Games section of the Software Manager.

Power Management

My system was able to resume from both Suspend and Hibernate states without any issues. Resuming from Suspend took about 10 seconds while resuming from Hibernate took a little longer at about 25 seconds from the GRUB boot menu to a working desktop.

Conclusions

I enjoyed the time I spent using Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon. The Mint development team is doing a great job with modifying and adding to GNOME 3 to make it a familiar and productive environment for those of us who prefer a more traditional desktop layout. The default theme is sleek and attractive, however some of the icons depart a bit from the norm and it takes a while to get accustomed to them. I found myself taking the time to wait for the mouse-over text to pop up many times to make sure I was on the right one. The save icon was the prime example of this for me. This icon is a simple rectangle next to an arrow pointing down. I'm not saying this is bad, I've just come to expect Save to always look like a 3.5 inch floppy disk from days of old.

Overall Mint 15 is a polished, smooth, and fast desktop Linux distribution. It is quite possibly the best desktop Linux distro available at this time and can easily go up against offerings from Apple and Microsoft. Desktop Linux in general still struggles against it proprietary rivals when it comes to software availability, but that is starting to change with companies like Adobe shifting major software packages to cloud based services.

I've been using Kubuntu 12.04 recently as my main desktop OS, but from what I've seen from Mint 15 Cinnamon I think it's time to make a change.

Have you given Mint 15 a try yet? What did you think?

The post Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon: Ready For Prime Time appeared first on Tux Tweaks.

Linux Mint 15 Released

Many people have been wondering what the official release date for Linux Mint 15 will be. The Mint team is known for not providing a firm release calendar. It's been about a week and a half since the Release Candidate for Linux Mint 15 "Olivia" was released and I've noticed that a few people have posted on Google+ that Linux Mint 15 has been released.

All Versions Available

Checking some of the mirrors, it does appear that the final iso files have been uploaded. The regular versions are dated May 24 and the No Codecs versions are dated May 27.

Linux Mint 15 Available

Checking the Linux Mint Blog, there is still no official release announcement at the time of this writing. I also have not been able to find any torrent files for the new version on Mint's torrent tracker.

Download Linux Mint 15

Regardless of the lack of release announcement and missing torrent files, it does appear that the final release version of Linux Mint 15 is complete and available for download. So if you're anxious to get it installed, go to one of the Linux Mint mirrors and download your preferred version.

Mint 15 Desktop

For your convenience, here are the MD5 hashes for the various versions.

4b60240ea2f5b59735c332e818434d2a linuxmint-15-cinnamon-dvd-32bit.iso
2396a39e802a0463bf1727acd72d0700 linuxmint-15-cinnamon-dvd-64bit.iso
198dff271dee2d827f7094e84cbce833 linuxmint-15-cinnamon-dvd-nocodecs-32bit.iso
37982ebcc491f468d4d9e8109f4ad6d8 linuxmint-15-cinnamon-dvd-nocodecs-64bit.iso
4b5ff169b019889aedf1d054b2d97447 linuxmint-15-mate-dvd-32bit.iso
63114a66d8da27f50fe8d6ba6d118462 linuxmint-15-mate-dvd-64bit.iso
cc9f66e2056501c8d7d182bf6a61d0fa linuxmint-15-mate-dvd-nocodecs-32bit.iso
1ae416a66721501df3e4c3c4d740bc31 linuxmint-15-mate-dvd-nocodecs-64bit.iso

Have a minty day!

UPDATE: It's official now. Linux Mint 15 has been released.

The post Linux Mint 15 “Olivia” Released! appeared first on Tux Tweaks.

Xubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu Linux that uses the Xfce desktop environment for the user interface. It is one of the official derivatives of Ubuntu Linux. The intent is for Xubuntu to be easy to use while being attractive and light on system resources. From the Xubuntu Strategy Document:

The target audience for Xubuntu consists of users who are interested in having an elegant, easy to use, polished and unified operating system. Xubuntu is a good option for those who want a stable, configurable and/or relatively light desktop environment too. Finally, Xubuntu is an appealing choice for users who prefer conservative workflows over the newest innovations.

For this review I tested the 32 bit Live environment as well as the 32 bit version installed to the hard drive of my MSI Wind netbook. I also briefly tested the 64 bit version inside a VirtualBox virtual machine on my desktop. Download time for the 789 MB iso file was about 25 minutes for me over Bittorrent.

Live Environment and Installation

After downloading the Live DVD image I created a bootable USB drive with it in order to boot my netbook. Booting to my Live USB I was greeted with a fairly clean desktop that included an icon to install Xubuntu to my hard drive as well as icons to mount my available hard drive partitions. After spending a short time checking out the Live environment and performing some basic tasks I decided to go ahead an install Xubuntu to my hard drive.

Xubuntu 13.04 Live DVD Desktop

If you've installed Ubuntu or one of its official derivatives before, then you should see any surprises while installing Xubuntu. I was able to accept the defaults on most menus. The one exception was the disk partitioning menu. I chose to manually select the partitions so I could use the partition I already have set aside for testing without affecting any of the other partitions on my system.

After making my installation selections, it was time to sit back and let the installer do its thing. During this portion of the installation, a slide show was displayed telling my about some of the features of Xubuntu 13.04. It was during this slide show that I discovered that there was a quick launch bar at the bottom of the screen that defaults to Autohide. It's funny that I didn't discover that during my time in the Live env ironment. I guess I just never ventured all the way to the bottom of the screen with my mouse.

Overall, installation took about 20 minutes on my netbook. After the installation was complete, I was prompted to reboot the computer.

System Updates

Upon booting the system for the first time, a notification appeared in the system tray informing me that there were system updates available. I don't know if the system was just reacting slowly, or something was crashing, but it took several clicks on the update notification before the update manager came up and I was then able to install the six available updates. I found the Update Manager was also slow to react when I tried Xubuntu inside VirtualBox.

Screen layout

By default, the system detected my monitor and set the screen to my monitor's native resolution. As you can see from the screen shot I included above, the screen is laid out with a menu in the upper left corner. To the right of that is the application switcher, followed by the system tray with power, sound and network information among other things. Finally, in the upper right corner is the button to log out or shut down the computer. The lower edge of the screen contains the quick launch bar that I mentioned previously. It is auto hidden by default, but that's easily changed by adjusting the Panel Properties.

Hardware detection

Almost all of my netbook's hardware worked as expected. Both the wired and wireless network cards worked properly. I was also happy to see that my wifi settings from the Live environment carried over and were remembered after I installed the system to my hard drive. The touchpad was properly detected and defaulted to a reasonable speed. It registered taps as clicks and registered corner taps for scrolling which is the expected behaviour of my quirky touchpad.

Almost all of my laptop function keys worked with the exception of the Sleep button. I was able to fix that by going into the Power Manager settings and selecting Suspend for the function when the Sleep button is pressed. I found it strange that Hibernate was not an option for the Sleep button on my laptop. Going to the Shutdown menu in the upper right corner of the screen I also noticed that the Hibernate option was grayed out and unselectable. I was able to get the machine to hibernate by issuing the following command from a terminal window though.

I did not test the webcam button because there didn't appear to be any webcam software installed by default.

The integrated sound card on my machine was properly detected and sound was automatically set to a reasonable medium level.

Media Formats

Trying to play an MPEG video for the first time caused a plugin finder to come up and it offered to find the correct codec for me. By default, the GStreamer.Fluendo mp3 decoder was selected. I accepted the default selection and clicked OK to install it. It went off and did its thing, but there was no indication whether the install was successful or if it was still busy installing something. The video player was just stuck there and eventually I closed the application in order to try again.

Media Codecs Missing

When I tried to play the same video, the plugin finder again popped up saying I needed to install an MPEG-2 demuxer. This time the selection defaulted to the GStreamer extra plugins. I went ahead and also selected the other GStreamer plugins available on the menu. This time, after being prompted to accept some additionally required packages and after entering my password, a window popped up indicating the progress of package installation. Once these additional packages were installed, I closed the video player. This time when I went to launch my video it worked properly. I was also able to view an MP4 with H264 video and AAC audio.

After my video ordeal I was able to MP3 audio without any problems. If I had selected to install the Fluendo codec during the installation, that would have saved me a step in trying to get MPEG support working. Both MP3 and FLAC files lauched in the music player, gmusicbrowser. When I launched an Ogg Vorbis audio file, it launched in the video player instead of the audio player. It worked fine to listen to the song, but it would be nice if music files were treated uniformly.

Installed Applications

The selection of software applications installed by default is fairly light compare to some other Linux distributions. I'm OK with that as it includes items for basic tasks and allows the user to chose what they'd like to add.

Internet Applications

• Firefox web browser
• Pidgin Instant Messenger
• Thunderbird Email
• Transmission Bittorrent
• XChat IRC Client

Office Applications

• Abiword word processor
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• Evince Document Viewer for PDF's, etc.

Graphics Applications

• GIMP Image Editor
• gThumb
• Ristretto Image Viewer
• Simple Scan

Multimedia Applications

• gmusicbrowser
• Parole Media Player
• Volume Control
• Xfburn

General Accessories

• Archive Manager
• Thunar File Manager
• Mouspad Text Editor
• Terminal Emulator

System Administration

• Ubuntu Software Center
• Settings Manager

Speaking of the Settings Manager, I found it a little strange that most items in the system take a double click of the mouse to launch, but inside the Settings Manager everything is activated with a single click. I think that all areas of the system should behave according to the user's preference when it comes to single vs. double clicking.

Conclusions

In some respects, the Xfce Desktop Manager looks a little bit dated. Overall though, I think the Xubuntu team has done a great job with the system theme to make the desktop look modern and sleek while maintaining a traditional desktop paradigm. In the time I spent with Xubuntu 13.04, I ran into a few small glitches, but I think it went much more smoothly than the typical fresh install of the most popular prorietary OS.

If you're a long time user of Ubuntu who can't get used to the Unity interface, I highly suggest you give Xubuntu a try. It's a close experience to the older Gnome 2 interface that Ubuntu used to have.

One aspect I liked about Xubuntu 13.04 was that for the most part the developers have stuck to one application per function. This helps keep the system light (if you can call an 789 MB DVD iso file light), and leaves it to the user to decide what additional applications to install.

So, what do you think? Will you be giving Xubuntu 13.04 a try. If you already use Xubuntu, how does 13.04 compare to earlier versions?

The post Distro Review: Xubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail appeared first on Tux Tweaks.

Building a mobile website for your blog or business can be a daunting task. Perhaps you're an expert at mobile website development and you can design a mobile website on your own just fine. But for many of us, learning to do this would take far too much time and effort and probably wouldn't turn out all that great anyway. If you are using WordPress to run your website, you're in luck. There are several plugins available to make your site look great on mobile devices.

With over four million downloads, WPtouch is perhaps the most popular WordPress plugin to make your website mobile ready. I have been using it on this site for a month or two myself.  You can see in the image below what my site's home page looks like on a mobile device with WPtouch enabled.

If this is the first time you're on my site, I'll tell you that I write a lot of tutorials that include commands to enter into a Linux terminal window. To separate those from the rest of the text, I've created a style in my site's stylesheet (style.css) that I use whenever I show one of those commands.This is what it looks like:

After a while I got tired of entering the html code to enable that style, so I modified my theme to create a shortcode for the style. As it turns out, WPtouch doesn't process those shortcodes from your main theme, so the shortcodes end up getting displayed on the mobile version of your site. Click to enlarge the picture below for an example. My shortcode is called term.

To fix this, you need to edit the theme for WPtouch. These files are not accessible from the plugin editor in WordPress, so you'll need to log in to your web server and edit the files from there.

Adding Shortcodes to WPtouch

Once you're logged into your webserver, navigate to the directory where WordPress is installed. It's probably installed under your public_html folder, but that can vary based on your server setup. Once you've found the right directory, navigate to

wp-content/plugins/wptouch/themes/default/

In that directory you'll find a functions.php file. This is where you can add your shortcode. (If you don't know where to find the original shortcodes, you should be able to find them in the functions.php file from your main desktop theme.)  Open your file for editing and add your shortcode at the bottom of the file and save it.  This is the code I pasted into the bottom of my functions.php file:

//Shortcode for terminal class styling
function term_shortcode( $atts, $content = null ) {
    return '<div>' . $content . '</div>';
}
add_shortcode('term', 'term_shortcode');
add_filter('comment_text', 'do_shortcode');

Once you have saved the file, you should see that WPtouch is now processing your shortcode.

If your shortcode has nothing to do with the page style, then you're done. In my case, I need to make one more change for the style to display how I intended.

Editing the WPtouch Style

Within the same directory as the functions.php file, there should also be a style.css file.  That's the file you'll need to edit if your shortcode requires a style definition in the style sheet. I pasted the following style into the bottom of that file for my terminal window styling.

You can see in the picture below that my style has been applied.

Note

The changes you've made to the WPtouch plugin will only last as long you don't update the plugin. If you do update it, (which I recommend for security  reasons), you will need to edit the plugin again to re-enable your shortcode.

This post originally appeared at http://tuxtweaks.com/2013/05/wptouch-enable-shortcodes/.

The post Enable Shortcodes in WPtouch on WordPress appeared first on Tux Tweaks.

The latest version of Ubuntu just came out; Ubuntu 13.04 - Raring Ringtail. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has done a good job setting up a set of defaults for a fresh install, but there are a few things you may want to add or change on your freshly installed OS.  

1. Privacy Settings

You may want to adjust the privacy settings after you install Ubuntu. By default, Ubuntu provides online search results when you enter a search in the Dash. Each of these searches ends up running through Canonical's servers. It's a good idea to disable this function.

Click the Settings icon on the Launcher (it's the icon with a gear and a wrench on it). Then click on Privacy in the System Settings window that comes up. From that menu, turn off "Include online search results" and "Record Activity".

Ubuntu Privacy Settings

2. Remove Amazon Shopping Lens

This one is somewhat redundant with the item above, but still seems to be a good idea to me.  Once you've disabled online search results, you should see any items for sale from Amazon in your dash. I still prefer to remove that functionality.

Open up a terminal window and enter the following command to remove the Amazon Shopping Lens from the Unity Dash.

Log out and log back in and you shouldn't see search results from Amazon when you search the Dash. Unless you disabled online search results, you will however still see offers from Amazon in the Video Search section.

3. Select the Fastest Update Server for Your Location

This is a nice little tweak that will help you get your system updates from the fastest server. Server speed can vary based on your location and what route the data has to take to get to you. There's a utility in Ubuntu that will ping all of the available update servers and locate the fastest one for you.

To access this tool, open up the System Settings again from the launcher and then double click on Software & Updates. From there, click on the drop-down for "Download from:", then select "Other...".  On the next menu that pops up, click on "Select Best Server" and the utility will start searching for the fastest update server for you. Once it's done, it will highlight the fastest one and you just need to click on "Choose Server" to complete the task. Finally, click on "Close" in the Software & Updates menu.

4. Install Unity Tweak Tool

I wrote about the Unity Tweak Tool before. It's nice to see that it has been added to the Ubuntu repositories for Ubuntu 13.04.  Now that it's in the main repositories, you no longer need to add a PPA in order to install it. You can search for it and install it from the Ubuntu Software Center, or you can install it from the command line with:

Once it's installed, you can launch it from the Dash.

5. Install Multimedia Codecs

Most codecs you might need can be found in the ubuntu-restricted-extras package, but if you want to play encrypted DVD's, you'll need to install some packages from the Medibuntu repository. To enable the Medibuntu repository, you need to enter this long command into a terminal window.

Once Medibuntu is set up, install multimedia codecs with:

6. Install Synaptic Package Manager

The Ubuntu Software Center is a pretty nice software manager, but if you've been using Ubuntu or another Debian derivative for a while, you probably want a more fully featured package manager.  Synaptic used to be included in a default Ubuntu install, but it isn't any longer. You can find it and install it from the Software Center, or add it with:

Well, that's it for my Ubuntu post install list. What other things do you like to install after a fresh build of Ubuntu?

This content originally appeared at http://tuxtweaks.com/2013/04/6-things-to-do-after-installing-ubuntu-13-04/.

The post 6 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 13.04 appeared first on Tux Tweaks.

From time to time I like to test out a new Linux distribution or just an updated version of my current distribution. I've created extra partitions on my hard drive for these test installations. All of the distributions I've tried so far require a boot loader to be installed to the hard drive as part of the process. This creates the minor problem of the test installation taking over the boot process. I prefer to have my main Linux installation handle the booting process. The following steps will show how to hand boot control back to your main Linux installation with the GRUB 2 boot loader.

Re-install GRUB 2

The solution to this problem turns out to be pretty simple. You just need to boot into whichever Linux installation you want to be the default and then re-install GRUB from there. Once you've booted into your desired default OS you'll need to open a terminal window to complete this process with a few simple terminal commands.

What this process is going to do is install the GRUB 2 boot loader to the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your hard drive. What if you have more than one hard drive? How do you know where to install it?

You probably have your OS installed on the first hard drive, but it's best to check anyway. The following command will list the block devices on your computer. This will include your hard drives.

The output from that command should look similar to this, but will most likely be a little different.

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 149.1G  0 disk 
|-sda1   8:1    0   3.9G  0 part 
|-sda2   8:2    0  39.1G  0 part 
|-sda3   8:3    0   9.3G  0 part /
|-sda4   8:4    0     1K  0 part 
|-sda5   8:5    0    86G  0 part /home
|-sda6   8:6    0   1.4G  0 part [SWAP]
|-sda7   8:7    0   9.3G  0 part

In the output, look for the device where your root file system is mounted, (the line with the / listed under the mountpoint.) I've highlighted the line of interest in bold above. You can see in my example that the root file system is on the sda3 partition. Now it's not the partition that matters, but the device. So in this example, the root file system is on the sda device.

Now that you know the correct device, you can proceed with re-installing the GRUB boot loader to the MBR of that drive.

Now there's just one more step to create the GRUB menu.

That's it. Now reboot your system and you should see your chosen Linux installation listed at the top of the GRUB boot menu.

The post Reset GRUB Default System After OS Installation appeared first on Tux Tweaks.

The Unity Desktop Shell for GNOME 3 on Ubuntu Linux has created a lot of controversy in the desktop Linux world. Some users love the new forward looking vision of Unity while others long for a more traditional desktop layout. One of the criticisms of Unity has been its lack of configuration settings. While many configuration settings have been added to Unity since the initial release, most of them remain hidden from regular users. That's where the Unity Tweak Tool comes in. It provides GUI access to many of Unity's hidden settings and collects them together under one convenient application. 

Install Unity Tweak Tool

The Unity Tweak Tool is developed by the Freyja Development Team and they have provided a package archive on Launchpad.net. At the time of this writing, there is only a PPA for the daily builds of  Unity Tweak Tool. The easiest way to set up the PPA is from the command line, so open up a terminal window and enter the following command.

After entering your password at the prompt, press [ENTER] if prompted to continue with adding the PPA to your sources list. Next you need to update your package list.

Now you can install Unity Tweak Tool with

Launch Unity Tweak Tool

Now that it's installed, you can find it in the Unity Dash.

Once it's launched, this is what you should see.

Now, I could go though all of the various settings you can adjust with Unity Tweak Tool, but it's easier to just take a look at the menus for yourself. Take a look at the Unity Tweak Tool screenshots to see what it has to offer.

Unity Tweak Tool is a great addition to Ubuntu. Hopefully Canonical will see the value of this wonderful software and include it by default in future releases of Ubuntu.

This content originally appeared on TuxTweaks.com at http://tuxtweaks.com/2013/01/install-unity-tweak-tool-in-ubuntu/

The post Install Unity Tweak Tool in Ubuntu appeared first on Tux Tweaks.

Unity Tweak Tool is an application for adjusting the settings of the Unity desktop shell in Ubuntu Linux. To add it to Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quezal or Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail, follow the instructions to install Unity Tweak Tool in Ubuntu.

Click the images below to see them in full size.

This content originally appeared on tuxtweaks.com at http://tuxtweaks.com/2013/01/unity-tweak-tool-version-0-0-2-screenshots/

The post Unity Tweak Tool Version 0.0.2 Screenshots appeared first on Tux Tweaks.

My last review of Linux Mint was for the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 13 "Maya". Linux Mint 14 "Nadia" was released back on Nov. 20, 2112, but with all of the hustle and bustle of the winter holidays, I didn't have time to install it and write up a review until now.

For this review I'm using both the 64 bit and 32 bit versions of Linux Mint 14 with the MATE desktop. The 64 bit version was installed inside a VirtualBox virtual machine on my desktop computer. The 32 bit version was installed on my MSI Wind U100 netbook. I started off by downloading the 64 bit Live DVD version of Linux Mint 14.1 over bittorrent. The torrent was running fast and my download completed in a little more than 30 minutes. This was most likely limited by my modest Internet connection.

Linux Mint 14 MATE 64 Bit

My first look at Mint 14 was to install it into a VirtualBox virtual machine. Booting up to the Live DVD iso image was fast and in a few seconds I was viewing the desktop. The desktop felt snappy working with 1024 MB of RAM. After a quick test drive I decided to go ahead with an installation to the virtual hard drive. I chose the basic install option allowing Mint 14 to take up the entire 8 GB virtual disk that I'd created. Due to being based on Ubuntu, the installation is similar and familiar if you've installed Ubuntu previously. After selecting the language, keyboard layout, and timezone, the installation prompts you to create a new user ID and then moves forward with installing packages. After about 15 or 20 minutes I was prompted to restart the machine. I shutdown the VM and removed the virtual DVD from the drive and booted up to the fresh installation.

If you've used Linux Mint previously, you're probably familiar with the Mint Welcome Screen. This is where I ran into my first hiccup. Normally I've just dismissed the Welcome Screen and gone about my business. This time I decided to click on some of the links on the Welcome Screen to see what's new in this release. Clicking the "New features" link brought up Firefox, but then the "Close" button on the welcome screen didn't work. I had to kill Firefox in order for the Welcome Screen to go away.

After getting through the Welcome Screen issues I moved on the check out the rest of the release. Since it's been a few weeks since the latest ISO was released, I was not surprised to see a notification that there were 116 updates available. I clicked the icon and entered my password to begin the update process. After a few minutes of downloading updated package information I got a number of error messages warning me that the Medibuntu repositories could not be reached. As that is a repository outside of the Mint team's control, I can't blame them for the issue. I clicked through the error messages and then found that the mintupdate package had to get updated first. After that updated, I then found that there were 184 updates for me to install. At this point all of the updates installed smoothly.

After a fresh boot, Mint 14 MATE was using only about 245 MB of RAM according to the System Monitor. Running Firefox with 3 tabs open and with an empty document open for editing, System Monitor showed about 360 MB of memory in use. This leads me to believe that Mint 14 MATE Edition would be suitable for systems with only 512 MB of RAM which is in line with the stated requirements.

 Linux Mint 14 32 Bit

After taking Linux Mint 14 for a test drive on VirtualBox, I decided to give it a try on my MSI Wind netbook. For that I downloaded the 32 bit edition. Again, the download was fairly quick over bittorrent. I decided that I didn't want to blow away my installation of Linux Mint 13, so I decided to resize the existing Linux partition to make room for a small testing partition. I tried to do this ahead of time from the Live environment, but for some reason GParted was indicating an error on the ext3 partition and was unable to resize it.  I went ahead with the install and decided to try partitioning again. The partitioning tool inside the installer had no problem resizing the existing ext3 partition and creating a new ext4 partition for my new install. Resizing and creating the new partition took about 20 minutes.

Once the partitioning was complete I went ahead with the installation. Similar to the Ubuntu installer, the Linux Mint installer offers to import settings from any other operating systems that it detects on the computer. The installer starts copying and installing files to the hard drive right away while you set your location, keyboard layout, and set up the initial user ID. The installation process took a little over 15 minutes to complete. The system prompts you to reboot once the installation completes.

On the first boot, I was again greeted with the Mint Welcome Screen. I found that I had the same issues with the Welcome Screen on my netbook as I did with my 64 bit installation on VirtualBox.

Hardware Detection

The screen resolution was properly detected and set to the maximum amount. Screen brightness and audio were both set to a medium level. The touchpad worked properly registering taps as clicks and corner taps worked to scroll windows. The special function keys all worked to adjust sound volume and screen brightness. The wifi card worked properly and the system even remembered the wifi password for my router that I entered from the live environment prior to installation.

System Updates

Shortly after logging in, an icon showed up in the system tray indicating that there were 116 recommended updates available. Clicking the icon prompts for the user password and then starts the Update Manager. Like before, the system first needed to update the mintupdate package. After applying that update, the Update Manager said there were 208 recommended updates available.

The Mint Menu

Clicking on the menu button brings up the Mint Menu in its Favorites mode. This mode of the menu shows items that the developers have deemed to be the most popular or useful items for users. Clicking All Applications in the upper right corner changes to a more traditional cascading style menu. One feature of the menu that I really like is the search box at the bottom. Entering a term into the search box will find any locally installed programs that match the search. If there aren't any matching programs, the search results offer several options to search further. If your search matches any installable packages, those are presented for installation right there in the menu. Clicking one of the package installation buttons will bring up the Synaptic Package Manager to complete the installation.

Installed Software

Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird come installed for web browsing and email respectively while Transmission is included for downloading over bittorrent. The Libre Office suite is installed for your office document needs while Banshee is provided for managing and listening to your music collection.

Codecs to play popular free and non-free media formats are included by default, so no extra steps need to be taken by the user to play MP3 music files of Flash videos. Applications for viewing PDF's, viewing and editing photos, editing text files are included along with the other basic functions you would expect.

The Totem movie player is provided along with Gnome MPlayer and VLC for viewing video files and Brasero is included for authoring and burning CD and DVD discs.

Eye of MATE and gThumb are both installed for viewing and organizing your digital photos while the GIMP Image Editor is installed for heavier duty image manipulation.

There are also several programs installed for setting preferences and managing your computer. For file management, Mint 14 comes with Caja 1.4.0. I was pleased to see that this version of the file manager includes an icon to toggle the path display between a button/breadcrumb style and a basic text style. This is a feature I'd been missing since it was removed at some point from the GNOME file manager, Nautilus.

Package Management

Linux Mint 14 has a few different systems for managing software packages. The first one that you see on the menu is the Software Manager. The Software Manager allows you to browse through categories of software or search for a particular program. It works similarly to the Ubuntu Software Center. Packages are installed in the background meaning that after you select a package for installation, the Software Manager starts to download and install the package while you're allowed to continue browsing for more programs if you want.

Just below Software Manager on the menu is Package Manager. This menu entry launches the Synaptic Package Manager that most users of Debian based distros will be familiar with.

The Mint Update Manager is installed to handle software updates. There's usually an icon in the system tray indicating the status of your system's packages. The Mint Update Manager can be found under the Administration menu or within the Control Center.

For those who prefer to manage software packages from the command line, the standard tools of apt-get, aptitude, and dpkg are all available.

Suspend, Hibernate, and Resume

In my review of Linux Mint 13 "Maya" I had noted that while the system appeared to resume properly from suspend to RAM or hibernate, my wifi connection would not work without a reboot. I'm happy to report that the issue has been resolved in Linux Mint 14. Everything is working properly for me after resuming the system.

Conclusions

Linux Mint 14 "Nadia", MATE Edition is another solid release from the Linux Mint team. It's fast and responsive, even on my netbook, but it still includes most of the latest and full functionality software one would expect from a modern Linux distribution. I would not hesitate to recommend it to someone whether they are new to Linux or a seasoned Linux vet.

This review originally appeared on tuxtweaks.com at http://tuxtweaks.com/2013/01/review-linux-mint-14-mate-edition

The post Review: Linux Mint 14 MATE Edition appeared first on Tux Tweaks.

My main computer at home acts as a file and media server for the whole house, so it's pretty much turned on all the time. There are times when I'm away from home that I want to remotely access or download a file from my home computer. My home internet service uses a dynamic IP address and every once in a while we get a short interruption to our power that forces the modem to reset. Of course, when that happens, the modem pulls a new IP address. I thought it would be handy if I could come up with a script to keep track of my current IP address for me.

Finding my IP address

The first step is to find out my current IP address. In my case, I have a SpeedStream 5100 DSL modem. The address of the modem on the local network is 192.168.0.1 and entering that address into a web browser will bring up a page that looks like this.

I've blurred some identifying information, but you get the idea. You can see from this image that the external IP address is one of the pieces of information displayed.

Getting the IP address as text

So now that I know where to find my IP address, I need to get it in text format and save it in a log file. The text based Lynx web browser is up to the task. There's a command line switch,  -dump, that will display the text of a web page to standard out.

Modem Web Page Lynx

So now that I have the web page in text form, I can do some further processing to clip the IP address information.

In retrospect, awk would have been an easier tool to pull the IP address rather than cut at the end of the pipeline, but the above command did the job just fine.

Automating the task

One of the things I wanted was to know when my IP address changed even when I'm not at home. So I figured the best way was to send myself an email which I could read from my smart phone or other remote computer. I use Gmail for personal email, so I used my procedure for sending Gmail from the Linux command line. I chose to set it up under the root ID for security reasons since the email account ID and password end up getting stored as plain text in the configuration file.

I then wrote a bash script to check the IP address and save it to a file called ip-address.log under /var/log. The script then compares the IP address to the previous one and if there has been a change, it sends me an email. Here's a copy of the script.

!/bin/bash

#Check to see if ip-address.log exists
if [ -e /var/log/ip-address.log ]
then
   mv /var/log/ip-address.log /var/log/ip-address-old.log
fi

#Get my current IP address from the modem
lynx -dump 192.168.0.1 | grep "IP Address" | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f12 > /var/log/ip-address.log

if [ -e /var/log/ip-address-old.log ]
then
   #Check to see if they are the same. If the same then exit, otherwise send email.
   if diff /var/log/ip-address-old.log /var/log/ip-address.log >/dev/null
   then
      #They are the same, exit
      exit 0
   else
      #They are different,send email
      mail -s "IP Update" your.email@example.com < /var/log/ip-address.log
   fi
fi

exit 0

Save the above script as the root user and save it to /usr/local/bin/get_ip. Of course, replace your.email@example.com with your actual email address. Make sure that the file is executable with

Now all that's left is to set up the script to run every so often. Linux has the cron command to take care of repetitive tasks like that. Since I set up my command line email to run as the root user, I also want my script to run as root. Edit the root crontab with

Then just add a line to the bottom of the file that looks like this:

*/10 * * * * /usr/local/bin/get_ip

This will run a cron job every ten minutes to run my get_ip script. Now I get an update through my email whenever my modem resets and pulls a new IP address.

A similar technique could be used to monitor all sorts of things. What kinds of tasks would you like to automate? Let me know in the comments.

This post originally appeared at http://tuxtweaks.com/2012/12/keeping-track-of-my-ip-address/

The post Keeping Track of My IP Address appeared first on Tux Tweaks.