ubuntu snippets

moovida - A media center solution that won't allow you to watch movies.

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:52:00 +0000

I am not really a fan of media center software but I wanted to organize all of my media in one location and play them as I pleased. I installed elisa as I once tried beta version of it with it's impressive user interface animation capabilities. Weird but I don't see Elisa entry any where in Ubuntu menu. Package info showed it only contains documentation files and README revealed some off-world creature called moovida.

The fun starts

Started moovida and it showed some vertical areas divided into movies, videos, music, etc. Now all I have to do is add my USB drive to moovida so that it will show some play lists but I couldn't find any option. Instead it scanned some random locations and added some random videos to "Unclassified Videos" in Videos section and I throughly verified whether they are by mistake "Area-51 alien interrogation videos". I couldn't find any option that said add a folder or add file or anything that remotely implied "import your sxxx". At this point of time I was really pissed and started googling how to add videos and it didn't give any results ever after adding f word.

After some googling...

Found it's the section called "Devices & Shares" where you add your media. After digging thorough it and losing all my patience I just started installing "XBMC" hoping it will let me add my media and give me feedback on what it's doing.

Fix unresponsive widgets in eclipse on ubuntu karmic

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:47:00 +0000

Execute following command before running eclipse. This bug affects wizards, button clicks, etc...

export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1

apt-cacher-ng - chache deb packages and sources.

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:42:00 +0000

To this date installing apt-cacher-ng is the most simple way to setup apt proxy in ubuntu.

Install apt-cacher-ng

sudo apt-get -y install apt-cacher-ng

Lets call the system which has apt-cacher-ng as server and other systems that are going to use this cache as client.

After installing the apt-cacher-ng on the server you have to make sure server it self uses this apt-proxy. You can do this by creating a file called /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01proxy and enter following line and save the file.

Acquire::http { Proxy "http://127.0.0.1:3142"; };

Now open terminal in client systems and create the same /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/01proxy file and enter the following code and save the file.

Acquire::http { Proxy "http://<server ip address>:3142"; };

Replace "< server ip address >" with real server ip address.

That's it all your apt fetch and updates will go through your apt proxy and you will save tons of bandwidth if you have multiple systems at work or home.

nethogs - Monitoring per application bandwidth usage on ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:38:00 +0000

nethogs allows you to see which application is consuming your network bandwidth. It has conventional interface like top command so lot of details about each process is displayed in tabular format. nethogs is available in ubuntu universe so no need of adding extra repo lines.

Install nethogs

sudo apt-get -y install nethogs

Usage

sudo nethogs <network interface name for eg: eth1>

SmarterFox : Imporove your browsing experience

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:30:00 +0000

SmarterFox learns site pagination systems and allows you to view other pages without even a single click.

These are the features offered by SmarterFox.

SmarterFox makes your address bar smarter by integrating Google search with awesome bar(address bar).
Save flash based content.
There is a quick launcher which allows you to open your favorite sites.
Search selected text in Google, Wikipedia and other sites.

Vim key bindings for gedit

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:34:00 +0000

There is a plugin called vigedit which provides vi emulation for gedit.

First execute following command to checkout the source from bazaar repo.

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~tristil/vigedit/main-method

Now go inside main-method folder and execute following command.

python install.py

Now open your gedit and goto Edit > Preferences > Plugins and check vigedit. Your gedit will turn into basic vi editor.

PySide : Nokia's offical python bindings for QT

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:31:00 +0000

Nokia started working on providing official python bindings for QT after talks with PyQt creators riverbank failed.

The new API is called PySide and it's available under LGPL license and going to maintain API compatibility with PyQt thus ensuing porting of existing PyQt applications with minimal or no changes. Nokia is going to provide pyside as an alternative option to develop mobile applications for next Maemeo 5 devices.

Get pyside

Getting KDE 4.3 on Ubuntu Jaunty

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:42:00 +0000

Add following two lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/staging/ubuntu jaunty main

Execute following command to setup GPG keys and to update your apt package meta data.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 8AC93F7A
sudo apt-get update

If you already have previous version of KDE execute following command.

sudo apt-get -y dist-upgrade

If you don't have any KDE version already installed then execute following command.

sudo apt-get -y install kubuntu-desktop

Unknown Horizons - RTS Game

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:10:00 +0000

Unknown Horizons is a RTS game focused on building your city and its economy, commerce.

Install Unknown Horizon

Add following source to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

deb http://deb.unknown-horizons.org/ release main

Install GPG keys of the repo to confirm package authenticity.

wget http://deb.unknown-horizons.org/key && sudo apt-key add key

Now update your apt cache to fetch info about new packages and install Unknwn Horizons game.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install unknown-horizons

State of netbook offerings and politics

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:03:00 +0000

We are seeing an invasion of netbook offerings from lot of vendors Acer,dell,hp,Intel, the list goes on with the impressive battery backup times. But everything boils down to either Intel atom processor with Intel chip set or ARM processor package.

State of Intel offerings

Many of Intel partners are competing against Intel using Intels own hardware. So to neutralize this threat and to make Intel offerings look much more attractive Intel is supplying hardware locked at lower frequency to its partners.

If you own an Atom based netbook with Intel hardware you may try GMABooster to remove these limitations.

Get GMABooster

State of Intel graphics

Every chip-set of Intel works well on Linux except chip-sets that use PowerVR based graphics acceleration. Since PowerVR doesn't have any track record of releasing open source video drivers, GMA 500 has very primitive driver support in Linux.

These are the things that I am able to uncover about Intels offering of netbooks. If you have more info on either Atom or ARM based netbooks please discuss here.

Download vm images of different linux distros.

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 07:43:00 +0000

stacklet.com is providing virtual disk images of most popular distros and also offering kernel packages with Xen support. Download them here. http://stacklet.com/

PiTiVi - An Awesome Video Editor Based on GStreamer

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:02:00 +0000

There is a new video editor called PiTiVi on ubuntu PPA repositories. It uses newer gstreamer packages with bug fixes.

Installation

Add following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gstreamer-developers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/gstreamer-developers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Execute following command to install gpg keys.

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 688F8FE67057C366AFA97270C0B56813051D8B58

Now do an apt-get and install PiTiVi package.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y install pitivi

Features offered by PiTiVi

Multilayer support.
Trimming/Cutting , Ripple/Roll, Slip/Slide support.
API for writing extensions.

PiTiVi features
Launchpad page for PiTiVi

FTP Servers for Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Thu, 21 May 2009 11:47:00 +0000

ProFTPd

ProFTPd is one the easiest ftp server to install and configure. Use following command to install ProFTPd server.

sudo apt-get -y install proftpd

Now open /etc/proftpd.conf file and change root to something like below.

DefaultRoot ~/ftp

Above configuration option tells ProFTPd to use ftp folder in your home for storage purpose. So don't forget to create the folder. Now restart ProFTPd using following command.

sudo /etc/init.d/proftpd restart

Now your Ubuntu FTP server is ready.

vsftpd

vsftpd is another ftp server which is available right out of Ubuntu repositories. Install vsftpd using following command.

sudo apt-get -y install vsftpd

vsftpd has numerous number of configuration options available and you can use these options to control every aspect of your ftp server. You can modify /etc/vsftpd.conf to change behavior of your ftp server.

Learn more about vsftpd server configuration options.

Enable Keyboard shotcut for restarting xserver

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Sun, 17 May 2009 06:38:00 +0000

Latest version of Ubuntu comes up with the handy shortcut to restart xserver using keyboard. Here is a way to enable that option.

First install dontzap package.

sudo apt-get -y install dontzap

Now add following three lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

Section “ServerFlags”
     Option “DontZap” “false”
EndSection

After restarting Ubuntu you can use Control+Alt+Backspace keyboard option.

QT Repositories

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:08:00 +0000

QT is officially available under LGPL and as promised Nokia opened up their repositories to outside people. You can now checkout QT code using git. Use following git command to get QT code.

git clone git://gitorious.org/qt/qt.git

Official QT git repository.

Get Firefox 3.6

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:11:00 +0000

Firefox 3.6 beta 4 is in testing phase and it makes browsing a breeze. The following are the advantages of using latest Firefox.

Has native JSON support/web worker threads.
TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
Private Mode Browsing (aka Porn Mode).
Support for animation in XUL toolkit.
Better integration of web standards.
Many stability & security bug fixes.

Download & Install Firefox 3.6

Add following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Add PGP keys.

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com B34505EA326FEAEA07E3618DEF4186FE247510BE

Now update your repositories and install Firefox 3.6.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install firefox-3.6

Now start Firefox using the command firefox-3.6

emacs starter kit - emacs made easy

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Tue, 12 May 2009 19:45:00 +0000

emacs starter kit comes up with beginner friendly defaults and makes emacs learning much pain less. It sets some good default settings to get started.

Get emacs starter kit

Use following command to start downloading emacs starter kit.

git clone git://github.com/technomancy/emacs-starter-kit.git

Now start emacs using emacs starter kit.

emacs -q -l ./emacs-starter-kit/init.el

Benchmark, Get System Information

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:25:00 +0000

Hardinfo allows you to benchmark and get system information. Following types of benchmarks are performed to access the system performance.

ZLib
Fibonacci
MD5
SHA1
Blowfish
FPU Raytracing

These benchmarks doesn't cover all aspects of the system but it's nice to start somewhere.

Hardinfo also collects the following info and generates the html report.

Operating System Info
File system Info
Network Info
Hardware info (Processor, Memory, PCI, USB, Printers, Sensors, etc...)

Install hardinfo

sudo apt-get -y install hardinfo

Things to Avoid on Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:51:00 +0000

Moonlight

This is Linux port of Microsoft sliverlight apparently designed to compete with adobe flash. Silver light doesn't offer anything new that's not already offered by adobe flash.

Linux distros previously included some of the technologies that were controversial because they were widespread and to make interoperability easy for new users. We don't need this turd and it's not widespread.

Mono

Here comes another patent covered piece of junk aggressively pushed by Novell. Apparently some parts of win forms are covered by patents and could give ground for Microsoft to spread their FUD further.

Some of the applications using Mono.

F-Spot - An excellent photo management application written using propaganda software.
Beagle - A desktop file search tool.
Tomboy - A gnome note taking application.
And many more...

If you want to see Linux survive and not polluted by Microsoft's litter either use pure OSS counterparts of these software or prefer applications with GPL 3 compatible license.

Upgrading from Intrepid to Jaunty

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:21:00 +0000

Tried normal GUI upgrade using upgrade-manager -d command. I was told I need to download around 1.5G to complete upgrade. I wasn't surprised since I have 10s of window managers and other apps installed which I play around with.

First thing I did was uninstall everything GUI based and bring down the system to bare bones. I did achieve this by uninstalling kdebase, libgtk, openoffice and games etc. And did apt-get autoremove to remove unnecessary packages.

Since I don't have any window manager installed I had to do everything from virtual terminal. I used following command to do upgrade from CLI. us.archive.ubuntu.com was incredibly slow for me and I had to use tw.archive.ubuntu.com. Took me around 3hrs on 512kbps connection.

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

After completion of system upgrade installed default GNOME environment.

sudo apt-get -y install ubuntu-desktop

Surprises

Finally ath5k started supporting my atheros wireless chipset. nVidia driver was automatically installed and configured.

I didn't see any change in my system boot time. It was neither fast nor slow. Needs further investigation.

My system is now super responsive its either due to changes in jaunty or removing crap out of my system. :-P

iotop - Monitor Disk I/O by Process

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:49:00 +0000

iotop allows us to watch processes which are currently accessing the disks. iotop also shows I/O transfer speeds by process and thus it becomes easy to pinpoint what's going on.

Installation

Use following command to install iotop.

sudo apt-get -y install iotop

Now you can use iotop command inside terminal to launch iotop.

nethogs - Watch Network Traffic by Process

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:26:00 +0000

nethogs allows you to watch network traffic on the system grouped by process. It tracks both upload and download speeds. Has support for ethernet, PPP and supports both IPv4 and IPv6.

Install nethogs

Use following command to install nethogs

sudo apt-get -y install nethogs

Windows key as shortcut in gnome keyboard shortcuts

noreply@blogger.com (ravi) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:05:00 +0000

Ever tried using win key(super,meta) as shortcut in gnome keyboard shortcuts? It will take it as super-key and not modifier. Do the following to use win/super/meta/mod4(different names for same key btw) for shortcuts in gnome. Change Win key behaviour in gnome. Select "Alt/Win key behaviour" by selection doing selecting following actions. Select "Meta is mapped to Left Win" from the list.

preferences -> keyboard -> layouts(tab) 
-> Layout Options(button) -> Alt/Win key behaviour(dropdown list item)

Now select "preferences -> keyboard shortcuts " and select the action you want to change and press win+key as you do normally. You will see Mod4+key. And it works now :)

Lightweight Terminal

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 10:35:00 +0000

I like gnome terminal except with each tab it consumes more and more memory. Some times I can actually see system slowing down and perceived delays in terminal response.

Recently I stumbled on to xfce4 terminal which is similar but takes lot less memory, lightweight and responsive.

Install xfce4 terminal

Install the package xfce4-terminal

sudo apt-get -y install xfce4-terminal

Use following command to run the XFCE terminal

xfce4-terminal

Bleeding Edge Chromium on Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (vamsee) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:39:00 +0000

Chromium is the Linux port of official Google chrome browser for windows. Right now chromium is unstable and only useful for scratching your curiosity itch.

Install chromium

Add following sources to /etc/apt/sources.list file.

For jaunty

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

For intrepid

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

For hardy

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu hardy main

Now execute following commands to install chromium.

sudo apt-get -y update && sudo apt-get -y --force-yes install chromium-browser