Work has been keeping on my toes lately and posts are few and far between. However I did have some time try out the upcoming Ubuntu release and I am actually very excited about the release. I tried out the Alpha 5 late last month and then the Beta I have running now on a spare machine.

Overall I think it is going to be a solid release; one of the best in a while for Ubuntu. It seems like they are really trying to push things forward in this release. Below are some of the features note.

Software Center

One of the new additions to the Ubuntu desktop is a new replacement for the Add/Remove program. It sounds like they are trying to integrate all of the various applications used to install and update software. However the software center has a lot of work yet to be done on it and it remains to be seen how well this application will be a real replacement for Synaptic, the Update Manager and apt-get.

This interface is a lot nicer than the old application for finding and installing software. You can actually get halfway decent details about an application before you choose to install it. Also you can queue up applications you want to install as you go instead of having to mark them all and then run it all at once, feels a lot more streamlined.

They also are playing with the idea of presenting commercial software in the software center. This seems like a good possibility for Canonical to monetize their Linux offering by running a pay for commercial repository. I don't think we will really see any of this in this release, so we will have to wait to see where this goes.

PulseAudio

They finally seem to be trying to properly integrate PulseAudio. The default sound preferences seems to support a much more robust set of sound preferences. I haven't really had a chance to put the sound system through its paces yet because the machine I am testing on doesn't have a microphone or anything to test out Skype on. The real test will come after the release and I upgrade all my machines.

Look

With every release they keep slowly getting closer and closer to something decent for a default theme for Ubuntu. This time they have opted for something a little darker and on the whole it is a little more attractive. However the default background on the Beta is ugly as can be. On the other hand the the boot up and login screens look great.

And of course, as always you can customize it to no end.

Boot

The boot time seems remarkably fast. Also the look and amount of polish on the whole process is really impressive. The startup splash screen is really slick looking and the way the login window fades into the desktop gives the whole desktop startup experience a level of polish that you don't see in any other operating system to date.

I wanted to try out the Fedora LiveCD on my netbook, however I really only use Ubuntu and the utility on Ubuntu to create a USB boot disk only supports converting an Ubuntu ISO.

I figured out how to convert the Fedora ISO and get it onto a USB stuck from within Ubuntu. The steps follow:

1. Download the Fedora LiveCD ISO.
2. Insert the USB stick and format it to ext2 using the Partition Editor (under System - Administration - Partition Editor; you may need to install it).
3. Double click on the ISO and copy the file LiveOS/livecd-iso-to-disk from the ISO onto the Desktop.
4. Use apt-get to install the package syslinux.

   sudo apt-get install syslinux
   

5. Use the script you copied off of the ISO to create the bootable running the following command.

   livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 512 /path/to/iso /path/tousbstick
   

   You will have to change the /path/to/iso to reference the path of the Fedora ISO and also change /path/tousbstick to the path of the USB stuck (usually /media/disk).

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my netbook and overall I am very pleased with upgrades, mainly in the availability of better versions software, specifically QuickSynergy, GNOME Do, AWN and Nautilus. I also really love the new administrative utility that allows you to create a USB install disc as opposed to having to burn a CD (this is huge considering the Dell Mini 9 doesn't have a CD drive). Also the screen resolution manager is slowly showing more promise.

However I am completely confused by PulseAudio. It still seems like it is not very well integrated into the desktop. It has been my process for the past two Ubuntu releases to have to disable it to get Skype functioning. Here is the guide I used to disable PulseAudio without destroying my install.

http://idyllictux.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/alsa-instead-of-pulseaudio-for-ubuntu-810-intrepid-a-non-destructive-way/

For reference this is the guide I used to get through the installation. Fortunately pretty much everything works out of the box except detecting the audio driver (thankfully it is a simple fix).

http://www.ubuntumini.com/2008/10/installing-ubuntu-on-dell-inspiron-mini.html

The way I got the Ubuntu 8.10 ISO onto a USB stick for installation was to download and burn the ISO to a CD then I booted into the live CD on my desktop then used the utility under System - Administration - Create a USB startup disk.

Also if you want to upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3.0, check this out.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/How-To-Install-OpenOffice-org-3-0-in-Ubuntu-8-10-96449.shtml

I have been playing around Oracle 11g and Microsoft SQL Express inside of virtual machines. I wanted to be able host these databases to other computers in my LAN which meant the virtual machines needed an IP address on my subnet. I am using VirtualBox to host the virtual machines and unfortunately bridged networking (needed to make this work) is not setup when you install VirtualBox. However I found this walkthrough and I worked really well.

The guide is written for VirtualBox 1.6.2 but it worked fine for me in version 2.0.4.

http://samiux.wordpress.com/2008/07/30/bridging-virtualbox-162-on-ubuntu-8041/

For quick reference the basic steps are:

Install bridging utilities.

sudo apt-get install uml-utilities bridge-utils

Change the permissions of this file so others can access it.

sudo chmod 0666 /dev/net/tun

Add the bridge to the networking configuration (you can give the bridge device a static IP if need be).

sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces

auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports eth0
bridge_fd 9
bridge_hello 2
bridge_maxage 12
bridge_stp off

Restart networking.

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Add a virtual network device to the bridge

sudo VBoxAddIF vbox0 `whoami` br0

Then you can in and assign the virtual machines networking configuration to Host Interface: vbox0. Something to note is that only one virtual network interface can be used at a time. So if you want two virtual machines to run at the same time using the bridge, you have to create additional ones (sudo VBoxAddIF vbox1 `whoami` br0, etc) and assign them to machines accordingly.

I finally got my big desktop computer organized and rebuilt to the latest version of Ubuntu. The computer has two 500GB SATA drives on it, so I also put Sun's Virtualbox on it and am now downloading Open Source operating systems like crazy. I have already got two Linux distributions and one Unix installed and about five or so more downloaded.

I want to get back into trying out all kinds of distributions again because for about the past year I have stopped hopping from one distribution to the other and settled on Ubuntu. So I am a bit out of touch on non-Debian based operating systems.

I have been taking some notes on my experience installing and playing with these systems and I will post my thoughts here as I get time.

So I accidentally added a misspelled word to the dictionary in Firefox. I wanted to remove it so I looked through the preferences and I even checked out about:config, but no luck. So I did a little research and found that in Linux, Firefox settings are kept in a hidden file in your home folder (like most applications) and your custom dictionary words are kept in a file in that folder.

The hidden folder is called .mozilla and the path to the custom dictionary file is: ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/persdict.dat

The x's represent the name of the Firefox profile and if you don't know what a Firefox profile is, chances are you only have one and it will be the only folder inside of the firefox folder.

One thing to remember is that if you just made the mistake you have to close Firefox completely for it to save the new settings to disk. So the misspelled word just sits in memory and you wont find it in the persdict.dat dictionary file until after Firefox has been closed out.

For Windows and Mac the process is very similar and is covered well in this Lifehacker article.

http://lifehacker.com/software/dictionary/remove-misspelled-words-from-your-firefox-dictionary-244497.php

Grep is a tool for searching through the contents of files on the command line. It can be very useful for activities like finding records in log files or searching a directory of files for specific content. Anyway, it is a very powerful tool that has many options which can make it quite complex to construct a useful command.

Typically when I use it always takes me a few tries to get the syntax right because I forget how the basic options go. So I figure I would record it here for future reference; so a basic search goes like this:

grep -rni searchterm /path/to/directory/or/file

The basic form of the command is the command followed by options followed by the search term and then where in the file system to look.

The options are as follows:

• r is for recursive, this way if you are trying to search a folder it will search all files in the folder and everything in all sub-folders too.
• n means it will show you what line of the file the the match was found. this can be useful to know if you are looking through files to find and change something.
• i means that the search will be case-insensitive. Which means that it doesn't care whether or not the match is made up of uppercase or lowercase letters. So if your search term is foo; Foo, FOo and FOO will all be a positive match.

There are many more options but these are the most useful typical options.

The search term cannot have any spaces in it unless you put quotes (or something) around it. You could also use basic regex (i.e. ?+.).

The path is the last argument and it can be a folder or a single file. If you specify a folder it will search the whole folder and all of its sub-folders, you can also use an asterisk to specify a range of files and folders.

Came across this website today. It allows you to customize and build a Linux install disc with your choice of applications, desktop background and various other settings. Your customized Linux install disc is based on NimbleX (which is based on Slackware). The process is somewhat limited in what options you can choose, but it is super fast at building your image once you are done customizing.

http://custom.nimblex.net/

Since I am talking about building your custom Linux distributions I will also mention a resource to truly build your own custom Linux distribution from source. This site is dedicated to producing guides that allow someone to gather software from around the Open Source world and create a Linux distribution package by package.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

I have been setting up Xen based virtualization and I just wanted to post the useful links I have found. Unfortunately (at the time of this writing) there are couple of bugs in the Ubuntu repositories for Xen that can make installing and configuring Xen a bit of a headache.

This article on HowtoForge pretty much gives you everything your need to get going (even how to get around the current bugs).

http://www.howtoforge.com/ubuntu-8.04-server-install-xen-from-ubuntu-repositories

This is the user manual for Xen. Unfortunately it is not very descriptive in places, but it is still a good resource.

http://tx.downloads.xensource.com/downloads/docs/user

This is the manual page for xen-create-image. It has some really great examples to base your DomU creation commands from.

http://man.cx/xen-create-image

Below is the Ubuntu community documentation for Xen. They still need some time to update to Hardy.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Xen

Sometimes it can be useful to give a computer a static IP address. I was working on a Xen cluster and kept having to setup each machine with a static IP. I am posting this here to help me remember.

Edit this file.

sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces

Look for the lines that should say something like the following.

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet auto

This is presuming you only have one ethernet device in you computer. If you have more than one you may need to change eth1 or eth2 (or whatever), depending on which one you are using.

Take those lines and make it look something like this.

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.168.0.150
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    network 192.168.0.0
    broadcast 192.168.0.255
    gateway 192.168.0.1

The 'address' is the static IP address that you choose. The rest of those could also be different depending on your network configuration and the IP address of your router ('gateway' is usually the IP of your router).

After you get that setup like you want you can restart networking to test it out.

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Then you can check that everything is correct by looking at the output of ifconfig.

ifconfig

It should show your device and the static IP address.

I was doing this on Ubuntu, but it should work for other distros as well.

Here is the reference link that helped me figure this out.

http://codesnippets.joyent.com/posts/show/319