Posts filed under 'Linux / Ubuntu'
Mark Shuttleworth presented an interesting idea on his blog yesterday that I would love to see adopted. I think this would be a great benefit to the FOSS world, not just Ubuntu, and I hope that there is some interest among the Red Hat, Novell and Debian crowd, all of whom I respect very highly. The benefits of synchronization would be huge. For what it is worth, I vote a huge +1.
There’s one thing that could convince me to change the date of the next Ubuntu LTS: the opportunity to collaborate with the other, large distributions on a coordinated major / minor release cycle. If two out of three of Red Hat (RHEL), Novell (SLES) and Debian are willing to agree in advance on a date to the nearest month, and thereby on a combination of kernel, compiler toolchain, GNOME/KDE, X and OpenOffice versions, and agree to a six-month and 2-3 year long term cycle, then I would happily realign Ubuntu’s short and long-term cycles around that. I think the benefits of this sort of alignment to users, upstreams and the distributions themselves would be enormous. I’ll write more about this idea in due course, for now let’s just call it my dream of true free software syncronicity.
May 13th, 2008
I get a lot of my news via rss feeds. For that purpose, I really like Liferea. Liferea is a consistently good feed reader and aggregator for Linux. I have used it since the 1.0 series and have always been pleased.
There is a stable version out that has been available for about a month, 1.4.15. Usually I can find a deb for new versions within a week or so from places like GetDeb, but this time around I can’t find one. The Hardy repos have 1.4.14, but it has a problem that causes the program to run away with my cpu, causing weird usage spikes and slowing down my system until I kill it. The Debian Sid repos have the new version, but it requires other dependency updates, and I’ve had my fill of mixing repos (I used to do that a lot in the Hoary Hedgehog - Ubuntu 5.04 days, mixing in Debian repos for the occasional program).
There is a bug report on Launchpad for the runaway CPU behavior. Anyone have any ideas on what we might be able to do to fix this, other than the obvious “download it myself and compile it,” which I may do anyway.
May 6th, 2008
I found this here and liked it enough to believe it was worth sharing, even if the picture is a little large and breaks the flow of my site. This is good enough that I have to share it. Yet another reason I love Ubuntu…if only I had a Hardy 8.04 disk to take my own picture…
April 29th, 2008
I failed to post yesterday during the main release party excitement, not because I wasn’t excited, but because I was so excited that I had already upgraded all of my boxes when Ubuntu 8.04 was still in beta.
Anyway, woo hoo!!!
If you want to download the new version, go here. The links are at the bottom of the page. I recommend using a torrent download as it will be faster and will save some of the load on the Ubuntu servers.
April 25th, 2008
We have upgraded the Ubuntu Forums to use the newest version of vBulletin, 3.7.0RC3 and it rocks! There are a ton of new features, a new look, and still the same friendly, welcoming, helpful atmosphere.
The upgrade is a direct result of work done by ubuntu-geek, so he should get all the credit and thanks. The atmosphere in the forums is because of our members, who are wonderful and deserve the best looking and best working forums on the internet.
April 22nd, 2008
All the way back in October 2007 I made two posts about conky, a lightweight and highly configurable system monitor for your desktop.
I still use conky and love it. My configuration changes regularly, especially the colors, but you can get the basic idea from the config files I included in the earlier posts. There is one change I made recently that I would like to highlight because I think others will appreciate it.
Originally, and for many months, I had a line in the configuration that would query a specific website to get my public IP address. I appreciate whatismyip.org allowing people to do this. At the same time, the service has some limitations that I wanted to bypass. For example, you are limited to the number of queries per unit of time, and occasionally I would end up with a conky that included an ugly html page smeared over my desktop instead of a pretty set of IP numbers.
How to fix it?
I decided to do what any good geek would do and make my own IP query site. I won’t share the location, simply because I can’t afford to have 10,000 requests per hour hitting my web server. However, this is something that anyone with web hosting space can do. It is simple.
I just made an unbelievably short php file and uploaded it to my web server. Here is what it contains.
<? $remote = $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"]; echo $remote; ?>
Yep, that’s it. Put that in a file on your web server with a name like myip.php and test it out by pointing your browser there. If you get your IP address as the response, you are set. Add something like this to your conky file and you are good to go.
${color #FEB60D}Public IP ${color #FECE0D}${execi 360 curl ‘http://yourwebaddress_notmine.com/myip.php’}
April 16th, 2008
From the article:
The European Parliament’s IT department is testing the use of GNU/Linux distribution Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Firefox and other Open Source applications, the British MEP James Nicholson explained last week in a letter to Italian MEP Marco Cappato.
According to Nicholson the tests show this Open Source configuration meets the Parliament’s office requirements. It does not mean that Ubuntu will immediate replace the currently used system, he added. “This depends on long-term developments and needs and functional requirements of the Parliament. The stability of our IT systems is crucial.”
I think this is pretty cool!
April 11th, 2008
I know he got it from someone else, but I first saw this on Jeff Waugh’s blog. So, my turn.
matthew@telecaster:~$ history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
166 sudo
63 cd
62 ls
41 clear
22 rm
10 ssh
9 fglrxinfo
8 tar
7 rsync
7 man
April 10th, 2008
There are lots of good ways to back up your computer. I’ve used several. Lately, I am enjoying the ease, convenience, and quality of rsync. In typical geek fashion, I was perusing the rsync man page the other day and found some nice options that I hadn’t known about, so I started to experiment.
I wanted to back up my laptop to a portable, external hard drive, starting with a full backup, then going to incremental backups after that. I also wanted to make sure the backup was kept in sync with my local hard drive, but without accidentally permanently deleting anything from the backup that I might want or need later. Here is what I came up with, posted here mainly for the sake of my memory, but you might find it interesting as well.
First, to back up the entire hard drive, I need to do this as root. Since I am using Ubuntu, and because I like sudo, I just add that to the beginning of the command and enter my password at the prompt. This reminds me to mention that it is important that your backup be kept in a secure location, just as with your computer. Anyone with physical access to the backup drive will eventually have access to all your data.
Here is the command I used, followed by an explanation of the options I am using.
sudo rsync --force --ignore-errors --delete --delete-excluded --exclude-from=/media/disk/matthew-exclude.txt --backup --backup-dir=`date +%Y-%m-%d` -av / /media/disk/backup/matthew-laptop
Options used:
–force: forces the deletion of directories on the backup drive, even if they are not empty
–ignore-errors: tells –delete to go ahead and delete files even when there are I/O errors
–delete: deletes unnecessary or extra files from destination directories
–delete-excluded: deletes excluded files from destination directories
–exclude-from=/media/disk/matthew-exclude.txt: tells rsync not to backup files or directories listed in this file, which I include on the destination drive (my sample is below)
–backup: creates backups of files before deleting them
–backup-dir=`date +%Y-%m-%d`: creates a backup directory on the destination drive for those backups with today’s date as the directory name
-av: archive mode, which combines lots of great stuff together like preserving file permissions and ownership, and verbose output, which is nice for knowing what is going on
This is my exclude file.
home/lost+found/
home/.Trash-root/
home/matt/.thumbnails/
home/matt/.Trash/
lost+found/
media
mnt
proc
root/.thumbnails/
root/.Trash/
sys
tmp
That’s it. The first time I ran it, it took a long time. Of course, I have some 75 gigabites of data, so that isn’t surprising. After that, only things which have changed need to be transferred or deleted, so the process is quite fast.
April 8th, 2008
This is a pictorial synopsis of some of the highlights from the 2008 edition of the Ubuntu Forums’ April Fool’s Day celebration. We will see some of the obnoxious color schemes first. I apologize that my AWN launcher bar is visible in many of the shots…I didn’t notice that when I took them. Also, I had to resize them to make them a reasonable size for a blog post. I may upload the originals to the UF gallery later.
Next, you will see many (hopefully all) of the user titles and avatars of staff members who switched with other staff for the day. If I missed anyone, please forgive the unintentional oversight. Then, you will see an Easter egg that not everyone caught.
We will end with one user’s comment on the amusing and garish colors. There was a lot more going on, but this post is already going to include a lot of graphics, even after resizing. Enjoy!
April 1st, 2008
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