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…
3 comments 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.
4 comments 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.
8 comments 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’}
4 comments 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!
1 comment 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
6 comments 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.
17 comments 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!
5 comments April 1st, 2008
If you haven’t stopped in at ubuntuforums.org today, be sure you do. I won’t spoil the joke by telling you what it is. If I get some good screenshots, though, I may follow up tomorrow with pictures.
3 comments April 1st, 2008
I admit it. I have given a metric ton of different reasons for why I choose to use Linux. I have made lists. I’ve discussed tons of features. I’ve mentioned freedom.
Earlier this week I found a blog post in which the writer claims the real reason we use Linux is because it is fun. You know what? He’s right, at least as far as probing the real reason I use Linux.
This operating system has brought me back to my childhood, sitting in front of a computer with a flashing cursor just daring me to make it do something. There is very little that can compare or compete with the thrill of figuring out how to make this pile of electronics do something I want it to do, whether it is something practical or silly.
Yeah, it’s stable. It’s secure. It’s free as in freedom. I love all those things. The bottom line for me, though, is simple. It’s fun. I enjoy using it.
Thanks, Linus, for letting us all play along with your little educational toy that grew beyond anyone’s expectations. 
10 comments March 18th, 2008
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