minushuman.com blog

Using NTFS-3G on Ubuntu 7.10

2008-02-07T17:46:00.000-05:00

I recently decided to test out NTFS support on Ubuntu. I'd previously read good things about the NTFS-3G project (www.ntfs-3g.org) so I figured I'd test it out. My current system has two hard drives in it, one dedicated to Linux and all my data, the other for Windows (XP at the moment) and strictly for games and the occasional Windows-only app I may need to run when I don't feel like messing with WINE (Turbo Tax for example). Anyway, in a previous post I was using a SMB/CIFS mount to perform backups to, but I've had minor issues with it not unmounting correctly and with the Simple Backup utility just not being able to write to it now and then. So, I decided I might as well make use of NTFS-3G and my second hard drive, since in the end my main objective of backing everything up is in case my hard drive dies. They surely won't both die at the same time, right? :-)

So anyway, to get started, simply install the "ntfs-3g" package and its dependencies. Then, just add a line similar to the following to your /etc/fstab file:

/dev/sdb1 /media/ntfs ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=0137,fmask=0137,dmask=0027 0 0

So, just as before, the first second is the drive/partition I want to mount (/dev/sdb1), the second part is the location I want to mount it to (/media/ntfs), which I created in advance, then I believe the next part just tells it to use the default settings when mounting the drive and also tells it to use the locale of your choice (assuming it is supported by NTFS-3G). Next is the "uid" and "gid" options if you want to force ownership to a particular user and group. If you don't utilize these, the mount point will be owned by root. However, if you also don't specify the "umask, fmask, or dmask" then it won't really matter as the default option is to make it readable, writeable, and executable by all users. In my example, I chose my own user account (I believe it has to be in numeric form according to the man page for NTFS-3G) and group to be the owner and set the file mask so that it would allow the user read/write access and read/write/execute on directories.

If you like to keep things extra simple, you can also install the "ntfs-config" package. Then all you have to do is run the application (under "Applications" --> "System Tools" after you install it) and it lets you simple check which NTFS partition(s) you want to mount and where you want to mount it to (it forces it to be somewhere under /media). Then after clicking OK it'll ask if you want to make it writable or not and bam, you're all done. Your /etc/fstab entry will look exactly like mine above but without the uid, gid, and mask settings (well that and your partition and mount point will likely differ). I believe this app even creates the directory you chose as your mount point as well.

Installing the Citrix ICA Client on Ubuntu

2007-10-29T22:36:00.000-04:00

Here's how I installed the Citrix ICA client on Ubuntu 7.10 (and other versions for that matter):

Download the latest Linux client from here (get the tar.gz version) into a newly created directory.
Extract the en.linuxx86.tar.gz file (or whatever it was called if not this) from the directory where you saved it.
Now run the setup program from the terminal (sudo ./setupwfc)
Follow the prompts to install (or remove if need be) the Citrix ICA client. I chose to not use the defaults and installed mine to /opt/citrixICAclient instead just because that's generally where I install anything that isn't from an apt package.
If you use a non-default path as I did, the installer says you need to create the ICAROOT environment variable. I didn't do that initially and it seemed to work fine, but I eventually added this line to /etc/profile: export ICAROOT=/opt/citrixICAclient
Finally, to get the Citrix Presentation Server Client (the part that includes the Connection Center) to actually work, you need to install the motif-clients (and dependencies) package.
Firefox should be good to go with ICA goodness now, enjoy.

Setting up Azureus on Ubuntu

2007-10-29T22:29:00.000-04:00

Here's how I installed Azureus on Ubuntu 7.10 since I prefer it over the default BitTorrent client that comes with Ubuntu. I didn't use the "Azureus" package from the apt repository because it seems to grab all sorts of old Java packages and I had issues with it in the past. That was a while ago, so maybe they've fixed the issues, but as of this writing, only Azureus 2.5 is in the repository and version 3.0 is current. So, first make sure you have Java installed properly--I used the "sun-java6-plugin" package (and its dependencies) to get Java set up (mainly for Firefox use)--then follow these steps:

Go to azureus.sourceforge.net and download the latest tar.bz2 file for Linux to your home directory.
From the terminal and in your home directory, run the following command (all one line): sudo tar jxvf Azureus_version_linux.tar.bz2 -C /opt/
Next, run: sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/azureus.desktop
Add the following text to the new file:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Azureus
Comment=Java BitTorrent Client
Exec=/opt/azureus/azureus
Icon=/opt/azureus/Azureus.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Network;

Now you should see the "Azureus" shortcut under the "Internet" menu.
UPDATE: I just had to change the permissions on the Azureus directory in order for updates to work. Since the instructions above create the directory with only "root" ownership, I had to enter chown -R myusername:myusername /opt/azureus to allow the updates to work. So I guess if you have multiple people that use Azureus you may want to set up a group for those users that has the appropriate permissions assigned.

Ubuntu 7.10 Build Doc

2007-10-28T21:42:00.001-04:00

This is a not-as-complete version of my Ubuntu 6.10 build doc as a lot of the items are going to be the same and I've gotten a lot more comfortable with Ubuntu since then, so there's less for me to have to write down as I tend to remember more now. That and some of the items are not even needed as Ubuntu has made some good improvements over the last year. Anyway, here goes...

First, configure the apt repositories by either uncommenting all the lines in /etc/apt/sources.list or by using Synaptic to enable everything. I made mine look like this initially:

## Canonical-supported Open Source software (main)
## Proprietary drivers for devices (restricted)
## Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)
## Software restricted by copyright or legal issues (multiverse)
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted universe multiverse

## Recommended updates (gutsy-updates)
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-updates main restricted universe multiverse

## Pre-released updates (gutsy-proposed)
# deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-proposed main restricted universe multiverse
# deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-proposed main restricted universe multiverse

## Important security updates (gutsy-security)
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy-security main restricted universe multiverse

## Unsupported updates (gutsy-backports)
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy-backports main restricted universe multiverse

## Third-Party Software
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu gutsy partner
deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu gutsy partner

Install the restricted version of your video card if it is detected or if you want it. I have an nVidia card, so I just enabled the restricted driver and it downloaded the "nvidia-glx" package for me and enabled the "normal" 3D graphics. I bumped it up to "extra" under System > Preferences > Appearance > Visual Effects.
Install the Microsoft fonts package ("msttcorefonts") if you want them and configure Firefox default fonts like so (if you want web pages to look as they were likely intended) -- Proportional: Serif, Serif: Times New Roman, Sans-serif: Arial, Monospace: Courier New
I prefer to change my font style to "Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)" under System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts and then change the font sizes all to 9 instead of 10.
Set up time syncing if you care about that sort of thing (System > Administration > Time & Date)
I have a Logitech MX510 mouse and unfortunately the side buttons still do not work out of the box with Ubuntu. So, to fix, I had to modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file as follows (the bold lines are the ones I either added or modified from the existing file) - more info at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ManyButtonsMouseHowto:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7"
Option "Resolution" "800"
EndSection

You want Adobe Flash for web surfing, so be sure to get the "flashplugin-nonfree" package if you didn't already get it via Firefox.
I generally want Adobe Reader too instead of Evince, so to install that:

Click here to add the Medibuntu apt repository or for Gutsy...
Run (all one line) sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
and then (again, one line) wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
and finally, install the "acroread," "acroread-escript," "acroread-plugins," and "mozilla-acroread" packages to get Adobe Reader set up.
Finally, it appears there's an issue with version 8.1.1 from the Medibuntu repository. If you load up Adobe Reader on its own (as opposed to the embedded in Firefox version) it gives an error regarding "libgtkembedmoz." To correct this, go the main Adobe Reader window and then click on Edit > Preferences > Internet. Set the browser executable to /usr/bin/firefox and the libgtkembedmoz folder to /usr/lib/firefox.

If you want Java, install "sun-java6-plugin" and its dependencies (or "sun-java5-plugin" if you need the older version).
I'm not a fan of the default screenshot utility (Gnome-snapshot), so I install "ksnapshot" and its dependencies instead.
I use Azureus, so I installed it using these instructions.
I need Citrix ICA for work, so I installed it using these instructions.
Now that the apps I use are installed, I typically hide the ones I don't use from the menu since all the included apps seem to be tied to the "ubuntu-desktop" package. So far this includes (formatted as package name / friendly menu name):

evince / Document Viewer
gnome-screenshot / Take Screenshot
gnome-btdownload / BitTorrent
ekiga / Ekiga Softphone
evolution / Evolution Mail

If this was a fresh install, be sure to restore data via "sbackup" (in my case anyway) and reconfigure it to start backing up my system again. Instructions can be found here.

And that's all I have for now. I will update this doc as needed, if you see any errors or corrections that need to be made, drop me a comment.

5.1 Surround Sound

2007-08-19T23:08:00.000-04:00

I continuously had issues getting the various video apps to play back in 5.1 surround sound. Eventually I stumbled upon this part of the Ubuntu Guide and it solved my issues so far.

How to Backup Data on Ubuntu Linux Using Simple Backup Suite

2007-03-20T23:03:00.000-04:00

UPDATE: I've since decided to stop using the following SMB/CIFS mount to backup my data and instead am using the NTFS-3G driver and my local Windows hard drive since it is, well, local and thus faster. If you are in a similar situation and would prefer that to SMB/CIFS, then skip down to the "Backups" section after reading this post.

This document assumes you already have Ubuntu Linux up and running and is based on Ubuntu Edgy 6.10, though assuming they keep the Simple Backup Suite available in future versions I see no reason why this won't continue to work on newer versions.

First off, I chose to store my data on a remote Windows SMB/CIFS share. Why? Well, for one, I wanted my files on a system other than my Ubuntu Linux PC for obvious reasons. Second, the Windows PC is the only other computer in my home, so my options were limited. The following are the steps I used to set things up for this scenario:

In order to mount a remote SMB/CIFS share (the Windows PC) you need to make sure you have the "smbfs" package installed. Do this using either apt-get or Synaptic.
Next, unless you want to mount the remote filesystem by IP address or you have a DNS server in place, you should probably add the remote system to your /etc/hosts file.
Next, you need to either pick an existing directory (such as /mnt) or create your own directory where you will mount your remote SMB/CIFS filesystem.
Rather than doing a manual mount command each time the system boots, we will set it up to mount on startup each time. To do this, you need to place an entry in your /etc/fstab file as follows:

//remote_computer/sharename /mount_dir cifs credentials=/path_to_credentials_file,uid=username,gid=groupname,file_mode=0644,dir_mode=0755 0 0

Note that the above path is one long line.
Most of the line we just added is straightforward, however let me explain a bit. First is the path to the remote computer's filesystem, the Windows PC in my case. Then after the space is the location where you want to mount the remote filesystem, /mnt/windowsPC for example. Following that is the filesystem type that we are mounting, CIFS in this case, then you have the credentials file (created in the next step). The "uid=" part is only needed if you want to force the files and directories on the mounted filesystem to be owned by a particular user account. The "gid=" is the same thing, except this defines the group name that the filesystem will be owned by. The "file_mode=" sets the file mask while "dir_mode=" sets the directory mask. Click here for more info on the numbers that follow these parameters if you do not understand them. As for the final two 0s (zeros) on the line, they control how the "dump" and "fsck" programs work on this file system. I'd stick with the 0s (zeros) until you read through the man page for "fstab" (type man fstab to read it).
Finally, we need to create a credentials file at the location we pointed to in /etc/fstab. To do so, simply populate the file with two lines as such:

username=an_account_with_permissions_on_remote_filesystem
password=password_to_above_account

I named my filename .smbpasswd and also created a separate Windows account on my remote computer that I only use for this particular share (the account is just a regular user account on my Windows XP computer and has "modify" rights to the share I am mounting to keep it somewhat secure). I put a strong and random password on this account and entered it into the .smbpasswd file accordingly.
Now, you may notice that we just put a username/password in a clear text file. Obviously this is bad, which is why I used a separate, non-admin account for this. On top of that, we will change the permissions on this file so that only the necessary user (my Linux account in this case) has read/write permissions by typing chmod 600 .smbpasswd. When the paths in /etc/fstab are mounted, it is done by the root user, which can still read this file. Coincidentally, this fact is also a good reason to use the "uid=" and "gid=" parameters above in the /etc/fstab file so that the mounted filesystem is not owned by root only.
Finally, either reboot your system to test things out or type mount -a to mount everything in the /etc/fstab file.
Assuming everything above worked, you should now have a remote SMB/CIFS filesystem mounted and should be able to read/write files to/from it.
Attribution: Pretty much everything I've documented so far I learned from this site.

Backups:

Now that the remote share is set up, we can install/configure the backup software. As mentioned earlier, I chose to try out the Simple Backup Suite.
To install Simple Backup, just install the "sbackup" package.
After installation, you should see two new entries on your System --> Administration menu--"Simple Backup Config" and "Simple Backup Restore."

Select "Simple Backup Config" to configure the backup.
There are different ways to configure the backup and rather than go through them all, I will explain what I did and refer you to this site, which is straight from the Ubuntu Edgy Starter Guide section on backing up Ubuntu. In addition to Simple Backup, it also has a link to Dar and Kdar if you are interested (I did not try these out).
On the first tab (General) of Simple Backup I selected "Custom" as the recommended settings would not accomplish what I needed. "Manual backups only" also would not accomplish what I needed, which was to backup all my data automatically.
On the second tab (Include) I removed all directories except for /etc and /home. The first directory (/etc) is good to backup because it contains lots of configuration files for Ubuntu and /home of course contains the users' home directories and generally all the users' data. This is definitely the case for me.
On the "Exclude" tab I left all the default paths the same and even added one--the directory that contains my BitTorrent downloads. I only exclude that because it often contains large files that I only keep for a short while and are generally not something I consider crucial if my hard drive died. Plus, the hard drive I'm backing everything up to isn't all that big, so I need to save disk space where possible.
On the same tab, there are side tabs on the left side of the window. The "Paths" tab I just referred to in the previous step, but the next side tab is "File Types." I removed all the default file types as I have data of those types and want to back it up. I'm not sure why MP3 files are excluded by default since I'm sure the majority of users would be quite upset to lose their music library if their hard drive died.
On the next side tab, "Regex," I did not remove anything. It appears to exclude the directory storing auto-generated thumbnails of images from viewing in Nautilus, the Trash directory, and the Firefox cache directory. I don't care to save any of this stuff and you probably shouldn't either.
On the "Max size" side tab, I simple unchecked the "Do not backup files bigger than..." check box because I don't care how big my files are. If they are in my list of included directories, then I want them saved regardless of size.
Next, on the "Destination" tab I selected "Use custom local backup directory" and selected the path to my recently mounted SMB/CIFS remote filesystem. This selection is a bit misleading since it says it is a local directory when in reality it doesn't have to be. The default selection is truly local, however, so keep in mind that storing your backup files there won't help you in the event of a hard drive failure if that directory (/var/backup) is not mounted to at least a different physical hard drive.
On the "Time" tab, you can select whether or not you want to schedule backups to run automatically. My initial settings (I may change these in the future depending on how things work out) were to do a backup every day at 3am and to do a full backup at least every 14 days. I'd prefer to do a full backup every week, but I don't think my remote Windows PC that's hosting my SMB/CIFS share will have enough disk space to accommodate this.
Finally, the last tab (Purging) let's you set how long to retain your backups. Once again, I'm starting out by selecting "Logarithmic" (the default and recommended setting by the application) and will change it if necessary (e.g. if my Windows PC runs out of disk space too early I will probably just do the "Simple cutoff" option and set the number low enough) down the road.
When done setting your options, simply click the "Save" button and the settings are saved and backups should run at your scheduled time if you've configured it as such. You also have the option to kick off a manual backup job to test things out.
Simple backup will run a full backup the first time it runs and then do incremental backups each time until the number of days passes that you set on the "Time" tab for full backups to occur.

Restores:

Now that you've backed everything up, you might want to test the restore function. Just click on the "Simple Backup Restore" shortcut on your "Administration" menu to get started.
The first thing to do is to select your "Restore Source Folder." The default choice should point to wherever you told Simple Backup to store your backup files. In my case this is the remote SMB/CIFS filesystem we mounted in the first part of this post.
Next, choose from the list of available backups. Obviously if you've had a complete loss of data you'll want to pick the most recent full backup, and then restore each incremental backup after that.
The following screen shot is an example of a restore (the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in this case):

As you can see, there are two restore options--"Restore" and "Restore As." The first will restore the file to its original location. The second let's you pick an alternate location if you like. This is the one part where I found a bug in the software. If you try to browse for the alternate directory and click "Open" it still tries to restore it to the original location (it'll ask you if you want to overwrite the file if it already exists). So, if you truly want to restore to an alternate location, you'll have to just type it in the "Name" text box as shown in the next screen shot:

That's pretty much it for backups and restores on Ubuntu. One thing I've noticed is that the daily incremental backups are larger than I thought they'd be considering I didn't change any of my own data. However, the hidden directories such as .gconf, .gconfd, .nautilus, etc. all have files that frequently get updated. I may decide to exclude these from the backups soon because so far, my first two incremental backups have taken up 55-80MB of space each, so that will likely add up quickly and most of that data would be regenerated in the event of a hard drive crashing and having to reinstall Ubuntu on a new one. But there might be a configuration file that I'd want in there some day, so until disk space becomes an issue, I'll probably leave them be.

Finally, one thing to note is that the Simple Backup configuration file is named /etc/sbackup.conf in case you need to restore it some day.

Ubuntu 6.10 Build Doc

2007-01-27T18:09:00.001-05:00

This is an ongoing document that I plan to add to whenever I do anything with my freshly installed Ubuntu 6.10 Desktop (32-bit x86).

First things first, download the ISO for Ubuntu, burn it, and install. Go to www.ubuntu.com if you need help with this step. I chose the standard "CD Image for desktop and laptop PCs" i386/x86 CD (as opposed to the PowerPC or alternate install CD or DVD).
NOTE on install: On my PC (with an nVidia video card) I had issues with the graphics being garbled when the live CD loaded X. I followed the instructions here to fix it except for the RenderAccel part because I'm not sure what the ramifications of that is yet. The short version of the instructions is to switch to a different console and change the Driver "nv" section to Driver "vesa" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart gdm. I had to kill gdm as it did not stop correctly for me.
After successfully installing Ubuntu, the first thing I did was update the /etc/apt/sources.list file so I had access to more packages that I would need later. It looked like this afterwards:

## Main repository
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy main restricted universe multiverse

## Backport repository
# deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
# deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-backports main restricted universe multiverse

## Major bug fix updates
deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ edgy-updates main restricted universe multiverse

## Security updates
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy-security main restricted universe multiverse

Next be sure to open a terminal and run sudo apt-get update to make use of these changes. Note that this can also be performed by the Synaptic tool (as can the step above for that matter).
For the remainder of this document I will only refer to package names that need to be installed/removed and will not provide the apt-get command. Feel free to use either apt-get or the Synaptic GUI front-end unless otherwise specified.
If you had video card troubles as I did, you will want to update your video card driver appropriately (you may want to do this regardless). For me I had to install the "nvidia-glx" package and then run sudo nvidia-xconfig. Find more info on video driver installations here.
Some buttons with side buttons do not work correctly in Firefox. If you want them to work, find the mouse section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the following two lines per the instructions here:

Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7"

The next thing I did was set my clock to sync to pool.ntp.org. Just right-click on the clock, choose "Adjust Date & Time," check the "Keep clock synchronized with Internet servers" box, then click the "Install NTP support" button. After that, just uncheck the time servers Ubuntu selected by default and add or check whatever server you want to use.
Since Ubuntu pretty much sucks out of the box for playing any non-open source multimedia format, we need to fix that. Here's how I did it:

Install these packages per this page (note that I've skipped a few): "gstreamer0.10-pitfdll," "gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg," "gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad," "gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse," "gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly," "gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse." This worked for all the formats I was interested in except WMV.
To fix the lack of WMV, take a look at this page. However, I actually added a new "apt" repository so that I could get updates to this package if newer versions come along (assuming they update that repository in the same manner as the others that is). I ran the following two commands from this page (keep in mind the commands are likely wrapped but each is only one line long):

wget -q http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/repo/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sudo wget http://medibuntu.sos-sts.com/sources.list.d/edgy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Now you must run "sudo apt-get update" and/or press the "reload" button in Synaptic to update the list of packages available.

Install the "w32codecs" package that should now be available (keep in mind the legality of this package is somewhat suspect). After this, make sure WMV videos play now. If they do not (they did not for me) then run the following two commands:

rm -rf ~/.gstreamer-0.10

gst-inspect-0.10

An alternative to the above section is to install "mplayer." I used this on Kubuntu 6.06 and was mostly happy with it, but I like the Totem interface better and am hoping it works better for me.
Finally, what about DVD playback? First off, you'll need to get the "libdvdcss2" package to play many DVDs. Again, this package is of questionable legality so download/install at your own risk. This is found in the same "apt" repository we added for the "w32codecs" package. After installing this package, you have a few options for playback:

Stick with "Totem-gstreamer" (which is what we've been using up to now). Problem with this is that the current version doesn't handle the DVD menus or alternate audio tracks (it just starts playing the movie with no options). It also did not play back in Dolby Digital 5.1 on my system.
Switch to "Totem-xine". Note that this requires you to remove "Totem-gstreamer" and you will likely have playback issues with other media formats (when I switched it broke everything except for WMV).
Install "Ogle" or "Mplayer." I've tried all of the above and don't like any of my options, but I'm also running into sound issues right now and after wasting two nights on the problem I'm done with it for now. Besides, I don't really watch DVDs on my PC anyway. So I'm just going to deal with stereo audio and no menu support with "Totem-gstreamer" for now.

Next on the list is Adobe's Flash Player. You have a few options here:

Install "flashplugin-nonfree" and Firefox will have the Flash 7 plugin.
Go to Adobe's Flash Player site and download the installer for the current version (9.0.31.0 as of this writing) and use Adobe's install script.
Add the "Backports" repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list file by uncommenting the two lines under the "Backports repository" section (see up above) and then after updating "apt" and/or Synaptic, install "flashplugin-nonfree" which should be on version 9 now instead of 7.
Go to this page if you don't like my instructions.

Speaking of Adobe, you may want Adobe Acrobat Reader and the web browser plugin unless you are happy with Evince (I don't like its interface). Install "acroread," "acroread-escript," "acroread-plugins," and "mozilla-acroread" to get Acrobat Reader.
I'm also not a fan of the "Gnome-snapshot" tool (listed as "Take Screenshot" under "Accessories" menu) so I installed "ksnapshot" and its dependencies and just hid "Take Screenshot" because it is part of the "gnome-utils" package and it includes other tools that I actually find useful. Plus "gnome-utils" is tied to the "ubuntu-desktop" package anyway and I obviously don't want to remove that.
You'll probably want Java. Install "sun-java5-plugin" and its dependencies.
You may want to install the core Microsoft fonts package ("msttcorefonts") and set Firefox up to use them unless you want to be a big stud and shun all the sites that use Microsoft fonts on them. After installing the package, you can set Firefox up as it is by default on a Windows installation. It should look as follows:

BitTorrent client: I prefer Azureus to the "gnome-btdownload" client. Note that I did not use the "Azureus" package from the "apt" repositories to install because it tries to grab all sorts of older Java packages (older than the version we installed earlier) and it caused me issues on Kubuntu 6.06 likely because of multiple versions of Java being installed. So, do this instead:

Go to azureus.sourceforge.net and download the latest tar.bz2 file for Linux to your home directory.
From the terminal and in your home directory, run the following command (all one line): sudo tar jxvf Azureus_version_linux.tar.bz2 -C /opt/
Next, run: sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/azureus.desktop
Add the following text to the new file:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Azureus
Comment=Java BitTorrent Client
Exec=/opt/azureus/azureus
Icon=/opt/azureus/Azureus.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Application;Network;

Now you should see the "Azureus" shortcut under the "Internet" menu.

I like to use an application to store my web usernames/passwords and have settled on KeePassX (keepassx.sourceforge.net). It appears to be in the Ubuntu repositories now, so simply install the "keepassx" package.
Install Wine--If you don't know what Wine is, check it out here. I need it for one app I use time-to-time that is Windows-only. You can simply install the "wine" package from the Ubuntu repositories or add the Wine HQ repository and get updates directly from the Wine team. I chose the latter since they are more likely to stay the most up-to-date. Just run the following commands that were taken from here (again, keep in mind the commands are likely wrapped but each is only one line long):

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/edgy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

Now just run sudo apt-get update and/or reload Synaptic and install the "wine" package.
After installation, run the "winecfg" command to configure Wine before using. See the Wine documentation page for more information on how to use Wine.

Now that the apps I use are installed, I typically hide the ones I don't use from the menu since all the included apps seem to be tied to the "ubuntu-desktop" package. So far this includes (formatted as package name / friendly menu name):

evince / Document Viewer
gnome-screenshot / Take Screenshot
gnome-btdownload / BitTorrent
ekiga / Ekiga Softphone
evolution / Evolution Mai

That's it for now. If you see any errors or broken links, please let me know or leave a comment as such so I can fix it.

First Post

2007-01-23T21:22:00.000-05:00

So here's my first post. I have nothing in particular to say right now but I needed to get something on here. Read the "About This Blog" section to find out why I bother with this nonsense. Oh, I almost forgot...GO BEARS!