earobinson

I got my Ubuntu Hardy Heron T-shirt Today. I will try and post some pictures soon. Maybe even update with a new hackergotchi.

Tags: Hardy Heron, short, t-shirt, Ubuntu

I know that this has been done before but it seems to go around every once in a while and I always have fun reading them. So once again here are my top 10 commands.

My Computer

earobinson@MinusOne:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
143 cd
114 ls
53 make
48 svn
34 svnup
18 sh
12 cat
11 rm
11 geany
9 touch
earobinson@MinusOne:~$ alias svnup
alias svnup='. /media/data/dev/scripts/svnup/svnup.sh'

Laptop

earobinson@NaN:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
138 make
82 ls
70 cd
41 cmake
33 svn
19 svnup
18 cat
16 man
12 ./A/runA
10 geany
earobinson@NaN:~$ alias svnup
alias svnup='. /media/data/dev/scripts/svnup/svnup.sh'

Girlfriends Computer

earobinson@Null:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head<strong>
49 espeak
7 sudo
1 vi
1 top
1 ssh
1 man
1 ls
1 history|awk
1 history
1 exit
earobinson@Null:~$ espeak "love ya baby"

Tags: commands, shell, terminal, top 10

This Friday I got my powered by Ubuntu stickers, from system76. They came with a nice little letter pointing me to ubuntu-ca.org. I did send off for these about a year ago but free is free so I’m not complaining and my Ubuntu CD’s always come fast so I’m not complaining.

Thanks to everyone who made the stickers possible. They look great on my laptop. Sorry about the picture quality I took them with my XO because my digital camera is dead.

Tags: mail, stickers, Ubuntu, ubuntu stickers

APT-URL is one of my favorite programs. The great thing about it is I can keep a list of programs I like on a website and easily install all the program I like on a new box, or point someone new to Ubuntu to the website with all my favorite programs. The problem is that with the personal package archives, letting users run there own repositories on launchpad, and many great programs using there own repository’s you need to add them to your source.list file before you can use any of those great programs.

My solution, let APT-URL add a repository after giving a warning of course. Is this dangerous, sure it is but we can take a similar approach to this that Firefox does, only let trusted websites add to the source.list file. So on a trusted website like launchpad you would get a message like “launchpad.net is trying to add the following repository” compared to a random website that might say “wiki.earobinson.org is trying to add a repository if this is a trusted website please click yes otherwise click no”. This would add some risk but the benefit to the user is huge. Please support this idea by voting for it at the Ubuntu brainstorm.

Tags: apt-url, feature, idea, install, repository, request, Ubuntu, ubuntu brainstorm, vote

Using gmails spam filters I normally don’t have a problem with spam. However my one email that does receive a lot of spam is my Ubuntu email address. Interestingly enough a few open source members have droped there open source email addresses due to this exact problem. Jeff Bailey has disabled his @gnu.org email address, and talked about doing the same to his Ubuntu address. Daniel Robitaille has also posted on the problem. Now I like my Ubuntu email address so I’m not about going to delete it but I did receive three rather “great” bits of “email” to it today (Ill only include screen shots of two).

What I thought was “great” about these messages was that they where “sent” to Colin Watson and Corey Burger. Yes they got the emails wrong but I recognized the name instantly. I did find it funny that I had “antecedently” received personal emails to the both. It would be great if we where to use google apps, to run the Ubuntu emails that way we could take advantage of google great spam filters but I know that wont happen. I guess for now I’m stuck reading emails about the sexual prowess of Colin Watson and Corey Burger.

Tags: email, gmail, google, Open Source, spam, spam filters, Ubuntu

I’m not really a gamer, I think this has to do with a lack of skill, its no fun playing Americas Army if you die in 30 seconds, and yes they have a Linux installer. One game that I do come back to every now and then is nethack, however just like Americas Army I still die every 30 seconds. My solution … cheat. I use two simple shell scripts (backup.sh and restore.sh) to cheat.

How to cheat

1. Save backup.sh and restore.sh in /var/games
2. Play nethack I use nethack-gnome
3. When you get to a spot you want to save, save and exit <ctrl + s>
4. Using a terminal navigate to /var/games and run sudo sh backup.sh
5. Reload nethack and continue to play
6. If you die or need to reload your save point exit nethack navigate to /var/games and run sudo sh restore.sh then run nethack again

backup.sh

rm -rf nethack.bak
cp -ra nethack nethack.bak

restore.sh

rm -rf nethack
cp -ra nethack.bak nethack

It would be really great if someone created a version of nethack-gnome with cheating built right in.

Tags: cheating, games, HowTo, nethack

I often recommend Ubuntu to people and recommend that they install programs like miro, and geany. Geany comes stock in the Ubuntu repositories and miro has great step-by-step install instruction for beginners, however as I make this post they currently have no official Gutsy support. When I recommend a program to a user I usually send them the command line install command sudo aptitude install geany as well as sending them instructions

Go to System, then Administration, then click Synaptic. From there you can search for geany and you should be able to double click the name then click install and Ubuntu will install geany for you.

In my mind both solutions extremely simple, but then I have been using Linux for a while now and am a computer geek. I was trying to set up ssh the other day for a friend and they where complaining to me about how on Windows they can just click the program the select run, I claimed that you could do the same thing in Ubuntu (with a deb file) but the claim was that the website (repository browser) was ugly, and well I cant really argue with that. Now that Geany is out I can go back to my friend with another solution and if they want to install Inkscape I can just say “here you go“.

The only downside is that currently adding a new repository is disabled, my two cents is that we should give the user a nice large warning then go ahead and add the new repository. Another anoying and easily fixed thing is that I was looking at the Ubuntu wiki for games yesterday and I thought “ohh I’ll add in some apt:// URLs so that users can just click to install games”, but currently the Ubuntu wiki doesn’t support apt:// URLs so I got them working on my own wiki, just to make sure that it was easy and started a list of my favorite applications.

I guess I really have 2 requests:

1. Enable AptUrl to add third party repositories, I’m going to download the code eventually and take a look at this and post a deb file if I make one. But It would be great if someone beet me to it.
2. Add support for apt:// URLs on the Ubuntu wiki.

Oh and thanks for such a great feature.

Tags: apt, expirence, firefox, gutsy, install, My $0.02, synaptic, Ubuntu, ubuntu expirence, url

In light of the fact that I am now bald, today I uploaded a new hackergotchi to the planet ubuntu bzr tree. Uploading the picture was easy, making the picture was a bit harder. This is my first time using GIMP 2.4.0-rc3 and it seems that the selection tools don’t work the same way that they used to. In the old gimp I was able to make a selection the drag that selection around in order to remove it. It would seem that in the new gimp the only way to remove a selection (That I my girlfriend, could figure out) is to cut (<ctrl>+x) that selection. On the other hand the fuzzy select still works great.

TIP: when using fuzzy select you can use the ctrl key to un-select things that you have selected.

All in all I would say the update was a success. I just wish I had had a larger source image, (The large scale version of my new hackergotchi is a bit jagged around the edges, stupid digital camera being broken).

Large Version

From Me

Small Version

From Me

On a side note it would be fun to make a web page linking all the planet ubuntu faces to there websites / launchpad IDs, any thoughts on this? (Update: it could be just like the gnome one unless we all ready have one?)

Also I have three midterms this week, wish me luck.

Tags: bzr, gimp, hackergotchi, image editing, Open Source, planet ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Experience

A while back I posted about my top 10 feature requests for Gutsy on the Ubuntu Forums. Gutsy has brought some great new features to Ubuntu many of which I did not include in my original top 10 feature requests but if I was to do it again I probably would. In fact when I wrote the original list I had a bit of trouble coming up with 10 and in my opinion “Allow Us To Vote (like ideastorm, digg, etc.) On Ideas Here.” while it would be a grate addition to the Ubuntu Forums is not a feature for Ubuntu and hence a bit of a cop-out. All the same with the release of Gutsy I think its about time I revisited that list and commented on that list again and congratulate everyone who worked on it.

10. [IDEA] Nautilus “Restore from Trash” - Still not implemented. This feature would be quite hard to implement and for me it is a very low priority, but I can see why other users would want it.

9. [IDEA] Modify the installer so that it asks for Timezone instead of City. - While this did not happen, as far as I could tell there where a lot more cities to pick from during the install.

8. [IDEA] Reliable Kill for Fullscreen Applications - I think the best way to do this is still <Alt>f2 then type xkill then click the application.

7. [IDEA] Auto removal of old kernels - Unknown so I will assume no. (kernels are removed during a dist upgrade, thanks Kai Schröder)

6. [IDEA] Bring back screensaver settings - The new screensaver settings manager is still being used, how do I change a screensavers options in this gui?

5. [IDEA]: Warning about disk being full - Nope, per this blueprint on launchpad this feature never got out of the idea stage. (This feature might be included according to Kai Schröder … Thanks)

4. [IDEA] External Monitor Support - This feature is now included, however using the propitiatory drivers nvidia-settings gave me more options

3. [idea] Fix the delay when searching in Synaptic - It feels faster, but then this is a fresh install.

2. [IDEA] Graphical Frontend for xorgconfig (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg) - This works really well. I’m really glad to see this feature.

1. Allow Us To Vote (like ideastorm, digg, etc.) On Ideas Here. - As I said before this is a cop-out and It has not been implemented on the Ubuntu Forums, however the forum staff did a great job of communicating the forums needs.

So that gives us about three 3.5 (I rounded to three 3.5 because there was a few half implemented features ex feature 9) out of the nine (I’m not counting feature number 1) features that I blogged about all that time ago and that doesn’t even include the 10 rocking features in 10 days. All in all I think that makes Great Gutsy Gibbon.

Tags: features, gutsy, top 10, Ubuntu, upgrade

I’m quite a fan of stats, checking my most viewed posts is a bit of an obsession of mine. On of my posts that continues to baffle me in how much activity it gets is my post about ubuntu root access. This post resulted in a friendly argument between me and a friend during class. At the time it was a quick and dirty post to try and prove to him that linux was far superior to windows (lol, j/k, only a friendly debate).

In response to that post so long ago I now want to post about SUM (Screenshots). SUM lets you control your boot settings, including your boot password, from a GUI. For anyone interested you can get SUM here, or if you use propensity you can import this .pa file.

Tags: Linux, password, Propensity, root, security, start up manager, stats, sum, Ubuntu, windows