Logs from today’s class can be read here: http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2010/02/23/%23ubuntu-classroom.html#t18:01

First, open a spreadsheet from Firefox. The file will be downloaded, and opened as read-only in OpenOffice.org. Next, select Tools -> Macros -> Record Macro. This will create a shortcut that you can use on later spreadsheets.

Then do File -> Save As, and save the file as /tmp/temp.xls (Excel file format saves faster than ODF).

Hit “stop recording” once the file save operation is complete.

Save the macro under whatever name makes sense to you. I chose Save_as_temp. Note: your macro name cannot contain spaces.

Then click the down arrow on your toolbar and select “customize toolbar”.

Click add, and then find the macro you just recorded. I then clicked Modify -> Change icon and gave the button a new icon.

Now, whenever you need to manipulate a spreadsheet you downloaded in Firefox, you can click this button and strip the read-only privileges.

Mark Cahill is a web developer and Ubuntu user, and writes on how the open source movement is shaping the future of the web and how we do business. For more articles written by Mark Cahill, visit tiemonster.info.

EnableSendfile Off

According to the documentation, Apache tries to hand static files to the kernel’s sendfile to serve files more efficiently, but the kernel’s cache causes issues when the filesystem is mounted over the network. For more information refer to Apache’s EnableSendfile documentation.

There can, however, be a downside.  Suppose you didn’t allocate enough space to your root partition, or you’ve installed way more apps than you thought you would.  Suddenly your down to your last 100 MB, and apt-get upgrading to the newest release needs to download* 2GB of packages!  What to do?

Don’t Panic, there’s an easy solution.  All you have to do is tell Apt to download those packages to your home partition instead.  Here’s how:

1. Run: sudo apt-get clean to delete cached packages from their current location (most likely /var/cache/apt/archives)
2. Create a new directory at /home/apt/cache, owned by root.
3. Create a new file at /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02homecache with the following contents:
   Dir::Cache::Archives "/home/apt/cache";
4. Run: sudo apt-get update again, just to make sure you don’t have any syntax errors.
5. Run: update-manager to begin your upgrade!

* Note, you will be given two sets of space requirements, one is for the difference in disk space after the upgrade is complete, the other is for the amount of diskspace that is needed to download and store all the new packages while the upgrade is taking place.  This hacklet only helps with the latter of the two, if you don’t have enough space on your root partition for the new installation, you’ll have to delete some files or resize your partition.

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) introduced the new Indicator Applet, which lets applications that need to show indications/notifications to a user congregate all in one place.  Gwibber is one such application that makes use of the Indicator Applet, but the sanity check I mentioned above means you still get tray clutter.  Here is a quick, simple hack you can make to the Gwibber code to override this behavior.

1. sudo gedit /usr/share/pyshared/gwibber/client.py (If you installed Gwibber from the repos, if you’ve checked out the source it’s under $src/gwibber/client.py)

2. Locate the on_window_close method.

3. Comment out the line: self.preferences["show_tray_icon"] = True (Put a # at the beginning of the line)

4. Save and restart Gwibber!  Now you can minimize to tray without showing a tray icon.  Use the Gwibber entry in the Indicator Applet menu to bring the window back up.

client.py changes

I waited a few days to let the load on the servers cool down so I could try Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 out on my new Dell Inspiron 530 system. Intrepid was released on October 30th and I downloaded it a few days later. With this upgrade I went from an Athlon X2 3800 to an Intel Q6600 Quad Core system. This new system has 6 gigabytes of memory so I needed to move up from 32 bit Ubuntu to the 64 bit version. For those who don’t know, a 32 bit OS can’t address over 4 gigs of memory. So 64 bit is quickly becoming a necessity with the systems coming out today.

reprinted here with permission

Intrepid Ibex is not a long term support release. Support will only last 18 months for it. For those needed longer support, Canonical’s previous release offered it. Ubuntu Hardy Herron 8.04 LTS had 5 year support for servers and 3 years on the desktop.

Software Included in Intrepid:

Linux kernel 2.6.27

GNOME 2.24.1

X.org 7.4

Compiz 0.7.8

Firefox 3.0.3

Gimp 2.6.1

OpenOffice 2.4.1 (3.0 was available but not included in release)

F-Spot 0.5.0.3

Network Manager 0.7.0

Python 2.5.2

Mono 1.9.1

gcc 4.3.1

Hardware Detection:

There is not much to write about here. Intrepid saw everything on the system that I had plugged in. Graphics acceleration, networking, Flash cards, USB sticks, and my Epson CX3800 inkjet printer were all working. The last couple of versions of Ubuntu pretty much has had everything working right out of the box for me.

Creating a USB Startup Disk:

Before I did a hard disk install I wanted to try out one of the new features in Intrepid. Intrepid includes the ability to make a bootable flash drive right from the GNOME desktop. It is located under the Administration Menu. I used a 4 GB Sandisk drive to try this out. I like Sandisk for putting the Tux Penguin on the back of their flash drives. It is rare that I see anything other than Microsoft and Apple logos on computer accessories. The installer gave me the option of using up to 3 GB of the 4 GB to use for saving data leaving the remaining GB for the operating system.

The installation was simple and I was able to boot of the flash drive with no problems. Changes I made to the Ubuntu installation were, as promised, saved to the drive for later use. However, I did notice an occasional slow down on the system. It would hesitate for a few seconds and then be fine. I don’t know if the particular drive I using was faulty or it was because of the slowness of flash drives in general. In the past, I have tried using bootable USB drives with Puppy, DSL, and SLAX. They all seemed to be about as fast as booting off a regular hard drive. But these are smaller distributions that are not as demanding as Ubuntu.

For those Windows users who don’t want to partition their drive the Wubi installer is included with Intrepid Ibex. Canonical has included the Wubi installer on the CD since Hardy Herron 8.04. For those who don’t know, Wubi lets you install Ubuntu using Windows. The whole Ubuntu install is put within a file in the Windows file system (c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk). You can use the Windows Add/Remove Programs to delete this file later if you want to remove Ubuntu from your system.

Installation:

Before I did the hard drive install I needed to prepare the system using GParted. The Ubiquity installer allows installations using the whole drive or you can shrink a lone Windows NTFS partition to make space for Ubuntu. But I had Vista system that already had 3 primary partitions (Dell diagnostics, Recovery, and the Vista partition) and I need to add a 4th partition which needed to be setup as an extended partition so I could go beyond having just 4 partitions on the drive. So I had to do some prep work in GParted before running the Ubiquity installer. I wanted the Windows install to take up about 200 GB of the drive and leave the rest to Linux. Using GParted, I successfully resized the last NTFS partition down from 640 to 200 GB, but it took over 2 hours. I can’t complain since GParted has been very reliable the many times I’ve used it. I’ve never lost data with it resizing either ext3 or NTFS partitions.

A few things I should mention for those who haven’t tried to move a Windows partition with Gparted before. Make sure the NTFS drive is not too fragmented and that you properly shut down Windows the last time you used it. After you move the NTFS partition in either XP or Vista the Windows OS is going to want to run a chkdsk to check the integrity of the drive. I had to reboot Vista twice for it to go through the chkdsk process and be happy with the drive again.

Once I had the ext3 and swap partitions setup I went and fired up the installer. The 7 step Ubiquity installer looks pretty much the same to me as in Hardy Herron with the exception of a couple things. They added some pretty color coded disk usage bars showing disk space left on my hard drive. I guess they felt Ubiquity needed a little dressing up. Now if they can just dress up the GRUB menu in Ubuntu. Ubiquity also includes setting up a boot without a login feature. It’s a checkbox on step 5 of 7 in the installer. While this makes things a little more convenient, you obviously need to have a your box in a secure location if you use it.

First Impressions:

Like previous versions Intrepid has a brown look to it’s theme, wallpaper, and GDM logon manager. There were some subtle changes to the looks though. The Human theme (now using the Murrine engine) has had some subtle changes to it. I noticed the GDM logon screen, while still being brown, now has a dark smoky look to it. The wallpaper has changed too. I’ve read other bloggers calling it a coffee table with a stain on it. In my opinion, the Intrepid wallpaper is more neutral and less distracting then the flashy bird in Hardy Herron.

Ubuntu Intrepid has also included a new darkroom theme that looks pretty impressive. I have, however, read other reviews write the darkroom theme makes it difficult to read text. The theme that I really wish had been included is the Dust theme. Check out it’s use with various wallpapers at the Ubuntu Wiki. Maybe they will consider it for addition when Jaunty 9.04 comes out.

Network Manager Improvements:

There are several major improvements for the road warrior in this version of Ubuntu. Network Manager now supports connections to Virtual Private Networks so you can securely login to a corporate network while out on the road. They have also added the ability to use mobile broadband via GSM/CDMA 3G networks. Unfortunately, I don’t have either a VPN or mobile broadband so I could not test out these features. They also have added a tab in Network Manager to help DSL users get online. I either use WI-FI or Cable modem to get online so I could not test this feature. The NetworkManager page has more information on the updates to the project.

Encrypted Folders Added:

Encrypted private folder support is now built into Ubuntu using a package called ecryptfs-utils. Installation and directions can be found here. I followed the instructions and had no problem setting up an encrypted folder on the system. For now, encryptfs-utils is only a command line based project. Since Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu are newbie distributions I wonder if they will come up with a GUI frontend for this. I suppose you could argue that when people start messing with encryption they are going beyond newbie status and should know some command line stuff. Either way it is nice having this feature built into the distribution.

New Guest Account Feature:

New to Intrepid is the ability to open up a guest session using the Fast User Switcher applet. Since the guest home directory is stored under the tmp directory changes made using this account will be wiped out on shut down. This account is well locked down so someone you loan the computer to can’t view your home directory or administer the system.

Nautilus Gets Some Tabs:

The version of Nautilus shipping with Intrepid, version 2.24.1, has full tab support with it. This is something other Linux file managers, like Konqueror, Thunar, or PCMan, have had for some time. You can create a new tab in Nautilus by hitting Ctrl + T or using the File Menu>New Tab. I find this makes copying and pasting between two directories a lot easier. Also new, the sidebar now includes eject icons of your mountable drives.

Eject CD-ROM Bug:

My system suffers from a well known bug that shipped with Ubuntu 8.10. If I try and eject a CD using Nautilus the tray opens and closes immediately, leaving me no time to take out the CD. If I eject the CD using the hardware button on the computer I don’t have this problem. The comments in the bug report at Launchpad said it was a problem with the udev device manager. They recommended upgrading udev to fix the problem. I can confirm this fix works, because when I grabbed the latest version of udev this problem went away.

Getting Plugins Working:

Ubuntu does not ship with MP3, Flash, DVD playback, and other codecs for legal reasons. There are other distributions, like Linux Mint, if you need that stuff working out of the box. However, It usually easy to get this non-free stuff working in Ubuntu with it’s services like the Plugin Finder and Restricted Driver Manager. To test this feature out, I went to YouTube to playback some Flash clips. On my old Athlon 32 bit system, Plugin Finder was initiated when I tried to play Flash videos and it installed Flash with no problems. For some reason I didn’t have the same luck with 64 bit Intrepid’s Plugin Finder. It did not get activated when I tried opening up a video in Youtube.

Fortunately, adding Flash 10 to Ubuntu can be done easily from the command line or Synaptic package manager. You just need to make sure you have the universe and multiverse repositories enabled. I was able to get Flash 10 working by typing in this line at the command prompt:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

I had a more positive experience when I tried playing MP3 files in Rhythmbox. When I tried to open up a MP3 file Ubuntu asked if I wanted the gstreamer plugin that Rhythmbox needed to play it. This worked without a fuss. I really like the Plugin Finder system Ubuntu has. Using it they manage to ship an almost entirely free distribution while giving people an easy (one click) way to add the proprietary stuff if need be.

Ubuntu also has an automated way to install proprietary drivers using the Restricted Driver Manager. I’ve used this successfully on other systems before. Fortunately, with the Intel integrated graphics on this motherboard I was able to get Compiz working with a free driver.

Synaptic Quick Search and BBC Content in Totem:

A new feature added to Intrepid was a Quick Search box at the top of Synaptic package manager. No need to click the search button any more for you searches.

I also tried out the BBC DRM-free content that is incorporated into Totem media player. The BBC and Canonical have teamed up to add BBC content to Totem. They had a good variety of programs available when I tried the service. You can access the content by clicking on the Playlist drop down box in Totem and selecting BBC. Unfortunately, not all content is available for people outside the UK. If you click on UK-only content in the US you just get a recording telling you don’t have access to it. It would save time if they could somehow filter UK-only content on the playlist to save people outside the UK time. It would also help if they somehow marked or separated audio and video content. All though I have read there is some out there, I couldn’t find any video content when I searched through the programs. The project is fairly new so hopefully user interface improvements and more audio/video content should be available soon.

Complaints:

One of the first things I downloaded after installation was Compiz Config Settings Manager. It is available in the Ubuntu repositories. I am not sure why they do not ship with this by default. It seems kind of silly to have all the Compiz features built into the distribution and then not include a program to configure it. I know people with lousy graphics cards can’t make any use of the program. But it leaves people who can use the bling with no clue how to use it. It’s features is one of the things that puts Microsoft Vista to shame. I’ve got Vista and Ubuntu on the same box now and having played with both I can say the Aero Glass eye candy can’t compete Compiz.

Starting with Hardy Ubuntu has a easy to configure frontend to Iptables called Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW). Unfortunately, while it’s syntax is really easy, it is a command line only tool. This leaves Ubuntu with no GUI firewall shipped with the distribution. I think this is a weak point for Ubuntu. Even more so with the number of laptops people carry around with them nowadays. Unless you want to pack a router in you laptop bag your going to need a software firewall. A new Linux user (Ubuntu’s claimed target audience) will not see any firewall in the GNOME menu structure. They are not going to be looking for a command line one since most Windows users only live within the GUI. In my humble opinion they should try and add a simple GUI frontend for UFW. Something like Gufw would be a nice improvement. Firestarter might be a bit overkill. If you want to try it out, Gufw It is already available in the Ubuntu repositories.

Lastly, I wish Rythmbox had a way of exporting/importing OPML feeds of podcasts. If one wanted to switch to using Rythmbox for a podcasting client this would make things considerably easier. Manually adding a couple dozen feeds is no fun. This feature is included in other Linux podcast clients like Gpodder and Icepodder. I’ve read Itunes has OPML import/export too although I don’t use Itunes. It would make the migration to Ubuntu easier if this were included. Here is an idea. Maybe Ubiquity could pull your podcast client’s OPML file in your Windows/Linux partition using the Migration Assistant. Much like it does for your bookmarks, wallpaper, contacts, etc.

Conclusion:

I have been running Ubuntu as my primary system since Dapper Drake. It is a fast, stable, and easy to use operating system. I’ve tried many Linux distributions and I find I have the least hardware problems with Ubuntu. There are complaints that I have with it, but they are few. I also appreciate their stance on free software. They run without a lot of the non-free drivers and codecs, but if you want they make adding them easy through applications like the Restricted Driver Manager and Plugin Finder. It is the compromise that is the most inclusive of both views. You get a choice either way. With the addition of programs like the Migration Assistant and Wubi, they also have added tools that make the transition from Windows as easy as possible.