Learning Ubuntu #5 - Flash, Gnome Terminal

1. After looking around at options to get flash working, I decided to try opening a terminal window, and then I ran "sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer". I shutdown firefox, restarted it, and it worked like a charm. Too easy! I loved it.
2. Ok, so I am not always in a GUI, I like a command line. So far, gnome-terminal seems fine, but I disliked the fact that it always opened a small terminal. I wanted to resize the terminal to a larger initial size. I had already dragged a launcher out to the Gnome panel, and it turns out all you need to do is right button the launcher, click properties, and change the command to read "gnome-terminal --geometry=150x60", and presto, nice 150 wide * 60 line terminal. Nice.
   

Learning Ubuntu #4 - Pidgin, APMS, Slow Internet, Grub

So, last night, I spent some time with Pidgin. Look under "Applications > Internet", and select Pidgin. Select Accounts > Manage Accounts", and add your MSN account. Really straight forward, and seems to work OK. I have a couple of issues where my logon drops, but that may be because I am having an internet problem - more about that latter.

The other thing I did was set up Pidgin to start automatically. That is also easy. Select "System > Preferences > Startup Applications", click add, hit Alt+F2, scroll down to make sure the command name is "pidgin", hit cancel, fill in the name you want and set the command to "pidgin", click add, click close. Your done.

The other thing I did was fool around for an hour or so with power management. I mean that I was trying to get hibernate and suspend to work, including resume. Hibernate was straight forward - it just works. But, I screwed around with suspend and could not get it to work. Did a bunch of surfing, and found nothing that looked very helpful in the way of a fix, but lots of hits indicate the problem is fairly wide spread. It did sound like Ubuntu 9.10 might help, so I revisited power settings, and turned off all the suspend stuff, and just it the machine hibernate.

Next, I spent a couple of hours on my desktop with Wireshark trying to figure out the Internet is slow then fast - the good news is this is not an Ubuntu problem - reproduced on the Win XP machine. The bad news - I will have to talk to my ISP and get them to try and do something - never likely or very pleasant - sigh.

Also, found this post about a GUI to manage the grub boot manger: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Jaunty#Use_Startup_Manager_to_change_Grub_settings - will give it a try, and report back! Two more things:

1. Per http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Jaunty#GRUB_boot_manager_settings you need to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to change descriptions and stuff like that.
2. I am a GUI guy, and wanted to do that from the Nautilus file browser, but you need to be root. Turns out to be simple - right click the file, select "open with other application", and specify "gksudo gedit". There may be ways to improve this
   

Learning Ubuntu #3 - Firefox, Mplayer, Update Manager, Misc

A few more things today:

1. To upgrade Firefox to 3.5.1, go to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FirefoxNewVersion , and click on the "install the following package: firefox-3.5. Firefox 3.5 will be installed alongside Firefox 3.0" link. After this finishes, you will see on the "Applications > Internet" menu, a new application named "Shiretoko", and that is Firefox 3.5. A couple of things left to do:
1. Go to "System > Preferences > Prefered Application", change the browser setting to custom, and set the command text to "firefox-3.5 -new-tab "%s""
2. Right button the firefox icon on the lauchpad, and delete it. Then, from "Applications > Internet", right-button the Shiretoko icon, and select the "Add this launcher to panel"
3. If you already did some profile changes in 3.0 that you want to save, then have a look at http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Backing+up+your+information?style_mode=inproduct#Backing_up_your_profile and at http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Managing+profiles?style_mode=inproduct
   
   
2. After a little research, I found that opening a command window, and doing "sudo apt-get install mplayer", and installing the mplayer movie player gave me a tool which would play back .wmv files. But, I notice that the application keeps issuing errors like "error overreading 55 bits". Not sure what to do about that. Strangely enough, I downloaded the same video again, and this time it played just fine, also Firefox now knew that mplayer was the correct application - good stuff - FIDO.
3. The other cool thing was "System > Administration > Update Manger", was really easy to use to download updates to keep the system current - good stuff.
   

To get Flash working, i tried to go to http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/alternates/, and it screwed up - i386 instead of x64 was the problem I think. So, for tomorrow, some key issues:

1. I am finding a lot of web sites really slow - so will boot Windows and check to see if the sites are slow, or if I have an Ubuntu issue.
2. Will try flash again.
3. While I am in Windows, I will look up my Windows IM credentials, and try and get Pidgin working
   
4. Also, in the above system update, I noticed that I got an update to power management - will see if that makes suspend work - I found the machine would suspend OK - but will not resume.
5. One other interesting thing, in this blogger window, every now and then my cursor jumps to an unexpected location - not sure if that is an unknown fat finger problem, or something else weird.

1. See you next time!

Learning Ubuntu #2 - Partitions, and getting started

Well, I am posting this entry using FireFox running under Ubuntu on my laptop. When I went to install the other night, the Ubuntu disk partitioning was not giving me the "Guided Install" option. It turned out that this was because my Toshiba L300 laptop comes from the factory with 4 partitions:

1. A small EISA partition - this is a hidden partition - not really sure what this is for - sounds like Toshiba uses this to store setup info based on the searches I did. Also, it sounded dangerous to delete, so I decided to leave it alone.
   
2. The C: drive, where Vista is
3. A D: drive which is empty and apparently was where the french version of Windows was, and which was deleted when I selected the language as english when I bought the machine.
4. A medium sized hidden partition which is where Toshiba stashes the recovery copy of Vista

So, because there were 4 primary partitions (which is the max supported), Ubuntu was not able to offer me guidance for partitioning. After doing my research, I became sure that deleting the D: partition would be safe, and that is what i did.

After that, when I booted from the Ubuntu CD I created the other night, the install proceeded fine, and I ended up with two new partitions - one for Ubunto and one for a paging file.

To make sure I new what was going on, I did a little research, and found out about gparted, and even better, I found out how easy to use the "add/remove applications" function is to use. I installed gparted, and confirmed that an extended partition was created to hold the two new partions, and all is looking good.

Spent an hour or two just knocking around in Ubuntu, and it all looks good. More to report shortly.

Learning Ubunto #1 - Getting Started with 9.04

The objective of this blog entry, and likely several more, is going to be getting Ubunto dual-booting on a Toshiba laptop, and getting it doing the things that I do day to day:

1. Surfing the web. Preferably with Google Chrome, but I can switch back to FireFox
2. File sharing with some XP machines, and Vista machines scattered around the house. Oh yea - with another Ubunto machine I built a couple of years ago as a web server.
3. I use OpenOffice a lot, so will need to get 3.1 up and running
4. Gimp - great tool for photographs
5. My other favourite tool for photos is Picasa 3 - great stuff for simple photo management
6. I use Google Earth now and then - would like to get that working
7. Gotta have Garmin Mapsource - I love my Zumo - great for travel - especially on the bike
8. I have about 12G of music - some AAC mostly Mp3 - if I have to - I can toss the AAC and rerip from the original CDs
9. Burn a few CDs and DVDs now and then
10. Current Python and Perl for some work stuff I fool around with sometimes from home
11. Wireshark, just because I am a geek
12. Sirius Satellite radio - I love the Outlaw Country and Blues channels.

Thats about it. No doubt, I will find a couple of other things I forgot to mention, but that is the basics.

I have used Linux off and on since early 2000, but this is going to be my first shot at making Linux my "daily driver". A couple of nights ago, I downloaded the Ubunto 9.04 64-bit ISO, created the CD, and was pleasently surprised to find that most everything seemed to work.

So, here we go. Tonight, I started by following the directions posted at "How to dual-boot Vista with Linux (Vista installed first) -- the step-by-step guide with screenshots". So far, the resizing of the main Vista partion seems to have worked fine, I am going to do some backups, and then off we go.

Mussels Marinara

This recipe started a couple of years ago with a recipe we clipped out the newspaper, and I started changing it a bit to make it fit our tastes.


I made it on Saturday night, and we both really enjoyed it. So, I thought I would write it down

Ingredients

• 1 kg (2 lbs) of Mussels
• 1 28 oz can plum tomatoes
• 1 small can of tomato paste
• 1 medium sized red pepper
• 1 medium sized Hungarian Hot Pepper
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh Tarragon - medium-coarse chop
• 4 Roma tomatoes
• 1 medium sized sweet onion
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 1/2 cups of Sauvignon blanc
• 1 tablespoon chili peppers (optional)
• about 1 1/2 cups of cilantro - strip the leaves off the big stems and toss out the big stems
• olive oil
• the best baguette from the neighbourhood bakery

Preparation

• wash and clean the mussels
• medium-fine chop the two peppers and the onion
• cut the four romas into bite-size pieces
• peel the garlic, crush with the flat of your knife, chop, not too fine
• I have a 16" wok that works perfect for this - but whatever you have that will work
• put enough olive oil into the very-hot wok, toss in the peppers, onions, and chopped garlic, simmer until they start to get nice and tender
• turn the wok down to a hot-simmer, add the tarragon, canned tomatoes, tomato paste, wine, and the chopped Roma tomatoes
• cover and simmer for 5 minutes
• add the mussels, cover and simmer for three minutes
• add the cilantro, cover and simmer for another three minutes
• should be done - check for mussels are open and look cooked - give another two minutes if you are not sure
• serve in a large bowl with the baguette on the side on a plate, have a soup spoon handy because the sauce is yummy
• you can skip the chili peppers - the Hungarian pepper has a fair amount of zing all by itself
• If you do not like cilantro, then use some parsley
• Also works great over pasta