If you are one who is constantly like to update your things in your net place then the best thing that you need to do is to install the Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1.

Once you install them you will be able to realize the change in your work place as they are great in providing excellent result. You will really be happy for installing it such is the facility and the flexibility that it has to offer.

If you are going to use them for the first time, then it is quite natural that you will not be able to understand many of its features. It will take time to know the applications and the other update that are present in it. Most of them don’t know how to update the software’s using them. You will be able to update the software’s whenever there is a new version available in them.

You will be able to see an icon on the window when a new version is available and once you have updated your computer they will then disappear. You will see the icon when the computer is booting. They do not differ a great deal from the 9.10 version. Here are some of the changes that the new one has

• You will be able to see the edge scrolling in the touch pad
• Notifications will be seen in the debug mode
• Breadcrumb control are updated newly with good animations
  
• The booting process is much faster than its previous versions.
• There are many changes that are likely to be implementing in the default software. You will be able to get numerous games; they are planning to add a video editor too.

They are planning to implement many new changes in order to make the software very useful for the people and they are likely to take place sooner

The Transmission is one of the best BitTorrent Clients which are available recently. The software is so good that people love it and the Ubuntu appreciates it by making it as the default Client. It has all the features that you need and is lightweight also.

The Ubuntu has a BitTorrent Client named Gnome and it is now being replaced by the Transmission. This Ubuntu torrent Client is being included in the 4^th Alpha release of hardy heron. In April 2008 a stable version of Ubuntu torrent Client 8.04 was released.

The most of the users after using the Transmission BitTorrent Client are more than satisfied and so there has been an increase in its popularity. The users feel that it is very fast and allows them to use it with less disk space usage. The cross platform product is available for all the operating systems and is an open source project. But it is not provided for windows instead utorrent is being used. They both are relatively similar and satisfy a BitTorrent user’s needs.

This is what the Transmission team words meant when BitTorrent was adapted by Ubuntu: “The Transmission software has been built with the goal of being lightweight but also being a commanding BitTorrent Client. It has a very elegant yet simple interface that allows you to work on any chosen platform. Transmission is the perfect choice as it would provide functionality without bloat and is well balanced.”

Since the BitTorrent Client is lightweight it can be used on mobile phones, routers and NAS devices. The clutch adds to the advantages of Transmission as you would be able to control and supervise the torrent transfer from one particular place. The clutch team has released v0.3 and further.

For more information on Ubuntu Hardy Heron you can go to Ubuntu Wiki.

The torrents have become one of the best ways to upload and download almost anything you want. The most preferred cross-platform named BitTorrent Client, Transmission had released a better version in the recent past. The newer version is much more advanced and would allow you to control your torrent from any web browser. It also comes bundled with clutch and loads of new features.

The multi platform BitTorrent Client – Transmission is totally free and has gained a very good popularity. The most of the software users consider it to be the best as it is fast and does not eat up large disk space.

The open source BitTorrent would run on any of the given operating system providing functionality without any bloat. The Client has exception of windows but on the ubuntu torrent web interface it is default.

The most of the windows users prefer the utorrent as their BitTorrent Client and they are able to control their torrents from the webUI which is known as web user interface. This webUI which is used for the transmission is better known as “Clutch”. There is a big advantage of this additional software as it would allow you to observe and control any torrent transfers from any of the websites that are connected on the internet by just sitting at one place.

When you were using the older versions of the BitTorrent Client the Transmission and the clutch had to be obtained separately. But it was all changed when the BitTorrent launched its new Transmission releases which are v1.30 and v1.31.

This is what one of the well known clutch developers – Gimp, had to say: “We are more than happy to announce that the Clutch developmental project and the Transmission project have become one. There will be no separate clutch releases from the v1.30 onwards and it would be bundled within Transmission. But if you have any older version of Transmission then you can download the clutch v0.4 from clutchbt.com. But anyhow that version is not supported any more.”

The Transmission version released last would work on the JSON-RPC protocol. The advantage of the new protocol is that other applications of BitTorrent Clients including the windows version would be able to make backend Transmission. The v1.30 and v1.31 of Transmission include enhancements such as:

• The compatibility to add or remove tracker addresses.
• Create .torrent files along with multiple tracker URLs.
• Includes support for FTP/HTTP seeding.

If you want to search for the clutch then go to ‘Preferences’ and under that click the ‘Remote’ tab.

There were few more additional words from Gimp to the community saying that: “Even though clutch has merged with the Transmission but clutch would remain a very new project. This is a new version of the Transmission with clutch but there is still room for improvement as there are few areas to be worked on. The people who make the usage of the clutch should go ahead and submit patches for improvements! But clutch does not have developer with enough time to work on clutch and anyone with good experience and time can walk in.”

You can contact Gimp at the clutch forums for recent updates.

Ubuntu makes it easy to enable automatic login if you're using a login manager such as GDM. I was recently setting up a minimal Ubuntu 9.10 system with an LXDE desktop and no GDM. Here#8217;s how I enabled automatic login.

Note: This was tested on Ubuntu 9.10. Previous versions of Ubuntu require different procedures because of changes to the way Ubuntu boots.

Open /etc/init/tty1.conf as root:

sudo nano /etc/init/tty1.conf

Change the last line of this file to (where USERNAME is the username of the user you want to log in):

exec /bin/login -f USERNAME < /dev/tty1 > /dev/tty1 2>#038;1

Reboot, and the user you chose should be logged in automatically after boot. If something goes wrong, you can switch to a different TTY with CTRL+ALT+F2 and log in normally.

If you want this user to be logged into a graphical environment instead of just a shell, there#8217;s more work to be done. Open your user#8217;s .bashrc file:

nano ~/.bashrc

Add the following to the end of the file:

if [ $(tty) == "/dev/tty1" ]; then
 startx
 fi

This code will start X (the graphical environment) whenever the user logs in on TTY1. You can add more code after startx that will be executed if the user logs out of X.

[via tombuntu]

If you're a GNOME Do user, you will have probably heard of Docky when it was introduced as a theme in Do 0.8. Docky has split from Do into a separate project and has become a full featured dock.

Docky is a full fledged dock application that makes opening common applications and managing windows easier and quicker. Docky is fully integrated into the GNOME Desktop and features a no non-sense approach to configuration and usage. It just works.

Docky hasn't hasn't made any releases yet, but the project has a software source for Ubuntu 9.10. The packages closely follow the current development source code and are mostly untested, so proceed with caution.

To get Docky, add the software source ppa:docky-core/ppa and install the package docky. To do this from a terminal, use the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:docky-core/ppa
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install docky

The Docky wiki has more on installing Docky. Docky will be added under Accessories in the Applications menu.

When you first launch Docky you will get a pretty simple dock on the bottom of your screen. You can drag and drop your application icons to rearrange them, and drag applications from the applications menu to Docky to add them. Pull an icon from Docky out and it will disappear in a puff of smoke.

Click on the blue Docky logo to open the configuration window. While this window is open, you can click and drag to reposition the dock. You can manage multiple docks with the #8220;New Dock#8221; and #8220;Delete Dock#8221; buttons. Click a dock to select and configure it, the current dock will glow blue.

You can choose between themes and hiding modes, as well as change the icon and zoom sizes. Be sure to check out the 3D background mode, which can also be combined with any theme for a different look. Also, the intellihide hiding mode only hides the dock when the current window would be obscured by the dock.

Docky comes with a selection of plugins (also known as docklets). An active plugin can be configured by right mouse clicking on it in the dock. All plugins are confined to the right side of the dock, and can be rearranged in by changing the order in the active plugins list. I'm currently using the the gmail, weather, and clock plugins.

I'm very impressed with Docky, but I'm not sure whether I'm willing to give up GNOME panel yet. Still missing from Docky for me is a plugin compatible with indicator applet, a volume control, a workspace switcher, and a main menu.

[via tombuntu]

Today, finally install Ubuntu 9.10. I've only to update the system for several hours, but everything seems to work smoothly.

II used my usual technique to install the new version of Ubuntu. I'm using a separate home and root partition. To use a custom installer Ubuntu partition and converted small partition using the new ext4 file system and use the old boot partition as the new boot partition. Setup has finished in less than nine minutes. Before leaving the live CD, opened a file browser (Alt-F2 and "gksu nautilus") to remove the old configuration files (files and folders from the period in your home directory). With the exception of a few applications I don't want to have to reconfigure, I moved the old config files in the backup location. This allows me to start new applications and application configuration, without having to backup and restore my data.

Ubuntu 9.10 is out for a while now, so surely everyone knows what's new. I'll just mention a few things I've found setting up the new system.

The default theme (and especially the icons) are much improved in Ubuntu 9.10. But I'm not a fan of orange so I installed the elementary theme (just the GTK and icon themes). I'm getting a warning that I don't have the right theme engine installed, but I like how it looks so I just ignored it.

The first thing I noticed after installing the Nvidia drivers and getting Compiz running was how moving windows around looked jerky. I reapplied my settings from Make Compiz Run Smoothly and Without Tearing to fix Compiz's refresh frequency and now it's back to being smooth.

I'm using Chrome for web browsing now. Before the upgrade I was using the daily builds of Chromium. I used Google's bookmark sync to save my bookmarks, but couldn't restore them because the official release of Chrome lacks the sync feature. I couldn't find a way to get at the bookmarks online (why isn't this integrated with Google Bookmarks?)(update: A commenter points out that bookmarks are available in Google Docs), so I copied .config/chromium/Default/Bookmarks from my backed up configuration folder to the new Chrome configuration at ~/.config/google-chrome/Default/Bookmarks.

I installed Ubuntu Restricted Extras as usual to install Flash, Java, web fonts, and media codecs. For some reason this didn't install the Java plugin. I installed 'sun-java6-plugin' separately to fix this.

After installing the latest version of GNOME Do I was pleased to find that it can now open my home folder. This bug (I think it was actually in Nautilus) has been annoying me for ages.

I added the new Wine PPA to get the latest versions of Wine. Trying to install the 'wine' package failed with a "unresolvable dependencies" error. Installing wine1.2 instead worked (all 'wine' should do is install wine1.2 anyways). There's a forum thread about this issue.

Ubuntu 9.10 has a little mail icon near the notification area called Indicator Applet. I'm using web-based mail and instant messaging, so the Evolution and Empathy integration aren't useful for me. I am using a utility called Gmail Notifier which integrates with Indicator Applet and Ubuntu's notification system. When I get a new email it pops up one of Ubuntu's fancy notifications and lights up the mail icon.

[via tombuntu]

The last few days I have been testing backup software to automatically backup my desktop Ubuntu system. I’ve only just got it set up, but rdiff-backup is exactly what I was looking for and seems to be working very well.

rdiff-backup tries to “combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup”. It’s a command line utility that not only gives you a plain mirror of your files, but also allows you to retrieve previous versions of your files using the extra difference data it keeps. This means you can quickly copy and paste to restore a file from your most recent backup, or retrieve the contents of files as they were at the time of any previous backup. rdiff-backup has built in support for network backups over SSH and is network-efficient and fast thanks to its incremental nature. It’s also possible to run rdiff-backup on Windows, soon I’ll be investigating whether it will work as a backup solution for the Windows systems on my network.

If you’re looking for an simpler graphical backup tool, check out A Guide to System Backup and Restore in Ubuntu. The rest of this post will go though how I’ve set up rdiff-backup to backup my home directory to a hard drive connected to another Ubuntu system on my network.

SSH public key authentication
If you want to schedule automatic rdiff-backups over the network you will need to use public keys with SSH so rdiff-backup can log into the remote system without a password. This assumes that both the remote and local systems already have SSH servers installed.

On your local system create new key pair with no passphrase for your user:
ssh-keygen -t rsa

Use the ssh-copy-id tool to give the new public key to the remote backup system:
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub '-p 2222 backups@192.168.1.40'

Finally, test logging in to the remote system without a password:
ssh -p 2222 backups@192

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The Eee PC 901 is an Intel Atom-based laptop, with 1 GB of RAM, a 20 GB SSD, a 9 inch display, and ships with Asus’ own Linux distribution. Since I bought mine, I’ve installed and used Ubuntu 8.10 and 8.04. The new Ubuntu 9.04 finally has full support for the Eee PC 901.

With previous releases it has been necessary to install a customized Linux kernel to add support for wireless networking, Ethernet, and more. In Ubuntu 9.04, everything is supported by default with the exception of some of the keyboard function keys.

The system feels much more responsive than it was with Ubuntu 8.04. Booting from bootloader to the login screen takes 20 seconds (35 seconds in 8.10). Battery life is approximately 4.5 hours (same as 8.10).

Installation is pretty straightforward, but here’s how I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my Eee PC 901:

Unless you have an external CD drive, you will have to run the Ubuntu installer from a USB drive (or SD card). The easiest way to create a live USB system is using Ubuntu’s USB Startup Disk Creator tool. If you don’t have another Ubuntu system, or the tool doesn’t work for you, UNetbootin is another option. To boot from a USB drive, press escape after starting your Eee PC to open the boot menu. Select the USB option and press enter. You can run Ubuntu’s installer normally, but pay attention to the partitioning step. The Eee PC has two solid states drives: a faster 4 GB drive, and a slightly slower 16 GB drive. Select the manual partitioning option and put your root (/) on the smaller drive and home (/home) on the larger. I also chose the Ext4 filesystem to get more performance out of the SSDs. You’ll be warned if you don’t create a swap partition, but I’d recommend not using swap to avoid shortening the life of the SSDs. Boot into the newly installed system and everything should be working

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For a long time it has bothered me that Compiz does not seem to run as smoothly as Metacity on my desktop system. With desktop effects switched off, moving windows around the screen would seem smoother. With desktop effects switched on, I’d also notice tearing in areas of the screen with fast motion including in videos. I was fiddling with Compiz settings recently and managed to fix the problem entirely. Now, if your graphics card struggles to run Compiz this will probably not help you. But if you have a decent graphics card (mine is a nVidia GeForce 8600 GT) give this a try if you have noticed this problem.

If you haven’t already, you’ll need to install the advanced Compiz configuration utility. Install CompizConfig Settings Manager from the package compizconfig-settings-manager (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Start CCSM from System->Preferences->CompizConfig Settings Manager. Under the category General, select General Options. Select the Display Settings tab. De-select the Detect Refresh Rate option. Set the Refresh Rate option to match the vertical refresh rate of your display. (I checked my monitor’s on-screen display to verify that it was running 60 Hz.) Finally, select the Sync To VBlank option.

These settings should take effect immediately. If Compiz is still not completely smooth, it won’t hurt to turn the refresh rate up higher.

[via tombuntu]

I’ve been using a small utility called eee-control on my Asus Eee PC 901 netbook with Ubuntu. eee-control lets you take control of the hardware on Eee PCs. Some of these controls, like the performance modes, were easily accessible in the default Asus Linux distribution but not from Ubuntu. It includes:

• on/off toggles for the wifi and bluetooth radios, the camera, and the SD card reader
• front-side bus performance modes including over and under clocking
• sensor readings for temperature, fan level, and fan RPM
• hotkey setup for extra buttons
• smarter fan control

I would absolutely recommend eee-control to anyone using Linux on an Eee PC. Be sure to turn on the smart fan control feature because with it my system is much quieter and even silent at times. By turning off the wireless radios and using powersave mode I can now push my Eee PC 901 to six hours of battery life.

Installing eee-control on Ubuntu is easy. Download and install the latest deb package provided by the author of eee-control. Reboot so that the eee-control daemon can be started. When you log in you should have a new Eee icon in your desktop’s notification area.

[via tombuntu]