Ubuntu 10.04 Code Named “Lucid Lynx”

The feature freeze for Ubuntu 9.10 has been in effect for a while now, so it’s time for the next Ubuntu release to be announced. Mark Shuttleworth has done this speaking to UbuCon at the Atlanta Linux Fest. The video of the announcement is from YouTube is embedded below.




In the video the code name for Ubuntu 10.04 is revealed: “Lucid Lynx”. As this release fits into the two year long term support schedule, it will receive the LTS designation. A few details about what this version will entail are given in the video. Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” will focus on GNOME 2 rather than GNOME 3, which will be adopted in subsequent releases. The server edition will focus on cloud computing and support for large scale web infrastructure.
Ubuntu 10.04 should be released in April 2010.
[update] Mark Shuttleworth has formally introduced Lucid Lynx in written form.


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Extend Eee PC Battery Life with eee-control

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.


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Make Compiz Run Smoothly and Without Tearing

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.


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Installing Ubuntu 9.04 on the Eee PC 901

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:
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Boot into the newly installed system and everything should be working. If Ubuntu doesn’t see the Bluetooth radio or webcam, these may be disabled in the BIOS. Install Cheese to take advantage of the webcam. If you’d like to be able to control the CPU scaling like in the default Xandros distribution, add the CPU scaling applet to your GNOME panel.
You may also be interested in my article on tweaking Ubuntu for SSD drives, although I haven’t felt the need to apply these tweaks myself yet because the system seems so much more responsive.


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Powerful Remote Incremental Backup with rdiff-backup

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@192.168.1.40

Install rdiff-backup
When operating over the network, rdiff-backup is required to be installed on both systems. Ideally both copies of rdiff-backup will be the exact same version. If your local and remote systems are both running the same version of Ubuntu, you can install it from the repositories. If you’ve got different versions of Ubuntu, there is a PPA available with the latest version of rdiff-backup for every supported version of Ubuntu except dapper. Unfortunately my remote backups server is still running dapper, but I didn’t have any trouble installing the latest version of rdiff-backup from source.
Write your backup script
rdiff-backup’s options are pretty easy to configure. Be sure to read the page of examples as well as the manpage as you write your backup command. Here’s my backup.sh script file for running a backup of my home directory:
#!/bin/sh
rdiff-backup --print-statistics --remote-schema 'ssh -p 2222 %s rdiff-backup --server' --exclude /home/tom/Virtual\ Machines --exclude /home/tom/Videos --exclude /home/tom/.gvfs --exclude /home/tom/.local/share/Trash /home/tom backups@192.168.1.40::/media/backups/backups/tom-rdiff
rdiff-backup --remove-older-than 1M --remote-schema 'ssh -p 2222 %s rdiff-backup --server' backups@192.168.1.40::/media/backups/backups/tom-rdiff

The first command connects to my backups server with ssh on port 2222 and backs up my home directory while excluding some directories with files I won’t mind loosing (be sure to exclude your trash and gvfs folders). The second command removes increments older than one month to save disk space.
Restoring files
rdiff-backup doesn’t require anything special to restore files; just browse to the remote folder and all your files will be there. If you need it, you can use rdiff-backup to recover files from dates in the past. Check the links I posted in the last section for more on how to do this.
Automate it
I’ve scheduled my backup to run every Sunday when I’m not going to be on the computer using cron. Edit your user’s cron file with this command:
crontab -e

Here’s my cron line for backing up. See the Ubuntu documentation page for help with writing your own. I’ve also redirected stdout from the backup script to a log file so I can watch the rdiff-backup statistics.
0 2 * * 0 /home/tom/backup.sh >> backup.log

I’ve just finished setting up this new backup system, so I’ll update this page if I find that I need to make changes. What software are you backing up your Linux systems with? I’d be interested to hear how many of you are using rdiff-backup as well.


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Use the new Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1

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
    breadcrumbs in Ubuntu Software Center
  • 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

Enable Automatic Login in Ubuntu 9.10 Server

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<br /> startx<br /> 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.

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How to Install Docky in Ubuntu 9.10

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<br /> sudo apt-get update<br /> sudo apt-get install docky

The Docky wiki has more on installing Docky. Docky will be added under Accessories in the Applications menu.
simple Docky
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.
3D Docky
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.

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Setting up Ubuntu 9.10

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.
Chrome and elementary
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.

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Download and Install BitDefender antivirus on Ubuntu with 1 year free license

This guest article was written by Vivek Kumar from LinuxHub.net, a blog focused on Linux tutorials (how-to’s), technology and news.
One great advantage of using Linux (Ubuntu) is the fact that you don’t really have to worry about security and hence viruses. However, this does not mean that you should not use an anti-virus on your Ubuntu machine. Especially when you can get a good anit-virus for free. BitDefender for Unices is one such anti-virus solution for Linux and you can get it for free. Let’s see how to get a free license of BitDefender anti-virus for your Ubuntu machine and how to install it on your Ubuntu machine.

BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices is a versatile on-demand scanner built for Linux and FreeBSD systems. It provides antivirus and antispyware scanning for both UNIX-based and Windows-based partitions.

BitDefender Antivirus Scanner for Unices is highly customizable and capable of script and extension-based integration with various applications such as file managers and mail clients.
Get a free home license for BitDefender
Before we download and install BitDefender on Ubuntu, let’s first get a free license copy of BitDefender. Please remember that the free copy of BitDefender is only for non-commercial home usage. In case you want to use it for business purpose please get a valid license. In order to request a free license go to the following page:
http://www.bitdefender.com/site/Products/ScannerLicense/
Fill in the information and accept the license agreement to get the license key to your email.
Download Free BitDefender Antivirus for Linux
  1. On the following page, click download, enter your details to download the free BitDefender antivirus:
    http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-80-en–BitDefender-Antivirus-Scanner-for-Unices.html
  2. Once you have filled the information the download link will be sent to your email address.
  3. Click the download link that you received in your email and click BitDefender Antivirus scanner for Unices (Linux, FreeBSD).
  4. On the next page click Download.
  5. Click EN_FR_BR_RO/ and click Linux on the following page.
  6. You’ll see many links on the page. Depending on the version of Linux and your OS (32 or 64 bit), you can download the files. In our case we’ll download the following file:
    BitDefender-Antivirus-Scanner-7.6-4.linux-gcc4x.i586.deb.run


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