Wiki: Unofficial Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) Starter Guide

A quick note about Ubuntu Starters Guide. A nice collection of how to migrate your most often done tasks to Ubuntu. A great place for a new comer to begin. Can be used immediately after you have installed Ubuntu.

Link: Unofficial Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) Starter Guide

More:

• Amarok: The 'baap' of all music softwares on Ubuntu
• Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) on my Sony Vaio PCG-K115Z
  

Flickr-ing with Ubuntu

Moving to Ubuntu continues (See Previous article).

Continuing my quest to move everything i am doing to Linux, an important step is uploading photos to Flickr - the photo management website. Its not like its a horribly complicated. As a matter of fact, its downright simple. Well, atleast in Windows, it is.

So, I fire up my trusty Firefox and navigate to Flickr.com. The Flickr tools section points you to jUploadr - a java based equivalent of the Windows-based Uploader utility. Hold on a minute! Did i just read Java-based .. ugh! Having been a Java programmer myself, i have learnt to appreciate the importance of native applications. The jUploadr comes very close to acting its Windows counterpart - but just close. It lacks features like uploading to a new album - something i always do. It also doesnt prompt me for tags when i upload. Instead it expects me to go into preferences and set them. Not very intuitive, scohen.

And yes, before i forget. It needs Sun Java runtime to be installed (that can be done with a: sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jre). In short, this (too) is isnt something a non-techie user can do on his/her own. And if you are unfortunate to have GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) installed, then this can get a bit complicated since you need to uninstall gcj first. I would have expected apt-get to do the job (sudo apt-get remove gcj). But nope! I still have no reason why that did not work. So finally fired up synaptic and uninstalled gcj from there. After that jUploader had no problems.

To make a long story short, Flickr-ing on Ubuntu is no where as smooth as in Windows. So, score plus one to Windows. As for me, i switched to a different machine (the one that was running Windows) and used my trusty Flickr uploader from there.

See also: See you later Linux and other UNIX/Linux articles

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) on my Sony Vaio PCG-K115Z (Contd.)

Continued from my previous blog post (it was getting too long anyway). Decided to spend more time investigating what all was available. Here's what i found.

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) aka Digital Signature:
I have been using PGP for some time now to sign my mails, etc. The obvious GUI front-end choice came from my older days with Linux i.e. gpgp. But then i went through all the available packages for pgp (apt-cache search pgp). It was here I found seahorse. Just perfect! Try it.

RSS Syndicator
There are several to pick from (try: apt-cache search RSS). Of course, an obvious choice would be a web-based application like Feedreader or even Google RSS reader. But in case, you like a local app, try Straw (sudo apt-get install straw).

Laptop Battery Power System tray icon.
The icon shows up only when the battery is in use. I would rather see it always. Here's how it is done. Go to System >> Preferences >> Power Management >> Select "General" Tab >> (Under "Notification Area") select "Always". That's it!

Blogging
I havent had a lot of luck in this area. I tried the default "Blog Entry Poster" that comes with Ubuntu (if you havent, try: sudo apt-get install gnome-blog). But its really basic and can do only bold, italic formatting and inserting links - thats it. If you have your own blogging space (like your own server and domain name, etc) then there's some good news - look for a software called Wordpress - its a pretty cool blog publishing platform. But if you blog through websites like Blogspot, etc there's not a lot of choice that i can see at the moment.

Know any different? Let me know. Leave comments.

More:

• Amarok: The 'baap' of music softwares on Ubuntu
• The Unofficial Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) starter guide

Update (24/03):

• I've recently upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04. Related notes can be found here.

Tags: English, GNU, Mayuresh, UNIX, Linux, Ubuntu, 6.06, LTS, Dapper Drake, buntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), Sony, Vaio

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) on my Sony Vaio PCG-K115Z

To give a quick background, i have played around on Linux until about Redhat 7.0 was the king and Redhat 8 was expected. But since then i have been working on proprietory system software and never had the chance to use Linux. That was until recently. I have taken some time to go through some articles, seen some screenshot and decided that Ubuntu seems to be a good place to start.

So, today i got around installing Ubuntu Linux (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake) to be precise) on my Sony Viao Laptop. I obtained the CDs free from Ubuntu Shipit. I must say that my first impression has been - not bad.

Also, for people who are interested, i have been recording all the links i have found useful on my del.ico.us account (you should be able to see the feed on the right hand panel of my blog).

Here's a quick list of the flow:

1. Booted off the CD and played around with the LiveDemo - My Vaio's never looked better.
2. Got down to installing. The Disk Partition Manager is non-intuitive! I preferred the one i last used with Redhat 7 (years ago!) and that was seamless.
3. Oops, look what i've done. I've just lost my Windows partition (thank god for backups!)
4. Most of the installation was smooth and took about 45 mins to an hour until it rebooted me into a classy looking Ubuntu login screen (Nice!)
5. It seems to have configured almost everything nicely, except i am not able to see my battery status and my Wifi's connections dropping occassionally.
6. I went through the update manager - it seems to have been at work for about 35 mins (a lot of updates downloaded and installed).
7. Played around to see whats new (i like Synaptic, Gaim continues to look ugly - i miss Yahoo! and Gtalk!). But i *love* having all my chat contacts in one screen (score 1 for Gaim)
8. New bunch of Games - some of them are quite interesting. I lovvve Mahjong!
9. Firefox is here, Evolution looks a lot like Outlook. I played around with Fonts and set my screen resolution (thats what its called right?) to 80 DPI. The Vaio screen is one of the BEST parts of owning a Vaio.
10. I plugged in my ipod - opened up as drive. A help document says i need GTKPod. A quick command line (sudo apt-get install gtkpod) got what i needed. I have been using ITunes on windows. This is nothing like it and it takes ages to "parse" my songs (which are in few thousands!). So ITunes for windows was still better for this one.
    Update: Found a nice link: LinuxJournal.com - Ubuntu and your IPod.
    
11. That brings me to my songs. Copied them back from backup. The copy was quick and swift (go Linux!). However, i havent found a good music manager for my files (i used Winamps Music Library on Windows). Althought XMMS is nice, but its got that creepy GTK look. I like my graphics crisp! So its back to my old favourite VLCPlayer for me (apt-got it again).
    
12. CD Burning - Nero was the Boss! Help told me that the replacement was GnomeBaker. But its not AS good. But its free right? So who am i to complain. But fortunately, i have a licensed copy of Nero, i remember having read that i can download a copy for Linux as long as i am a legal owner. Must do that sometime (yay! if thats so).
13. Next come my photos. No issues getting pictures off my camera and there's a XP like thumb viewer and image browser as well. Downloaded Picassa from Google. It tries to maintain the Windows look and feel on Linux (why!). But its pretty slow to get started. But once it does, its quite ok.
    
14. Compression - I have .zip, .arj, .ace and .rar files (all from my various compression favourites from time to time). Zip and arj dont seem to be a problem. I apt-got (heh, that is almost a new verb now) the software for .rar and .ace. But one issue with this is that i dont have a right click in Nautilus (the file browser) that gives a menu "Extract to /" like most of the common compression programs on windows (what a pain!). And whats more they make me select a folder EVERY time. Perhaps there's a better - but it certainly isnt obvious to me.
    
15. An old favourite XChat is here. Fired it up. Just selected defaults. Connected to #ubuntu. Met someone who walked me through re-installing my Wifi Drivers. He also gave a link to keep handy. My Wifi connection has been rock-steady since! Thank you faceless stranger.
16. I read something about enabling 3D rendering using my graphics accelerator card. Trolled through the Ubuntu User Forums and found a couple of posts that helped (search terms: ATI 3d rendering). Again, i ran into someone on IRC that set me right in 25 mins flat! A note here, most of Ubuntu help document asks the users to reboot! In my earlier days of linux, rebooting was considered laughable. So what happened?
17. The next day. Linux has been running overnight. I usually run my bittorrents every night. Apparently, there's a very limited number of choice for good clients for Linux. The first is Azureus (but thats a known memory hog!) and another one for KDE. But most IRC folks i asked recommended utorrent and wine. I was able to set it up and get utorrent up and running in a few minutes. But again, the graphics look sooo bad, that i stopped using it. All in all, there is no decent native app for bittorrent on Gnome. Update: Try freeloader (sudo apt-get freeloader) or gnome-btdownload(sudo apt-get gnome-btdownload)
    
18. I found a nice Indian wallpaper at Aqshar.com's wallpaper collection. It fits beautifully on my Ubuntu desktop. I have been noticing a strange problem since yesterday evening. My USB mouse stops working every hour or so. I have to unplug and plug it in everytime (what a pain!).
    

Update: This post is now listed at TuxMobil.org's Linux Laptop installation survey.

Note: Just noticed that this post is getting really long. Its continued => here.

Update (24/03): I've recently upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04. Related notes can be found here.

Tags: English, GNU, Mayuresh, UNIX, Linux, Ubuntu, 6.06, LTS, Dapper Drake, buntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), Sony, Vaio