Looking Cool/Screenlets

I had seen some desktop pictures with floating clocks and other neat eye candy and wondered where it came from. Screenlets has several small programs you can use to spice up your desktop. While I am not using the clock, I am using a weather screenlet and a screenlet that gives me information about my computer (as well as the time).

The screenlets web site lists many of their screenlets (maps, calendars, copy/paste lists, e-mail, notes, etc) and has much better screen shots. I used these directions to install the package. (which amounted to adding deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/gilir/ubuntu gutsy main universe to your third party repositories and then installing screenlets).

After the instillation, screenlets appeared in my menu under preferences. When you start screenlets, it shows you a list of screenlets and allows you to start them by clicking launch/add. Its all intuitive and easy. You can move them to any location you choose no your desktop and increase or decrease the size. While they are transparent, it is difficult to see behind them meaning they may take up some screen real estate. Cool, easy, and information I want at a glance.

Install Ubuntu from Windows

It looks like the next version of Ubuntu (8.04) will allow users to install Ubuntu from Windows. Arstechnica has some screen shots of the new installer.

I hope this gets more people to start using linux.

While I like this change and I think Ubuntu, Novel (Opensuse), Linux Mint, and many others have great distribution, I hope someone begins to improve the multimedia plugins for Firefox. While Mplayer does a good job, it still doesn't allow me to fast forward like the windows media player plugin for the Windows version of Firefox. I watch cycling on the internet and frequently when I watch an archived (ie not live) race, I use Windows because I can fast forward or rewind much easier. I don't boot into Windows often, but that is the most common reason.

That's my two cents about what I would like to see improved.

Sbackup

I recently moved from Linux Mint to ubuntu Hardy (8.04) Alpha 4 to Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty Gibbon. I've changed my linux distro about six times since November/December. Since I store most of my information (files) on the windows partition of my computer, it really isn't that hard (I'm dual booting). While I have yet to loose any information while I am distro hoping, I do back-up my files before I move.

I used to burn a DVD or two. Since my brother bought me a large external hard drive, I can now use that. This time I experimented with Sbackup. The program is easy to use. You tell it which directories you want to back-up and where to send the back-up. You can tell it to back-up at certain intervals and it looks like it will back-up only the changes it finds to the directories you choose.

While it looks cool and probably works great, the problem I had was that I could not tell when the last back-up occurred. For me, I'm not interested in timed back ups or regular back-up as my external hard drive is not always attached. Also, even though I told the program to save the files to my external drive, both times I used it the files were save to the default location. I thought I changed the settings before I began the back-up process, but it is possible that I did not (ie it could be my fault).

Sbackup looks really easy to use. I may try it again, but for me it is also easy to just choose the files/directories I want to back-up and move them. If I had my exterior hard drive attached all the time, it would be a better program for me. Another issue is that Sbackup does not show you the progress of the back-up nor tell you when it is done. In looking at the sourceforge project, it looks like that has been a feature request for some time.

This is a cool program. It is not perfect. If you are looking for something to back-up your desktop on a regular basis, this might be what you are looking for. For information visit the Sourceforge project or get instructions here or here.

You can install Sbackup by opening a terminal and typing:

sudo apt-get install sbackup

Hardy Heron Alpha 4

I decided to install the Alpha of the upcoming Ubuntu distribution. I was hoping it would be stable enough that I could use it for a while, but I'll be running another version of Linux soon. After running from the CD, I decided to install it because it was so quick. From the CD the system seemed to operate very fast. I know that the system is quicker than my former Linux Mint set-up, but that may be because there are fewer programs installed.

This alpha is supposed to have Xorg 7.3. The alpha 4 wiki says,Xorg 7.3 has "an emphasis on better autoconfiguration with a minimal configuration file." I couldn't get compiz to work and I don't know if the problem is the Nvidia drivers or what and I didn't feel like experimenting too much as this is an alpha release.

After I installed the updates, the restricted drivers icon appeared. I'm not sure it is working as it did not get my broadcom wireless card working. It has worked using the restricted drivers tool in past versions of Ubuntu. Combine that with compiz not working and that was my guess for a culprit. Again, I didn't want to spend too much time as I would likely have to re-install everything later.

The Hardy Heron wiki that discusses the new features can be found here. Above are two pictures of the new gnome system monitor.

Moving to Linux

I've taken a break from trying distros for a bit. I've been expirementing with my main computer. I have the important stuff back-ed up, but I'd like to find a better back-up tool. I may experiment with a few different back-up tools and see how they go.

Until then, here is a cool page with open source alternatives to commonly used software. There were some programs on this list that I had never heard of. While this is a neat list, you might also use Osalt to find open source alternatives to programs you use.

Stata/Linux

I installed Stata10 in Linux Mint 4 which is based on Ubuntu Linux 7.10. It took me a while to figure this out. I installed the dynamically linked version thinking it would just work. It did not. I was missing one small line of code.

When I tried to start stata using the ./xstata command from the command line I received the error:
./xstata: error while loading shared libraries: libtiff.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The simple solution was to link the libtiff.so.3 file to libtiff.so.4. I had no idea to do this or why. These are files used in the appearance of the graphical user interface. The simple solution was to go to the directory /usr/lib which is where the files were. So I used the command cd /usr/lib and this took me to the correct directory.

I linked the two files using the command:
ln -s libtiff.so.4 libtiff.so.3

Now the command ./xstata brings up Stata with a graphical user interface (GUI) that is dynamically linked rather than statistically linked. And, yes, I have no idea what that means other than it should take up fewer resources. This only cost me a few hours of my life.

File Manager as Root

I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but I get frustrated not being able to create folders using the nautilus file manager because I do not have the authority (permission).

If you go to a terminal and type gksudo nautilus it will run nautilus as if you are the root user and have full authority to create folders and erase them. This is written mostly for me.