The book is a concise yet comprehensive guide to day-to-day Ubuntu use. It conveys core competencies quickly, without the need to wade through thick manuals, and provides a lasting reference for all stages of your Ubuntu journey. 

It will be available from 14 January 2009 in two separate editions. The Print Edition will retail exclusively through Amazon.com for a recession-busting $9.95. The PDF Edition will be available to download entirely free of charge. Yes, you read that right! The full thing will be available for $0.00! No catches!

More details will be released closer to the launch date, so watch this space. You might also want to keep an eye on the book’s official website: www.ubuntupocketguide.com.

Ubuntu Kung Fu

To listen to the show you can subscribe using RhythmBox (or iTunes if you’re running Windows or Mac OS X) by clicking the link on the left. Alternatively, click here for a link directly to the MP3 file for the show (circa 11MB).

Ubuntu’s wifi support has gotten steadily better over the years, and with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) it’s safe to say that the majority of wifi devices will work fine. However, if you find that yours doesn’t (you’ll know because it will be like no wifi hardware is installed), help is at hand in the form of Ndiswrapper.

This lets you use Windows XP wifi drivers under Ubuntu. As you can imagine, it’s something of a hack and doesn’t always work, although in most cases the results are very good.

The following steps walk you through what’s needed to get XP wifi drivers working under Ubuntu. The guide is split into three sections: identifying your wifi card make and model, sourcing the Windows driver and extracting the driver file components, and finally installing the Windows XP driver files.

NOTE: If you’re using Ubuntu 8.10, first try installing the linux-backports-modules-intrepid package via Synaptic. 

Identifying the Wifi Card Hardware

To source the correct driver for your wifi hardware, it’s necessary to find out its make and model. However, you don’t need the make and model listed on the box or in the specification list. You must find out what company actually manufactured the hardware, which will probably be different from the company that sold it (particularly with more inexpensive hardware). You must also find out the PCI ID number, which is how operating systems like Ubuntu and Windows refer to the card on a technical level.

Open a terminal window, and type the following:

lspci -vv -nn|less -i

This will list the hardware on your system connected through the PCI bus (which is practically all of it). The command options specified cause lspci to return more information (-vv) and cause the vital PCI ID numbers to be returned too (-nn).

Hit the forward slash (/) to search, and type wireless. Then hit Enter. If you find no result, hit forward slash again, and search for wlan. If you still get no results, try searching for 802.11. These are the common terms used to describe wifi hardware. When you get a match, use the up/down cursor keys to scroll so you see the entire entry for that device (each entry is separated from the others in the list by a blank line). Make a note of the make and model name listed on the first line.

After this, look at the end of the same line for a pattern of numbers and letters that look like [168c:0013]—four digits, a colon, and then four more digits (the digits are hexadecimal, if knowing that helps you identify them). Write these down too. For an example taken from my test PC with the relevant parts of the entry in the listing highlighted, see the screenshot below. Be careful not to get the details mixed up with the Subsystem line.

Sourcing the Windows XP Driver

Finding the Windows XP driver isn’t too difficult. The easiest way of doing it is to head over the Ndiswrapper website and browse its database of cards, which links to the download sites of drivers known to work. Of course, you’ll need to do this using a computer that can get online (assuming your Ubuntu computer is currently unable to for lack of wifi drivers), and the easiest way of doing this is simply to boot into your Windows partition.

Once you’ve found the correct driver file, you must extract the components you need. The following instructions describe how all of this is done:

Use a web browser to head over to http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net. Once there, click the Documents/Wiki link on the left, and then click the link that reads List of cards known to work. On the following page, click the entry in the alphabetical list that refers to the first letter of the manufacturer details you discovered earlier.

In the listing page that appears, search using the PCI ID number you noted earlier. Note that you shouldn’t include the square brackets surrounding the numbers and letters. The details from my test PC were [168c:0013], so I searched for 168c:0013.

Note: At the present time (Nov 08), the Ndiswrapper site database is down. It’s not clear why this is, or when it will return to service. However, an Ubuntu community member maintains a copy of the database that can be found here.

It’s likely more than one entry in the list will match, so you should then check the details listed in the Card: and Chipset: components of the website listing against the manufacturer and model details you wrote down earlier. Try to get the best match possible. Some entries in the Ndiswrapper website list might even refer to the make and model of computer the wifi card is used in. Once you find a match, click the link provided to download the driver. Avoid any drivers marked as x86_64 in the list—these are designed to work on 64-bit versions of Linux (unless you have the 64-bit version of Ubuntu installed, of course, although this is unlikely unless you specifically opted to).

Once you have the driver file, you must extract the necessary driver components from it. To be frank, this is easier done using Windows rather than Ubuntu, so if you don’t already have Windows up and running, copy the driver installation file to your Windows desktop and then boot into Windows. Once Windows has started, download a program called Universal Extractor from http://legroom.net/software/uniextract. This is a clever open source program that’s able to extract files from just about any archive file, including Windows setup executable files (.exe). Once it’s downloaded and installed, right-click the Windows XP driver file, and select UniExtract to Subdir. This will create a new folder containing the individual driver files.

The files you want will probably be in a folder named WinXP, WindowsXP, or similar. If you’ve ever installed hardware drivers in Windows, this will sound familiar, although the folder might be called ndis5x or similar. In the folder, look for .inf files. If you’re in luck, there will be only one, and you can skip straight to the last step in this section. If there’s more than one, then you’ll need to search through each until you find the correct one.

Open the first .inf file in Windows Notepad by double-clicking it. Click Edit —> Find, and search for the first part of PCI ID you noted earlier. For example, the whole PCI ID number on my test PC was 168c:0013, so I searched for 168c. If you find no match, close the file, and move onto the next .inf file. If you do find a match, look further along that particular line, and look for the second part of the PCI ID. It will probably be next to the word DEV_. If you find a match, then congratulations! You’ve found the .inf file you need.

Copy the .inf file to a new folder, along with any .sys and .bin files you find in the driver folder (you may not find .bin files). Any other files can be ignored. You now have all you need to install the XP driver under Ubuntu, but don’t reboot just yet. First you’ll need to grab some package files from the Ubuntu repositories.

Installing the XP Driver Files

As mentioned, installing the XP drivers is easy, but first you’ll need to download and install the Ndiswrapper configuration software (the actual Ndiswrapper system software is already installed out of the box on Ubuntu). The following steps are all you need to do to install the driver:

Type the following addresses in the address bar of your browser. Each will cause a file to be downloaded:

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/n/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper-utils-1.9_1.50-1ubuntu1_i386.deb

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/n/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper-common_1.50-1ubuntu1_all.deb

http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/n/ndisgtk/ndisgtk_0.8.3-1_i386.deb

Reboot into Ubuntu, and copy the XP driver files to the desktop, plus the three system software packages you downloaded. Open a terminal window, and type the following to install the software:

sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/ndis*.deb

Once installation has finished, click System —> Administration —> Wireless Network Drivers. Once the program window opens, click the Install New Driver button.

A dialog box will appear prompting for the location of the .inf file. Click the Location drop-down list to open a file-browsing window, and navigate to the .inf file. Then click the Install button.

In the Wireless Network Drivers program window, you will now see your wireless hardware listed on the left of the window. Beneath it should be listed the words Hardware present: yes, as shown in the screenshot above. If you see Hardware present: no, you have an incompatible driver. Select the hardware in the list, and click Remove Driver. Then repeat the previous steps to download an alternative driver.

After this, your wifi hardware will be immediately available for configuration using NetworkManager at the top right of the desktop. You can close the Wireless Network Drivers window and delete the driver and package files from the desktop.

__________

This tip is taken from Ubuntu Kung Fu—a recently published and best-selling book of over 300 excellent tips for Ubuntu. It’s available from all good bookstores although the PDF edition of the book is available for a recession-busting $22. The author, Keir Thomas, also wrote Beginning Ubuntu Linux, a “from zero to hero” guide to Ubuntu 8.04 and beyond, which has recently reached its third edition. Please take a moment to check out both of them, and also take a look at the rest of the site.

http://lifehacker.com/5072351/a-users-look-at-ubuntu-810-intrepid-ibex

All of this is possible using the Nautilus Actions add-in. As its name suggests, this lets you add options to the right-click menu that perform certain actions on particular types files. It’s simple to create your own action, but hundreds of ready-made scripts are available and can be imported easily.

To install Nautilus Actions, use Synaptic to search for and install the aptly-named nautilus-actions package. Once installed, the configuration program can be found on the System —> Preferences menu.

Creating a Configuration from Scratch

Let’s take as an example adding a Print document option that will appear whenever a word processing document is right-clicked. This takes advantage of the fact that OpenOffice.org Writer can be used from the command line to print any document by using the -p command option, without actually starting the program in editing mode—for example, oowriter -p filename.doc.

Here are the necessary steps (these steps can, of course, be adapted for any type of file and/or action):

1. Start by running the Nautilus Actions Configuration program, which can be found on the System —> Preferences menu. When the program window appears, click the Add button.
2. In the Label field of the dialog box that appears, type Print document. This is the text that will actually appear on the right-click menu and can be anything you want. You can add some text to the Tooltip menu too—this will appear if the mouse is hovered over the menu option. However, it isn’t essential. You can also select a suitable icon from the Icon drop-down list. This will appear alongside the new entry on the menu, but, again, it isn’t essential.
3. In the Path field, type /usr/bin/oowriter. Most programs you use every day can be found in /usr/bin, and it’s necessary to provide the path to the program along with its command-line filename. If you are in any doubt as to where an application ‘lives’, open a terminal window, and type whereis command, replacing command with the name of the command in question.
4. In the Parameters text field, specify any command options that are needed, along with the filename and path. For our particular example, we need to type -p and then %d/%f, so the line reads -p %d/%f. %d and %f are Nautilus Actions shorthand—%d refers to the path of the file that has been right-clicked, and %f refers to the filename itself. The slash in the middle separates the two, just like at the command line. As you type, an example of the command that will be executed appears at the bottom of the dialog box. This is effectively what you would type at the command line to run the same command, so you can check to ensure it makes sense.
5. Click the Conditions tab. Here we can ensure that the new Print document option appears only whenever we right-click word processing document files, and not any others. We do this by specifying file extensions in the Filenames text field—several extensions can be entered, but they must be separated by a semicolon (;). Most word processing documents you’re likely to encounter will be .doc, .sxw, .rtf, or .odt files. If you know you will encounter others—for example, WordPerfect documents (which use the .wpd file extension)—then add the relevant file extension. Precede each file extension by a wildcard (an asterisk). For an example, see the screenshot below. Once done, click OK. Click the Close button on the main Nautilus Actions configuration window.
6. After this, you can test your new action by right-clicking a word processing document and selecting the new option—it will appear about two thirds of the way down the menu. Also try right-clicking other files that aren’t word processing files, and note how the option doesn’t appear. If the menu option doesn’t appear when it should, try logging out and then back in again.

Importing Configurations Made by Others

By visiting http://www.grumz.net/index.php?q=configlist, you can download Nautilus Actions schemas (effectively configuration files) for just about any task you might want to do to any kind of file. To download a schemas file, click the header in the list, and then click the schemas link to download.

Be sure to read the schemas description to see whether any particular software is needed. For example, schemas that manipulate images will almost certainly need the ImageMagick software installed, so use Synaptic to search for it. Schemas that manipulate video files will probably need the ffmpeg software installed. Bear in mind that the notes alongside each schema are probably not written specifically for Ubuntu users, so don’t name specific packages you will need. You might well have to use common sense when searching through Synaptic’s package archive.

Once the schemas have downloaded, open Nautilus Actions Configuration (System —> Preferences menu), and click the Import/Export button. Then click the button to the right of the File to Import text field, and browse to the schemas file. Click the OK button, then the Close button in the Nautilus Actions parent window. The new menu option will appear immediately, although you might have to log in and out again to see the icon (if applicable) appear alongside its entry in the list.


__________

This tip is taken from Ubuntu Kung Fu—a recently published and best-selling book of over 300 excellent tips for Ubuntu. It’s available from all good bookstores although the PDF edition of the book is available for a recession-busting $22. The author, Keir Thomas, also wrote Beginning Ubuntu Linux, a “from zero to hero” guide to Ubuntu 8.04 and beyond, which has recently reached its third edition. Please take a moment to check out both of them, and also take a look at the rest of the site.

All are taken from my brand new book Ubuntu Kung Fu, which contains over 300 other fun and useful tips for Ubuntu. The book has been referred to as “a fantastic compendium of useful, uncommon Ubuntu knowledge” by Ubuntu expert Eric Hewitt. Ubuntu Kung Fu is available from all good bookstores or you can buy the PDF version for just $22 by clicking here. 

1. Slow Down a Touchpad’s Scrolling

If you have a notebook computer, you might be used to edge scroll on the touchpad when running Windows. This is where the right edge of the notebook’s touchpad is used as a virtual scrollbar—by running a finger up and down, the currently active window scrolls up and down correspondingly.

You might already have realized that you can activate the edge scroll functionality in Ubuntu using the Touchpad tab of System —> Preferences —> Mouse. The problem I had was that the scrolling was just too fast. A light touch on the pad caused the web page or file listing to fly up or down the screen. The solution was to add a line to the xorg.conf configuration file, as follows:

Open the Xorg configuration file into Gedit:

gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Look for the two lines that read as follows:

Section "InputDevice"
Driver   "synaptics"

Then, beneath all the lines that begin Option, add a new line as follows:

Option "VertScrollDelta" "50"

You can align the words with the other entries in the list if you want, although this doesn’t matter.

Save the file, close any open programs, and then hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace to restart the X server. Log in again as usual, and the changes should be instantly visible.

If the scrolling is now too slow, try changing the value of “VertScrollData” to 25 or perhaps even less—the lower the value, the more sensitive the edge scroll becomes.

To make Firefox scroll fewer lines as you drag and scroll, start Firefox, and type about:config into the URL bar. Agree to carry on despite the warning about voiding a possibly warranty. Then, in the search bar, type mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines. In the list of results, double-click the entry so that it reads false and turns bold. Now try the new scroll speed by opening a new tab and browsing to a website.

To speed up the scroll slightly, type mousewheel.withnokey.numlines, and change the value to anything greater than 1. For the ultimate in scrolling, click Edit —> Preferences in Firefox, click the Advanced icon, and put a check in Use smooth scrolling.

2. Set the CPU Speed from the Desktop

With some types of CPU, it’s possible to manually alter the clock speed while the system is running. This can be useful with a notebook computer, for example, where you might choose to throttle down the CPU speed when on battery power to save juice or to minimize heat generation when the computer is resting on your lap.

The CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applet takes care of this function, but before it can be used, some additional configuration is necessary.

Open a terminal window, and type the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

You’ll see a warning about how enabling the cpufreq-selector program could be a security risk if it is given root powers. This is true, but, as always, usability must be balanced against security. The chances of a hacker exploiting this are very slim. Hit Enter; then, on the next screen, use the cursor keys to highlight Yes, and hit Enter again.

After this, right-click a blank spot on the top panel, click Add to panel, and then select CPU Frequency Scaling Applet from the list. A new applet will be added, showing the current speed of the CPU. By clicking it, you’ll be able to set either the speed you want the CPU to run at or the power-saving mode it should use (these modes vary in name and nature from chip to chip, but what they offer should be obvious from their names).

If your CPU has more than one core, such as Intel’s CoreDuo series, each core must be configured separately. For example, a dual-core chip will need two CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor applets. Just right-click the panel as explained to add another. To alter which particular core each applet controls, right-click an applet, select Preferences, and choose the CPU core under the Monitored CPU heading.

Note that each core can run at a different speed compared to the other core and be switched to a different power-saving mode.

3. Closely Monitor the Power Consumption of a Laptop

Run gnome-power-statistics from a terminal window, and you’ll see a graph of the exact power usage of your computer over the time since it booted up (provided your computer’s hardware supports it). Try boosting the brightness of your screen or loading programs, and see how much of a drain they can be!

4. Set Hard Disk Power-Saving

Ubuntu has a powerful raft of power management features, accessible through System —> Preferences —> Power Management, but you might notice one missing if you’re used to Windows or OS X: hard disk spin downtime. This is where the hard disk powers down after a period of inactivity. When data is requested after this, it spins up again, although there is sometimes a momentary pause while this happens.

It’s possible to set your hard disk to spin down under Ubuntu in order to save power and/or wear and tear (particularly on a computer left on most of the time), but you’ll need to edit a configuration file. Follow these steps:

The configuration file containing the settings is hdparm.conf, so open it in Gedit by typing the following into a terminal window: gksu gedit /etc/hdparm.conf.

Look for the line that reads #spindown_time = 24, and remove the hash from the beginning of the line so it reads simply spindown_time = 24.

Alter the spindown_time time to any value you want. Each number is five seconds, so the default setting of 24 equates to 120 seconds (24 x 5 = 120 seconds). However, a value greater than 240 changes things—beyond 240, each unit equals 30 minutes. So, a value of 241 will spin down the disk after 30 minutes, a value of 242 will spin down the disk after 60 minutes, and so on. Setting the line to read spindown_time = 241 is a good choice, because the disk will spin down after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Save the file when you’ve finished, and reboot for the changes to take effect.

Remember that this doesn’t mean the hard disk will spin down thirty minutes after you stop using the computer. It means it will spin down thirty minutes after all hard disk access has ceased. Often Ubuntu will do things like flush its caches or run anacron jobs in the background, meaning the hard disk can’t spin down until thirty minutes after these jobs have finished.

To stop the hard disk spindown, edit the hdparm.conf once again, and put a hash (#) before the spindown_time line. Then save the file, and reboot the computer.

5. Synchronize Files Between a Laptop and Desktop PC

If you have two computers, you might want to synchronize data between the two. For example, if you have a laptop, you might want to transfer the files in your Documents folder to the main PC (and vice versa). You could do this manually by creating a network share, but it’s much better to do it automatically, with just a single click.

There are a variety of ways of synchronizing files under Ubuntu, and indeed, this is the kind of task that Linux excels in. However, perhaps the most fuss-free method is to use a program called Unison (or, actually, Unison GTK, which adds a graphical front end to the Unison command-line program; throughout I refer to the whole thing as Unison for simplicity). Unison uses built-in Linux tools to sync files but hides everything behind a friendly user interface.

The following are the steps required to sync the Documents folders on two separate computers using Unison. Before following these steps, ensure each computer has the correct time. This is essential because synchronization will fail otherwise.

These instructions make reference to a desktop PC and laptop computer but could be any two computers capable of running Ubuntu (or indeed any computer with Linux installed that can run Unison):

1. On the desktop PC, use Synaptic to install the unison-gtk package. Meanwhile, on the laptop, use Synaptic to install the openssh-server and unison-gtk packages. As you might have guessed, Unison uses the SSH program in the background to provide the file transfer conduit but you won’t come into direct contact with it.
2. Once installed on the desktop PC, Unison can be found on the Applications —> Accessories menu. When it starts, a wizard will walk you through creating an initial profile. The first step is to enter the folder on the desktop PC that you want to synchronize. Click the Browse button, and then locate your Documents folder. Click OK to close the file-browsing dialog box and OK again to move onto the next step of the wizard in Unison.
3. In the next step, you must tell Unison which folder you want to synchronize with on the laptop. In the Directory text field, type Documents again. There’s no need to precede it with /home/username because Unison will automatically log into the laptop’s /home/ folder each time it synchronizes.
4. Click the SSH radio button. You’ll now need to find the IP address of the laptop. This can be done by moving over to it, right-clicking its NetworkManager icon, and selecting Connection Information. Then look in the dialog box that appears for the line that reads IP Address. Type what you see (four numbers separated by dots) into the Host text field back on the desktop PC.
5. In the User text field, still on the desktop PC, type the login name you use on the laptop. Then click the OK button.
6. You’ll immediately be told that the laptop computer is being contacted. Then a dialog box will pop up telling you that the “authenticity of host can’t be established.” This is fine. Just type yes to continue, and hit OK.
7. You’ll then be prompted for the login password on the laptop. Type it, and then click OK.
8. After this, you’ll see a scary-looking warning dialog box saying that “no archives were found for these roots.” Don’t worry. This appears because this is the first time you’ve synchronized. Once you click OK, Unison will detect the files both on the desktop PC and on the laptop (it’s worth pointing out that you won’t see any sign of Unison running on the laptop, and you won’t have to do anything on the laptop—Unison runs automatically in the background).
9. After a few minutes, the program window on the desktop PC will indicate the file differences between the two folders. The Path heading will show the file in question, and under the Action heading will be the “direction of travel,” indicated by an arrow—if the arrow points left, the file will be transferred to the desktop PC from the laptop. If it points right, the file will be transferred from the desktop PC to the laptop. If you don’t want to synchronize a particular file or folder, select it, and click the Skip button on the toolbar. However, assuming you’re happy with everything, click the Go button on the toolbar. The files will then be copied across. When Unison has finished (look at the status bar in the bottom left of the Unison window and the Status heading in the list of files), you can close the program window.

And that’s all there is to it. After this, you should run Unison on the desktop PC every time you want to sync the Documents folders on the two computers, such as when you get home from work. When Unison starts, just select default from the list.

Note that Unison always updates older files when synchronizing. For example, if you started a file on your desktop PC, transferred it to your laptop using Unison, and edited it while out and about, Unison would automatically overwrite the older file on the desktop PC with the updated version. This makes sense, of course. If the situation arises that the file gets updated on both machines between synchronizations, a question mark will appear alongside the file when you come to synchronize—see screenshot above—and it won’t get automatically copied across. You’ll then have to manually intervene to decide which to overwrite—the copy on the desktop PC or the copy on the laptop. Click the Right to Left toolbar button to overwrite the file on the desktop PC or the Left to Right button to overwrite the file on the laptop.

You can create additional profiles to sync other folders too—just click the Create New Profile button in Unison’s startup program window, type a name for the profile when prompted, and then double-click its entry in the list to start working through the wizard again. I find it useful to synchronize the Desktop folder on both machines because I tend to temporarily store a lot of files there. Don’t choose to sync your entire /home folder—hidden files are copied across too by Unison, and hidden files within your /home folder contain program configuration files unique to each computer. Upon synchronization there would be some almighty file clashes, and the likelihood of the login accounts on both systems getting damaged beyond repair because of mangled configuration files is high.

6. Use an Alternative Wifi Connection Manager

Wicd (http://wicd.sourceforge.net/) is an excellent swap-in replacement for NetworkManager. NetworkManager is the system software that sits in the notification area and handles network connections. Wicd does the same job but uses a piece of software that’s almost entirely independent of existing Ubuntu infrastructure and packs in a few extra features too, such as the ability to configure static IP/DNS addresses and use non-ISP-specific DNS servers such as that offered by OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.org).

Here’s how to install and configure Wicd:

1. You’ll need to add a new software repository. To do so, click System —> Administration —> Software Sources, click the Third-Party Software tab, then click the Add button, and enter deb http://apt.wicd.net hardy extras. Click Close and then the Reload button to refresh the list of software.
2. Use Synaptic to search for and install wicd. Once you have it installed, you’ll need to reboot, and then you’ll find Wicd on the Applications —> Internet menu. Note that the wicd package will remove the NetworkManager packages during installation. You might see a brief error message that the “NetworkManager applet could not find some required resources.” You can ignore this. Once Wicd has been installed, reboot the system, although if you want to set up a notification area icon for Wicd, follow the instructions in the next step first.
3. To add a notification area icon, similar to that of NetworkManager, a few manual steps are necessary. Click System —> Preferences —> Sessions, and click Add. Type wicd into the Name field and /opt/wicd/tray.py into the Command text area. Leave the Comment text field clear. Then close the dialog box and reboot.
4. When you start Wicd (it can be found on the Applications —> Internet menu), it will automatically scan for nearby wifi networks. If no networks are shown, click the Refresh toolbar button.
5. Before you can connect, which is done by clicking the Connect link, “unfold” the configuration options by clicking the little chevron alongside the wifi base station’s entry on the list. Then unfold Advanced Settings, and put a check in Use Encryption. Select the type of wifi protection the base station uses from the list, and and type the key or password in the text box provided. Of course, if the network has no protection (usually described as an open network), then you can skip this step. Then click the blue Connect link. Once you’ve connected to the network, you can quit the Wicd configuration program.

To revert to using NetworkManager, should you want, use Synaptic to install the network-manager package and uninstall the wicd package. Then stop Wicd’s notification area applet starting at GNOME startup—click System —> Preferences —> Sessions, select the entry you created for Wicd, and click the Remove button. The reboot the computer.

7. Password-Protect and Encrypt Files

Any file or folder within Ubuntu can be encrypted so that it can be decrypted only by using a passphrase. This has obvious benefits for laptop users, whose computers might get stolen when they’re out and about: if your laptop should go missing, you can rest assured that any personal files can’t be viewed by the thief. 

What actually happens is that an encrypted version of the file or folder is created that requires a passphrase to unlock it. The original file or folder must then be deleted by the user. Whenever you want to edit or view the file after this, you must double-click the encrypted file to extract a decrypted copy. Then, if you update the file in any way, you must reencrypt it.

Some setup work is necessary before the files or folders can be encrypted, and you must generate a personal key pair.

Files encrypted using the method outlined in this tip aren’t particularly “portable,” which is to say this isn’t a system designed to let you copy files to another machine and decrypt them. For that to happen, you would have to export your key pair, which represents a security risk. Nevertheless, how to do this is explained later in this tip.

Bear in mind that if you follow these instructions to encrypt files and then forget your passphrase, any files you encrypted are effectively lost forever. There is no “back door” and no way of cracking the system—the method of encryption used is extremely thorough.

First we look at creating a key pair and then look at how to encrypt/decrypt files or folders.

Creating a Key Pair

Follow these steps to create a key pair, which is necessary before you can encrypt/password-protect any files (note that you can skip these steps if you’ve already created a key pair for use with email encryption):

1. Click Applications —> Accessories —> Passwords and Encryption Keys to start the Seahorse application, which is used to manage all encryption keys within Ubuntu.
2. In the program window that appears, click the New button. In the dialog box that appears, select PGP Key, and click the Continue button.
3. In the dialog box that appears, fill in the Full Name and Email Address fields (you can leave the Comment field blank). To be frank, the email field is used only if you later publish the public component of the key pair for email encryption purposes. If you don’t intend to do this, then it doesn’t matter what you type. Note that you must type both a forename and surname into the Full Name text field.
4. In the Advanced key options drop-down list, you can choose a different type of encryption, although the default choice of DSA Elgamal and 2048 bits is considered extremely secure and also flexible enough to meet most needs. Once done, click the Create button.
5. After this, you’ll be prompted for a passphrase. Essentially, this is the password you will need to decrypt files. It’s important you make the passphrase something hard to guess but also memorable enough so you don’t forget it. The passphrase can include letters, numbers, symbols, and space characters.
6. After this, the key will be generated. Depending on the speed of your computer, this could take up to an hour. Once it’s done, quit the Seahorse application.

Encrypting/Decrypting Files or Folders

Once the key pair has been created, encrypting a file or folder is as simple as right-clicking it and selecting Encrypt. In the dialog box that appears, put a check alongside the key you created, and then click OK

If you’ve selected to encrypt a folder, you’ll be asked whether you want to encrypt each file separately or automatically create a zip archive that will then be encrypted. The latter is the best option in most cases.

If you password-protected a file, once the encrypting process is complete, you should find yourself with a new version of the file that has a .pgp extension. You can then delete the old file. If you encrypted a folder, you should find two files have been created—the protected .pgp version and a .zip archive of the original folder. That archive, along with the original folder itself, can then be deleted.

For security reasons, the unencrypted versions should be permanently deleted, rather than just sent to the trash. Ideally you should use the shred command too. Before destroying the old file, however, you might want to first test-run decrypting the file.

To do so, just double-click the .pgp file, and then type your passphrase when prompted. The original file will then reappear. In the case of a folder, the .zip archive will appear, and you can then double-click it to extract the contents.

Decrypting Files on Another Computer

As mentioned in the introduction to this tip, this isn’t a system designed to create portable encrypted files. To decrypt files on another computer, you need to export your key pair and then import it on the other computer. Anybody in possession of your key pair file along with any encrypted files will be able to decrypt them, so this represents a security risk. However, sometimes it might be necessary to decrypt files on another machine. Here are the necessary steps:

1. On the computer that created the encrypted file(s), start Seahorse (Applications —> Accessories —> Passwords and Encryption Keys), and then right-click your personal key (the one created in the previous steps). Select Properties from the menu that appears.
2. In the dialog box that appears, click the Details tab, and click the Export button alongside the Export Complete Key heading. Save the file to the desktop. You will find a new file has been created with an .asc extension. This is your key pair in text format.
3. Copy the .asc file to a USB key stick or floppy disk, and take it over to the second computer. Still on the second computer, start Seahorse (Applications —> Accessories —> Passwords and Encryption Keys), and click the Import button. Navigate to your key file, and click Open. This will import the key. After this, close Seahorse. You can then double-click any encrypted files to decrypt them.
4. If the other computer doesn’t have Seahorse installed—perhaps if it’s a different version of Linux or maybe an older version of Ubuntu—copy the key file to the desktop, and then type the following into a terminal window (these instructions assume gpg is installed, which is very likely):

   gpg --import "/home/username/Desktop/key file.asc"

   Obviously, you should replace key file.asc with the name of the .asc file and replace username with your username.

5. Then, to decrypt a file, type the following:

   gpg filename.pgp

   Again, you should replace filename.pgp with the name of the file you want to decrypt. You’ll be prompted for your passphrase, so type it. After this, the original file will be restored in the same location as the .pgp file.

Note that you MUST ensure the internal PC clock is set correctly and shows the current time before exporting/importing keys. For various technical reasons, Seahorse and the gpg command cannot import a key if the time on the PC appears to be before the key file appears to have been created. Of course, this means that if the computer that created the key file had the wrong time, you will have real problems importing the key. The solution is to set your PC’s clock to a time and date in the future. Then import the key, and return the PC’s clock to the present time.

8. Use a Dial-Up Modem

Like all Linuxes, Ubuntu has spotty support when it comes to dial-up modems (those used to dial into ISPs over the phone line). Some work. Some don’t. Generally speaking, those that work tend to be older models that connect via the serial port or newer, more expensive models that connect via USB (more expensive models have dedicated modem hardware, rather than relying on software drivers to handle the decoding, which is what causes problems for Ubuntu).

If your modem works, you can use the gnome-ppp software to connect/disconnect. It can be installed via Synaptic and, once it’s installed, you’ll find it on the Applications —> Internet menu. When running it for the first time, click the Setup button, and then click the Detect button under the Modem heading in the dialog box that appears. Once done, click Close to return to the main dialog box, where you can enter your ISP’s username, password, and phone number. Then click Connect to dial up.

When connected, gnome-ppp minimizes to the notification area. Right-click it to disconnect from the call.

9. Switch Monitor Resolutions with a Single Mouse Click

If you have an external monitor or projector you occasionally attach to a notebook computer, you might be used to switching resolutions on a regular basis. Unlike with Windows, this isn’t just a right-click procedure—you must navigate the System —> Preferences menu.

A good solution is to use Synaptic to search for and install resapplet. For some reason, although it’s officially a GNOME applet, resapplet doesn’t appear on the standard applet list. Instead, it must be configured to start at login. To do this, click System —> Preferences —> Sessions, ensure the Startup Programs tab is selected, and click the Add button. In the Name and Command fields of the dialog box that appears, type resapplet. Leave the Comment field blank. Then close the dialog box, and log out and back in again.

The new icon will then appear beside NetworkMonitor in the notification area. Clicking it will reveal a list of possible resolutions from which you can choose.

Incidentally, it should be possible to instantly step up and down resolutions by pressing Ctrl+Alt and tapping the +/- keys on the numeric keypad. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on Ubuntu systems because of the way the graphical subsystem is configured. It may work on other Linux systems, however.

___________

Ubuntu Kung Fu contains over 300 excellent tips for Ubuntu and has just been published by Pragmatic Programmers. It’s available from all good bookstores and a PDF version is available for just $22. You might also take a look at Beginning Ubuntu Linux, a “from zero to hero” guide to Ubuntu, and also take a look at the rest of the site.

The following 10 tips explain how to do cool and interesting things at the command-line. They’re not specific to Ubuntu but they were written with Ubuntu in mind, and have not been tested on other distros. But all should work on most versions of Linux or even Unix. 

Use the mouse in virtual consoles

This is a neat hack that brings a block cursor to virtual console windows so that text can be easily copied and pasted. Just use Synaptic to install gpm. Once installed, open a terminal window, and type sudo /etc/init.d/gpm start to get the program running. In the future, gpm will start automatically on bootup.

Then switch to a virtual console to see the fruits of your labor. You should now have a block mouse cursor that moves around the screen. You can highlight text in the usual way. To paste it, click the middle mouse button (on most mice, this is the scroll wheel button; if your mouse has only two buttons, the right-click button will paste the text).

Some software that offers text-mode menus also responds to mouse clicks in this way (for example, the Lynx text-mode web browser—see below). Check the command’s help output to see whether a special command option is needed to support gpm.

See a calendar

You’ve probably already realized that clicking the time display at the top-right of the Ubuntu desktop shows a calendar. To see the same kind of thing at the command line, type cal. Without any command arguments, it will show the dates for the current month. If you want the axis of the calendar reversed (days down the side, rather than across the top), type ncal instead. To see the dates for last month, this month, and next month, type cal -3 (for some reason, however, this particular command option doesn’t work with ncal).

To see a calendar for a whole year, type the year straight afterward: cal 2010. To see a calendar for December of any particular year, type cal dec followed by the year (or you could type jan, feb, mar, and so on).

Both cal and ncal can be used to find out historical dates. To find out the day when the Declaration of Independence was signed, type cal july 1776. If you seriously need to know precise dates going back millennia, there might be issues with the Julian/Gregorian calendar switch—see cal’s man page for details.

Create text banners

Start Synaptic. Then search for and install figlet. Then type the following into a terminal window:

figlet "Ubuntu Kung Fu"

The output is built from symbols, letters, and other characters. There’s even different fonts available—take a look in /usr/share/figlet. Any file with an .flf file extension is a font. To use a different font, just specify its name after the -f command option, without a file extension:

figlet -f lean "Ubuntu Kung Fu"

Believe it or not, figlet did have a serious use (well, actually, its older brother called banner did). In the days of shared dot-matrix printers and sheet-fed paper, the command was used to clearly indicate who had sent which print job. The banner text would appear at the start of any printed documents, so it was clear where the sheet output could be torn off.

I like to add a figlet command to the end of my .bashrc file so that figlet runs every time I log in at a virtual console or open a terminal window. Just type gedit ~/.bashrc to open the file in Gedit and add the entire command as a new line at the end. If you want a sentence to appear, as opposed to just a single word, ensure you enclose the sentence in quotation marks (that is, figlet -f small “Greetings Professor Falken”).

You might want to take a look at the unfortunately titled toilet, which does exactly the same thing but with added color. Once it’s installed, try the following:

toilet -f mono12 -F gay "Ubuntu Kung Fu"

See a visual representation of files/folders

If you’re new to the Ubuntu file system (or even an old hand), it can be easy to get lost while browsing the file system. The pwd can be used to get a quick reminder of the current folder, but you might also use the tree command. First you’ll need to install it using Synaptic—search for and install tree. Then just type tree at the prompt. Here’s what I saw on my test system when I typed the command within my /home folder:

.
|-- Desktop
| |-- gnome-terminal.desktop
| `-- synaptic.desktop
|-- Documents
| |-- accounts08.ods
| `-- brochure.pdf
|-- Examples -> /usr/share/example-content
|-- Music
| `-- tom gold-magic.mp3
|-- Pictures
| |-- barbecue.jpg
| `-- disneyland.jpg
|-- Public
|-- Templates
`-- Videos

It should be obvious what’s what here. The folders (Desktop, Documents, Music, and so on) are represented as branches on the virtual tree and the files (or subfolders) as subbranches. What you don’t see here, and which is very useful, is that everything is color -coded according to the standard color-coding used at the prompt. Thus, folders are light blue, image files are purple, the MP3 file is green, and so on. To see only folders, and not files within them (possibly more useful), use the -d command option: tree -d. To filter the results for a particular type of file or files with a particular name, use the -P command option. For example, to filter for .doc files, you could type the following:

tree -P *.doc

Or to filter for files that include disneyland in their name, you could type the following:

tree -P *disneyland*

As if all this wasn’t enough, tree has a trick up its sleeve. It can output everything as a hyperlinked HTML file. This can be useful if you need to quickly create a directory listing of online files. Let’s assume you have a website called http://www.example.com and the local folder that contains your local copies of the site is /home/keir/website. The following command will output a file called index.html that contains a visual tree representation of the files contained within website, including hyperlinks to the files themselves:

$ tree -H http://www.example.com -T "Click a file to download" /home/keir/website/ > index.html

First we provide the URL that the hyperlinks should be prefaced with. This could be a path on the server (for example, www.example.com/files; note that you must not include the trailing slash in the path). Then we provide the -T command option, which gives the web page a header—this can be anything you want, but steer clear of symbols like !, which have specific functions at the command prompt. After this, we provide the location of the files. Finally, we redirect output into the index.html file.

View PDFs at the Command Line

If you want to view a PDF, simply use the Evince program: evince filename.pdf. This will open a program window showing the PDF file. If you actually want to look at the PDF within the terminal window (or maybe in a virtual console), you’ll first need to convert it to text. To do this, use the pdftotext program: pdftotext filename.pdf. This will create a .txt file containing the contents of the PDF. To view it, use the less command: less filename.txt. To extract the images from the PDF, use the pdfimages command. You’ll need to specify the filenames for the pictures and also the -j command option to ensure the photographic images are outputted as JPEG. For example, the following:

pdfimages -j filename-pdf pictures

…will extract the images as JPEGs and give them filenames beginning with pictures. So, the first might be pictures-001.jpg, the second pictures-002.jpg, and so on.

Mirror Commands and Output Across Different Terminal Windows

To have one terminal window mirror the contents of another, first start a screen session in one of them. screen effectively allows you to create a command-line login that’s independent of any actual terminal windows or virtual consoles (so if the terminal window quits, the command-line login will still be running in the background).

To start it, simply type screen. Then open another terminal window, and attach to the currently running screen session by typing screen -x. Now try typing something to see what the effect is. To detach from the screen session, in either or both terminal windows, type Ctrl + a, and then hit d. Note that if you detach in both terminal windows, the screen session will still be running in the background. To quit it, you must reattach to it (type screen -r) and hit Ctrl + d (or just type exit at the prompt).

This trick works in a virtual console too—you could start a screen session in a terminal window and have it mirrored at a virtual console prompt by attaching to it using screen -x.

By combining this tip with an SSH remote connection, not only can you create a command login using screen that will persist on the remote computer even if the SSH connection is lost (useful if running commands that take some time to complete or if you’re using a flaky connection), but you can create a setup whereby what you type is mirrored on the remote computer in a terminal window—just ask the user sitting in front of the remote computer to open a terminal window and type screen -x, once you’ve started screen in the SSH session. This provides an excellent way of remote teaching.

Insert Command-Line Output and Files into the Clipboard

Wouldn’t it be useful to quickly pump an entire configuration file, or the output of a terminal command, into the clipboard for pasting into a website forum’s posting page or similar? Well, that’s just what xclip is designed to do. It can be installed via Synaptic. Once installed, you can redirect text files into xclip so that they become the clipboard contents:

xclip < /etc/fstab

…which will add the contents of the /etc/fstab configuration file to the clipboard, or you can pipe the output of a command into it:

dmesg|xclip

…which will place the output of the dmesg command in the clipboard (dmesg shows system log output and can be useful when diagnosing problems). There is one proviso. The piped output/files are placed in the selection buffer clipboard, which is distinct from the standard cut/copy and paste clipboard accessible from the Edit menu of most applications. xclip’s output can be pasted by positioning the cursor in the relevant spot and clicking the middle mouse button (this means pressing the scroll wheel, if your mouse has one; if not, click both the left and right mouse buttons simultaneously). In theory, the use of the -selection command option with xclip should allow the user to add to the primary clipboard, but this doesn’t appear to work, perhaps because of the way the Ubuntu desktop is configured. To be honest, I see this as less of a bug and more as a feature—xclip will leave any existing clipboard contents untouched.

Have Ubuntu Speak to you

Ubuntu includes a built-in speech synthesizer called espeak. It’s there to work in partnership with the Orca screen reader, which provides support for those who are partially sighted, but it can also be called from the command line, as follows:

espeak "Ubuntu Kung Fu"

As you’ll be able to tell, it’s not the most sophisticated speech synthesizer in the world (it has a feel of Speak & Spell about it), but it can be fun to play around with. By simply typing espeak and then hitting Enter, whatever you type after this will be spoken. To quit, type Ctrl + d. To switch voices, use the -v command option, but first you’ll need to find out the available voices, which can be done by typing espeak –voices=en (note that’s two dashes before voices). For example, to have the phrase “How about a nice game of chess?” spoken in a Jamaican voice, you could type this:

espeak -s 140 -v en-westindies "How about a nice game of chess?"

In this example I also added the -s command option, by which you can specify the speech speed in words per minute. The default value of 170 tends to be a little fast, especially when it comes to longer sentences.

Get Rid of the Virtual Console Legal Boilerplate

Whenever you log in to a virtual console, you’ll see a few paragraphs of legal boilerplate, reminding you that Ubuntu is free software and is supplied without warranty. Once you’ve read this, you’re unlikely to forget it, so to stop it appearing each time you log in, type the following into a terminal window, which will delete the contents of the “message of the day” (motd) file, which is responsible for the message:

sudo rm /etc/motd
sudo touch /etc/motd

Of course, rather than deleting the contents of the file, you might just choose to replace the text within it with something else. It’s a simple text file. To load it into Gedit, type gksu gedit /etc/motd, and change its contents to whatever you want.

Browse the Web from the Command Line

Call it a form of insurance, but I like to have a command-line web browser installed in case anything goes wrong with either Firefox or the entire GUI system. I can then look up help and solutions from a virtual console or just check the news while I’m waiting for things to get better. Command-line browsers are pretty primitive. There are no images, for example, or even color. The page design always gets mangled. In other words, they’re not for use all the time, unless you’re a masochist. Or a command-line fanatic.

There are two competing text-mode browsers—links and lynx. links is perhaps the better of the two because it understands frames and thus gets the layout of pages slightly more correct, but both are only a download away via Synaptic.

Once either program has started, hit g to enter a URL (with lynx, you’ll also need to type http:// if the address doesn’t start with www). Once the page has loaded, use Page Up and Page Down to scroll the page. Use the up/down cursor keys to cycle through each link onscreen until you find the one you want, and then hit Enter to follow it. To go back a page, hit the left cursor key. To download a file that’s linked to, highlight the link, and hit d. You can search for words using a forward slash (/), in the same way as with man pages.

Hitting Esc in links will cause a rudimentary menu to appear—use the cursor keys to navigate, and hit Enter to select a menu option. Once you’re done, hit q to quit the program. If links is used in a terminal window, you’ll be able to click each link using your mouse.

If gpm is installed (see above), you’ll have rudimentary mouse control over the browser and can click links in a virtual console window.

__________

These tips are taken from Ubuntu Kung Fu—a book of over 300 excellent tips for Ubuntu. The author, Keir Thomas, also wrote Beginning Ubuntu Linux, a “from zero to hero” guide to Ubuntu, which has recently reached its third edition. Take a moment to check out both of them, and also take a look at the rest of the site.

The Alpha 4 release of Intrepid has just been released. According to the Intrepid release schedule, there are two more alpha releases due before the final release. There are no betas or release candidates this time around, and this reflects the truly experimental nature of Intrepid—it really is a case of “straight from the hands of the developers”.  EDIT: Doh, I was wrong. There’s a beta and RC due too. Apologies. 

In my humble opinion, Hardy set a very high bar for desktop releases of Ubuntu. I’m surprised more people didn’t comment on this at the time. Sure, there were problems, but anybody experienced in Linux will know that Hardy is simply light-years ahead of releases of Linux made even one or two years ago. Ubuntu really is pushing the envelope and Hardy got everything “just right”. 

Intrepid has to somehow best this, or at least introduce useful new technology to prove its worth. In terms of features at least, at this stage of the development process we should be seeing things start to firm-up—according to the release schedule, 28 August is the Feature Freeze date, after which nothing else gets in. We’re only a few weeks away.

In this review I take a look at Intrepid as a complete operating system, just like I would a new release of Windows or Mac OS. I don’t look at it through the eyes of a Linux enthusiast, and I don’t look at it as a composite of separate projects.

I want to know how well Intrepid is likely to work in real-life, and how much of an improvement it is over Hardy. I’m looking to see how well everything integrates and, above all, how well everything works (taking into account that this is pre-release software and therefore incomplete/buggy, of course).

Installation and setup

I installed Intrepid on my MacBook for a genuine everyday user experience. Apart from the fact my touchpad didn’t work (a known issue), and after an external mouse was attached, installation progressed OK. New to the installer is an automatic login option during the user setup screen. This will no-doubt raise the hackles of security freaks but I don’t think it’s that big an issue.

Although the Ubuntu installer (Ubiquity) is down for a visual refresh, I didn’t see much improvement. The window decorations were the garish Atlanta theme, and made everything look like a Sun workstation circa 1985. More of that in a minute, however (it’s another known bug).

Installation completed OK, no different to Hardy, in fact, but after a reboot and after Ubuntu had booted, the screen was black. I heard the startup drums and the screen’s backlight was on, but I saw nothing. Switching to a virtual console didn’t help. After some fiddling around, I discovered that Intrepid would boot to a black screen if the power was connected. If the battery was in use, it worked OK, although the backlight was prone to flickering. This is clearly an issue with power-saving and backlighting. Once booted, I could connect the power without a problem.

On booting, I saw the same-old Ubuntu desktop. The dark-brown theme of earlier alpha releases has gone, although maybe by accident—when I took a look at the visual theme settings, I saw an error message that “the window manager theme ‘Human-Murrine’ is not installed”. This is a known bug and is fixed by selecting the Human Murrine theme option. The dark-brown theme is still present, now labelled NewHuman, so you can switch to it if you want. I must admit that, despite being critical of Ubuntu’s GUI choices, I rather like this, but it isn’t clear whether it will make it into the final release as the default theme. I think they should use the dark theme for experimental releases, and a brighter, cleaner theme for LTS releases. Just a suggestion. 

NetworkManager’s main menu has been expanded to include a VPN Connections option. I’m very pleased it’s present because VPN is becoming a popular choice for the corporate worker, especially bearing in mind crazy border control practices of searching laptop hard disks (many workers now wipe data before traveling, and then VPN into their corporate network once landed to retrieve the files; the files are uploaded and the disk wiped once again before traveling back).

However, the placement of the VPN option on the NetworkManager menu is confusing—right below the wifi network options, as if making a VPN connection will somehow get the user online. In reality, of course, the user will have to join a wifi or wired network first, and then configure VPN. I can expect non-technical users being confused here, and many tech support phone calls along the lines of not being able to connect via VPN when the computer isn’t even online.

Note that I wasn’t able to test the VPN functionality because I don’t have access to a VPN.

Included in a new network configuration box that appears when you choose to configure VPN are tabs for Wired, Wireless, Mobile Broadband, and DSL. The mobile broadband option lets you configure GSM or CDMA connections, and is a much-vaunted new feature, requested by Ubuntu overlord Mark Shuttleworth right back at the beginning of the development process. Again, I couldn’t test this because I have no mobile broadband hardware, but the configuration screen looked mighty complicated to me. There’s no step-by-step wizards here—just a dialog box asking for details such as APN, PIN, PUK… Scary. The setup screens for all the other choices are similar. If you attempt to configure a wifi network, you’re prompted for the MTU, and the BSSID…

Yeah, I know Linux is about configurability and not hiding technical details from the user, but this is overkill. Ubuntu is supposed to be Linux for human beings. Linux developers always seem to start by making software complicated, and then attempt to make it easier to use afterward. Why not start by making it easy to use in the first place? Don’t lose the complicated options. Just move them to “Advanced” tabs, or similar.

My wifi network wasn’t automatically detected. I don’t know why because those of my neighbors were. They all use WPA, however, and I use WEP (ironically, I use WEP because it’s the most compatible with various Linux-powered devices in my household). The dislike of WEP is almost certainly an alpha bug. Ironically, while running Intrepid on my MacBook, the wifi device seemed to become supersensitive—I spotted several wifi networks belonging to my neighbors that I’d never seen before. The wifi device is an Atheros AR242x, according to lspci.

Login

If you select the automatic login option, you will—of course—be logged in automatically upon bootup (because of my wifi problems I was unable to find out if this fixed the annoying bug of being prompted for a keyring password each time you boot, in order to give NetworkManager the wifi password).

If you subsequently log out again, a timer will start in the login dialog, and automatically log back in within 10 or 30 seconds. Rather worrying, there seemed no way of stopping this. Hitting a key just caused it to start again from 30. Selecting not to login automatically during installation gives you the standard GDM login screen, sans countdown.

The Fast User Switcher applet now supports a Guest Session option, which creates a locked-down login for others to use (for example, those who borrow your laptop during a meeting to check their email).

I’m not sure if it’s entirely necessary—I regularly create locked-down Guest accounts on all my computers anyway, and it’s the kind of thing that virtually any competent Ubuntu user can do with just a few clicks (remembering not to allow administrator privileges, of course). The only benefit of a ready-made Guest Session option would be that it’s entirely locked-down and thoroughly security-tested, so there absolutely isn’t any way for the user to break-free. I’m not sure if this is the goal, however.

Applications

Let’s move on to look at the apps. Nautilus appears to be mostly the same, except for eject icons that appear alongside any removable storage devices.

Synaptic has had a bit of a visual refresh, and now sports a “Quick Search” box in the toolbar (this was grayed out, so is obviously a work in progress). There are now clear dividers between columns too.

The System —> Shutdown dialog has been overhauled, so that it’s now a series of buttons, rather than icons and, once selected, a countdown timer appears, telling you that the system will shutdown in 60 seconds. This is (cough) borrowed from OS X but I think it looks pretty neat—the previous graphical shutdown dialog was always overkill. Shutdown or restart should be quick and painless. No fuss. 

But other than this, I had trouble spotting any major differences between Hardy and Intrepid when it came to day-to-day apps. I’m sure there have been a few tweaks here and there, but they weren’t visible on my cursory inspection.

Here are the version numbers of key apps—those in parenthesis are the version numbers on a freshly updated 8.04.1 installation. Note how many are the same:

Kernel (2.6.24): 2.6.26
GNOME (2.22.3): 2.23.6
Evolution (2.22.3.1): 2.23.6
Firefox (3.0.1): 3.0.1
OpenOffice.org (2.4.1): 2.4.1
Pidgin (2.4.1): 2.4.3
GIMP (2.4.5): 2.4.6
F-Spot (0.4.3.1): 0.4.4
Totem Movie Player (2.22.1): 2.23.4
Rhythmbox (0.11.5): 0.11.6
Brasero (0.7.1): 0.8.0

When you try and run an application from the System —> Administration menu, there’s still a mishmash of old-style password requests and new “Unlock” buttons. I had hoped that PolicyKit would have made it into more apps, but I didn’t spot it. Maybe this is one for the future.

Encryption

New to Intrepid is the easy creation and subsequent mounting of encrypted folders. By issuing the following commands (the first of which installs the necessary software), you can create a filestore called Private in your /home directory that will be automatically mounted and unmounted when you log in and out, along with restrictive permissions when in use meaning nobody else can access it:

sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils auth-client-config
sudo auth-client-config -p ecryptfs_standard -t pam-auth,pam-session,pam-password
ecryptfs-setup-private

This seemed to work fine in my tests. Configuration is command-line, however, and there needs to be a GUI (again, “Linux for human beings”, anybody…?) Maybe part of the initial installation routine could take care of this. Indeed, I’m not sure why the entire /home directory can’t be encrypted, like OS X’s FileVault, although I appreciate this is immature technology and maybe it isn’t wise to entrust all your data to the system right now.

Personally I prefer to use TrueCrypt, at least until this component matures. This has the benefit of a GUI interface and is also cross-platform, working equally well on Windows and OS X. This is ideal for creating secure but portable data transfer archives. I like being able to easily unmount an encrypted file store when I don’t need it, and having several in use at once. 

Verdict

This is an alpha release and it shows. Intrepid is also definitely an incremental release of Ubuntu—more of a point release than an entirely new version. Aside from minor changes, the main addition is the new network configuration software that allows mobile and VPN connections. However, this is very young and the design needs to be refined. At the moment it’s simply a downright scary raft of configuration options.

The new encryption option is welcome but, again, needs to mature considerably. GUI configuration is a must—asking users to rely on the command-line to setup such a vital feature working is too much. With a distribution like Ubuntu, the command-line should be either a last resort, or an alternative for power-users. It should never be absolutely necessary.

Still, when everything is tightened up, as will inevitably happen over the next few months, I can see Intrepid making for an excellent release of Ubuntu. The new features are necessary and vital for our modern world and, more importantly, bring Ubuntu up to speed with Vista and OS X.

Unless you’re a “road warrior”, however, I can’t see any reason why you should upgrade from Hardy, which, as mentioned, gets things just about right for most users. If you really need the new network configuration utilities, I’d simply scan the Ubuntu forums to see if somebody has found a way of backporting the relevant components into Hardy. If you need encryption, download TrueCrypt instead.

(C) 2008 Keir Thomas. You may reproduce the above on your blog provided that an author credit is given and a link to www.ubuntukungfu.com is clearly shown. 

___________

This review was written by Keir Thomas, an award-winning author of Linux books. Recently he’s published several books about Ubuntu, including Ubuntu Kung Fu—a book of over 300 excellent tips for Ubuntu—and Beginning Ubuntu Linux, a “from zero to hero” guide to Ubuntu. Take a moment to check out both of them, and also take a look at the rest of the site.

A giant is in the process of being toppled right now. Arguably, Microsoft is thrashing about in death throes as the era of personal computing ends.

At the moment, Ubuntu is the giant of the Linux world. If giants are always being toppled, and if you read any of the social networking sites such as Digg, you might get the impression that gOS is just about to do that. Is it true? Is gOS an Ubuntu killer?

Let’s take a look at the newest beta release—”3.0 Gadgets Beta“—to find out. 

What is gOS?

First, let’s be clear about what gOS is. But finding this out is harder than it sounds. Just two sentences appear on the gOS “About” webpage and, perhaps wrongly, this gave me the impression of people who don’t want to reveal too much. However, in the Press Releases section, they’re a little more open:

gOS is a new open source startup dedicated to bringing Linux mainstream. Its new Linux-based operating system, called gOS, is beautifully designed to use Google, MySpace and other “Web 2.0” apps. In November 2007, gOS launched a $199 desktop, the gPC into Wal-Mart with Everex. In the first two weeks, the Everex gPC sold out of Wal-Mart. 

Wikipedia has more details, but it’s clear this is a company with ambition. Not only that but it has what we here in England call gumption (look it up in your dictionary)—it’s getting results at a commercial level, which is more than can be said for many comercially-oriented distributions of Linux, most of which have been struggling to do so for years. 

But what you actually get if you install gOS is Ubuntu. It isn’t that gOS takes Ubuntu 8.04.1 as a base, in the same way Ubuntu takes Debian as a base. gOS takes Ubuntu and repurposes it, applying a different visual style and a handful of apps, mostly concerned with Google functionality. But underneath it’s Ubuntu 8.04.1. Here’s the contents of /etc/lsb-base on an gOS 3.0 Beta installation:

gos@livecd:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=hardy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.04.1"

It’s like taking a Ford car, repainting it, adding in a new air freshener, and calling it the Foobar 3000.

If I were being cruel I would say that gOS 3.0 Beta is simply Ubuntu with a customized desktop and a Google fixation. But that doesn’t do it justice because the additions really do make for a different kind of experience. 

However, a brief peek at the /etc/apt/sources.list file shows that gOS even uses the same-old Ubuntu servers too. Do they have permission to do this? After all, this is effectively one commercial enterprise configuring its product to leech bandwidth from another commercial enterprise. It’s like AOL giving out AT&T’s tech support phone number.

The Applications, Preferences and Administration menus are almost exactly the same as Ubuntu 8.04, although they all spring-off a gOS Start-like button at the top left of the screen. The relevant applications look, feel and operate exactly the same, aside from a questionable green/grey visual theme, of which more later. Evolution is perhaps wisely eschewed in favor of Thunderbird, however, and both Rhythmbox and Totem have gone, to be replaced by the venerable Mplayer. Additionally, Wine is a standard feature.  

There’s nothing wrong with this kind of appropriation, of course. That’s what open source is about. At least gOS hasn’t gone down the path of taking open source apps and renaming them, like some commercial releases of Ubuntu do (wherein Firefox is renamed “Foobar Internet Suite“, and so on).

And the benefit of an “appropriation approach” is that you know exactly how to operate gOS—all your mad Ubuntu skillz will work just fine. 

The desktop

As gOS boots you’re treated to an explosion of greens and grays. The GRUB menu uses a wallpaper with the gOS logo behind, and Usplash shows a customized gOS progress indicator. I must admit that I liked this, and even found it vaguely uplifting, if only because Ubuntu’s choice of browns and oranges tend to be dreary. (I sometimes often wonder if Ubuntu’s visual design team has been infiltrated by goths.) 

When the desktop appears, the wallpaper is green, and the window decorations a rather murky green/grey mixture, with the close/minimize/maximize buttons on the left, as with Mac OS. No other themes are installed, so short of using Synaptic to grab some more theme packages, you’re stuck with it. 

In many ways, the gOS desktop reminds me of SUSE Linux releases from about four or five years ago, which had a similar love of green and grey. All that’s missing is the gecko icon. This impression is reinforced by the fonts, which are almost universally set at a tiny 8pt (SUSE Linux used to struggle to detect a monitor’s DPI settings, leaving the fonts sometimes too small to be readable).

gOS uses GNOME, with a single top panel, and a Mac OS-like dock at the bottom (wbar). The dock is simply an application launch toolbar with OS X-like “zoom” animation effects when you mouse-over icons. Applications minimize to a standard GNOME Window List applet on the panel at the top of the screen. Perhaps annoyingly, the dock doesn’t even indicate which apps are running—there’s no orb or pointer underneath each icon, as with OS X, or other Linux dock-emulation projects, such as AWM. Additionally, the dock is entirely unaware of what’s already running—if you click the Gmail button when an instance of Gmail is already running, a new one will start.

Applications

Several dock buttons are provided by default: Firefox, Gmail, Google Calendars, Google Docs, YouTube, Pigdin, Skype, and OpenOffice Writer, Calc and Impress. The Google buttons use Mozilla Prism (version 0.8), which is effectively Firefox without the toolbars. The Google application webpages simply appear in a program window frame on the desktop. This works surprisingly well—I’m typing this review in Google Docs in a Prism window, and it feels natural and intuitive. Newbie users might even be unaware that they’re running an online application, which I guess is the point. 

Additionally, a shortcut on the gOS menu links to the Google Gears installation page, a Firefox add-on which should let you use the Google Docs applications offline (and, eventually, the Google Mail app too). Unfortunately, no instructions are provided, and I couldn’t get this working in my tests (I got it installed but it refused to sync, with the progress bar stuck at 0%).

The downsides of Prism is that it’s not clear how to configure the applications—I couldn’t find a way to enable live spellchecking in the Google Docs application, for example, which should be possible because it is essentially Firefox. Right-clicking on the user interface appeared to be captured by the AJAX magic of the Google apps themselves. 

When Prism apps minimize to the top panel, they use the standard Prism icon, rather than those of the Google applications. This is a little annoying because it makes “at a glance” spotting of minimized apps hard and you have to read the text alongside. 

The YouTube button didn’t work in my tests, so I couldn’t find out what it offered. The other Google apps worked fine.

Widgets

The big new feature of this release of gOS is the Google Widgets, several of which are crammed onto the desktop at the right-hand side, just like Windows Vista (in fact, too many are activated out of the box—several overlapped on my 1280×800 screen, making for a cluttered appearance).

On the MacBook I used to test gOS, I saw a batery power widget, a weather globe widget, a Google calendar widget, a calculator, and a pot plant. Gadgets can be added by clicking the applet in the notification area on the top panel. (This icon appears to be, confusingly, a Windows logo.)

Desktop effects (Compiz) are not activated by default, even though I ran gOS on a notebook with an Intel graphics chip for which drivers are open source. So there isn’t really any excuse NOT to activate them. However, if you attempt to activate effects manually (right-click the desktop, click Change Desktop Background, and then click the Visual Effects tab), you’ll get a scary warning that Compiz isn’t installed. I don’t know what’s going on here. At a guess I suspect visual effects somehow screw-around with the widgets but I didn’t test this to find out.

It’s perhaps worth pointing out that gOS comes with a handful of proprietary apps installed by default—Adobe Flash player, for example, and Skype. Picasa is also installed, continuing the Google obsession, although Google Earth and Google Desktop aren’t. Multimedia codecs are also installed courtesy of Mplayer, and I wonder how gOS is dealing with the patenting implications of distributing codecs. Ubuntu leaves the decision up to the user.

Verdict

There’s a lot to like in this release of gOS, but Ubuntu fans have nothing to be worried about. This ain’t gonna topple the world’s favorite Linux anytime soon. Indeed, it’s not in gOS’ interest to do that. And I don’t really think that’s the intention anyway. The gOS guys seem to have OEM partnerships in mind. This is pretty smart, but it’s just one small component of Ubuntu’s plans for world domination. 

I really liked the Google/web 2.0 integration of gOS, and it works surprisingly well. I must confess that I had expected to hate it. But I wonder why there isn’t an existing Ubuntu-sponsored project to meet the same ends. This is such an obvious avenue to travel down that it’s surprising only gOS is doing so.

But gOS may well be 5-10 years ahead of its time. At the beginning of this review I mentioned that Microsoft’s demise is because the era of personal computing is coming to an end. This is true, but while personal computing is dying, it isn’t dead yet. gOS looks to a future of shared computing, rather than personal computing, but the guys behind it ought to remember that being too early with a technology can be as bad as being too late. Timing is everything.  

In summing-up on a practical level, I’d say that if gOS has a fault it’s that it’s a little rough-and-ready. It feels clumsy. Some of this might be down to the beta status of the release I looked at, but I don’t think that explains all of it. There’s a feeling of disparate things being thrown together (a disease that has blighted many up-and-coming Linux distros).

Ubuntu excels in sheer attention to detail, and this was something new that it brought to the world of Linux that accounted for its success. Some of that attention would be welcome here. 

You can download the public beta of gOS yourself and try it out. I advise you to do so. I don’t think most of us will switch to it anytime soon, but it’s an interesting future echo of the way things might be in a few years’ time.

(C) 2008 Keir Thomas. You may reproduce the above on your blog provided that an author credit is given and a link to www.ubuntukungfu.com is clearly shown.
________

My name is Keir Thomas and I write books about Ubuntu.

Below I explain how to add a “wallpaper” to the GRUB boot menu, and then explain how to add password protection. Both tips are taken from my new book Ubuntu Kung Fu, and should work OK on other distributions of Linux, although I’ve only tested these steps on Ubuntu 8.04.1.

Let’s crack on with it.

Give the Boot Menu Wallpaper

Ubuntu’s boot menu is ugly and looks like it’s straight out of 1985. It doesn’t have to be this way. The GRUB menu software is capable of having a graphical backdrop that can be any picture. However, you’ll need to shrink the picture and reduce its color level. Because of this need to simplify the image, graphical designs tend to work better than photographs (I noticed that cartoon images work well too—pictures from The Simpsons are a particularly good choice!).

Choose a picture, and then load it into the GIMP (right-click, and select Open With —> Open with “GIMP Image Editor”); you might like to know that the default Ubuntu desktop wallpapers are stored in /usr/share/backgrounds. You should select a picture that’s roughly in 4:3 ratio, such as a digital camera snap. Don’t select very tall or broad images—they won’t work.

Right-click the image within GIMP, and select Image —> Scale Image. In the Width box, type 640, and hit the Tab key. The Height box should then automatically change to 480. If it doesn’t, click the small chain icon to the right of the Width and Height boxes so that it changes to a broken chain icon. Then enter 480 into the Height box. Once done, click the Scale button.

Right-click the image again within GIMP, and select Image —> Mode —> Indexed. Ensure Generate Optimum Palette is selected, and then type 14 into the Maximum Number of Colors box. Then click the Convert button. The picture might now look ugly, but such a low color count is all the GRUB boot menu allows. You might want to try an alternative simpler image if you don’t like what you see. Some nice Ubuntu-themed ready-made boot menu wallpapers are available for download from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Hardy/Alternate/Grub.

Right-click the image again within GIMP, and select File —> Save As. Give the file a name in the Name box, and use the .xpm file extension. You might save the file as bootwallpaper.xpm, for example. Bear in mind that GIMP automatically detects the file type it should save the file as from the file extension. Click OK to select the default alpha values, if prompted.

Open a terminal window, and type the following (this assumes the file was saved to the desktop):

sudo mkdir /boot/grub/splashimages
gzip ~/Desktop/bootwallpaper.xpm
sudo mv ~/Desktop/bootwallpaper.xpm.gz /boot/grub/splashimages

Replace bootwallpaper mentioned earlier with the filename you chose.

Then open the boot menu file for editing in Gedit:

gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Look for the line that begins ## ## End Default Options ##, and, after that, add a new line that reads splashimage=(hd0,4)/boot/grub/splashimages/bootwallpaper.xpm.gz.

As earlier, replace bootwallpaper with the filename you chose. Save the file, and then reboot to see the new wallpaper in action.

Note that the last step assumes your computer is dual-booting with Windows. If Ubuntu is the only operating system on your computer, the line should read splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splashimages/bootwallpaper.xpm.gz.

To remove the wallpaper, simply edit the menu.lst file and remove the splashimage line you added.