Archive for the ‘Linux’ Category

How to install OpenOffice 3.2 in Ubuntu 9.10

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Posted 22 Feb 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

OpenOffice 3.2 was released 10 days back. It has some new enhancements including faster startup. I wanted to install the new version, but it won’t get into Ubuntu repositories soon. Here is what I did to install OpenOffice 3.2 in my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop. The steps below will remove the current installation of OpenOffice and installs the new one.

  1. Go to OpenOffice website and click on “I want to download OpenOffice.org”. If you use the Firefox browser in your Ubuntu installation, it will download the file “filename_deb.tar.gz”. When I used the Google Chrome browser, I believe I got a non deb version. Make sure you get the deb version. My download includes Java JRE, so it took longer to download than the non JRE version.
  2. Once you download the file, go to the downloaded directory using Nautilus and double click the downloaded file. The file extractor will show a directory OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483 or something similar to that. Extract the directory to wherever you want (Desktop or Download folder or Home folder etc.).
  3. Open a terminal by clicking Application -> Accessories -> Terminal.
  4. Copy, paste the highlighted command in the terminal and press the enter key. (don’t include the quotes for any of the commands in this tutorial). This command will remove the current installation of OpenOffice. Say ‘Y’ if it asks for confimation. “sudo apt-get remove openoffice*.*”
  5. Now copy and paste the following command and press enter. “sudo dpkg -i ~/directory_name/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/*.deb” where directory_name is the directory where you extracted the downloaded file. If you had extracted it to the desktop, then enter sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/*.deb. If you extracted it to your home directory, then enter sudo dpkg -i ~/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/*.deb. ‘~’ stands for home directory. This will install all installation files under that directory.
  6. Copy and paste the following command in the terminal and press enter. This command will install OpenOffice integration package for Ubuntu since we uninstalled the OpenOffice that came with Ubuntu. “sudo dpkg -i ~/directory_name/OOO320_m12_native_packed-1_en-US.9483/DEBS/desktop-integration/openoffice.org3.2-debian-menus_3.2-9472_all.deb“. Again the directory_name is where the file was extracted.
  7. Type exit and press enter to exit the terminal.

You can now open the new version of OpenOffice from Applications – Office menu. You are all set. When you open the Office applications the 1st time, it might ask you to enter your name and register the application.

Credit: Ubuntu Forums.
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NZ school ditches Microsoft and goes with Ubuntu and Open Source

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Posted 25 Jan 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, News, Ubuntu

A New Zealand high school running entirely on open source software has slashed its server requirements by a factor of almost 50, despite a government deal mandating the use of Microsoft software in all schools.New Zealand government is a sucker to Microsoft. Microsoft has a long-standing contract with the national government and most planning documents for education presume an Microsoft infrastructure.

“The education space is Microsoft-focused and heavily subsidised by government,” said Patrick Brennan, lead engineer from Open Systems Specialists, which led the IT project at the school, during a presentation at Linux.conf.au in Wellington. “Every reference plan is based on Microsoft technology.”

The school’s open source implementation uses Ubuntu on the desktop and Mandriva for four key servers (one firewall, one storage and two KVM hypervisors). Mandriva was selected because of the ease of using Mandriva Directory Server to manage the school’s LDAP directory, but Brennan said either desktop or server OS could easily be replaced.

NFSv4 is used to connect users into the system, allowing them to remotely mount into their home directory on the server via Kerberos.  Applications used within the school include OpenOffice, Google Docs, Moodle for managing education content, and Mahara for student portfolios. The Koha software used by the school library was also customised to integrate more closely with the LDAP security system and to allow book recommendations. While Koha was paid to make those changes, the resulting code will be freely available to all New Zealand schools.

The school doesn’t get any credit for the reduced spending. “The brilliance of Microsoft’s business model is they get the same amount of money regardless of who uses it,” Osborne said. However, the school has saved significantly in other areas, such as not needing specialised routers to handle connections to the Watchdog system used to filter school internet connections.

It’s a wonderful move by Albany Senior High School. I hope the government will take a notice of that and the cost savings and won’t renew the contract with Microsoft when it expires. Great job Albany Senior High School.

Source: CIO.
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Logitech Quickcam Chat with Skype 2.1 in Ubuntu Linux

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Posted 21 Jan 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

As you may be aware of, Skype released their 2nd beta of Skype 2.1 for Linux. I have Logitech Quickcam Chat I use with my desktop and it didn’t work with official Skype before. I was using the one from Medibuntu repository and it worked well. Medibuntu removed Skype from their list.

Before you install the new beta of Skype, if you have already installed Skype through Medibuntu, you may have to uninstall Skype and Skype-common before you install the new Skype. You’ll get an error otherwise. Once installed, the video didn’t work. I could then get the video work by loading Skype using the following command I issued in a terminal.

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

Make sure you have libv4l-0 installed. If not, install it before you try the above command. I now have to put this command as a file and run it as an executable to run Skype. It’s a pain, but it works atleast. I hope Skype team will fix this before they release the final version.

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Skype 2.1 beta 2 released

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Posted 20 Jan 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

Skype team has released the 2nd beta of Skype 2.1 for Linux, 5 months after the 1st beta release. This release brings the following new features along with several bug fixes.

  • Screen sharing.
  • Report abuse.
  • Support for UI styles.
  • Possibility to quote a message.
  • Localized time formats.

Here are some improvements in the new version.

  • performance improvements.
  • Possibility to add more email addresses to profile.
  • Load all historical group conversations into event history.
  • PulseAudio: Possibility to choose different audio device for ringing and notifications.
  • A message is displayed when the user tries to add contacts that already are his/her buddies.
  • Incoming contact request dialog.

I couldn’t get the video working in both my desktop and laptop with Skype 2.1, but the package that was offered by Medibuntu worked fine. They stopped offering Skype. Skype now says that if you have Video issues in Ubuntu 32 bits, then use the following command to start Skype.

install “libv4l-0″ package and launch Skype with: LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype

You can download Skype 2.1 beta 2 from here.

Here is the list of known issues with the new beta.
General

  • Logging out and in may cause Skype to crash.
  • Using Oxygen Style might lead to graphical issues.
  • On Debian amd64 version Skype crashes on startup with the message: “Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 623: _dl_open: Assertion `_dl_debug_initialize (0, args.nsid)->r_state == RT_CONSISTENT’ failed!”. This seems to be Debian only issue with 32 bit PulseAudio libraries being installed even if PulseAudio is not active, a workaround can be: – Debian Lenny: sudo chmod a-r /usr/lib32/libpulse{-simple.so.0.0.1,.so.0.4.1} – Debian Squeeze: sudo chmod a-r /usr/lib32/libpulse{-simple.so.0.0.2,.so.0.8.0,common-0.9.15.so}
  • On some amd64 distributions avatars are not showing, this is a problem with 32-bits emulation Qt library. Qt tries to find its image format plugins, but finds a 64-bits version instead and fails to load it.A workaround is to specify a plugin path when launching skype like this:

– Ubuntu 64 bit: install “ia32-libs” package and launch Skype with: QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib32/qt4/plugins skype
– Arch 64 bit (with 32 bit chroot installed in /opt/arch32): QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/opt/arch32/usr/lib/qt/plugins skype
– Other distributions might have a different path.

Options

  • When PulseAudio is enabled in the audio settings, only that specific entry will be available; to change the settings, use the PulseAudio manager tool that is bundled with your distribution.

Contact list

  • Newly added contacts are not found by QuickFilter until Skype restart.
  • It is not possible to drag multiple contacts to a group.

Instant Messaging

  • Sometimes Instant Messages are not ordered correctly.

Video

  • Sometimes receiving video shows a white square on top-left part of the window.
  • Skype does not work well with newer version of GSPCA Webcams driver (Linux Kernel >=2.6.27), possible workaround:

– Ubuntu 32 bit: install “libv4l-0″ package and launch Skype with: LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype
– Ubuntu 64 bit: install “lib32v4l-0″ package and launch Skype with: LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib32/libv4l/v4l1compat.so skype
– Other distributions might have the same library, but may have a different path.
How to make video working on Logitech Quickcam Messenger [0x046d:0x08f0]
  http://www.kuhrti.de/index.php/linux/logitech-quickcam-messenger-on-linux/
 http://www.kuhrti.de/index.php/article/logitech-quickcam-messenger-on-ubuntu-9-04/

For more information, read the release note.

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Integrate Firefox notification with Ubuntu notification system

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Posted 04 Jan 2010 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

FirefoxNotify is a Firefox addon which integrates Firefox notifications with Linux notification system, which allows Firefox to integrate better with Linux OSes. The addon needs Galago compatible notification server which can be enabled by installing libnotify (if it’s not installed already). Here are the list of dependencies.

  • Python
  • DBus
  • Galago compliant notification daemon (libnotify)
  • python’s pynotify package. The debian package should be apt://python-notify
  • xdg-utils (for opening files from the notification)

According to the author, If you’re on Ubuntu, you may or may not need the package python-dbus. One bug with the addon is that, if there there are multiple windows open, you will get multiple notifications. It will be fixed in the future.

Source: OMG!Ubuntu.
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Google Chrome (beta) for Linux available now

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Posted 08 Dec 2009 — by Arun
Category Linux

Google has released a beta version of Google Chrome for Linux. The beta version comes after a long delay in introducing it in Linux while Windows has seen couple of versions released already. Google acknowledges that most engineers use Linux machines at Google, but they didn’t act quickly enough to get a Linux version out. Google Chrome for Linux now includes tight integration with native GTK themes and updates are managed by standard system package manager.

So far, about 50 developers outside Google have contributed code. Linux version embraces HTML5, like Windows.

Google has also released extensions for Google Chrome in Windows and Linux. There are around 300 extensions in the extension gallery. Extension is not yet available for Mac. It should show up soon in developer channel.

Source: Google Chrome Blog.
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Linux takes 90 percent of top 500 super computer for November

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Posted 20 Nov 2009 — by Arun
Category Linux

90% of the top 500 supercomputers run on Linux. Only 1% runs on Windows based. The rest are used by Unix or something else. You might have read my earlier post in June which stated that 472 of the top 500 super computers run on Linux. That trend is continuing, which is good. Take a look at the chart here.

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Linux in netbooks surge globally

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Posted 05 Nov 2009 — by Arun
Category Linux, News

LinuxWorld reports:

Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year.

“Just because you live in the United States, don’t assume that everything is on Windows,” Orr said. Orr said Ubuntu is a popular choice on netbooks, though he declined to confirm that with any hard statistics.

As netbooks running the ARM processor become a major factor, Orr predicted Linux will overtake Windows on netbooks by 2013. That will be driven by consumers in less-developed countries buying Linux netbooks as their primary PCs, rather than North American consumers buying netbooks as secondary machines as predominates today.

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Microsoft Linux

1 Comment
Posted 05 Nov 2009 — by Arun
Category Linux

Ex-Microsoftie says that Windows 7 is doomed and Linux, free software, will ultimately dominate. Read the story here.

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Dual monitor in Ubuntu Linux

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Posted 21 Oct 2009 — by Arun
Category Linux, Ubuntu

Yippee!!! I got dual monitor working with Ubuntu 9.04. Check the screenshot at the bottom of the post.

I bought NVidia GeForce 9800 GT 2 months back. Newegg had a good deal on it (I think they still have). The card is energy efficient and quiet. I don’t play lots of games, so I don’t know how high the temperature goes. For normal operation in Ubuntu, the temperature stays anywhere between 46C to 54C. Installing the card in Ubuntu was smooth and Ubuntu automatically detected the card and asked me to enable the NVidia proprietary driver. I’m not sure how to increase the fan speed of the card in Ubuntu.

I also bought an ASUS VH236H 23″ widescreen 1080p monitor from Buy.com. They had a good deal on that monitor. I wanted to buy a glossy monitor since my laptop, HDTV etc. are matte finish (for better reason), but this monitor is also matte. It has glossy bezel, but the screen is matte. I don’t regret buying this monitor after using it for a month. The pictures are crisp clear. It has 2ms response time, 1920*1080 resolution (1080p), 5 preset modes, It’s energy star rated. It has HDMI, DVI and VGA inputs, so I can use this as HDTV. It also has built in speakers, but I don’t use that. The only negative thing is, the stand is not height adjustable.

I connected my old 19″ Samsung monitor and the new one to the NVidia GeForce 9800 GT video card using the VGA to DVI connector (old monitor) and DVI (new one) cables. After I started Ubuntu, I went to NVidia settings manager and saw the 2 monitors under X Server display configuration. The 2nd monitor (old one) was disabled by default. I clicked on the 2nd monitor picture and clicked on Configure button. I was then presented with 3 options (shown below).

I first selected Seperate X screen, thinking I would use them as 2 different monitor, but that didn’t work. When I selected that, only the 2nd monitor worked. I then selected the TwinView option which then spreaded my desktop across both monitors. In Twinview, you’ll see the taskbar, menu etc in only one monitor. You can move the application across both monitors. When I enabled TwinView, I believe, due to the way I connected the monitors to the dual DVI outputs in the video card, my old 19″ monitor was taken as default with menus and taskbars and the new 23″ was used as an extended monitor. All I have to do then was to click on my primary 23″ monitor and put +0+0 under position and on my secondary monitor, added +1920+0 where 1920 is the primary 23″ monitor resolution. Doing that made my new monitor as primary and the old one as secondary.


(Primary 23# monitor)


(Secondary 19″ monitor)

Another major problem I encountered was trying to save the configuration. I tried to save the settings by clicking Save to X Configuration File button, but it said I didn’t have permission to write to Xorg.conf file. I then tried starting the NVidia settings manager under super user (sudo) mode and tried the same. It still didn’t work. What I then did was, I made a backup of xorg.conf file, opened a terminal and opened the xorg.conf file using sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, deleted everything in that file, then went back to NVidia control panel, set the monitors as I explained above, clicked the save to X configuration button in the NVidia control panel (under X Server display configuration) . When you click the save button, I think you will see a preview button to see the new xorg code. Click the preview button, copy the code and paste that code in xorg.conf file, save and close it. Restart Ubuntu and it should work.

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