Forgoing The Commonplace, Hello Ubuntu!

Yesterday in #ubuntu, someone asked, "I am still confused about this. Everything claims that dist-upgrade actually *upgrades* distributions...can someone please clear this up for me"

So I told them:

<maco> apt-get dist-upgrade differs from apt-get upgrade in that it will remove obsolete packages and add new dependencies, while apt-get upgrade will not. this is necessary when upgrading from one distro release to another, but it is not the *only* time it is necessary. thus, in aptitude, dist-upgrade has been renamed to full-upgrade
<maco> apt-get dist-upgrade will only change you from one release to another if you've modified /etc/apt/sources.list to point to a newer release, but this method of upgrading is not recommended

They also asked "and if i do want to upgrade the distribution (not that i do), how do i go about that?" to which I responded:

<maco> the recommended way to change distro releases is sudo do-release-upgrade

They said it was the best explanation in the shortest amount of text, so I'm posting it here, hoping it'll make it easier for people to find. By the way, man apt-get does explain all this…just in slightly more technical terms.

Remastersys is a tool that can be used to do 2 things with an existing Klikit or Ubuntu or derivative installation.It can make a full system backup including personal data to a live cd or dvd that you can use anywhere and install. It can make a distributable copy you can share with friends. This will not have any of your personal user data in it.

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…if this is the sort of email you're intending to send:

Subject: I had no idea that hot girls liked linux
Body: Are there more of you? I mean how does that happen? How does a good looking female put off their social life to the point where they can actually use ubuntu without ripping their eyes out?

Seriously, I don't want to hear it. Just think about it for one minute. What does appearance have to do with technical ability? Why do all the good looking men involved in K/X/Ubuntu put time into their favourite distro that could otherwise be spent on their social life? My answer's not going to be any different than theirs! And for that matter, why should it be social life or Ubuntu? Consider that many of the developers are friends with each other.

Also, isn't that being a little mean to Ubuntu? I mean, yeah, it's not as awesome as Kubuntu, but.…still… (joking!)

And yes, that's an actual email I received today. Ugh. Including his name and email address here is /very/ tempting, but it'd also be unethical, so I won't.

Ubuntu Geek Forum Section Live Now please register to post your ubuntu related questions

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/forum

The qBittorrent project was started in March 2006 to create a lightweight but featureful BitTorrent client that would be multi-platform and very easy to use.qBittorrent v2 is the closest open source (GNU GPL v2 license) equivalent to µtorrent. qBittorrent is based on Qt4 toolkit and libtorrent-rasterbar.

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This quick script that generates an xml which can be consumed by the backgrounds config. This script was created by ozhoo in ubuntuforums http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1344787.

First you need to open wallpaper.sh file

gksudo gedit /usr/bin/wallpaper.sh

Copy and paste the following script


#!/bin/bash
#
# usage:./wallpaper.sh background_dir_1 background_dir_2 background_dir_3
#
# description: simply generate a backgrounds xml that can be consumed by gnome's background configuration
#
# author: ubuntuforums.org username 'ozhoo'
#
# note: only looks for .JPG and .jpg files

# output file
FILENAME=backgrounds.xml

# start time
YEAR=2009
MONTH=08
DAY=01
HOUR=00
MINUTE=00
SECOND=00

# time to show background (seconds)
WALLDURATION=900.0

# transition time (seconds)
TRANSDURATION=5.0

# script specifics
DIRS=$*
T1="echo -e \t"
T2="echo -e \t\t"

echo "" > "$FILENAME"
${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${YEAR}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${MONTH}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${DAY}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${HOUR}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${MINUTE}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${SECOND}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"

get_first()
{
for d in $DIRS; do
find "$d"|grep -i .jpg|while read j; do
echo "$j"
break
done
break
done
}

FIRST="$(get_first)"

${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${WALLDURATION}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${FIRST}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"
${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${TRANSDURATION}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${FIRST}" >> "$FILENAME"

for d in $DIRS; do
find "$d"|grep -i .jpg|while read j; do
if [ "$j" == "$FIRST" ]; then
continue
else
${T2}"${j}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"
${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${WALLDURATION}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${j}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"
${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${TRANSDURATION}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T2}"${j}" >> "$FILENAME"
fi
done
done

${T2}"${FIRST}" >> "$FILENAME"
${T1}"" >> "$FILENAME"
echo "" >> "$FILENAME"

Save and exit the file.

Now you need to give excute permissions for your script

chmod +x wallpaper.sh

Using this script

/usr/bin/wallpaper.sh background_dir_1 background_dir_2 background_dir_3

Note:- This script only looks for .JPG and .jpg files

DigiKam is an advanced digital photo management application for Linux, Windows, and Mac-OSX.The people who inspired digiKam's design are the photographers like you who want to view, manage, edit, enhance, organize, tag, and share photographs under Linux systems.

You can check digikam new feaures from here

Open terminal and run the following commands

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip5/extra

Update the source list

sudo apt-get update

Install digikam 1.0

sudo apt-get install digikam

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In around 15 minutes, the time it takes to install Ubuntu Server Edition, you can have a LAMP (Linux, Apache,MySQL and PHP) server up and ready to go. This feature, exclusive to Ubuntu Server Edition, is available at the time of installation.

The LAMP option means you don’t have to install and integrate each of the four separate LAMP components, a process which can take hours and requires someone who is skilled in the installation and configuration of the individual applications. Instead, you get increased security, reduced time-to-install, and reduced risk of misconfiguration, all of which results in a lower cost of ownership.New pre-configured installation options have been added to the Ubuntu Server Cloud computing server,cloud computing node and PostgreSQL Database options join existing Mail Server, Open SSH Server,Samba File Server, Print Server, Tomcat Java Server,Virtual Machine Host,Manual Package selection,LAMP and DNS options for pre-configured installations, easing the deployment of common server configurations.

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This is new GDM2 configuration gui tools you can use this tool to change GDM images,icons, GTK theme,enable/disable login sound and hide users list from login screen.This tool is useful for ubuntu 9.10 users.

1.) Download the Code from here

2.) Copy it into /home/

3.) Open a console and make the file executable:

chmod a+x gdm-setup.py

4.) Start Script with

gksu gdm-setup.py

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If you are using Windows and ubuntu as dual boot and if you want to access your windows partition you need to follow this procedure.This tutorial will explain how to access your windows partition in simple way.ntfs-config program allow you to easily configure all of your NTFS devices to allow write support via a friendly gui. For that
use, it will configure them to use the open source ntfs-3g driver. You’ll also be able to easily disable this feature.

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Chrome has recently been open sourced by Google as a developer preview. Its very young, clearly has some issues and needs serious work, however it is usable and lots of people have managed to get it running in a virtual machine or via a USB key.

Chrome OS is clearly based on Ubuntu(if you press Ctrl+Alt+T to open the terminal, you can see the Ubuntu Karmic development branch message) meaning hardware support should be excellent. However, its been heavily stripped down For most people, Wifi doesn’t work. Without Wifi, Chrome OS is pretty useless as it relies heavily on “the cloud”
for most of its features.

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I just gave an impromptu lesson on symbolic links (symlinks) and hard links, complete with ASCII art, in #ubuntu-offtopic, and Topyli commented that simple explanations of this for beginners are hard to find, so here's a summary.

The purpose of a link is to allow you to have two (or more) paths to access the same data without having the data exist on disk multiple times, thus giving convenience without sacrificing disk space. So why are there two kinds of links and how do they work?

Symlinks (ln -s REALPATH LINK) work like this:

LINK --> REALPATH --> DATA

While hard links (ln PATH1 PATH2) work like this:

PATH1 --> DATA <-- PATH2

See what's happening here? In the symlink case, your link points to another path, which points to the data. In the hard link case, two paths point to the same data directly. I think I could get a lesson on pointers in C out of this ASCII art if I wanted to. If you want a bit more background, your hard disk's filesystem contains a table of inode numbers, which is just like the Index at the back of a book. Symlinks are when you get "(see also: rubber ducky)" and hard links are when you get "Rubber ducky: 5" and "Sesame Street: 5" both showing up in the Index. Since we can have multiple filesystems mounted on one machine (for example my /home is on a separate partition), it is important to note that while a symlink can point to something located on another disk (or in a book "Further reading: Little Red Riding Hood"), a hard link only knows about data on its own filesystem (ie same partition). So, if you want to link from your hard disk to a flash drive, you need to use a symlink. This makes sense since your hard disk can't know if your flash drive rearranges things while it's plugged into another computer.

How do these show up in ls? Hard links look like normal files. For symlinks ls -l --color will show LINK -> REALPATH. If REALPATH is deleted, this will be highlighted as red text on a black background.

Speaking of deletion, how does that work? Well, if you remove LINK, REALPATH and DATA will still exist. If you remove REALPATH, DATA goes away too and LINK just points at nothing (though if you add REALPATH back, LINK will start working again, as it only goes by filename). As for hard links, DATA goes away once no more inode numbers point to it. As mentioned before, hard links point directly to the data, so this means removing all links and the original filename. So if I remove the original filename (PATH1), PATH2 will still point to DATA.

I hope that's a straightforward enough explanation of how it works.