Archive for the 'linux' Category

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linux mint 12 rc — a little look

linux mint 12 rc is avail­able for down­load. grab it here. i’ve gone with the 64 bit version. not a review (as usual) just a quick look at the new version and a couple of the changes. the install was rather speedy and smooth. the biggest delay was down­load­ing the uk lan­guage packs…and that only took 35 seconds. whole thing was com­plete within 5 minutes. after reboot­ing 100 MB of updates were available…another reboot and we’re ready to go.

biggest change? gnome 3. there was much dis­cus­sion as to whether mint should switch. i’ve tried various imple­ment­a­tions of gnome’s new inter­face and i have to say that mint’s is prob­ably the most usable so far. it retains the lower panel which helps when many windows are open at once. think they’ve made the right decision. caught up with the latest kernel too. see below for some grabs. seems stable…quick enough…and comes with much of the soft­ware that isn’t installed by default with ubuntu (gimp, build-essentals and more) although ia32-libs isn’t for some reason. if you plan on playing with 32 bit code then issue an apt-get install ia32-libs ia32-libs-multiarch as root.

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sshmote for android

want to control the mul­ti­me­dia files that are stored on your linux based com­puter using your android phone? from the comfort of your couch? yes? well sshmote does the job rather well. you can get it from the android market or grab the latest .apk from the developer’s website. you’ll need the openssh server installed which, on a debian based system, is easily taken care of by issuing apt-get install ssh as root in a ter­minal. you’ll also need an audio/video player installed…here i’m using vlc which can be added via apt-get install vlc

fire up the app on your phone and pick a profile. you’ll need to enter your host­name or IP address. the first time i tried to connect it failed…i had to long-press the data­base entry and choose ‘edit (advanced)’ to add the user­name and pass­word. in there you can also choose the default dir­ect­ory that will be dis­played and choose the inter­face theme. works well…though i’ve found that no GUI is dis­played on my laptop and i couldn’t get vlc to exit from inside the phone app. haven’t fiddled with it too much though. found it a lot easier to use and setup than gmote. some screen­shots can be seen below…

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begone unity

get rid of unity in ubuntu 11.10 and replace it with the gnome 3 shell? easy (well tech­nic­ally we’re just adding gnome 3…not remov­ing unity…that’d be rather more com­plic­ated). as root (or use your infernal sudo if you must) issue…

apt-get install gnome-shell

when that’s com­pleted log out and then click the small gear icon next to your user­name and select gnome from the menu. is it better? prob­ably not. not yet.

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ubuntu 11.10 — a little look

ubuntu 11.10 oneiric ocelot (come on people…you could have come up with better that that…) alpha 3 has been released so i thought i’d give it a whirl. been using fedora 15 64 bit since its alpha stage and kind of miss a debian based distro. so i fired up vir­tu­al­box to give it a try. here’s a brief look with some screen­shots (click any of them for a larger view).

the install was smooth and rather speedy (it’s still using some of the 11.04 artwork but that’s normal with ubuntu alpha ver­sions) and within 20 minutes i got to the login screen.

ubuntu have decided to stick with unity instead of moving to gnome 3 as fedora have which i can kind of under­stand as they’ve ploughed so many resources and so much time into it. after logging in we get to the main desktop inter­face and can load up some ‘goodies’.

i’m not dis­lik­ing unity as much as i did the last time i used it…the left bar is actu­ally more con­fig­ur­able than gnome 3’s version. apps can be easily removed (here i got rid of all the usual office guff that’s installed by default) and others added from the main applic­a­tion menu which looks like this…

if you’re too lazy to fire up a ter­minal window the soft­ware centre makes it easy to find and install new soft­ware (i.e. first stop… gimp, build-essential, joe, ubuntu-restricted-extras, filez­illa and ufraw)

11.10 is using a brand-spanking-new kernel (3.0.0–7-generic). hot off the presses. read more about this big step for linux here and here’s the proof…

memory usage isn’t exactly min­im­al­ist but i had a few things running and the virtual machine was only alloc­ated 1GB of RAM. here’s top and htop dis­play­ing the current load and processes

i’m actu­ally quite impressed with 11.10 so far. it’s rather pol­ished and reacts snap­pily (even when running vir­tu­ally) and while i wouldn’t recom­mend you install it on a mission crit­ical machine right now i’m just about to do just that.

EDIT — install com­pleted on my HP Note­book. ran into one problem after logging in… ‘/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 exits with status 256′ this also happened when i installed the 10.10 beta as i doc­u­mented here. follow the instruc­tions in that post to correct the error. here’s a wee grab of the fin­ished article running on my machine…

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