Ubuntu 9.10 is here

After 6 months of waiting ( the normal time for Ubuntu releases) Ubuntu 9.10 is here. Today (29 Octomber) I upgraded my laptop at Ubuntu 9.10. What is Ubuntu promising with this new release:

Faster, simplified, better-looking boot experience for most users in other words was redesigned from many points of view
Audio revamp – Pulse audio
Firefox 3.5 – no more comments

Other cool things:

Ubuntu One – a new technology which offer you 2Gb of free storage over internet (I should check that myself)
Better integration with: Flickr, Facebook, Picassa, Youtube, last.fm and other social sites.
Office – Openoffice 3.0
Games:

Over 400 completely free and completely cool games. Solitaire is not the only game in town.

Fully translated into 23 languages

But you should try install/upgrade yourself to see all this differences.
Download http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
Features http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/910features/

Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop

Windows 7 and Japan Linux Symposium

Japan Linux Symposium is between October 21 – 23 2009 in Tokyo, Japan. In the same day (21) Microsoft Japan Launched Windows 7 and one of the Microsoft point of sales was across the street from this Linux Symposium. The guys decided to do something fun and get one of their best guests, on this symposium, and take a picture on the Windows 7 stand.

Linux Torvalds and Windows 7

Yeah, the guest was Linus Torvalds

All the credits of this pictures goes to Chirs.

Quick Tip: X Server standby

Sometimes you need standby for your Xorg server and sometimes not (surveillance applications don’t need it). I will try to show you in several lines how you can configure that.

To control standby for your monitor you need to see if you have enabled Display Power Management Signaling enabled.

For that try to run following command in a xterm

$xset q
DPMS (Energy Star):
Standby: 1200 Suspend: 1800 Off: 2400
DPMS is Enabled
Monitor is On

if is not enabled just run

$xset +dpms


To set standby, suspend and off parameters run
$xset dpms X Y Z
where X is standby time, Y is suspend time and Z is off time all in seconds.

To set that at every Xorg boot then you should add the following lines to your xorg.conf
Section “ServerFlags”
Option “blank time” “150″
Option “standby time” “300″
Option “suspend time” “600″
Option “off time” “1200″
Option “dpms” “true”
EndSection

If you want to disable DPMS standby then put this configuration in your xorg.conf

Section “ServerFlags”
Option “blank time” “0″
Option “standby time” “0″
Option “suspend time” “0″
Option “off time” “0″
Option “dpms” “false”
EndSection

Also read here http://www.randombugs.com/linux/disable-monitor-standby-xorg-xserver.html

Quick Tip: Untrusted application launcher

If you copy your shortcuts from one system to another and you don’t preserve the right attributes on this files then is possible to get a warning everytime when you run a application from your desktop or your menus.

This shortcut should be a *.desktop file and it should have your rights on it or it should have minimum read and execute for group or others.

to fix that just run

sudo chmod ugo+rx *.desktop

That means you give rx rights (read and execute) to ugo (user, group and other).
So now, you also learned how to set the proper file rights

I know you can also use mark as trusted button, but is very useful when you have more than 40 shortcuts on your desktop.

Quick Tip: How to search in Windows Active Directory from Linux with ldapsearch

Sometimes we need to query, under Linux, Active Directory for users/computers without accessing a remote desktop. We can achieve that with ldapserch. First you should install first ldap-utils. In Debian or Ubuntu just run:

$ sudo apt-get install ldap-utils

The syntax for using ldapsearch:

ldapsearch -x -LLL -h [host] -D [user] -w [password] -b [base DN] -s sub "([filter])" [attribute list]

A simple example

$ ldapsearch -x -LLL -h host.example.com -D user -w password -b"dc=ad,dc=example,dc=com" -s sub "(objectClass=user)" givenName


NSFW: Ubuntu Sexy Logos

I hope you will enjoy this new gallery.
Warning !!! Contain almost nude girls.

NSFW: Ubuntu User Contributed Logo 2

The best NSFW logos for Ubuntu.

Quick Tip: How to disable PC Speaker under Linux

Is very annoying to hear a beep from your pc speaker everytime when you do a mistake or your keyboard buffer is filled.

The most easy way to disable it is to remove the pc speaker kernel module and after just blacklist it to don’t be loaded on boot.

$ sudo su -
# rmmod pcspkr
# echo blacklist pcspkr >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
# echo >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist


Quick Tip: How to install Windows fonts under Linux

A lot of webpages are build with “Windows” software and they are looking good only under Windows, and that only because of the fonts. Windows fonts can be installed under any distribution of Linux, so I will show you multiple way’s to install them.

Under Linux Debian just run as root:

apt-get install msttcorefonts

If you don’t have Linux Debian:

1. Copy *.ttf fonts from your Windows partition to virtual parition fonts:// under Nautilius
2. Copy *.ttf fonts from your Windows partition to virtual parition fonts:/// under Konqueror
3. Another working method for Ubuntu is to copy *.ttf windows fonts under .fonts folder created in your home folder.
4. This is the most generic method and it will made the fonts available for all users.
Find the path where True Type fonts are installed (/usr/share/fonts/truetype) or search this path with find. Read my tutorial Using find to search for files in Linux to have a clue about “find”.

find /usr -name '*.ttf'

Now copy all the *.ttf files from your windows folder to /usr/share/fonts/truetype/windows

$ mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/windows
$ cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/windows
$ cp /media/windows/windows/Fonts/*.ttf .


Now we should set the rights of the copied files

$ chown root.root *
$ chmod 644 *

Now we should index the new true type fonts

$ cd /usr/share/fonts/truetype/windows
$ mkfontdir
$ cd ..

Edit /usr/share/fonts/truetype/font.cache-1 and add

"windows" 0 ".dir"

Run
$ fc-cache

and you are done! Windows fonts are available to in your entire system.

Fonts what are coming with msttcorefonts

* Andale Mono
* Arial Black
* Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
* Comic Sans MS (Bold)
* Courier New (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
* Georgia (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
* Impact
* Times New Roman (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
* Trebuchet (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
* Verdana (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
* Webdings

If you want the Windows Vista fonts then you should follow this tutorial to grab them, and in rest just follow my tutorial to add them to system.

Funny Linux manpages

If you want to laugh a little bit, install funny-manpages under Linux. I presume you will find under any Debian distribution (like Ubuntu) and probably the package is in other distributions as well. The man pages what you will find are:

baby — create new process from two parents
celibacy — don’t have sex
condom – protection against viruses and prevention of child processes
date – get and print a date
echo – echo arguments
grope, egrope, fgrope – massage a file for a while
flame — reply to Usenet News posting automatically
flog — speed up a process
gong – evaluate process performance
party – set OS responses mode
rescrog — change something, make it different
rm – remove files
rtfm – a response for easy questions from clueless lusers
tm – meditate
uubp – Unix-to-Unix beer protocol
xkill – extended kill – kill processes or users, including Usenet posters
xLart – interactive X interface to rlart(1)
strfry – string operation
sex — have sex

Some of them are hilarious. Give them a try.