Embed a terminal on your desktop

Great little guide to get a terminal embedded onto your desktop. I don’t know about you, but its always handy to have a terminal session open and ready.

Shell on your desktop – Ubuntu Unleashed

Create your own Live CD

I created my own Ubuntu live DVD yesterday, complete with all the apps & codecs I use and the Ubuntu Studio theme I install each and every time I reinstall. I think I’ll call it GavBuntu (haha)

If anyone else using Ubuntu or Mint would like to do the same, it’s really easy.

Go to “Software Sources” in the admin menu
add a new 3rd party source as follows

deb http://www.remastersys.klikit-linux.com/repository remastersys/

Then, in a terminal type

sudo apt-get install remastersys

Then, if you want to create a full live backup of your system, type

sudo remastersys backup

or, you can create a redistributable live CD with

sudo remastersys dist

When making a redistributable live CD/DVD, for best results, uninstall the restricted display driver if you are using one, or theres a chance you’ll be greeted with an error message when you boot the new disc suggesting it couldn’t set the display settings.

The guide I used is here

Axel Downloader

If you download a lot of files and are frustrated at the slow speeds you get, you may benefit from a download manager.  Whilst there are many around, few are as lightweight and as handy as Axel.  It runs in the Terminal (command line) and downloads from various sources to speed things up.  If you’re young and impressionable and a fan of such movies as Die Hard 4, you will love how it makes your terminal scroll like crazy, making you look like one of those strangely cool hacker types from the movies.

It is available in the apt repositories, so all you need to do is open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install axel

To use it, all you have to do is type (in the command line)

axel http://theurlhere

There are other flags too, many infact, but you don’t need to use them.  If you want to find out what they are, just type

man axel

…in the command line.

 

Lyrics in Amarok

I’ve stumbled upon a great little tool that you can download from within Amarok called “wiki-lyrics”.

While you are playing one of your tracks, it’ll search wikipedia for the lyrics and the artist’s info. It’ll also then update the ID3 tag of the track – great for budding bedroom singers.

When running it in gnome I was greeted with a “needs RubyGTK to run”. This is easy to sort out if you have the command line….

sudo apt-get install libgtk2-ruby

If you don’t get any luck with that, you may need to do:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

…before the libgtk2 line.

Enjoy.

Another experiment

I stumbled on a very helpful blog earlier today, suggesting that there was a “preload” app in the repository that reduces load times on Ubuntu apps. I’m not getting my hopes up too much – I mean, its not as if things take a long time to load as it is, but its something worth looking at.

The command line is:

sudo apt-get install preload

The blog I found it on is here

Enemy Territory Quake Wars – losing focus

Here’s a tip for anyone trying to play games on Ubuntu. If you’re ever finding your game losing focus – as in, your menu bars keep appearing from behind the game – turn your Compiz effects off.

System/Preferences/Appearance…

Gaming in Ubuntu 64

If you’re running the 64bit version of Ubuntu and are in need of some recreation, you may find yourself running into a few more brick walls that 32bit users, thanks to the lack of 64 bit support in most retail games. However, help is at hand.

There is an “Ubuntu Gamers Arena” which provides guides on how to get these games installed on your system. I’ve personally followed the guide for Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and it is spot on.

Enjoy!

Success!

Blog Entry Poster works great!

Its a simple little app that runs from your desktop. Simply install it from the repository, set it to “self managed wordpress”, give it your username, password and blog URL and away you go.

You’re then greeted with a basic box with which to unload your thoughts. You can add links – but that seems to be about it. If you want to add pictures you have to do that from the website, but hey, its a start. It does check your spelling as well, which is nice.

This is a test

This is a quick test of the Blog Entry Poster in the Ubuntu repository, I’m just seeing if it works!

Ubuntu Studio theme

There is another version of Ubuntu, a mod if you will, designed for the more “creative” among us.  It comes with a bunch of applications depending on which flavour you go for – either image editing, music or video.  You can find out more here.  It sports a “realtime kernel”.  I must be honest I don’t know what that means, but I’m told it isn’t for everyone, especially if you use wifi, due to the way it plays havok with some drivers (I guess…)

What you may be interested in though is the theme.  It gives Ubuntu a charcoal grey look, which is quite attractive and looks a bit more professional than the default theme.  It also replaces the African drum sounds on the login screen with a more tuneful umm…tune.

Being linux, you can have the bits you want and leave the rest, in this case, the theme.  Here’s how:

sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-look

type that into the command line and wait for it to download.  You’ll then need to go to System, Preferences and then Appearance in the menu’s to enable it.  You’ll find some nice new desktop backgrounds in there too.