For what its worth, Lucid Lynx didn’t generate positive initial buzz, and for the first time since Ubuntu 5.04, I didn’t download and install latest version of Ubuntu. I had read comments that there are problems with latest version (that too LTS – Long Term support) of Ubuntu, so I decided to hold back.

Then couple days ago, I got hold of an ISO someone had downloaded, and installed successfully. (They came to me asking about why ssh wouldn’t work for them – As you might already know, Desktop edition doesn’t ship ssh server by default. It was matter of minutes to download ssh via apt-get, and they were up and running – and now to your regularly scheduled program) So I decided to give it a shot. Soon I realized, my decision to hold off was correct.

Attempt to boot from LiveCD

First of all, it took really long time for LiveCD to boot. I mean it did show the GUI splash screen quite quickly, but then for a really long time, it kept showing Ubuntu, and a progress bar (as dots/circles) None of the terminals were accessible via Alt+Fn.

Unable to recognize the existing Partitions

When it did boot, it was unable to recognize the partition table. Further troubleshooting showed that “Disk Utility” program under System->Administrator was able to read the partition table correctly, and identified the partitions correctly, but GParted (and embedded Partition Manager for the installer) could not. They showed entire disk as available. But a picture is worth a thousand words. See this image (I’ve not captured this, several others are facing the same problem) .

To be fair, this issue is well documented in Release notes here. But it still doesn’t change the fact that there was no way to preserve existing partitions and install Lucid on existing empty partition.

Some link of the internet asked to uninstall “dmraid” package, but it didn’t help. I didn’t have RAID anyway.
Next, back to the person who had successfully installed it from the same ISO. Turns out he installed it via Wubi. So I decided to try that.

Wubi woes

Now I ran into “permission denied” issue. After copying the files in target folder from CD, it would exit. Unhiding AppData folder didn’t help. Finally I downloaded wubi.exe, and copied an ISO and Wubi.exe in same newly created empty folder. This seemed to have worked – but make sure that if you want Wubi to use local ISO – Disable the internet or better still, remove the ethernet cable (as I did) else Wubi will go out and try to download the entire image before it starts installing.

This time it went much further – installed Ubntu successfully (or so I thought) and provided me a choice to reboot now, or later. After I reboot, I selected Ubuntu from Windows Boot loader list. It “continued” the installation, but at he stage where it gets time from network time server, it was stuck in a loop “No root partition defined” there were no option other than OK. Interestingly, the installation progress bar showed 272% (Yes more than 100%)

Finally … Success (sort of)

Luckily I didn’t have a precious data, and machine was my secondary machine, so I could afford to repartition the entire disk. That is what I did. I already had brand new ISO, This time I booted from USB drive, so that I didn’t have to worry about bad CD. I selected to repartition the disk from the Lucid Installer. Rest of the install went very smooth.

Conclusion

It is really sad that all three issues (permission denied, unable to recognize partition table, and no root partition defined) are widely reported. Only the first one (permission denied) has a work around that worked.

Image courtesy : jeffpro57

Personally, I think KDE 4.x is pretty nice. It comes with host of applications. I think KDE is cool (.. and acknowledge that cool is subjective – personal.)

Since I moved to KDE from Gnome,  I have become dependent on several GTK apps. (GTK is the cross platform widget library used to write the Gnome applications) But by default they don’t look good in KDE.

1. Firefox tabs would merge into each other, and visually I could not differentiate the boundaries.
2. Firefox scrollbars didn’t work correctly either
3. Gnome DO had weird problem, as is the drop-down list which allows me to select the theme went completely bonkers.
4. The Edit box in Autokey is completely Hidden (See the image Above)

Something had to be done. See the images below. Click on the images to see the details.

The Edit Box is missing

Edit box visible after the dialog is resized

The tab boundaries merged

Follow these simple instructions to ensure that GTK apps “play well” with KDE

1. Go to System Settings ->Appearance
2. Click on “GTK Styles and fonts” from the left hand side panel
3. The very first (at the top) option is GTK Styles. The Default is use KDE Style. Select USe Another Style.
4. Select Clearlooks (For blue) or Human Clearlooks from the drop down.
5. You need to restart the GTK Apps.

Now all your KDE/QT apps as well as GTK apps would work well (in terms of display)

See the screen shots after the above fix is applied. Click on the images to see the details.

The Edit box visible clearly - As designed

Tab Boundaries Visible Clearly

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Rainlendar Desktop Calendar

When I was using Windows XP, I had Webshots manage my Wallpaper. One of the features of Webshots was to display the calendar on the Desktop. Additionally, I also displayed my to-do list (and a short phone list) on my desktop using Windows’ Active Desktop Feature. Read about it here and here

When I moved to Linux (Ubuntu specifically) I needed similar functionality.  I came across kdesktopweb, but I use gnome, so it was not an option. I also looked at conky, but doesn’t look as polished, as Windows’ equivalent. Enter Rainlendar

As the Website mentions, Rainlendar is a customizable desktop calendar. It works on Windows, Linux as well as Mac OS X.  For Linux, it supports Debian/Ubuntu natively as .deb files, other distro will need to use tar.gz files.

Installation

Installing Rainlendar is pretty straight forward  (Isn’t everything on Linux these days ? ) I downloaded the .deb file. Firefox is smart enough to determine that this is installation file, and invoked the installer. It needed two more packages (tofromdos and patch) Depending on your setup it may need more or less additional packages. On Debian based system like Ubuntu, this is least of the concern, If you have an active internet connection, the additional packages wille be downloaded and installed for you.

After the installation is complete, you will see an additional entry titled Rainlendar2 under Applications->Office.

Calendar

Rainlendar displays a monthly calendar. It also has an option to show multiple months at-a-glance, as well as an yearly calendar showing all the twelve months of current calendar year.  It is configured with a Default Calendar, but you can add more calendars like personal, business (you can name them anything). The fee version supports only iCalendar file format, that too for local files. Pro version supports more rich calendaring functionality like sharing the calendar, as well as support for Google Calendar.

Right clicking on the calendar brings up a menu. Here you can do operations like choosing which windows to display. It shows monthly calendar, an empty to do list and events list by default.Since I did not have any appointments set at the time, I turned off the Events Window.  If you have multiple calendars, you can choose which calendars to display on the desktop. Similarly you can also choose to view previous/next months or any specific month of the current calendar year.

Rainlendar To Do List

Events and To do

Adding new events and tasks was as simple as clicking on the TODO or EVENTS Window. You get a dialog box that allows you to fill in the details. One caveat, if you created an task for a future date, it won’t appear in your to-do list. e.g. I need to send status report every weekend, so I created a recurring task for this. But it did not appear in my to-do list till Friday.

Skinning

Rainlendar ships with two skins. Shadow4 which is the default skin and Chromophore.  You can change the skins by Right Click->Options->Skins tab. Shadow4 has lot of Widgets like Weather RSS, TV to name a few. It also has an option to display the contents of a text file. This could be very useful to display things like Plan of the Week, but this feature appears unstable. Rainlendar crashed several times, when Files Widget was enabled. Once I removed the Files Widget, it appears to be stable.

Other Skin Chromophore is much more simpler. Here you can choose the color of the Rainlendar displays. The Brown color gels well with default Brown theme of Ubuntu. Since I have switched to Clearlooks, and blue wallpaper, I chose the Blue theme for Chromophore.

To sum it up,  one can say that Rainlendar is  a decent replacement for Desktop Calendar, and To-Do list on the desktop.

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During my last post I discussed about assigning keyboard shortcuts to switch workspaces. At that time, I was unable to assign keyboard shortcuts to switch to Workspace 3 and 4. After little more trial and error, I was able to assign shortcuts for these.

Number of workspaces listed in Keyboard shortcuts preferences are driven by meta-city configuration. So even though I added two more workspaces from Workspace Panel applet, the metacity configuration still had number of workspaces defined as 2. That is why additional shortcuts were not even available to configure.

How to update Number of workspaces in Metacity preferences ?

1. Press Alt+F2 to bring up Run dialog box (Similar to Windows+R on Windows)
2. Type gconf-editor, and hit enter.
3. This will bring up Configuration Editor window. If you have ever used Registry Editor on Windows, this will be very familiar, except there are lot less hex/cryptic values
4. Using the left hand side tree structure, navigate to /apps/metacity/general
5. Now in the right hand side panel, you’ll see several configurable items.
6. Click on num_workspaces. Default value would be 2. Click on 2 , edit it to 4
7. Exit out of Configuration Editor.
8. Go back to System->Preferences->Keyboard Shortcuts. Now under Windows Management Category, you should see entries for Switch to Workspace 3 (and 4)

Note : How-To geek article listed below was very helpful. See link below.

Correction : Nov 25, 2009

It is incorrect to say that this works in gnome. It would be accurate to say that this works in gnome when using metacity window manager. It is amply clear from the instructions above that these shortcut keys are honored by metacity window manager only. It was clear to me when I tried gnome-shell window manager in Ubuntu 9.10, where these keyboard shortcuts did not work.

If gnome-shell indeed supports something similar for workspace switching I’ll write another post detailing the instructions. But for now, consider yourself warned.

Update 2 : It turns out there is no need for separate hotkeys needed to switch to other work spaces. Alt+Tab shows the list of all the applications across all the work spaces. Applications in different work spaces are separated by vertical line

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Image via Wikipedia

If you are not sure what is Gnome Do, read my previous post on this topic. Ubuntu 8.10 repositories has older version 0.6.0.1 of Gnome-DO. This was probably released around October 2008 time frame when Ubuntu 8.10 was released. It has been several months since then, and Gnome DO has progressed nicely.

If you want to try the latest version of Gnome DO, which now comes with Docky, then read on How to upgrade to latest version.

Remove the existing version

Although update might work after adding coorect sources, it was adviced (on various ubuntu forums) that removing exisitng version is better. Use following command.

sudo aptitude purge gnome-do gnome-do-plugins gnome-do-plugin-rhythmbox

Add new sources

You need to add what is  called PPA – Personal Package Archive. This is where newer packages, which aren’t yet approved by Ubuntu are available. In simpler terms, this are additional Software Sources.

1. Go to System->Administration->Software Sources
2. Third party software Tab, Add, copy following line one by one. (Create two entries)

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

Install

1. System->Administration->Synaptic package manager
2. Click on Not installed from left hand side, then type gnome do in the search box.
3. Select gnome-do (it will also add gnome-do plugins) Click Apply, and wait for the installation to complete.
4. Once done, go to Applications->accesories->Gnome Do.

Docky still not available ?

So far so good,  But I wanted to install Docky. As per the instructions, I was supposed to select Docky theme. But there was an error that I had not enabled composting.

Since I had four years old machine, I had turned off all the effects, I thought I won’t be able to use Docky, after all. But apparently one can enable composting without having latest and greatest graphics card.

Follow this link to Enable Composting in metacity