Category Archives: Ubuntu

Mainly Ubuntu and its derivatives but potentially any Linux distro.

Canonical – ignore the hate and make your bet

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Does Canonical deserve the hate that is being directed at it by some people? I doubt it – who could? Canonical deserves criticism for some things, of course, but not the ongoing and disproportionate spite some technical people direct at it. The only explanation I can come up with is that when some people love or believe in something strongly, and then are disappointed in that love, they can feel very, very angry. And as with romantic love, nothing will make them feel better till they have a new love to take the place of the old one. So I’m not sure there is much Canonical can do to appease them. Instead, the focus should be on the big bets it has to make to secure a future. The following comment (on Slashdot) captured the issue especially well so I quote it in full:

It’s not rocket science. Rightly or wrongly Canonical has decided that the future of general computing is in the mobile space and they are working on getting Ubuntu there and bridging the gap between the mobile computing experience and the desktop computing experience.

In simplest of terms, they’re trying to make a distro that can be both a phone and a desktop all in the same device. Again — rightly or wrongly — they have decided that they needed to move certain things in house to best accomplish that goal (Mir) and needed a specific interface they were in control of to scale between display form factors (Unity).

If you are a person that thinks this direction is wrong and will hurt Linux in the long run, then you belong in the “bad for Linux” category. I’m a person that thinks this is absolutely the best way for Linux to finally have its “year of the desktop” similar to how Apple made their comeback but with a twist — by providing a compelling mobile experience with a device that just so happens to be able to double as someone’s desktop when they want a bigger screen.

Pay attention to plunging desktop sales numbers. As people find ways to make mobile devices and tablets their only computing devices, this strategy will start to look smarter and smarter. Whatever else you think of Canonical (and by extension Ubuntu), this will either make them or break them.

Ubuntu good for linux?

As with most big bets, there are no guarantees of success. And Canonical will make mistakes. But I fully support their attempt and wish them well.

Kernel panic fixed on mother’s laptop (Ubuntu 13.10)

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My mother’s laptop started displaying an alarming message:

(3.347276) Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown block (0, 0)

The good news is that this seemingly terminal problem has proved easy to fix (so far anyway 😉 ).

  1. Hold Down the Shift key when booting to see the GRUB menu displayed
  2. Press the Escape key to get to the menu
  3. Select a different kernel to boot into instead of the one that has been panicking
  4. Do whatever needs to be done as per [SOLVED} kernel panic-not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block(0,0)

In my case, I removed numerous kernels (Note – leave a couple behind including the two most recent)
sudo apt-get remove linux-image ...
sudo apt-get autoremove
and was advised by the terminal to run
sudo dpkg --configure -a

Picasa 3.9 + F-spot together on Ubuntu

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Some people want to use F-Spot and Picasa together – F-spot to import and tag photos; and Picasa to do minor editing ready for printing. Here’s their desired workflow:

  1. attach camera
  2. import into F-Spot
  3. do editing in Picasa
  4. want any changes to also be the same in F-spot.

This should be manageable given that Picasa can work on existing files, without having to separately import them to a different place on the file system. So the photo files are where F-Spot put them, and, irrespective of how Picasa organises them in its own “virtual” folders, changes made to the photo in Picasa alter the original photo in its F-spot location. So far, so good.

But there is one issue. If you install the last version of Picasa made for Linux, it is significantly out-of-date. It works as described with Picasa, but it is old. And if you install the latest version of Picasa (3.9) under WINE (instructions), a problem occurs when bringing all the photos into Picasa. Instead of merely pointing to the file locations for the photos, Picasa actually separately makes copies of them. Which means that when you edit them, the original in F-spot is unaltered.

Fortunately, there is a workaround and it involves changing the way Picasa watches folders. It requires some simple edits to the watchedfolders.txt file in: /home/username/.wine/dosdevices/c:/users/username/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Picasa2Albums

Note: even though you might be using Picasa 3.9, the path is Picasa2Albums.

Make the following alterations as appropriate, depending on which folders you have photos in:

C:\users\username\My Pictures\ –>

/home/username/Pictures

/home/username/Pictures\

C:\users\username\My Documents\ –>

/home/username/Documents

/home/username/Documents\

C:\users\username\Desktop –>

/home/username/Desktop

/home/username/Desktop\

Note that both versions seem to be needed (see also How can I get Picasa to view my second HDD?).

[UPDATE]

Here are some extra issues I encountered:

  • One huge gotcha – Picasa cropping must be Saved to change the file on disk. Clicking on “Apply Change” is not enough to change the file on disk even though the change persists within Picasa. If it isn’t saved, the change is only visible when looking at the image in Picasa – it won’t show up when looking at the file otherwise (e.g. using ImageViewer) and that includes F-Spot. Can’t really blame F-spot for that.
  • F-Spot doesn’t automatically know about files put into its folder structure e.g. if you manually insert an image into /home/username/Photos/2014/03/03 f-spot won’t display it.
  • Picasa only grabs images from the watched folders if they have an image extension e.g. .jpg. Otherwise it ignores them.

The net result is that if you want a simple workflow where you view and tag photos in F-Spot and modify images using Picasa you should follow these instructions:

WORKFLOW INSTRUCTIONS

  • Only put images into F-Spot using import. Don’t manually put images into the standard folders F-Spot uses e.g. “Photos/2014/03/03/”.

    A simple workflow is to have a standard folder under Photos e.g. “Photos/0 Upload These” where you put copies of photos whether you get them from a camera or from another source e.g. as email attachments. You can give these human-readable names such as me_at_beach.jpg rather than IMG9805.JPG etc before importing them. Once imported into F-Spot (and thus copies put into the date-driven folder locations), empty the “Photos/0 Upload These” folder.

  • Save changes in Picasa – don’t just Apply Changes.
  • If you want multiple versions of an image, make them in F-Spot so F-Spot knows about them, then edit the extra versions in Picasa.

    To create new versions in F-Spot File, select a photo, then Photo>Create New Version in the menu.

Ubuntu, new programs, and opening files with them

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First an observation – it should NOT be this hard to associate applications with file types in Ubuntu – there has to be a better way. And eventually these rough edges will be removed I expect. But in the meantime: Ubuntu Fix: Add Program to List of Applications in “Open With” When Right-Clicking Files in Nautilus and How do I set the default file association in Ubuntu 13.10 Nautilus/Files with Unity to something that is not listed in the Open With tab?. Re: the latter, you’ll find programs in /usr/bin/ but don’t forget to let the display load all the applications in the folder – it takes a while.

Eclipse + PyDev problems on Ubuntu 13.10

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I wanted the latest eclipse + the latest PyDev. The problem was that PyDev wouldn’t install properly or show up. And no amount of using the Install New Software GUI path helped ;-). The solution was to manually unpack PyDev and put it in the appropriate folder. Should have blogged on this at the time (a week ago) because now I can’t remember all the details. But the following helped: PyDev not showing up in Eclipse

Firefox old-style refresh-stop and new tab buttons

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I like to have separate Refresh/Stop and New Tab buttons in Firefox. I also use Tree-style Tabs. Here’s how to do it:

[Edit – note from May 1 2014 in context of FF29 – how to split refresh as a movable button again – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/]

1) Open the customise toolbars dialog:

Firefox customise buttons

2) Look to the far right of your existing toolbars to see if you can find the two icons to drag over to new positions. The desired end result looks like:

New Tab and Refresh Buttons

Note – the New Tab button may look different in the customise toolbars dialog e.g. a green plus, but it displays as depicted – at least in current versions of Firefox (25 at present and counting ;-)).

IDLE py File Association Annoyance Fixed

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I use eclipse + pydev for my Python development but I still like to use IDLE for simple tests, quickly banging out a simple script etc. So I want to be able to right click on a .py file and simply open it with IDLE. On Ubuntu this has not always been easy to achieve. Here is what worked on Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy):

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/idle.desktop

Add a %f to the end of the line, and then save it. It should look like:

Exec=/usr/bin/idle -n %f

Then do the usual to associate .py files with IDLE so they automatically open when you double click them – namely, right click on any .py file, select Properties, then Open With, select IDLE and click on Set as default. Also see How do I set IDLE as the default editor for Python scripts?

Lubuntu to Ubuntu

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I recently needed to change a machine from Lubuntu to Ubuntu after a test installation. The main thing was:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

But that left the log-in looking wrong. I tried:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

… but that didn’t work (at least, not on its own). The solution was to change the greeter-session from lightdm-gtk-greeter to unity-greeter. See:

Lightdm autologin problem on Lubuntu 12.10

And being fussy I also wanted to change the default splashscreen to Ubuntu:

Change the boot splash screen theme in Ubuntu/Lubuntu 12.10

Lubuntu Awesome for Older Hardware

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Lubuntu is a great way of using older hardware that can’t handle the video requirements of Ubuntu. I’ve just installed Lubuntu 13.04 on two machines – one as an in-place upgrade from Ubuntu 11.04; one as a fresh install over Ubuntu 11.04 on a dual boot (after backing up the home folder of course!).

On the latter, I had to sort out Broadcom wireless again after many years of being able to ignore it. Because I didn’t have a working ethernet connection, I needed to get the deb for linux-firmware-nonfree and install it via the terminal with:

sudo dpkg -e ...deb

Then (leafpad is the Lubuntu default text editor – an alternative to gedit etc):

sudo leafpad /etc/modules

Added a new line on the end

b43

And wireless is a solved problem 🙂

Shifting thunderbird from a backup drive was easy. Copy across the new …..default folder into ~/.thunderbird and change the relevant line in profile.ini to point to it.

To put icons on the desktop, find the program on the menu, right click and make a desktop icon. To change the name of the icon, right click, select Open with … and open the desktop file (like a Windows shortcut) with leafpad. Change the Name= e.g. from

Name=Thunderbird Mail

to:

Name=Thunderbird

To position icons in a tidy manner, select them all and right click then select snap to grid.

Finally, I changed the wallpaper to be the Lubuntu one which looks like Ubuntu phone, changed the icon set to Humanity, shifted the panel to the top, and added a CPU applet to the panel.

I also got shockwave working in Chromium – I think it was by installing the flashplugin-installer. However I did it, I’m grateful to have Youtube working plus some web games for the kids.