Change of scenery

Well this is the third time I have re-written this notice.

I am forever not happy with my choices.

Welcome to what is hopefully the new look for Denny's Home World for a while...

But don't quote me on that.

The old template was actually causing me some problems with ease of use of the blog, i.e. I wanted it to have the bar at the top so I could quickly add an article or change something.

I hope you like the new look...
-Denny

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AllBootDisks.com to the rescue!

Very few of us have a reason to use DOS nowadays. (Disk Operating System)

But every once in a while, we are forced to use it for things like bios updates and other unique situations.

"AllBootDisks.com is your number one FREE resource for all Microsoft boot disks.

We offer a boot disk for everything from MS-DOS 3.3 to Windows XP Professional. These disks can be used to setup a new hard drive, scan an existing hard drive for errors, install or re-install Windows, upgrade your PC's BIOS, run DOS utilities and much more." - AllBootDisks.com website

AllBootDisks.com has boot iso images you can then burn to cd.

They have a very useful selection.

To look them over, go to http://www.allbootdisks.com

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Shutter, Take screen shots in style!

I found Shutter while messing with very simple window managers for Ubuntu. These window managers, unlike desktop environments such as unity or gnome, do not come with a screenshot utility already implemented.

So after a little search on Synaptic, I found Shutter.

While I usually look for the simplest software I can get to do any one task, I have to admit the Shutter program has a lot of useful features.

Here is a quote from an article about it's features:

"You can take screenshots of a specific area, a window, or your whole screen. With an addition to that you can apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then use it as per your need. Shutter is free, open-source, and licensed under GPL v3. I am sure you will find this simple program interesting and helpful.

Shutter features in detail:

· Capture a specific area: you can choose any arbitrary region of your screen and take screen shot this help you to capture only those parts you really need. Shutter offers two different tools to do so in order to meet any user’s taste.

· Capture a window: You can choose the window you want to take screen shot of and Shutter will highlight the currently select window in an attractive and useful way. It is even possible to simple select a window from a list and capture it right away.

· Capture a menu or tool tip: Capturing menus or tool tips is very easy with Shutter. You select one of the options and a (user-defined) countdown starts. During this time you can open the desired menu or let a specific tool tip come up. Shutter will recognize and capture it. This is a real advanced feature.

· Capture a website: Choose the website opened in the browser and it can take the screen shot of the website."

-Tech Stroke Shutter Article

http://techstroke.com/shutter-ubuntu-1004910-advanced-screen-shot-program.html

As of my writing this article, the official website for Shutter, shutter-project.org was unreachable due to technical issues.

Here's a screenshot of Shutter in action:

If you are the one with blender and gimp installed on you version of Ubuntu Studio, then this is definitely for you.

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Openbox Rocks!

When I fist installed and ran Openbox years ago, I thought it was way to simple for me.

When you first start up Openbox, it's basically an ugly grey screen with nothing but a right click menu.

I now realize what it really is, the tray, forks, knives and napkins at an all you can eat Linux buffet.

Openbox is simple because it's the foundation for what you intend to do with your desktop.

After installing and running applications like wicd-gtk, tint2, feh, obmenu, pcmanfm, and grun it can be molded to be beautiful, functional, simple, and quicker than greased lightning. (and maybe gkrellm if you like what you see below.)

My personal set up starts with a file I had to create in the /home/user/.config/openbox/ folder. the file named is autostart, and it is very useful. (Replace user with your username, for me it would be /home/denny/.config/openbox/... also, .config is hidden, you may have to use control h to unhide it.)

I right clicked in that folder, and chose 'create new' and then 'blank file'.

After naming it autostart, I added a autostart template from the Official Openbox Wiki.

My autostart file looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
feh --bg-scale /home/denny/Pictures/wallpapers/starnight.jpg & tint2 & wicd-gtk & gkrellm

Here I am telling feh to set my background image, then i fire up tint2, then wicd-gtk (i use a wireless network) and then for my weather and email checking I use gkrellm.

Tint2 is a panel application. I chose it because it is simple and elegant. You could just as easily install xfce4-panel or lxpanel, both would work quite nicely.

Since I use regular old Ubuntu, and then hack the stuffing out of it once it's installed, i do have at my disposal the wireless panel app that comes with regular Ubuntu, but for some reason it doesn't want to show up on Tint2 unless I actually add tint2 to the /etc/xdg/autostart/ folder in desktop configuration file format, which I would rather not do.

So I instead use wicd-gtk, which has been exceptional on this machine.

Here is my screenshot:

There are a lot of other Openbox screenshots available here:
http://openbox.org/wiki/Openbox:Screenshots

You can see feh has changed the background image, tint2 is displaying my running apps, shutter is taking the screenshots, gkrellm is telling me whether I have email, what the weather is like, and how my processor is doing, and wicd-gtk is handling my wireless net connection.

One of the first things I do when installing Openbox is to run obmenu, and then I use obmenu to add obmenu as a menu option. That way you can change the menu through the menu option your created, very useful.

I also install grun and add it to the menu. Then I add pcmanfm to the menu, listed above in the menu options as home. with these few things you have a very easy way to get to and to do the rest of your modifications without having to fire up your terminal window to do so.

I top it off with some of my favorite cli apps like moc for my music player and htop in the "tools section", and I use terminator for my terminal emulator. These are all just suggestions, the fun part of Openbox is making it your own!

I hope after reading my little article you give openbox a try again... it can be quite rewarding, and make your machine run much faster.

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Terminator a first class terminal emulator

I am enough of a Linux geek to where I use the terminal emulator a lot. So many tasks can be accomplished faster and with less "clutter".

As much as I find Gnome-Terminal a fine app, there is definitely room for improvement.

I especially don't like how gnome-terminal uses the f10 key as one of it's hot keys, blocking use of the much used key in cli programs like Midnight Commander,  HTop and others. (CLI stands for Command Line Interface, for those of you who did not know.)

Besides gnome-terminal's weaknesses, I also find Terminator's ability to split the screen into two three or more panels inside the main screen of Terminator to be very useful.

It's great to be troubleshooting a problem with google using Links while chatting up the Ubuntu guys over at irc.freenode.org, channel #ubuntu for help using irssi, all on the same screen.

There is actually a lot more features than I have listed here.

Here are some screenshots of some of my usual setups with Terminator:

Well that's enough for me, here is what Chris Jones, Terminator's creator, has to say about his unique and useful software:

"Terminator - Multiple GNOME terminals in one window

Terminator  is  a program that allows users to set up flexible arrangements of GNOME terminals. It is aimed at those who normally arrange lots of  terminals  near  each  other,  but don't want to use a frame based window manager.

The  layout  can be modified by moving terminals with Drag and Drop.  To start dragging a terminal, click and hold on its titlebar.   Alternatively,  hold  down  Ctrl, click and hold the right mouse button.  Then, **Release Ctrl**. You can now drag the terminal to the point in the layout you would like it to be.   The  zone  where  the terminal would be inserted will be highlighted."

"The goal of this project is to produce a useful tool for arranging terminals.
It is inspired by programs such as gnome-multi-term, quadkonsole, etc. in that the main focus is arranging terminals in grids (tabs is the most common default method, which Terminator also supports).

Much of the behaviour of Terminator is based on GNOME Terminal, and we are adding more features from that as time goes by, but we also want to extend out in different directions with useful features for sysadmins and other users."

These quotes are from Terminator's man pages, and from http://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome-terminator.

I think that if you use the terminal window enough, you will find Terminator a very valuable tool.

For more information, I suggest you go to Chris Jones's website, http://www.tenshu.net/.

Their is a Terminator button right on the top of the page.

If you are interested in installing it, in Ubuntu you can do so using the command sudo apt-get install terminator. You can also get it by searching for it in Synaptic or Ubuntu's new Software Center.

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Moonlight in Firefox or Chrome on Ubuntu

Moonlight is a Silverlight alternative available for Linux users from the fine people at Novell.

This How To is designed for use on Ubuntu 11.10 using either Firefox 9.0.1, or Chrome (Chromium) version 15.

First I installed libmono-wcf3.0-cil. If you use Synaptic or Ubuntu's Software Center, you can find this by either searching for mono or Moonlight.

You can also install this with apt-get by typing the command: sudo apt-get install libmono-wcf3.0-cil in your terminal window. (Control alt t, unless your using xfce.)

*** This section is for Firefox only ***

I installed a Firefox plugin called:

Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks 1.3
by Kris Maglione

Reinstates the extensions.checkCompatibility preference without respect to the current application version.

This is needed because technically the Moonlight plugin is not yet considered compatible with Firefox 9.0.1., as well as many other versions of Firefox.

I have never had a problem with Moonlight running in this fashion though.

Firefox will ask you if you trust these plugins. Say yes to continue, or this process won't work.

I have never had any problems with viruses or any other intrusions from these authors.

You can find "Disable Add-on Compatibility Checks 1.3" here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/checkcompatibility/?src=search

Once that is installed, then we want to install the Moonlight plugin.

*** This section is for both Firefox and Chrome ***

You can get Moonlight here: http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

Again Firefox asks if you trust the author, which in this case is Novell, who is very trustworthy.

Chrome will display a warning on the bottom of the page. You must allow the download for this process to work.

Once this is accomplished you will need to restart Firefox. Chrome should not need a restart.

If you want to test your newly installed Moonlight plugin, I suggest using this page:

http://www.bubblemark.com/

I suggest you use this test: Silverlight 3.0 (CLR, CacheMode="BitmapCache")

The reason I suggest that particular test is that your new Moonlight plugin should now handle Silverlight 3.0 extensions with ease, so this is a decent test for our new plugin.

If you see the balls floating, you are the proud owner of a functioning Moonlight plugin.

I hope this has been useful to you, if you have any questions, please feel free to email me at dennygoot@gmail.com.

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Canonical's "Jumpstart"

I went to Ubuntu.com just to check out what's happening, and I was greeted with this:

Five days.
$9,000.
One fully-functioning cloud.

I started reading about it, and it sounds like a great way to get a service up and running on the order of a music store, facebook, twitter, or maybe something like sourceforge.

 I like that Canonical is working Ubuntu into a multi headed multi platformed system, not just for us computer geeks.

I also noted that Ubuntu has hit the 20 million mark for users. While I know that this is a drop in the bucket in comparison to Microsoft (I so wanted to call it Microshaft or something else not very flattering to MS, but...)

As a side note I have gravitated toward Xubuntu LTS releases for my customers. The stability of the LTS releases along with XFCE having a feel they are used to seems to be a win win.

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