Get to know Xubuntu!

Before I start diving into this subject, let me explain what Xubuntu is.

Xubuntu is Ubuntu (a Linux based operating system), but with XFCE, a much faster and rock solid desktop environment than Unity (In my opinion), which is the default Ubuntu desktop environment.

Over the years I have played with many distributions of Linux, and the many ways available to render the desktop.

KDE, Gnome 3, Gnome 2, Unity, XFCE and LXDE for starters.

I have even used Blackbox, Openbox, and a plethora of other available "window managers".

After Unity became the standard for Ubuntu, I started shopping around for another desktop environment.

I don't hate Unity, especially now that it has grown up a bit. It just does not fit, it is a round peg, and I am a square hole, if you will.

I decided to retry XFCE. I wasn't a fan in the past of the look, but the Xubuntu team has gone a long way towards making XFCE look more rounded off and polished.

Older versions of Xubuntu had fairly normal XFCE. XFCE has a plethora of settings options, which in my opinion is just one of the reasons why it is head and shoulders above LXDE, and above the window managers like Openbox.



Here is a screenshot from Xubuntu.org:

And here is a screenshot from my desktop configuration:

Click the photo to enlarge it

XFCE responds much quicker than KDE, Unity or Gnome 3. It also responds quicker than Gnome classic "no thrills" edition.

I have yet to see a speed difference between XFCE and Openbox, which I have used extensively.

These are just a few of the reasons why I suggest you give XFCE, or better yet, Xubuntu, a try.

Get started

• Get Xubuntu
• Help & Support
• Get Involved

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Your Ubuntu Tweaks

It seems that tweaking Ubuntu is a popular past time. Something I hadn't realized until just now.

The fact that I tweak Ubuntu myself should have been a clue.

So I am going to talk about my personal Ubuntu experience.

The first thing I do once Ubuntu has been installed is run a script I made some time ago. This script gets my most used apps installed, along with Wine, Flash, and a lot of codecs for my audio.

Here is my script:

sudo apt-get install mc moc irssi links htop ubuntu-restricted-extras wine mplayer cheese gftp synaptic unetbootin terminator ubuntu-restricted-addons audacity lame stellarium kompozer gimp gftp cheese alacarte cowsay leafpad openbox obmenu tint2 feh gmrun thunar lxappearance gkrellm gkrellweather xfce4-panel

Breaking down my script, this is what it does for me:

First it installs my CLI (Command Line Interface) applications. mc is a file manager, moc is my default music player, irssi is a irc client, links is a web browser, htop is a process viewer/terminator, and mplayer is another media player I use for watching videos and also for playing shoutcast audio streams.

Next is Wine, because there is a few apps that specifically need it, and I need them. (I.E., the Watchtower Library).

Then I install flash and codecs with the ubuntu-restricted-extras and ubuntu-restricted-addons packages.

Following that I install synaptic because i find it to be much better than the Ubuntu Software Center.

Cheese is a webcam picture taker.
Gimp is an image editor.
GFtp is a ftp client.

Stellarium is a very nice "view from earth" planetarium program. (Don't forget to set the location, unless you do live in Paris, France.)

Kompozer is the best html editor for Ubuntu, in my opinion.
Leafpad is my favorite text editor, very simple and quick to load.

Cowsay is a goofy, fun program I use to entertain my nephews with. It prints to screen a ascii cow with a talk bubble, with your message in it.

Alacarte lets me make changes to the unity and gnome based menus (which i use for xfce4-panel)

Terminator is the best terminal emulator on the planet.

Audacity and lame together give me the opportunity to cut audio how I see fit, and then turn that audio into open mp3's.

UNetBootIn allows me to put Linux based distros on usb key drives. (Very useful!)

Then there is my favorite window manager, Openbox, and the software I like to run with Openbox.

Openbox is what I use instead of Unity. obmenu is a menu editor for openbox.

Tint2 is a very handy task bar, with clock and a place for indicator applets like nm-applet.

Feh changes my background for me at start up (without feh, and a properly set up openbox autostart file, you will only have a grey blank desktop with openbox).

Gmrun is my favorite "run box" or "run dialogue box" program.

Thunar is my preferred file manager, minimalistic footprint and fast but yet full featured.

LXappearance is needed with openbox sometimes because you will have no icons in programs like thunar without it.

Gkrellm with Gkrellweather I use for the current weather conditions and to check my gmail.

Xfce4-panel I use because I forget the names of applications from time to time, and/or because I forget the proper cli command to launch them.


Then I copy over my backed up Openbox files, and then I switch to Openbox.

My openbox files have terminator tied to control alt t, and gmrun tied to alt-f2.

If you are interested in my Openbox set up, I have a more detailed article here:
http://dennygoot.blogspot.com/2012/03/openbox-rocks.html

Here is a look at my setup:

Click to enlarge picture

Ok, so you have now heard me go on and on about my setup, lets hear about your setup/tweaks to Ubuntu!

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Duck Duck Go!

I talked about DuckDuckGo.com 2 years ago on this blog. Back then it was something I stumbled upon on some now forgotten Ubuntu forum or blog.

Since then I have used it on and off.

It was a little too simple for me back then.

It has done a lot of growing up though in 2 years.

In many ways DDG is a lot like the open source community at large. It's not being developed only by those on the DuckDuckGo.com payroll, which is good because there is only one person on that payroll,  Gabriel Weinberg.

It is being developed by a large community of individuals, much like the open source projects running today.

Not only has Weinberg and his helpful voluntary staff accomplished a lot, but there is a lot still on there To Do list.

To check out the growing DDG community, go to http://duck.co/

Just like all the search engines today, DDG is continuously changing, but with the intent still on anonymity for the user, which is one of the big reasons I was drawn to it in the first place.

DDG doesn't track you. They also don't filter bubble you.

There's a video on this page that explains this better than I can:
http://duckduckgo.com/about.html

My 2 favorite reasons for using DDG as my homepage are,

1: Quick Loading. On a slow broadband connection, Google is so massively entangled in it's own "services a plenty" that it can be quite slow to load.

2: I don't get the strange, useless ads I get on Google. If you where to search for feces on Google, you will get search results like "buy feces here!" or "buy feces now!"

I am not a Google hater. Google has many services I love. Gmail, Google Calendars, this blog, Google Image search, just to name a few.

And that brings me to my next point. The DDG crew know they can't duplicate all the wonderful services Google and Bing offer. So instead of recreating the wheel, DDG lets you directly use those services though DDG, like Google Image search.

Try out DuckDuckGo.com today, I think you will be pleasantly suprised.
-Denny

P.S. Here is a list of all the DDG Goodies. It will probably do a much better job of explaining the awesome uses for DuckDuckGo then I can.

https://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html

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Watchtower Library disappears from Ubuntu Unity bar

***   Update for Ubuntu 64 bit users below   ***

I noticed a bug for Wine applications and the Unity side bar found in Ubuntu 12.04.

If you use Unity, you might have had this problem too.

Wine applications for some reason do not want to stay in the Unity sidebar. After several reboots I noticed every time the Watchtower Library Icon I had put there just disappeared after reboot.

My solution was to use a program called alacarte. You can get alacarte by looking in the Ubuntu Software Center for it, or by typing: sudo apt-get install alacarte in the terminal.

In alacarte, first you click on the category you want to add your new menu entry in. I chose "other" simply because none of the pre-defined category options really fits with the Watchtower Library.

You can choose "new menu" and make a new category if you want. Since my goal was simply to get the icon to stay put on the Unity bar, other worked fine for this.

click to enlarge picture

I then clicked inside the other category menu entries to make sure alacarte registered me as making changes in that category. I then clicked on the button marked 'new item'.

I got a box that looked like this:

click to enlarge picture

Inside that box, in the name field i put "Watchtower Library 2011" (without the quote marks, of coarse)

Then in the Command field I put this command:

wine /home/denny/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2011/E/wtlibrary.exe

This command will change for every person. My account name for Ubuntu is denny. If your account name where oscar for instance, then you would want it to look like this:

wine /home/oscar/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2011/E/wtlibrary.exe.

I then changed my icon by clicking on the icon button on the left of the new item window. Usually this looks like a springboard.

Once I did this, I was prompted with a file prompt box, and I had to tell alacarte where the icon I wanted was.

Here's what that box looks like:

click to enlarge picture

Once all that is done, I hit ok, and closed out alacarte.

Now when you look for Watchtower Library in the search box at the top of the Unity bar, you will see 2 entries for it. The one made by you, and the one made by Wine.

The one made by you will not have the "Watchtower Library 2011 - English" name, it will simply be what you named it. If you followed my lead, it will be called "Watchtower Library 2011".

Here's my example:

click to enlarge picture

Once you drag the proper icon (or menu entry, whatever you want to call this) to the Unity bar (and it seats itself) it will be there no matter how many times you reboot.

As a side note, this will need to be changed every year. It will be rather simple, just go back into alacarte, and edit your menu entry in "other" or whatever category you installed it in.

The change will look like this once you uninstall the 2011 library and install the 2012 library:

wine /home/denny/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2012/E/wtlibrary.exe

*Remember, replace "denny" with your username, unless your username is denny. :)

This change should be the same for recurring years, i.e. 2013, 2014, etc... That is unless the brothers make a serious change as to how the library is stored in the /home/(username here)/.wine/ directory.

I hope this has been of help to you, if you have any questions, feel free to comment here, or email me at dennygoot@gmail.com
-Denny

***   Update for Ubuntu 64 bit users   ***

I found out, by accident, that my little wine command above only works for 32 bit version of Ubuntu.

Here is my 64 bit correction:

wine /home/denny/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2011/E/wtlibrary.exe

Again, you have to swap "denny" for your username. I.E., if your username is susan, it will look like this:

wine /home/susan/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Watchtower/Watchtower\ Library\ 2011/E/wtlibrary.exe

The only change is that Program\ Files\ now says Program\ Files\ (x86).

Without this, you will NOT get wine running the Watchtower Library in your alacarte menu entry.

-Denny

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How to add your console apps to the menu

I noticed while looking over app choices people make, that console apps get ignored a lot because there is no Unity, Gnome, XFCE or LXDE menu entry for them.

If you have to open terminal and remember what to type, people aren't interested in using them, it seems.

I did some digging a few years back and have been using Terminator as my terminal emulator.

One of the great features with Terminator is you can pass it complicated instructions.

I am going to show you how I made easy to use menu entries with Terminator and the menu entry program Alacarte.

One of the first menu entries I made was for the program IRSSI.

To do this I needed to make an entry using Alacarte.

In Alacarte, I first clicked on the category that I wanted my app to be in. In this case "Internet" seemed the best choice.

Then I clicked the "New Item" button. This button will have a + symbol next to it.

As the picture shows below, you then have to add the name of the item and the command.

Click this picture to enlarge it.

The name for this item is simple enough, since my command logged me directly into freenode with my nick and password, I call it Freenode.

I could just start IRSSI, in which I would call the item IRSSI. The name of the item is entirely up to you.

Once you give the item a name, you can change the icon if you wish by clicking on the current icon's picture. In the picture above, it is a road cone.

Here is where Terminator comes in handy. There are 2 options here. If I just wanted to start IRSSI from the menu item I am creating, i can use the command: terminator -e irssi.

But I want it to go to the server irc.freenode.org, and to log me in with my registered nick and password.

So here is where the second option for terminator is so useful. The command to do all of this is: terminator -x irssi --connect=irc.freenode.org --nick=(add your nick here) --password=(add you password)

The -x option (or flag, as some call it) for Terminator allows me to pass a complex command with it's options to Terminator.

Once I have put all of this in the "command" section and hit Ok button (not shown in the picture above because the item was already created) then I now have a menu entry in Unity, Gnome, XFCE or LXDE that will launch my terminal, run IRSSI, and log me into freenode with my registered nick and password.

All of that done by choosing the menu entry I created now, Instead of having to open the terminal and remember all of that off the top of my head or dig around for an automated script I made earlier.

I personally use this option to make MOC my media player, to open my gmail with links, and a few other things I wanted at my fingertips.

Thanks to Terminator, and this wonderful option, you can automate just about any console work you have.

And thanks to Alacarte, you can put that automation into a menu option for ease of use by yourself and those who use your system.

I hope you found this little tutorial I made useful. I use my Freenode menu entry and my MOC menu entry daily.

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Brasero burning issue

Brasero

A week ago I had a unique project of taking an audio tape from the 90's and turning it into mp3's.

It's not a hard task, but it is long and slightly tedious.

I noticed though, after two attempts at burning, that I was making what computer geeks call "frisbees".

A frisbee is an improperly burned CD/DVD that will not work.

Brasero displayed an error saying it could not eject the disc. It then asked me to eject the disc manually.

Not a problem, until you notice that no matter how many times you eject the disc, Brasero is still asking you to do so.

Then when you ultimately hit cancel, you have your frisbee, which gets flung into the trash can at a high rate of speed.

The problem may have to do with not using the root user account, or with the fact that Linux distributions use different directories for the media cd mount directory.

In either case, I found that making your own temp directory in /home/user is the solution, for now.

Remember, /home/user is different for everyone. Mine is /home/denny/.

So I made a directory in /home/denny/ called temp. Now I have a directory tree that looks like this: /home/denny/temp/.

Now when you fire up Brasero, in the second screen it will have an option for choosing the temp directory.

It will look something like this:

But we do NOT want that temporary files option to read /var/tmp or anything else besides the /home/user/temp directory we made earlier. For instance, on my Brasero I want it to read /home/denny/temp.

The last step is a strange one. If Brasero gives you the same error it gave me, that it could not open the CD tray, and no matter how many times you open and close the cd tray it still shows the error, then you will have to hit cancel.

Hitting that cancel button seems like the last thing you would ever want to do, but by changing the temp directory to the one you created in /home/user, you should still have a fully burnt and functional CD or DVD.

In other words your Frisbee making days should be over. :)

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My tips for great deals on computers...

I was asked not too long ago by the neighbor kid how I manage to get deals on computers.

I explained to him that the first thing I do is try to buy a computer without Windows, that saves me some money.

But that's for Linux geeks like me, who are going to just wipe the hard drive anyways and install Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora, or CrunchBang the first chance they get.

For someone like my neighbor kid Jimmy who wants Windows, this is not an option.

He "needs" Windows to play his video games.

I am sure by now some Linux geek is going to point out to me that you can play video games on Linux too.

I know, been there, done that.

But to tell the customer you have to tweak this and run a no cd patch for that... to get a Windows game running on Linux, it just isn't what the customer wants to hear.

So this is the list of companies I use to obtain computers with or without Windows for my not for profit computer repair organization, Denny's Computers.

First off is my tried and true computer drop shipment company, 3BTech.net.

These guys offer decent hardware at excellent prices.

The only downfall I have with 3BTech.net is they sell ChiefMax power supplies. which in my opinion is a bad power supply manufacturer.

I have had ChiefMax power supplies go out so often, half of the time frying out the computer you just purchased, that I can no longer in good conscience sell a computer with their product in it.

I have been working with 3BTech for about a decade, good people willing to help.

Secondly, and carefully, I use Pricewatch.com.

I say carefully because Pricewatch is not who you will buy the computers from, Pricewatch is just a service that searches for the lowest prices on the net for any given item.

A great service, but the companies you are directed to CAN be shady.

Don't buy from a Pricewatch sight until you are as certain as you can be that the company you are dealing with is reputable.

Pricewatch is a great bargain, but also a "buyer beware" market.

Third, I add Walmart.

Yeah, this is a Walmart plug. ???

No not really. I have been accidentally, and pleasantly surprised by Walmart's desktop and laptop prices though.

And "ship to store" means that if the computer you want isn't in the store, you can still get it without paying for shipping, which is a nice bonus.

I stumbled upon Walmart's deals though Pricewatch.com, of all places.

The very last place I shop for computers at is Ebay.com. If I have a customer that simply can't swing anything on the 3 currently stated websites, then I very carefully check out Ebay items.

If Pricewatch.com is a buyer beware market, then Ebay is a "don't shop in their without a detachment of Marines" market. A lot of things are shipped from overseas, are of low quality, and have a tendency to arrive DOA. (Dead on arrival)

In closing, I cannot stress the importance of being a careful shopper at Pricewatch, and especially Ebay, enough. BE CAREFUL!

I also suggest that if you are really strapped for cash and need a cheap computer, to check out 3BTech.net and Walmart's "out of lease" computers. Just like a car, after so many years the lease is up, and the computer is now more affordable, having been used.

Good computer hunting!
-Denny

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