Love this tutorial on cleaning up my favorite Linux distribution. Even the best of OS needs some tidying up now and then.

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Angry and disappointed, that was the limited range of emotion I went through when I first installed Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04). There was so much hype about it before its official launch compounded by the fact that i went looking for the hype in the first place. I downloaded the iso but unfortunately had to wait for a full 48 hours (had to work the weekend) before I could get my hands on it to do anything about it.

After installation, I knew that I was in the red when Fiesty did not automatically pick the correct resolution for my LCD monitor; something that Edgy Eft did right off the bat. When I saw the option for automatically enabling restricted driver for my ATI X550 graphics card in the system administration option I naturally went for it. See I am a sucker for eye candy and cannot live without my wobbly windows. It did jack shit for my graphics card. I was still stuck with an ugly 800 x 600 (I am usually at 1280 x 1024 in my previous installations of Ubuntu) screen resolution and no other options.

I tried tweaking my xorg.conf file and ended up having to reinstall Feisty a total of 7 times seeing that every tweak I made caused x server not to load up. Before long I noticed clumps of hair at my feet and a quick look in the mirror revelaed a chemo-patient wannabe. I decided that I should give it a rest and went back to Edgy in another partition on my hard drive.

3 days later and with time on my idle hands I went in again. This time I followed the link here and I managed to get 3D acceleration going using ‘Method 1 : Install the driver the Ubuntu way’. Celebrations! Next I installed Beryl using the instructions here (following he Beryl setup section under Method 2 : Installing it the hard way). Double celebrations!

On the plus side Feisty recognized my multimedia media needs straight off and pointed me to all the correct codecs. I even got the fonts to look prettier with this link.

After about a week I finally got a working and good looking Linux OS sitting on my screen. And you know what? It was worth all the hair-tearing at the start. My life is complete now. Of course things could change as I get in deeper into Feisty but for now I foresee a bright future.

Beryl in action

After about 3 years of using various versions of Ubuntu, I have more or less come up with a gameplan following each fresh install of our favorite friendly neighborhood linux distro. I was bugged for the longest time that I could not get Beryl to run in Edgy Eft (version 6.10 for the uninitiated). I did it with the previous Dapper Drake and knew that my PC could handle it and handle it well. The various threads I found in the Ubuntu forums only made me more confused. Being a lazy Saturday I decided to do a clean install and perhaps finally get to enjoy all the eye candy that Beryl promises. Which brings us nicely to the point of this post. Many newbies to linux or Ubuntu will be largely underwhelmed when first confronted with the far from beautiful brown desktop. Worse still is the fact that the thing is mute and blind too. Due to fear of copyright infringement, Ubuntu has no multimedia capabilities out of the box. This does not mean it can’t be done. You just need some simple tweaks.

1. Upgrade the OS – as soon as you log into the desktop an icon on the top panel will inform you that there are upgrades available. Click on it and follow the resultant instructions. A broadband connection to the internet is essential.

2. Multimedia – Being a lazy ass, I decided to give the much touted Automatix a spin this time around and it did not disappoint. Before long Morrissey was singing from within my PC.

3. Graphics card driver – I found this automated script recently and it worked like clockwork. You will need the latest driver for Beryl to work.

4. Beryl – Finally. The best tutorial I have found so far is this one here. Everything but the kitchen sink can be found here. Scroll down to the section on “Eye Candy” and go crazy!

5. Should things not work out do not despair. Hop over to the friendly watering hole that is the Ubuntu forums and you will find people who will go out of their way to help you out.

That’s all you need to end up with a dancing, singing Ubuntu desktop environment.

Disclaimer : These things worked for me in version 6.10 codenamed Edgy Eft

ok i know it has been roughly one and a half months since the release of ubuntu 6.10 codenamed edgy eft but better late then never. after lurking around the ubuntu forums for the past few weeks and coming across horror stories about installation and inexplicable bugs, i finally decided to see for myself if it could be that bad. on the contrary i found it very stable and slightly faster then my previous install of version 6.06 codenamed dapper drake.

the install itself was smooth as butter. slipped in the cd of the iso and booted into the familiar sea of brown. a minor grouse i know but i wish that the powers that be would change the default background after all this time. making sure that my internet connection was detected by firing up firefox 2.0, i clicked on the install icon and away i went. the options by now are like second nature to me seeing that i have in total installed 3 different versions of ubuntu.

rebooting into the installed os was speedier compared to the previous versions. i have come to expect all multimedia to be crippled with a clean install and they did not disappoint as far as this disappointment was concerned. for any newbie reading this though; do not despair. diving into the rich resource that is the ubuntu web forums, i configured the synaptic package manager to include some proprietary repositories and before you can say ’slap me silly on my behind’ i have downloaded all the necessary codecs. minutes later various family members were seen running and screaming out of the house with heavy metal music streaming behind them.

downloading some cool wallpaper from www.deviantart.com, i ended up with the look at the start of this post. the bar at the bottom comes with the package gdesklets and it behaves like the famous mac os x dock. you can also run various widget-like menus with gdesklets which you will notice on the upper right hand corner of the screen. sort of like a konfabulator for linux.

over all it feels very stable and just right. firefox is blazingly fast during net-surfing and after installing the flash player and mplayer plugin, i have yet to come across a media-enriched website that it cannot support it. playing all those movie trailers on the apple website is a cinch.

ubuntu has consistently been topping the list of popular distro on www.distrowatch.com. its there for a reason and edgy eft has proved it yet again.

as a response to the squeaky clean christian edition of the popular linux distro, get ready for some satan worship! get it here.

A New Beginning
i am a ‘new’ ubuntu user. why the quotation marks? well i have been dabbling in ubuntu intermittently but my current foray with this linux distro may be the one that i finally settle down with. i am a windows poweruser. my 1st pc had windows 3.1 on it. subsequently i ran windows 95, 98 and then windows me. sometime last year i switched to xp. i have tasted all the different flavours that bill gates cared to throw at the masses. in april last year i began to hear about this linux os and decided to give it a spin on a lazy sunday afternoon. i have never dreamt that i would one day actually install a whole operating system on my own and you could imagine my nerves at that time. the installation went well besides a few anxious moments when i had to partition my hd and i did not know what the hell was written on the screen. unfortunately when it came time for me to reboot my pc, x server failed! luckily for me i had my handy ibook and a wireless router and managed to go into the ubuntu web forums. after poking around i got a quick fix solution to my problem (some incompatibility issue with my graphics card and the video driver in ubuntu breezy badger).

Brown Is The New White
with the brown gnome desktop sitting in front of me, i spent the next few days getting video and audio running in breezy. the forum members were in full force holding my hand while i waded through hours of software updating and configuration. i was a happy camper for the next month of so once i got everything up and running. at that time i was still dual booting between winxp for some program like itunes seeing that i could never get gtkpod or banshee to work with my ipod mini and nano. and also i missed my games in xp.

Breaking Wind
after the initial novelty, i started to neglect breezy and found myself turning back to winxp more and more. finally breezy was left sitting in a dark corner of my hard disk uncared for. to add salt to the wound, i also read a posting in another forum that referred to the ubuntu gnome desktop as ‘child-like’ . for some reason i found this less then complimentary remark apt and felt that ubuntu’s ranking as the most popular distro in distrowatch unfounded and over rated.

The Green Gecko
my pc finally gave up the ghost end of last year and i had to purchase a whole new desktop. this of course came with the ubiquitous winxp preinstalled and that was that. in april this year on another lazy sunday i decided to try out suse 10.0. this time i was less scared seeing that i have had some experience with my last ubuntu installation. everything went smoothly but again no multimedia capabilities out of the box. another few days went by and with the help of members in the suse web forums i got everything up and running. the suse kde desktop was an improvement over the ubuntu gnome desktop. it had a more professional and grownup feel to it. after a few months suse 10.1 was announced and i dutifully downloaded the iso’s and installed it on another partition ( i was now tri-booting!)

The Evil Brother
all my hope for a shiny new fully functional linux os was dashed when i ran into problems with the zen updater which came with suse 10.1. i was inundated with strange errors and unexplained alert messages while trying to update. i came away with a bitter after taste in my mouth. on the positive side i was now well on my way to becoming a linux convert. at least the ‘terminal’ now does not look so alien to me and i was no longer in mortal fear of it.

Dapper Drake To The Rescue
enter ubuntu 6.06 LTS codenamed dapper drake. at the expense of looking like a linux slut (sleeping with every distro that was available and willing) i again took the plunge and downloaded this new ubuntu not knowing what to expect. i have to admit that i was getting tired with suse and was itching for new experiences. of all the distros i have toyed with this was the best installation i have had. smooth as butter and everything went by flawlessly. updating the os was a breeze and after my recent encounter with suse and zen this was a definite plus point. in order to get multimedia, flash and java working in firefox i again relied on the cool folks at ubuntu web forums and within hours i was up and running. to my delight, this time gtkpod and banshee picked up on my ipod and i was able to transfer mp3s to it. a few days ago i even managed to install and set up compiz/xgl in dapper.

In Love Again
my initial reservations about gnome was largely unfounded. i now appreciate the intuitiveness and sensibility of this powerful desktop and wouldn’t change to kde even if i was offered a lot of money.
it may have something to do with the better specs of my new pc but dapper feels much snappier and faster when compared with breezy.
of the two that i have encountered this is the better version of ubuntu. having read through some of the threads in the ubuntu forums many people would even argue that this is the best version ever.

Some Lizard
but of course for the past few days the entire linux community at large has been stumbling over each other to download the latest edition codenamed ‘edgy eft‘. poking around the forums, i see a lot of red and angry faces ranting about how the new upgrade has royally screwed them with broken x servers (an example of an irate customer can be had here) and what have you. as for me i started the download but then stopped it midway. perhaps let the people at ubuntu iron out the bugs first before i take the plunge. i am a cautious one.