Chromium is the open source project behind Google Chrome. While Chromium is still in development, it is shaping up to be a feature rich browser. It's already fast, has native theming support for Linux and now can play flash.
Like the installing Firefox 3.5 guide, this how-to will use a Personal Package Achieve (PPA) to install and update Chromium as development continues.
Step 1: Add The PPA
- Go to the PPA for Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds Webpage
-Select your distro, the PPA has builds for Hardy (8.04), Intrepid (8.10), Jaunty (9.04) and Karmic (9.10).
- Add the Chromium daily build repository for your distro to your source list
in a terminal:
- Paste it into a text file
- paste, save and exit
- Go to Software Sources (System->Administration->Software Sources)
- Under the Authentication Tab select "+ Import Key File..."
- Navigate to where you have saved the PPA key.
This will leave you in the root area of your hard disk, if you saved the key in your Home folder you will have to navigate to it. (File System->Home->user folder)
- Import the key
- Update your Repositories
in a terminal type:
sudo apt-get update
Install Chromium
in a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
Step 3: Install Flash
- Close Chromium
in a terminal type:
- Point the terminal the the plugin folder of your Chromium install
I watched an episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicals on Hulu and a couple of YouTube videos. Playback is decent, but I'd really like to know what you think of it.
Firefox 3.5 has some great features planned. As of the time this article was written it is still in development and some plugins do not work or conflict with new features. If you'd like try out Firefox 3.5 before it's officially included in Ubuntu, there is a is a Personal Package Archives (PPA) with a daily build of Firefox 3.5 that makes installation easy. To install Firefox 3.5, codenamed Shiretoko, you have to add the PPA and its key to your repositories.
Add the PPA To Your Repository: - Go to the Mozilla Daily PPA Page - Select the correct packages for your version of Ubuntu (8.04, 8.10, 9.04, 9.10) - Copy the Mozilla daily repository to your source list in a terminal:
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
- save and exit
Add the Repository Key: - copy the key from this public key server page - paste it into a text file
- save and exit
- Go to Software Sources (System->Administration->Software Sources) - Under the Authentication Tab select "+ Import Key File..." - Navigate to where you have saved the PPA key. *This will leave you in the root area of your hard disk, if you saved the key in your Home folder you will have to navigate from your File System->Home->user folder
There are some exciting features planned for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. The biggest news is the work being done on the Intel video driver. Recently Canonical's Bryce Harrington reported on the improvement of the Intel graphic driver on the Ubuntu developer mailing list. The 2.6.30 kernel will ship with Kernel Mode Setting enabled for Intel graphics and the driver will more than likely switch from the current EXA acceleration method to the new UXA method. GRUB2 has been implemented and the goal is to work towards a 10 second boot. There is a new power management system,DeviceKit-power, that should help improve battery life. A new Fn key maphandler, udev-extras. ext4 has been selected as the default file system and should significantly increase disk performance.
Installation I used a Crucial Gizmo! 4GB USB flash drive and Ubuntu 9.04's USB Startup Disk Creator to install Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2. Using the default ext4 files system, I setup a 4.8GB partition for the / directory, 7.8 GB for /home directory and 1.9GB for swap. The installation process was smooth. The only issue, and it is a know bug, is that the system will fail to reboot cleanly after the install. You will have to manually power-cycle the system to finish the install reboot. The system will shutdown and reboot properly after this.
Grub 2 & Booting GRUB 2 is the default boot loader for Karmic, replacing the previous GRUB "Legacy" boot loader. GRUB 2 is a complete rewrite whose goals include making GRUB cleaner, safer, more robust, more portable and more powerful. It does offer a graphical menu but for now it's just a blue screen. As you can see from the video, I toggled between the two kernel entries so you can see how Grub 2 looks at this point in development. So far the only difference is the boot menu is blue. Hopefully Ubuntu can put something together as nice as Debian's Grub 2 menu for Ubuntu 9.10 when it ships.
Booting the Mini in Ubuntu 9.10 is quick but nothing special. Average boot up time, from powering on to a usable desktop, was about 25 seconds. Work is being implemented towards a 10 second boot time but currently 9.10 Alpha 2's times are not much faster than Ubuntu 9.04.
Video The Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950 driver has received some significant upgrades. The 2.7.99.1 Intel driver switched the acceleration mode to uxa and have stripped out exa acceleration altogether. Karmic has enabled kernel mode setting for Intel graphic chips. I followed these instructions for setting up uxa acceleration. The uxa acceleration has not crashed or throw up any weird errors throughout my testing. Some have reported problem, developers are asking for testers to report bugs upstream using these guidelines.
Flash Video Playback
YouTube's windowed and fullscreen mode work great. No pausing in video or audio during fullscreen/windowed transition. HD video still doesn't work properly, it suffers from choppy audio/video playback and transition pauses. Turn off annotations for best results. Highly watchable.
Hulu.com's playback is much better than 8.04 and 8.10. Windowed and fullscreen videos work well. Transitioning from windowed to fullscreen is still is a problem. Highly watchable.
LiveLeak.com's video playback is smooth and fullscreen worked well. Highly watchable.
Gametrailers.com's windowed mode works well, fullscreen causes video to become choppy. Watchable.
TheOnion.com's video playback is smooth and fullscreen works well. Highly watchable.
CNN.com's video is choppy, audio works well. Live streams work very well. Watchable.
Break.com's video playback is slightly choppy. Drag to resize does not work. Watchable.
NFL.com's windowed mode is great, fullscreen causes audio to become choppy. Watchable.
Metacafe's video playback is smooth and fullscreen worked well. Highly watchable.
Blip.tv's video playback is smooth and fullscreen worked well. Don't be fooled, the home page video doesn't work but the videos contained in the site are good. Highly watchable.
Revver.com's video playback is smooth but no full screen. Highly watchable.
Vimeo's video and audio was extremely choppy, fullscreen does not work. Unwatchable
Spike.com's video playback is smooth and fullscreen works well. Highly watchable.
Compiz Compiz runs out of the box. It's snappier than Ubuntu 8.10 and 9.04. I'm throwing everything I can at it and I haven't had any tearing or stuttering, shadowing, ghosting or bleeding.
Wireless Wireless does not work out of the box like Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10 and 9.04. It does work once you install the Broadcom STA wireless driver. I was able to connect to both WEP and WPA networks without a problem. I am getting the same rock solid performance as in Ubuntu 9.04.
Wired Worked out of the box. No problems or speed issues.
Audio Unlike Intrepid and Jaunty, audio works without configuring or having to turn up the speaker volume. The internal mic, external mic and headphone all work.
Webcam Worked out of the box. To test the webcam, install Cheese.
Bluetooth Worked out of the box and includes the ability to enter the device PIN codes through the GUI.
Card Reader Worked out of the box. Secure Digital (SD) & SDHC (High Capacity), MultiMediaCard (MMC) and Memory Stick all worked.
Fn Keys The brightness, volume, suspend, fullscreen keyboard shortcuts all work with any extra configuration. The wifi on/off (Fn+2) does not.
Suspend & Hibernate - Suspend works incredibly well. I suspended my computer over and over without a problem. - Hibernate will not work if you do not have a swap partition. If you have a swap file, Hibernate does not work properly yet. It takes about 15-20 seconds for your machine to turn off and it will only wake up to a blank screen.
Aircraft Manager Jitender's aircraft manager package for Jaunty works in Karmic Alpha 2 and turning wifi and bluetooth on and off worked flawlessly.
Download Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha 2 Pre-releases of Karmic are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs. The final, stable version will be released on October 29th, 2009.
Mini 9 owners know how easy it is to mod your system, upgrading the RAM takes less than 5 minutes. This is what pulled me to the system. When Dell released the Mini 9 service manual I had a geek-gasm. The Mini 9 was the perfect netbook for Linux newcomers and enthusiasts. Unfortunately this is not the case for The Dell Mini 10v. It's a nightmare to mod.
These videos detail how many steps it takes and the components you have to remove to get to the RAM. It's not just the RAM, getting to any of the components require you to dismantle the 10v. I personally don't want to pry off the keyboard and palm rest to get to my machine. I can't believe Dell has the nerve to recommend the 10v as suitable replacement to the Mini 9. I feel sorry for 10v users who can't order a machine with more than 1GB of RAM because of Microsoft's Windows XP OEM restrictions and then have to take 27 nerve racking minutes to disassemble and reassemble their machines. I have no problem with taking things apart, but this turned me off to buying a Mini 10v all together.
Remember that you can still get some great deals on a used Mini9 and that the Dell Vostro A90 is available from Dell's business division. It's is just a black version of the Mini 9, the layout and components are exactly the same.
The 3rd Video, wasn't worth embedding because it's just him putting everything back together.
This week's article was going to be about Gnome-Do & Docky, but those programs are dead to me, as well as Banshee, Tomboy and Beagle. This is sad because I really liked Gnome-Do, Banshee and Beagle. The problem is that they use Mono, an open source implementation of the .NET development framework.
Christopher Smart has written an excellent article, Mono: An Infectious Disease about the dangers of using Mono. I encourage everyone to take the time to read this article. There are very serious consequences with allowing Mono to infiltrate GNU/Linux. Novell and Miguel de Icaza have been pushing Mono dependency into Gnome, giving Microsoft a foothold into Linux's most popular desktop enviroment.
An excerpt from the article:
Through the recent TomTom case it is clear that Microsoft is using patents to leverage power over open source. Microsoft knows that if they do nothing, free software will eventually destroy their bottom line. They have to do something, which they certainly are. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted, "Linux is a serious competitor" and promised that the company will outsmart open source. So what’s their game plan?
One of the ways they are trying to gain the upper hand is by introducing their own proprietary programming framework into free software, which is called ‘.NET‘. While some parts of the .NET framework such as CLI and C# have been submitted to Ecma for standardisation, others have not. Even so, Microsoft still holds patents in relation to these standards, although the company grants “licenses on reasonable terms and conditions”, but only so long as the corresponding Ecma standard remains valid. The non-standard components also pose a risk.
Microsoft has ulterior motives for wanting support for .NET under Linux. They might not be able to destroy free software, but they sure want to control it. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said: "I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows".
Microsoft has declared itself our enemy and we know that Microsoft is getting patents on some features of C#. So I think it's dangerous to use C#, and it may be dangerous to use Mono. There's nothing wrong with Mono. Mono is a free implementation of a language that users use. It's good to provide free implementations. We should have free implementations of every language. But, depending on it is dangerous, and we better not do that.
This is why more projects like Gnote, a port of Tomboy written in C++, need to be started and maintained. Free and proprietary software can co-exist and should, but free software doesn't need Microsoft's backhanded help.
Mono: An Infectious Disease excerpt was used with permission by the author Christopher Smart / CC BY 2.5
The command-line interface (CLI) is a tool for interacting with the operating system or software by typing commands to perform specific tasks.
In Ubuntu the default command line interface is the gnome-terminal. You can find it under Application>Accessories>Terminal.
For some tasks, especially things like system configuration, it makes sense to use the terminal. This guide will show you how to use the command line to keep your system up and running, how a fix common errors and edit some things.
- The majority of these commands require you to be the superuser. To execute these commands as the superuser you will use sudo at the beginning of each command.
apt-get is the command-line APT package handling utility. It works with core libraries to handle the installation and removal of software in Ubuntu. The following are the most common APT for managing your software and system.
Install a package
sudo apt-get install [name of package]
Remove a package
sudo apt-get remove [name of package]
Remove a package and its configuration files
sudo apt-get purge [name of package]
Update your system
sudo apt-get update
Install updates
sudo apt-get upgrade
Does the same as clean but it only removes package files that can no longer be downloaded, and are largely useless (my preferred method)
sudo apt-get autoclean
Used to remove packages that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies and that are no more needed (another favorite)
sudo apt-get autoremove
Frees up space by clearing out the local repository of retrieved package files
sudo apt-get clean
If you want to learn more apt-get commands read user manual
man apt-get
dpkg is the software at the base of the Debian package management system. It is used to install, remove, and provide information about .deb packages. These are some of the most common dpkg commands for fixing problems with .deb packages and broken systems.
When something goes wrong with an upgrade, use this command and all unpacked but unconfigured packages we be configured.
sudo dpkg --configure -a
To fix a specific .deb package
sudo dpkg-reconfigure [name of package]
To fix your xorg.conf file, for resolution or graphical problems. - In most cases, selecting the default options will fix the majority of your issues on the Dell Mini 9. sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
If you want to learn more dpkg commands, read the user manual.
man dpkg
Some other helpful terminal commands:
To terminate the process currently running in the terminal by sending it a SIGINT command.
Ctrl+C [press the Ctrl and C keys simultaneously]
Edit you source list.
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
Edit your file system table (fstab).
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
Edit your xorg.conf.
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Add kernel modules to load at boot time
sudo gedit /etc/modules
List all drives.
sudo fdisk -l
Mount a drive. sudo mount [/path/to/drive] - to learn more on how to mount drives, read the mount user manual man mount
To unmount a drive. sudo umount [/path/to/drive]- to learn more on how to mount drives, read the mount user manual man umount
Configure, control, and query TCP/IP network interface parameters.
ifconfig
- to learn more commands for using ifconfig, read the usual manual. man ifconifg
Configure, control and display the parameters of wireless network interfaces.
iwconfig
- to learn more commands for using iwconfig, read the usual manual. man iwconifg
If you have a favorite command, feel free to leave them in the comments, I'll add the best ones to the guide.
Peter van Kann Dennis Jones Judson Dunn Houston R. Allen William Hennan David Decker William Hennan Gerld Graff Gregory Ramey Asheville Technologies Lori Perez
