Posts tagged Ubuntu
Honey, We are a Ubuntu Household Now.
Nov 3rd
Flash Back Two Months Ago…. Let me give you the story how I kicked my Microsoft addiction. Well actually my computers had an intervention!
This is my first post as an Ubuntu user
The Admin has been through computer hell these last few days. First my Dell Latitude X1 refuses to charge… So I have been trying to be savvy and save my 7 hour battery just for emergencies. This is not for the faint of heart!
After troubleshooting galore I have come to the conclusion that it’s the power module on the motherboard of that mother clucker. Dell does not sell that module – but they say it should just be re-soldered. but they won’t tell you to do it…Nor will they tell you how to do it with a small soldering gun…
The dude continued to tell me that I was probably better off getting a new machine. That caused me to inquire into the price of the board. He said he couldn’t be sure but with installation it would be in the area of a G bone…Without the processor!!! I didn’t pay a thousand bucks for the whole thing (I love eBay)!
I found a spot downtown, near my office, that says they can fix it for me for $250. We’ll see about that! Then to top it off my desktop hard drive just up and died on me. I was down to running strictly off my Dopod. Which wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be! But we will save that for the Dopod review this weekend. (I promise… Stop the emails… No Wait We Like Them… Keep The Emails Coming!).
I was so fed up I just pulled the hard drive out connected via a IDE to USB joint and popped an UBUNTU CD into the drive. I pushed a 4gb memory stick in that bitch and called it a day. Out of the box all I needed to do was activate the network and that’s it. I was off Ubuntuing around. Firefox, Gimp, MSTSC… I was golden. I haven’t found anything that I can’t do in Ubuntu yet – built in Bit Torrent client, CD/DVD burning tools and a repository with a shit-load of other crap you don’t need but will probably download anyway!
Then I went to try and explain this to the wife :)…
Honey, We use UBUNTU now… Its the same but different…
So thats it all I have to say is “go to hell you cold unforgiving Windows…” @ least until we demo Windows Server 2008 this weekend!
_TheUbuntuAdmiN_
Anyone got any tips for an Ubuntu n00b??…
Two months later still loving Ubuntu – Actually upgraded to the Gutsy Gibson AND my buddy helped me resolder my X1. So far so good. Any other converts out there?
What a Dream Come True! DreamLinux that is!
Oct 20th
I mentioned in a recent post that I recently aquired an older Pentium III laptop with only 384MB of RAM. It really isn’t fast enough to run Windows XP without trimming the fat.I originally was going to put Xubuntu on it, because Xubuntu is designed to be more light weight than regular Ubuntu, because it uses the more minimal XFCE interface. It turns out though that XFCE is still a little too beefy for even this computer. Sure it installed, and ran fine, just a little slower than I would like. I did try XP with the fat trimmed like I mentioned above, but that was still God awfully slow.
Not wanting to give up, or revert to an older version of Windows, I decided to keep poking around in the Linux world for a solution. There are a lot of them out there that will run just find on such a machine, but the trick it so get one that my wife won’t mind using when going to the Java Mama’s coffee shop with my little girl.
II found the perfect distro for my wife in Dream Linux! This is one of the many lightweight live CD distros out there that also have the ability to install to hard drive. The cool thing about Dream Linux that I like, and my wife likes especially since the popularity of MAC’s now days (Damn they have good marketing don’t they?) is that this is pretty much a MAC clone complete with the animated launcher bar at the bottom, and yes, that bar works well on the Pentium III without slowing it down!
If you have a relatively newer computer, it also supports Berly and AIGLX, which means sweet 3D desktop goodness!
Of course, I wouldn’t even try using Berly on a Pentium III, but it does make a strong case to test it out! Another cool thing about it is the graphical front end to ndiswrapper, which lets you use Windows drivers for hardware that isn’t supported under Linux! Just open the GUI, point it to your driver inf file, and away you go! I did have to add the following line to my /etc/rc.local script to make some hardware work after boot up, but that is a minor tweak and hardly a deal breaker:
modprobe ndiswrapper
The best thing though is that it is Debian based, so apt-get is in full effect, which means that if something you use normally is missing, you can get it and install it easily! For me, network manager is essential for easy WPA configuration. It didn’t come pre-installed on Dream Linux, but a quick apt-get later and I was good to go!I’m not quite ready to name Dream Linux as a replacement distro of choice yet, for me my favorite is still Ubuntu, but it really is pretty great, and works well on older computers!
Have you tried it out? Do you have a favorite Distro for similar Situations?
Originally Posted on http://www.bauer-power.net
Ubuntu 7.10 Final Releases TODAY!
Oct 18th
It’s finally here! The final release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon has been released today! Everyone is very excited (especially the lovely young ladies to your right). Doesn’t that make you want to try Ubuntu a little more??
They Make Upgrading From Fawn A Snap:
Go to the Update Manager and it tells you of the new release and it has this shiny, new button that if you click it downloads and upgrade tool to upgrade your OS!!!!! -Thanks SlothMan
From their website:
Ubuntu makes no distinction between community and enterprise editions, Ubuntu 7.10 is our best work and is available freely to all. Ubuntu has consistently ranked #1 in reviews of security update responsiveness and effectiveness. The Ubuntu platform is fully certified and supported, making it a secure choice for users looking to explore, deploy and enjoy Linux. Ubuntu 7.10 brings together the best open source and free software available in a stable, robust environment that ‘just works’.
Ubuntu 7.10 Desktop Edition adds an enhanced user interface, improved hardware support, multiple monitor support and integrated desktop search. Additional information is available at http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-desktop710.
Ubuntu 7.10 Server Edition features improved functionality, manageability, pro-active security and hardware compatibility and delivers a rapid deployment platform for developers and businesses. Additional information is available at http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-server710.
New versions of Kubuntu and Edubuntu, derivatives of Ubuntu aimed at KDE enthusiasts and the education community respectively, are also being released at the same time. Additional information is available at http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu-family710.
Here are some highlights of 7.10 Desktop Edition:
- Hardware management improvements – improved plug-and-play configuration for printers, as well as automatic firmware installation for Broadcom cards
- Improved support for display systems – For laptop users, full support external VGA (projector) support is available out-of-the-box with easy reconfiguration when hardware is switched. For power users this release includes the ability to manage multiple monitors
- Windows compatibility – Users with a dual partition can read from and and write to files that are on located in a Windows partition (including NTFS)
- Enhanced user interface – Simple 3D screen effects and graphics enhance the user experience
- Desktop search – gives users the ability to search their entire desktop, whether for files, folders, chat logs or photos. This capability includes the deskbar applet, a central location on users’ desktops for all local and web search operations
- Firefox plugins – automatic installation of popular Firefox plugins validated by Ubuntu for a richer, safer web-browsing experience
If you haven’t done so, check it out , and get the best Ubuntu distro yet today!
Originally Posted on Bauer-Power By El Di Pablo
SugarCRM Plus Some Ubuntu fun
Sep 21st
SugarCRM is the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software for companies of all sizes. Sugar easily adapts to any business environment by offering a more flexible, cost-effective alternative than proprietary applications. SugarCRM’s open source architecture allows companies to more easily customize and integrate customer-facing business processes in order to build and maintain more profitable relationships. SugarCRM offers several deployment options, including on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions to suit customers’ security, integration and configuration needs.
That is SugarCRM in a nutshell. To simplify it, it is Salesforce.com only cheaper, if not free, and customizable.
I’ve been playing with Sugar since version 2.0. Now they are releasing a beta of 5.0 and it has come a long way.
In short, if you need to keep a list of contacts, projects and potential sales/opportunities/leads, then Sugar is what you want to be using. It does everything that Salesforce does and more because it is open source and fully customizable.
While I am not a sales guy, I appreciate what it can do because of our current CRM situation. We have a product that is developed in Lotus Notes databases and for lack of a better way to say it, it blows chunks. It is clunky, hard to work with and hard to customize to the way we do business, not to mention that the modules do not interact with each other quite well! Ironically enough, our current CRM provider is limiting development of our product to make a tool that ties Blackberry devices to….SugarCRM!
Need a field…simply add it. That is how simple Sugar is. You cannot ask for anything more than that.
As far as getting Sugar to play with, go to their downloads and they have installers that work for OS X, Windows, Linux and there is even a VMWare appliance, so you can be up and running within literally 10 minutes or less.
Best of all…if the software doesn’t do what you want out of the box, check out the SugarForge and see if someone has made a freebie that does it, or there are people who charge for their apps too. Also, Sugar will do customizations for you, for a fee of course. There are add ins like Field Force that tie it to a Blackberry, toolbars for Thunderbird, Outlook and Firefox.
There are 3 different versions of it, Open Source/Community Edition, Professional, and Enterprise. You get more features and scalability in the Professional/Enterprise as well as you can use other databased other than the standard MySQL that comes with it.
I recommend that if you have a sales force that uses a CRM product that they look at Sugar and what it can do for them.
I did mention some Ubuntu fun earlier today so here it is….
I’m doing a trial run of Sugar for our head ‘sales’ guys here so that they can compare and contrast Sugar to our current debacle of a product. So the standard installer sets Sugar up for default port 8080. That is fine for testing, but I wanted to us standard 80 for when this chap gets to start using it after I get all the data into it.
Well…..Ubuntu doesn’t like port 80….well it does, but it likes it for ‘known services’. In other words, you cannot compile apache and run it on port 80. Ubuntu reserves all ports under 1024 as ‘privileged ports’. Therefore only a ‘known and trusted’ service can access them properly….well this was a problem as you could imagine.
So I Googled the crap out of the problem. No resolutions other than to do some port forwarding from 80->8080. No bueno thank you very much.
Using the start script from Sugar, after Apache was configured for port 80 I could get MySQL running but not Apache. If I ran the script under sudo I could get Apache running but not MySQL.
Digging through logs it looked like MySQL was failing because of permissions under sudo. Seems sudo didn’t have the proper access to the files and folders that MySQL needed to run. …sigh…
Dug through the MySQL configs and logs to find that I needed to create a user on the system called mysql with the proper, default MySQL password. Then give it permissions to the proper folders. Here I encountered a new problem. The default MySQL password is pwd. Ubuntu through the GUI will only allow a minimum password length of 6 characters. Into the terminal I go, run a sudo passwd mysql with the proper password, voila! MySQL boots!
But SugarCRM would still not access things properly. I sigh one more time. More digging and googling. I come up with the idea that I need to give the system user, moi, an account in MySQL with full access to the database. Did this, stopped Apache and MySQL, re-ran the start script with sudo and all came up!
That security was a bitch to get around. I don’t like the ‘privileged ports’ that Ubuntu has, but I understand why it exists.
After that I added some port forwarding on my firewall/router and Sugar is accessible outside and inside the wall.
How about that for a ramble???
Can You Update Ubuntu…By CD?
Sep 10th
If you have ever installed a fresh new copy of Ubuntu, you have gone through a ton of updates. It is almost as bad as Windows in that respect. If you have to update numerous computers at once, it can also suck up all of your bandwidth. There is another way though.
What if I told you that you could back up all of your updates from one computer to CD or DVD (Your choice) and then update all of your other Ubuntu machines at once without having to go out to the repositories and suck up your bandwidth? You would probably say, “El Di Pablo, you’re crazy bro!” That may be true, but it can be done.
With a little application called APTonCD, you can update one computer, then backup all of those many updates you downloaded to a CD or DVD, then turn around and update all of the rest of your Ubuntu machines with the CD or DVD. Those machines don’t even need to be connected to the internet!
For installation, and usage, read the full article here!
Originally Posted on Bauer-Power By El Di Pablo
Build A Stand Alone Bit Torrent Computer Out Of An Old PC & Ubuntu
Sep 7th
Direct from the website Nerdica (What a name!). Put that old pc you have collecting dust back to work. Crack that whip and build a dedicated BT server that will never use up your precious hard drive space with downloads of the Simpsons and Futurama when you need it for those work files.
Everyone knows you just put your work aside and let your bitTorrents keep downloading. And yes we do know you pretend to be busy while doing it. Your not alone!
And now you can increase your productivity - that is if you want to :) Separate your BitTorrenting activities from your mission critical work!
While most of our time on the Internet is spent IM’ing, e-mail, or just browsing the Web, you may run in to situations when you need to do some powerful file transfers. If you use a laptop, you’re use to getting up, suspending your laptop, and running out the door all of the time. But, sometimes you know you just need something dedicated to get work done. You’ll need a solution to retrieve files and serve data when you need it. In this guide, you’ll learn how to set a small headless Ubuntu server used to retrieve BitTorrent files, while even saving them to a external USB hard drive that can be disconnected on the go. You even discover how to remotely administer your server from the Web using SSH, VNC, and an intuitive HTML UI, while being able to retrieve files while you’re away from home.This tutorial takes for granted you have a spare computer laying around. Building a computer is out of the scope of this article. Edit: (But not out of AtA’s Realm Hit Us up!!!)
Check out the whole tutorial here. Let us know how that works out for ya…
