Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

Today I had the task to Install Ubuntu GNU / Linux on Toshiba L300 PLSBGE Laptop.

I had already installed Windows Vista Enterprise on the notebook. Thus I used Acronis Disk Directory Suite to partition the harddrive for Ubuntu even though I could have used the gparted included on Ubuntu's installation CD. I've asked specificly if
I could use the Ubuntu CD to repartition my hard drive in #ubuntu in irc.freenode.net.
The answer was positive it's absolutely safe to resize an NTFS partition using Ubuntu's installation LiveCD and gparted. That seems like a good news for all of us the free software users / enthusiasts / hobbyists etc.
I hated the default Ubuntu behaviour it automatically decided to install itself on a automatically created 2.5 GB partition.
I thought it won't be so dumb to install itself on such a tiny partition. Well guess what I was wrong IT WAS SO DUMB!
Even though I had already 80 GB ext3 partition. Ubuntu's default behaviour was to install on an automatically created 2.5GB partition.
Right after the installation I was stunned just to realize there was no free space on the drive where the dumbass installed itself.
After that I had some issues deleting the already cretead partitions, which for some reason messed up. Luckily the good old fdisk fixed the situation so I could easily delete all the partitions except the vista and recreate them again using gparted with Ubuntu's install LiveCD. The install was completely flawless. Everything worked out of the box, no external efforts to fix broken stuff like usually happens in Linux fantastic! The only broken thing was that switching to plain console with ctrl+alt+f1 would visualize a non working display output and I couldn't see the ttys at all. That wasn't such a hassle since the system is planned to work only in GUI mode. I guess Ubuntu is going through a real development with a positive end results. Even external USB printer Canon PIXMA IP3300 worked by simply plugging it in. For some weird reason to make the printer work correctly I had to use driver for Canon PIXMA IP3000. Anyways it worked with it and the printer started printing correctly even though officially on some of the linux printers databases it's reported the printer won't work correctly never ever.

Every time after installing a plain new Debian or Ubuntu system, I feel ridiculous cause of the fact. That many of the programs I do use in my daily work with my pc ain't there ready to use. In that manner of thoughts it's really really irritating for me to try to memorize the whole list of programs I usually use not to mention that I hardly could remember the exact name of the packages containing the programs. Moreover it's really irritating to type a hundred times
apt-cache search programname;
apt-get install programtoinstall;
. To make my daily life and hopefully my blog readers life easier I've decided to make a list of all the packages to install:
here is the one liner command required to install the whole heap of packages

$ apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly libxine1-ffmpeg vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc \
mplayer wifi-radar extremetuxracer powermanga supertux chromium kbedic transmission openoffice.org deluge \
alltray xine-ui dodgindiamond2 zblast-x11 blobwars briquolo kamefu blender inkscape gftp xchat \
k3b gnochm tecnoballz audacious audacity rezound opencubicplayer virtualbox gnomad2 kino grip xawtv \
cheese mozilla-helix-player abiword bgoffice-computer-terms sun-java-fonts sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin \
sun-java6-source sun-java6-jre sun-java6-demo dia gajim mc dpkg-dev amsn elinks lynx iptraf sniffit \
ettercap wireshark bluefish thunderbird screenlets verse bible-kjv dict-easton gnomesword sword-text-kjv realplayer pidgin \
ncurses-dev cbedic awn-manager centerim-utf8 apachetop alsa-oss oss-compat iftop

For your convenience I've also prepared a small shell script I've called desktop-bundle.sh download desktop-bundle.sh here
Just in case if you're wondering what exactly is the above package bundle installation good for.
Here is a few explanatory notes next to it:

mozilla-plugin-vlc - Allows mozilla to play in embeded player various video files

gftp - Gnome's FTP client

xchat - IRC Gnome Chat program

cheese - A program to make pictures and suchalike

k3b - kde's cd burner

kino - video editor

sun-java6-jdk, sun-java6-jre, sun-java6-plugin - allows you to run properly java applications on your Linux system both from the command line and in browser

screenlets - explained in my previous post here

wifi-radar - a gnome wifi detection and connection tool

cbedic - a bulgarian / english console dictionary I heavily use

dia - Diagram drawing software (handy to draw your for instance network diagrams)

kbedic - kde Bulgarian / English dictionary. To make it work properly you'll need also the bedic data files, which could be downloaded here

verse, bible-kjv, gnomesword - This and the rest bible related packages are a nice packages I use to daily read and research the bible, since I'm an Orthodox Christian

vlc - Nowdays I'm changing in using vlc to watch videos since mplayer is getting more and more old fashioned and it's behaviour is a bit disappointing sometimes

gnomechm - An app to read Microsoft's CHM help file

grip - Program to RIP audio files

opencubicplayer - the good old Cubic Player we all enjoyed in MS-DOS and Novell DOS to play various XM, S3M, MOD, IT etc. files, it's really nice that this version supports MP3 file format

audacity - An application to record sounds, supports songs sound reverse, for example you can use it to listen your mp3 files backwards, let's say to check if a song contains a satanic message or not :)

dosbox - dos emulator to run old school dos games I love this one

inkscape - 2D vector design software

blender - 3D design software

gajim - might need that one in case if you intend to use Jabber

pidgin - the program I use as an ICQ, MSN client

transmission, deluge - nice bittorrent softwares

kompozer, bluefish - editors similar more or less to the famous dreamweaver. kompozer is more advanced and is much closer to dreamweaver

virtualbox - The Sun's Virtual Machine substitute for VMWare, works okay maybe 20 or 30% slower than VMWare

rezound - again a nice sound editor, like audacity

xine - video player, most people who remember the times before few years should know it

amsn - MSN chat client

avant-window-navigator - A MacOS X like panel for the GNOME Desktop. Features a taskbar behaving similar to Mac OSX's dock.
There is one drawback it doesn't support the dock to be positioned anywhere except on the bottom of the screen
chromium, supertux, powermanga etc. - this and many of the rest are nice games I love to play every now and then when I get completely pissed off

Well that's all for now. Hope this post would be interesting to somebody out there.

After my upgrade to Debian Unstable I experienced problems with opening the microsoft office 2007 .docx files.
The error message that poped up every time I tried opening a docx file was:
Read-Error. Data could not be read from the file
I wasted some time looking for people who experienced the same issue and possible solution to the situation.
Unfortunately I couldn't find any fix online until I found the fix on my own experimenting installing different versions of the odf-converter-integrator.
First I've tried updating my current installed odf-converter-integrator version, which was odf-converter-integrator 0.2.1.
I've upgraded to a version odf-converter-integrator_0.2.2_i386.deb.
Unluckily that the problem persisted, so I tried some other suggested possible work arounds, none of which worked.
I was sure there should be a way to make it work so I continued trying stuff until I FOUND THE SOLUTION.
The solution was as simple as downloading odf-converter-integrator_strawberry_0.2.3-2_i386.deb from the odf-converter-integrator download page
And next install it executing:
dpkg -i --force-all odf-converter-integrator_strawberry_0.2.3-2_i386.deb
Hooray opening docx works corretly on my Debian Unstable now! I bet it works for you as well Praise the Lord!

Recently I had to make Ubuntu system to properly deal with Microsoft Office 2007 XML based .docx file format.
I achieved that in the following way:
1. Use the following odf-converter-integrator download link to download odf-converter-integrator-chocolate. The release offered in my case was odf-converter-integrator-chocolate_0.1.4-1b_amd64.deb.
2. Next install it with:
dpkg -i odf-converter-integrator-chocolate_0.1.4-1b_amd64.deb
Sounds simple eh? Indeed it is. Now you're ready to open docx files with your 64 bit Ubuntu Jaunty GNU/Linux natively in OpenOffice.

It's incredibly simple and comes to the command:
$ sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree Enjoy your brand new working Adobe Flash player.

To replicate your packages selection on another machine (or restore it if re-installing),
You can type:
$ aptitude --display-format '%p' search '?installed!?automatic' >~/my-packages Move the file "my-packages" to the other machine, and there type: $ sudo xargs aptitude --schedule-only install < my-packages ; sudo aptitude install It might be interesting for you to always check the automate command