Make Tech Easier » Joshua Price

Mastering Grub 2 The Easy Way

Joshua Price — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:38:33 +0000

If you’re running Linux, there’s a good chance your distro of choice uses Grub as the default bootloader. Grub has served well for many years, but it’s beginning to show its age. As with all software, it doesn’t take long before the latest-and-greatest becomes old-and-haggard. Features have been piling up in Grub without much thought going into revamping the core program. Eventually, this lead to a messy patchwork that no one really wanted to maintain. At this point, Grub2 was born. It’s a complete rewrite from the ground up using a completely redesigned structure. This new Grub gives us powerful features like conditional statements (if/then, etc), intelligent upgrades, and some greatly improved graphics.

Getting Grub2

Currently, if you want to use Grub2, your best bet is to run Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). If you just want to toy around and see what it can do without risking your system, I’d suggest running it inside a virtual machine as described here, but of course with Ubuntu 9.10.

menu.lst/grub.cfg

If you’ve messed with the original Grub (now called Grub legacy), you doubtless know all about menu.lst. That was the file where Grub legacy stored pretty much everything. In Grub2, the closest equivalent is grub.cfg, also located in /boot/grub. One of the most important differences, however, is that you should not edit the grub.cfg file directly. Some of you may be thinking “Ha! Warnings like that are for n00bs!”. Well the reason for this rule is not because the developers don’t think you’re l33t enough, it’s because that file is auto-generated by Grub2 and will be overwritten without warning as a result of things like kernel upgrades.

Any time the update-grub command is run, Grub2 will read its various config files and use their contents to generate grub.cfg. These files are dealt with individually below.

/etc/default/grub

Many of Grub’s options that used to be in menu.lst are now here. This includes things like whether or not to display the Grub menu, and how long to wait before timeout. This screenshot is the default config in Ubuntu 9.10, and is set to hide the Grub menu, disable “recovery mode” options, and instruct the kernel to include a splash screen.

By the way, to force Grub 2 to show the menu on boot just hold down the Shift key while Grub is starting.

/etc/grub.d/

This is where things really begin to differ from Grub legacy. Where you’d normally enter all your boot options in the menu.lst file, Grub 2 takes a very different approach. The /etc/grub.d/ directory contains individual files, each representing a option for the boot menu. The following shows the files contained in the default install.

While it’s certainly a lot different than Grub legacy, you may notice something familiar about that folder. It’s set up in a way very similar to the standard Linux startup system, SysV Init. Each of the files shown is a shell script that executes in order. Order is determined by the numbers at the start of each filename, so the script in 00_header will always run before, say, 05_debian_theme.

/etc/grub.d/40_custom

Chances are, if you need to edit your boot menu, this is the file you’re looking for. This is where you add your custom entries to the menu. Since this is the last numbered file in the grub.d directory (as explained in the section above), any entries you place in this file will show up at the end of the boot menu.

By default, the 40_custom file is mostly empty. In this example, I’ve added a new menu entry.

Splash Images

You can easily download the Grub 2 splash pack in Ubuntu with:

sudo apt-get install grub2-splashimages

When it’s done, all the images will be stores as TGA files in /usr/share/images/grub/.

The file that specifies what splash image to use on boot is the 05_debian_theme file we saw earlier. So to set our new custom splash, we want to open /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme as root in whatever text editor you prefer. Look for a line similar to the highlighted one in the example below,

And change the filename to whichever splash image you prefer. Make certain the path points to the /usr/share/images/grub/ directory. Some older versions default to /usr/share/images/desktop-base/ and that’s not what we want.

Applying changes

As you may remember from the beginning of this guide, the grub.cfg file is auto-generated from the other config files we’ve covered. When you’ve made changes to those files, you’ve got to tell Grub to read them and pull together a new config file. To do that, simply run the following command as root:

update-grub

Once it’s complete, reboot your computer (or virtual machine) to see the results. Don’t forget to hold Shift while booting, if your menu is still set to Hidden.

Mastering Grub 2 The Easy Way originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Play Classic Console Games in Linux

Joshua Price — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:07:37 +0000

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you grew up with classic video game consoles like the NES and Sega Genesis. For years Windows users have been enjoying high quality game emulation software, but many of the Linux options have been buggy or incomplete. It’s time to take a look at where things stand when it comes to playing console games in Linux. Here at MakeTechEasier, we’ve touched on console game emulation here and there, but never done a guide covering multiple systems. Today, we’ll show you how to run games for NES, SNES, Genesis, original Playstation, and Dreamcast.

Before we begin, it’s important to note one thing right up front – many console manufacturers do not look kindly on emulation, and some emulators require proprietary software (like the game system BIOS) in order to run. Because of the legal grey area occupied by some of this software, there may be some files or programs for which MTE cannot provide links, such as the actual game files (commonly called ROMS).

NES – GFCEU

We’ll begin with the system that brought video games into many of our homes for the first time, the Nintendo Entertainment System. NES emulators are often the easiest to find, install, and run. In my searching for quality NES emulators for Linux, I’ve found GFCEU to be my favorite.

Installation – It’s available in the standard Ubuntu repositories, so it can be installed easily with apt-get/aptitude/Synaptic, or with the command below:

sudo apt-get install gfceu

It is a graphical frontend for the console-based NES emulator FCEU, so if your distro does not have GFCEU in the standard repositories, look for FCEU to get the same capability.

SNES – SNES9Express

We’ve covered the ZSNES emulator before, so this time we’ll check out my personal favorite, SNES9Express. Like GFCEU above, this is a graphical frontend to a console emulator, in this case SNES9X.

Installation - Like the NES emulators above, both the graphical frontend (SNES9Express) and the emulator itself (SNES9X) are available in Ubuntu’s repositories, so they can be installed easily with apt-get/aptitude/Synaptic like most other software.

Genesis – Gens/GS

Gens/GS is a fork of the popular Gens Genesis emulator. Its goal is to combine the various forks of Gens into one clean, functional program. It can support a wide variety of games and runs on both Linux and Windows, but unfortunately does not (yet) fully support 64 bit processors.

Image by SonicRetro

Installation - You can download Gens/GS for Ubuntu (32 bit only) and Windows here.

Playstation – pSX

Since we’ve covered pSX in detail before in this article, I wont go into a lot of detail here. pSX allows you to play many original Playstation games from your Linux PC. It does, however, have the same drawback as Gens/GS in that it does not currently support 64 bit environments.

Installation - covered in detail here.

Dreamcast – LXDream

Running Dreamcast games on PC requires a fairly fast machine. My Core 2 Duo with Intel graphics wasn’t quite up to the task, so LXDream only gets about 20% native speed for me. On the plus side, 64 bit CPUs are fully supported. You will need the Dreamcast system BIOS to run any games, and that’s one of those files you’ll have to find on your own.

The only problem I had with LXDream was that it didn’t have any controls configured by default. Fortunately, setting up the keyboard is as simple as opening Settings > Controllers and choosing Properties on Sega Controller section.

Installation - Source and binaries for Mac OSX and Linux can be found here. The Debian package installed perfectly on my Ubuntu desktop.

If you know any other high quality console game emulators for Linux, let us know in the comments.

How to Play Classic Console Games in Linux originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

10 Useful GMail Search Tips

Joshua Price — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:07:18 +0000

Like many of you, I’ve been happily using GMail for years. While there are many things I like about it, one in particular has always impressed me: email search. It’s no surprise that Google would add powerful search features to their email system, but there are many great features that go laregely unnoticed by many GMail users. Today we’ll go over some of GMail’s best search tricks and how to get the most out of this powerful feature.

1. Removing keywords

A common websearch function applied to email. You can filter out items containing certain words. For example, if I want to get a list of all my MakeTechEasier messages, but not those relating to pingbacks, I can remove items containing that word from my results with the minus sign.

2. To: and From:

Probably the simplest and most often used search function is the ability to specify sender or recipient. By specifying a name or email address you can narrow results to items written by (or to) a name or email address. In this example, I’m trying to get all the emails I’ve written about MakeTechEasier to Damien.

3. CC:

Much like To: and From:, you can filter to show messages with a certain person in the cc or bcc fields. Here I am searching for all party-related messages that involve my good friend The Dude.

4. has:attachment

This one’s pretty self-explanatory – you can get only the results that have a file attached. In this example Im looking for all emails from my sister that may have pictures of her kids.

5. filename:

Similar to #4 above, but this time you can specify an exact filename, or even just part of a filename in an attachment. I can improve upon my previous search by specifying that I want only results with pictures attached.

6. OR

No search system is complete without at least a few boolean operators, and GMail is no exception. While AND is implied in most searches, sometimes you need OR to get the results you want. In this example, I’m trying to get messages about Christmas plans from both sisters.

OR, by the way, does have to be in caps.

7. is:

Another very handy one, is: lets you see only messages in a certain state, like read, unread, or starred. Here, I’m trying to get any emails from Damien which I had previously marked as important (starred).

8. label:

Labels are already a very useful GMail feature, and the search function only makes it better. You can tell the search to return only messages with a particular label attached. If I have a Work label for all my work-related emails and I want to find a message relating to last year’s company picnic, I can use label: to avoid getting messages relating to my countless other picnics of 2008.

9. (Parentheses)

I just recently learned about this, and I’m very glad I did. Using parentheses you can group items for use with things like OR. Parentheses can shorten what might otherwise be a long search string. Let’s say I’m searching for the XBox Live names of my friends Adam, Galt and Joe. I could write out three separate from: statements much like #6, or I could use parentheses to group items together.

10. Combinations

A few of these examples have combined the search options into single queries. GMail gives nearly unlimited flexibility when combining complex search options. You can get extremely detailed results by combining the options to return exactly what you want. The following is an attempt to bring up all messages from both of my sisters about all our prior Christmas plans, that also have pictures attached, but not including our trip to Kentucky.

10 Useful GMail Search Tips originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Share Files Securely with OneSwarm

Joshua Price — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:04:47 +0000

There have been a few attempts over the years at making a safe and secure way to swap files or interact online. Projects like Tor and Freenet have give us some of what we’re looking for, but often have drawbacks such as low speed or complex installation. OneSwarm takes a different approach. Essentially, it’s a multiplatform Bittorrent client with support for the OneSwarm network. With it, you can securely swap files over insecure networks, search for friends and content, and even play media like videos and music from within your browser.

What does it do?

There are two aspects to OneSwarm – the private, secure, friend-based OneSwarm network, and the standard P2P. The developers took an existing Bittorrent client (Azureus) and heavily modified it to include support for their private network. They added a web client (you can control your file transfers through a web browser, even remotely) and included software for finding and inviting friends into your swarm.

Even if you have no interest in the secure swarm aspect, OneSwarm makes a great torrent client. It’s built on the Azureus classic UI which is a high quality mature torrent client. All the P2P benefits of Azureus matched with the extra functionality of the web client gives OneSwarm a very powerful feature base.

How does it work?

There are two methods of using OneSwarm, a web client and a desktop client. Both are usable immediately after installation, but the developers seem to encourage use of the web client. That’s where I’ve found most of OneSwarm’s unique features. The desktop client is more or less a standard Bittorrent client. So far, I’ve found the web client to be the way to go when working with OneSwarm friend-based transfers, but the classic desktop client gives more options for standard torrent downloads.

Windows users who’d like to use the desktop client instead of web can do so by right-clicking the OneSwarm icon in their system tray and choosing Show Classic UI. Linux users – access to the desktop client could vary widely based on your choice of desktop environment. Because of this, and to highlight the unique features of OneSwarm, this article will focus on the web client.

Getting Started

If your system didn’t take you to the web client automatically, you should be able to access it by opening your browser of choice to http://127.0.0.1:29615/. There you’ll find the opening screen for the OneSwarm web client.

For those who aren’t networking geeks – 127.0.0.1 is the address a computer uses to identify itself. By putting that into your browser you’re telling it “open the web page running on this computer”. The OneSwarm web client runs a small webserver on your machine so you can access the web client.

Finding Friends

The main concept behind OneSwarm is Friend-To-Friend transfers. When you first connect to OneSwarm, you’ll be asked to add friends. The first, and easiest way to do that is to choose “Use Default Settings”. This will connect you to the OneSwarm community server. Within a minute or two, you’ll see names pop into your Friends list. Users of the community server can all see each other, but cannot, by default, see each other’s files. Everyone on the community server is a “limited” friend by default and cannot trade files.

There are multiple other ways to add friends, all of which can be found by using the Add friends button below your contacts list on the left. For me, the GMail/Google Talk option would normally be a great way to add my friends, but as of the time of this writing, that feature does not appear to be working correctly. I have settled for using email invites through the Redeem/Create/View Invitations option.

When my friends get the invitation in their email, they can install OneSwarm and click the link included in the invite to become a OneSwarm friend. For example, I sent an invite to Tara, who has named her computer “Hank”. She downloaded the OneSwarm client, clicked the link in the invite, and now OneSwarm sees us as friends. She shows up on my Friends list as well as the community server with which she’s registered.

Friend Access

As noted earlier, friends by default are set to “limited” status. They cannot see each other’s files or initiate any transfers. Fortunately, removing that limitation is quick and painless. You simply choose Friends from the navigation panel on the left, and you will have the full list of friends. Click the one you want to share with, and remove the check for “Limited”.

From now on, Tara can browse through all the files that I have shared and choose whatever she’d like to download. Speaking of sharing…

Sharing Files

At the heart of any P2P app is the sharing of files. There’s not much point otherwise. To allow certain files to be shared over OneSwarm, you just add those files or directories to your Shared list. On any section of the OneSwarm web client you’ll find the Share button near the top of the screen. This will let you choose what to share. Here, for example, is one user’s files that they’ve chosen to open to the OneSwarm network.

I can download whichever of these files I like and choose where to save them. In addition, OneSwarm appears to have read the ID3 tag information for the music files, and added the album art to the thumbnail view. A nice touch.

I’ve found OneSwarm to be a very elegant, well-designed system. I’ve often looked for (and written about) ways to securely transfer files over the Internet. Some of them are simpler than OneSwarm, but not nearly as friendly and versatile. I’ll be sticking with OneSwarm for a while.

What about you?

How to Share Files Securely with OneSwarm originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Google Wave – Round 2

Joshua Price — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:22:47 +0000

We here at MakeTechEasier got a lot of positive feedback on our coverage of Google Wave, along with quite a few requests for additional information. So here, by reader request, is the second installment of Wave. Today we’ll be covering some of the more advanced and detailed features that didn’t fit into the original post. In this installment we’ll take a look at Wave’s use of folders, contacts, extensions, and believe it or not, even scroll bars.

Message Management

One of GMail’s strengths is its ability to handle large volumes of email while allowing you to keep things organized. Wave built on GMail’s experience and has also included some useful features for keeping things in order. For starters, you’ve got Folders which work like GMail’s labels and everything else’s… well… folders. You can drag and drop waves into these folders and they will not show up in your inbox. To view that message you can either click the title of the folder or choose All at the top of the Navigation pane.

As you can see in the screenshot, you can also colorize each of the folders individually. I can see how this could be helpful if you have a LOT of folders and want to use colors to group them together, or if there’s a particular folder you want to keep highlighted to catch your eye.

In addition to managing waves through folders, you also have two ways to essentially forget about a message until it’s needed. First, you can Mute a wave, so that it no longer shows up as unread even when it has been modified by others. If you just want a wave out of your inbox but still want to know when it’s been updated, you can Archive that message. You won’t see it until someone makes an update to that wave. Both muted and archived waves will show up in searches and in the All section.

I’ve found it useful to archive almost everything. When a wave has pretty clearly ended, I’ll set it to Archive and leave only messages I intend to keep alive in my inbox. If anyone happens to update one of those waves, it’ll pop right back up in my inbox like normal. Without this I think it wouldn’t take long for Wave to feel a bit overwhelming, if you use it frequently.

Embedded Replies

One messaging feature I really like is the ability to embed a reply inside the original message. In this example, Tara wrote the original message, and instead of creating a separate reply or copy & pasting her words, I can choose any spot in her message and insert my reply.

Private Branches

Let’s say you’re in a wave with everyone at the office. Your boss is discussing the importance of TPS reports. Suddenly, a witty remark pops into your head, and you have a choice. Do you uphold your status as the office comedian, or bite your tongue to keep your job? Wave provides a third option – create a private branch. Only the people specified in that branch can see those messages. In this example screenshot, there are many people in the wave but only the person I included in my private reply can see what I wrote.

Managing Contacts

The only really notable feature about the contacts is that you can do an incremental search for people in your contact list, as demonstrated below. My only complaint is that Wave does not apparently include GMail type status messages with the contacts. I’ve seen no word so far on whether or not that will be a feature in future Wave revisions.

Extensions

We covered extensions briefly in our first report on Wave, but there’s plently more to be said. Extensions can be installed and removed through the Extensions Gallery, which is a wave itself. For me, the extension gallery showed up in my inbox the day after I activated my Wave account. In it is a list of available extensions you can choose to install.

One of the most notable aspects of Wave in regards to extensions is they Google strongly encourages independent developers to create their own Wave extensions. The recommended language is Java but they also have a Python client library. As a fan of Python I think this is great news.

Bottom Line

With the many clever options Wave provides for message management and extensions, Wave is clearly going to be a contender for online communications. Right now the biggest obstacle is establishing a firm user base, as Wave is only useful if all your friends and associates also use it. Leaving the system open will work to Google’s benefit in that sense, as future users won’t be limited to just the official Wave website and client, but will be able to communicate over any wave-compatible platform. I, for one, look forward to seeing what the future holds for Wave.

Google Wave – Round 2 originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Google Wave – The Future of Email?

Joshua Price — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:18:05 +0000

Google’s not afraid to reinvent the wheel, as long as they think they can make a better wheel. So far, in my opinion at least, they’re usually successful. That being said, when I first heard about Google Wave, the new browser based communications system, I was skeptical. I like my emails, IMs, message boards and blogs the way they are. Could Wave really transform the way I communicate online? Could Google really reinvent email in a way powerful enough to pull me from my beloved GMail? Well through my massive underground operative network I was able to get one of the beta invitations to try out Wave for myself.

So what is it exactly?

According to Google:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Intriguing, but not very specific. Suffice it to say, each “Wave” is like an email thread or message board post. The difference is that you’re not just posting a series of replies (though you certainly can use it that way), you’re making changes to a single document. Each change becomes a branch of the original message. You can roll a wave back in time to see how the conversation has evolved. If you get added to a pre-existing wave, you get the whole thing – the document (or thread) as-is, along with its entire history. Waves can be embedded into blogs, so any time a change is made to that wave it can show up in something like Blogger in near real time. We’ll cover the most interesting Wave features in more detail as we go.

Using a Wave

The Wave exists online, and can be accessed a few different ways. The most common would probably be through a “Wave Client”, ie a GMail-like web app that displays your Waves in the browser window. Here is an example of the main wave.google.com

On the far left we’ve got a pretty familiar webmail style menu, with the usual Inbox, etc. Below that is your contacts. Wave seems to have imported my GMail contacts and added those who are also signed in here. The center pane shows your message history much like any email client, including the pic for each participant in the wave.

Things get more interesting when we get to the right pane. Here we can view, edit, and create waves. In this example, I wrote a Kurt Vonnegut quote to Crystal. She responded not by creating a separate reply, but by editing my original words. When I get back to Wave and see her message, Wave highlights the changes she has made.

This means you could use a single wave to have multiple people, say, write a paper for school or collaborate on a family Christmas list. All changes are essentially real time, each change creating a new branch with a complete backup history. In fact, Wave provides a playback feature that allows you to step through the document from creation to the present.

Extensions

Wave expects and encourages user-developed extensions. As it’s still in development, there aren’t many choices yet. The extensions that do exist are all fairly useful. First, you can perform a Google search and include the results in the wave. No real surprises there.

Next is the single-click Yes/No box. Of all the things to include in an early release I’m a little surprised the Yes/No box was one of them, but I suppose it demonstrates some of the things you can do with extensions.

The results were unanimous.

There is also a Maps extension, which is another single click surprise. I have to admit, this would make it a lot easier to exchange directions.

As I write this, a new wave just arrived in my inbox for the Google Wave Extension Gallery. I can browse and install new extensions from within the wave. Presumably the wave will be updated as new extensions come out.

Conclusion

There is FAR more to Google Wave than I could possibly cover here, and this is still a fairly early development version. For those who want all the details, you can find a LONG (80 minutes) video of the tech demo here. For something with so drastically different from email on the technical side, Wave manages to feel surprisingly comfortable. The technology is certainly impressive, and it’s easy to adjust to the Wave way of doing things once you’ve spent a few minutes using it. As for usefulness, that’s a little harder to judge. From what I’ve seen, Wave only works if everyone else is also using it. As great as the map feature may be, the recipient would of course need to be a Wave user as well. Not that this is a flaw in Wave exactly, but it does place a limit on how useful it can be. I think it’s got a lot of potential, and I’ll be keeping a Wave tab open for a while to see how things go, but I won’t go closing my webmail tab just yet.

Google Wave – The Future of Email? originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Create Your Own USB Linux Distro with LiLi

Joshua Price — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:00:59 +0000

Linux Live CDs have long been well known as a handy tool in PC repair. Personally I’ve used Linux CDs dozens of times to repair Windows problems, from virus scans to file retrieval to partition adjustments. As great as Live CDs are, they still have a few drawbacks, like an inability to save any new files or changes. Bootable USB sticks solve most of the problems with Live CDs. You can write to them, change the software or the whole system without burning a new CD, and carry them easily wherever you go.

There’s a new (Windows only, strangely enough) software tool out called LiLi USB Creator. LiLi makes it incredibly easy to create your own customized bootable Linux system on a USB stick, and even run it from within Windows using an portable copy of Virtualbox that’s included on the installation. Impressed? I am.

I ran LiLi on Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 3 and a 2GB Kingston USB drive. You can download the installer here. It’s a ZIP file and there’s no installer so you can just run it directly from wherever it was extracted. Once loaded you’ll get the main LiLi screen where all your choices are made.

Step 1: Choose a USB Key

If your USB drive isn’t already connected, connect it now and wait a few seconds before hitting the blue refresh button. When you click the drop-down list, you should see your flash drive in the list. Make sure you’re choosing the correct flash drive, as the program also lists your hard drives, and we certainly wouldn’t want to go wiping any of them. Which reminds me – in case this isn’t yet clear, this flash drive will be wiped clean so make sure there’s nothing important on there before we proceed.

Step 2: Choose a Source

LiLi needs to know what you plan to use as the base of your system. This is one of LiLi’s big strengths in my opinion. You can choose to use a Live CD ISO file you already have, a Live CD in your CD-ROM, or to have LiLi download an ISO for you. This last option is particularly impressive, as LiLi provides a list of some of the compatible distros and will automatically fetch and check the files it needs.

As for me, I went with Fedora because… well… pretty much just because I haven’t used it in a while. If you chose to let LiLi download a compatible ISO for you, then you’ve got a little time to wait while it downloads. Now might be a good time to make a snack, read a book, or better yet – browse articles on MakeTechEasier.

Step 3: Persistence

At this point, we can take advantage of the fact that we’re using a USB drive and not a Live CD. By setting some space for persistence, we can now save file and settings changes directly on to the USB drive. This is also the cause of some confusion when creating these live systems.

For clarity, we’ll use my 2GB Kingston flash drive as an example of how this all works. It’s actually about 1.9GB, and the files from the ISO will be using up about 700MB, so according to LiLi that leaves about 1.1 GB for persistent files to be saved. The math doesn’t quite add up, but I would guess that LiLi is using up a little more space than just the ISO contents for things like VirtualBox (discussed below). The slider bar in the screenshot above lets me choose how much of that space I really want to use. Unless you’ve got other plans for that space, you probably want to slide the bar all the way up.

If your USB drive is larger than 1GB and LiLi doesn’t let you move the slider past 0MB, just reformat the entire USB drive, reload LiLi and try again.

Step 4: Options

The first item in the Options section is whether or not you want to hide the system files on the USB drive. The only relevance this has is whether or not Windows will show the Linux system files on the flash drive. The benefit is that you won’t have to worry about a convoluted mess of files and directories on the drive if you just want to run VirtualBox (which we’ll cover in a moment). The down side is that it would be more difficult to access or edit those files from Windows, should you want to. Neither choice will have any significant effect on how your Linux system runs.

The second option is whether or not to format the USB drive in Fat32. Unless you have a specific reason not to, I’d recommend you allow the format to be certain that the drive is being wiped clean and installed correctly.

The last option is one of the really unique and interesting things about LiLi. As I hinted in the opening paragraph, LiLi is capable of adding a portable copy of VirtualBox to your USB drive. For anyone not familiar with VirtualBox, it’s a high quality free virtualization program. With VirtualBox on the drive, you’ll be able to run your new Linux USB system from within Windows, without rebooting. I’d recommend checking this option, so that your flash drive can be as versatile and useful as it can be.

Step 5: Create

Before clicking the lightning bolt to begin, there are a few things to check to make sure we’re not about to cause a disaster. First, make totally certain that the device you chose in Step 1 is the USB drive, and that you don’t mind wiping its contents. Next do a quick glance at the traffic light icons in the bottom right corner of each step. Each light should be green, indicating it’s got everything it needs in order to proceed. When ready, hit the lightning bolt icon, and go make yourself another snack.

Running your new USB Linux System

If you’ve followed this guide closely, then you now have two ways to start your new system. The first is from within Windows, using VirtualBox. Open My Computer to your flash drive, and you’ll see a Virtualbox folder. Open that and run Virtualize This Key. That will launch the portable VirtualBox to your Linux image and you can use your shiny new Linux system from a contained environment within Windows. Keep in mind, this method does give the benefit of being able to use both OSes simultaneously, but Linux will most likely be MUCH slower here than if it had been booted on its own.

The other method is to boot the USB key as intended, as its own OS. To do that, you insert the USB drive into whatever computer you’d like to boot, and restart the computer. Some computers may require you to open the BIOS settings to include USB in the boot devices. Others may give you an option when starting up like Hit F12 for Boot Menu, or something along those lines. Any fairly modern PC should be capable of booting from a USB drive.

Presuming all went well, you should now have a portable, self-contained, customizable USB Linux system installed on your USB drive that can be taken anywhere. This can be useful in repairs, file recovery, virus scanning, or just showing off. Files saved to the USB drive will persist across multiple reboots.

Other than a booting glitch when I tried LiLi with Crunchbang (which may or may not have been LiLi’s fault), everything seems to work smoothly. I was very impressed by LiLi’s simple yet powerful user interface, and the developers have clearly put a lot of thought and effort into making LiLi a quality piece of software. I’m a little surprised it only runs in Windows, but everything it does, it does well. Kudos to the development team.

How to Create Your Own USB Linux Distro with LiLi originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Install and Use Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Joshua Price — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:06:47 +0000

As time goes on, netbooks are getting more and more popular. These small, cheap, portable computers are gaining popularity in situations where you want the flexibility of a laptop, but don’t need the raw power or price tag of a high-end machine. Some come with Windows, some come with Linux. Unfortunately, the pre-installed Linux on some netbooks can be lacking in quality and features. For those who aren’t satisfied with the default OS on their netbook, Ubuntu has created Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

As the name implies, it’s Ubuntu with some tweaks to make the size and speed of the OS more appropriate to the hardware you’ll find in your average netbook. The most noticable difference is that they’ve completely re-skinned the standard Gnome desktop into something more closely resembling Gnome Shell than the Gnome you’re used to.

Preparing USB Media

Since many netbooks have no CD/DVD drives, you’ll need a USB thumb drive (1GB minimum) to perform the installation. The second thing you’ll need is the image file that we’ll be putting on the thumb drive, which can be downloaded here. The requirements for UNR list an Intel Atom processor for CPU, however I am writing this from UNR running on a Core 2 Duo so it seems the Atom is the “minimum” CPU, not necessarily the only supported type.

Installation will proceed in 2 steps. First, we put the live image on the USB stick (using Linux, Windows, or Mac) then we insert the USB stick into the netbook and install to the netbook’s hard drive. The USB stick is the temporary storage, replacing the CDROM in a typical Linux install.

Linux – Ubuntu

If you’re copying the image file to the USB drive from an Ubuntu system, you need the usb-imagewriter package. Ubuntu users can install it from the repositories with apt-get/aptitude/synaptic like any other package. With apt-get, it would look like:

sudo apt-get install usb-imagewriter

or simply click here to install it in your computer.

Once installed run the program from Applications -> Accessories -> Image Writer.

Choose the image file downloaded earlier, and the device it’ll write to (your USB drive). THIS WILL WIPE ANY DATA CURRENTLY ON THE USB DRIVE. Click Write when ready. Once it’s done, you’re ready to plug the thumb drive into the netbook and proceed to the Installation section.

Details for writing the image from other operating systems can be found at the Ubuntu Netbook Remix website.

Booting UNR

Once the image file has been written to the drive, it’s time to take it to your netbook. Shut down the netbook, plug in our newly formatted drive, and turn it back on. On some netbooks, you may need to manually specify that you want to boot from the USB drive instead of the netbook’s internal storage. If this is the case, you can normally set the boot order in the netbook’s BIOS settings. Some even have a option when first started, that says something like “Press F12 for boot menu”.

Running UNR

Here’s what we’ve all been waiting for. Once booted, you won’t see the normal Gnome desktop. Instead, you’ll get a custom desktop menu system devised specifically for UNR. Regular MakeTechEasier readers will immediately notice the resemblance between UNR’s menu system and that of Gnome Shell.

Your normal panel on top has been replaced by a black bar containing some of the items normally seen in Gnome’s panel, such as the Network Manager, clock, and power management applet.

When you run any app from the new menu system, it will automatically be maximized to fill the entire screen. Instead of having a box for each running application filling up the panel, UNR gives each app an icon next to the menu button, and the rest of the screen space is used for the title bar of the currently active (maximized) window. Here, for example, is my top bar while running Firefox, Rhythmbox, and The Gimp.

Some whitespace in the titlebar was removed to avoid shrinking the image and losing clarity.

You may also notice in the full screenshot that all my storage devices were detected and are listed along with Home, Music, Documents, etc on the right hand section of the menu screen. This is roughly the equivalent of the Places menu on a normal Gnome installation. At the bottom of that last is the Quit/Shutdown button which is normally found in the top-right corner of a typical Ubuntu system.

A nice feature of UNR is the very first menu section, Favorites. As the name implies, this holds your most frequently used applications. As someone who despises the traditional hierarchical menu system, I appreciate anything that speeds up and simplifies the act of finding and running my favorite apps. The only thing I found lacking in the left pane’s menu setup is a Run box, allowing me to type in the name of my preferred command instead of hunting through menus.

Installing UNR to Netbook Hard Drive

UNR uses the standard Ubuntu installer, which can be found in the Favorites menu. The process for installing from USB to hard drive should be no different than any other Ubuntu installation, which we’ve covered here before. You do not need to install UNR to the hard drive in order to use it, you can simply boot from the USB stick any time you like if you want to run UNR, however there are a few drawbacks to this. For one, any changes you make are not persistent. Next time you reboot, any changes made the the files on the USB drive will be reverted back to their original state. This means no (useful) software upgrades, and no persistent settings and preferences. Each boot on to your USB drive will be like the first.

Caveats

I had a few complaints about the UNR menu-driven interface. For starters is the auto-maximization of pretty much any application. I can see how, in theory, the small screen on your average netbook would mean you’d only want one app on screen at a time, however that’s not always the case in practice. You still have the option of right-clicking the titlebar and choosing “Unmaximize” to drop a window into normal mode, but then you have a semi-transparent version of the menu sitting behind all your apps, giving it a cluttered look.

The biggest drawback, to me, was the lack of multiple workspaces. I use these “virtual desktops” extensively, and so far I haven’t found a way to enable them on UNR. I suppose the idea behind UNR’s interface is that people will generally only be running a few full screen apps like web browser and email, due to the low power of your average netbook. That’s another thing that sounds fine in theory, but has caused me frustrations when attempting to use UNR as a desktop system.

Finally, there’s the issue with multi-windowed apps, such as The Gimp. I briefly mentioned above that whenever an app is NOT maximized, you can see a semi-transparent menu floating on your desktop. While not a real problem, I find this very annoying as it makes my workspace feel cluttered and disorganized.

Conclusion

As far as the real guts of the system, UNR is roughly the same as any Ubuntu installation, with approximately the same set of software and whatever pros and cons they provide. Regarding the interface, I wasn’t particularly impressed. Some of the design choices seem good at first, but over time have caused me some frustrations. I suppose, though, that if you’re using UNR exactly as intended (light use, small amount of full-screen apps) it could provide a cozy, simple setup that sure beats some of the pre-installed operating systems many manufacturers provide (I’m looking at you, Xandros). Perhaps in the next iteration of UNR, some kinks will be better worked out and the UNR interface will more closely match the clever design we’ve seen in projects like Gnome Shell.

How to Install and Use Ubuntu Netbook Remix originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Gnome Shell – Your Next Desktop Environment

Joshua Price — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:57:47 +0000

Since the release of KDE4, a major overhaul of the KDE desktop, there’s been some grumbling among the Gnome community about if and when Gnome would have a major overhaul. Well with Gnome 3 we’ll have it in the form of Gnome Shell. It pretty much replaces the panel and window manager in a normal Gnome installation with a fully composited environment with some great new functionality.

Installation

It’s important to note right away that Gnome Shell is still in fairly early development. There is no stable release or package, we’ll be downloading and installing from source code using an auto build script. While I had no trouble at all with the installation, things could change at any moment so there’s certainly no guarantees that it will build, let alone run. That said, Gnome Shell has so far given me no trouble at all.

First, we’ll need jhbuild, a tool that’ll help with the installation. It’s probably in your distro’s repositories. Debian/Ubuntu users an fetch it with:

sudo apt-get install jhbuild

Next we download and run the installation script:

wget http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gnome-shell/plain/tools/build/gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
bash gnome-shell-build-setup.sh
jhbuild build

This will take a little while. It ran for about 10 minutes on my Core 2 Duo test machine. Fortunately, there were no errors during any part of it during my installation.

Running

BEFORE RUNNING GNOME SHELL, make sure to disable Compiz if you’ve got it running. Ubuntu users can do this by opening your normal Gnome panel to System -> Preferences -> Appearance and turning off desktop effects. Once you’re sure any desktop effects have been disabled, save any work you’re not willing to risk, and enter the following in your terminal:

~/gnome-shell/source/gnome-shell/src/gnome-shell --replace

If you find yourself liking Gnome Shell and running it often, I’d suggest making an alias in your .bashrc file for the command above.

Launching Applications

The main difference in working with the Gnome Shell desktop is that your panel on the top is not your normal panel, Once you click Activities, you’ll see a completely different interface from what you’re used to.

You can also open the Activities screen by hitting the Super (aka Windows) key on your keyboard. On the left, you’ve got the equivalent of the old menu system. The top of that panel is the Find box, which operates like many of the desktop finder tools out there. You can type in the name of a program (like “firefox”) to run it, or you can specify a word in the program’s description, like below.

The other method of launching programs is to click the Browse button under Applications, if you prefer using menus.

Multiple Desktops

No Linux desktop environment would be complete if it wouldn’t run multiple desktop screens to manage all your apps. Gnome Shell is no different, and provides an interesting take on these often-used workspaces.

With the Activities screen up, you’ll see a small round “+” icon in the bottom right corner of your screen. Click that to add new workspaces to your desktop.

Even though Gnome Shell is still in pretty early stages, they’ve already included some great usability features. For example, with the Activities up, you can click an application icon to launch in your current workspace, or drag the launch icon onto the appropriate workspace. So in the screenshot above, for example, I could drag the Firefox icon onto the third desktop to make it open there directly. Once a window is open, you can easily drag it from one workspace to the next. This video demonstrates exactly what I mean.

Sidebar

This is a nice little feature that’s not much right now but my guess is that it could evolve into a great little tool. If you click your username in the top right corner of the screen, you can choose to enable the Sidebar. If enabled, it sits at the left edge of the screen and can be collapsed to a thin bar or expanded into a small box by clicking the arrows at the top.

Eye Candy

The most obvious comparison for a composited window manger like Gnome Shell would be to Compiz. They’ve both got window animation effects for things like minimizing and opening windows, as well as transparencies and everything else you’d expect from a composited setup. The difference, so far at least, seems to me to be the purpose of those effects. Compiz puts much more emphasis on pure decoration like rain drops and wobbly windows whereas the Gnome Shell effects are generally more practical. That’s not to say Compiz doesn’t have some handy features, and this could all change as Gnome Shell development goes on.

Conclusion

My overall impression of Gnome Shell is most certainly positive. There’s clearly been a lot of thought put into its design, and some equally impressive coding behind the implementation. The visual effects are pleasing but not overwhelming, and the interface is very intuitive and takes almost no effort to understand.

That said, there’s still plenty of room for development. So far I’ve found essentially no configuration options of any kind, so at the moment it seems you’re stuck with having the shell exactly the way it was installed, like it or not. Fortunately for me, I like it. I’m sure configuration options will improve as development continues and more tools and features are added, so that’s not so much a complaint as a suggestion to be patient. It looks like it’ll be worth the wait.

Gnome Shell – Your Next Desktop Environment originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts

Joshua Price — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:00:27 +0000

Many people don’t think of their command prompt as a particularly useful thing, or even pay it much attention. To me, this is a bit of a shame, as a useful prompt can change the way you use the command line. Well I’ve scoured the Interwebs looking for the best, most useful, or sometimes most amusing bash prompts. Here, in no particular order, are the ones I’d be most likely to use on my computers.

Note – to use any of these prompts, you can copy & paste the “PS1=” line directly into your terminal. To make the change permanent, paste the line to the end of your ~/.bashrc file.

1. Show Happy face upon successful execution

This prompt is probably the most amusing one on the list, but remains useful. The idea is that as long as your commands execute successfully, your prompt shows a happy face. Any time a command fails, it shows a sad face instead.

Example:

Code:

PS1="\`if [ \$? = 0 ]; then echo \[\e[33m\]^_^\[\e[0m\]; else echo \[\e[31m\]O_O\[\e[0m\]; fi\`[\u@\h:\w]\\$ "

2.Change color on bad command

Here’s one of my favorites. This prompt has it all. Like above, the prompt changes color if your last command failed to run successfully, but it also shortens long paths and contains the bash history number of each command for easy retrieval.

Example:

Code:

PROMPT_COMMAND='PS1="\[\033[0;33m\][\!]\`if [[ \$? = "0" ]]; then echo "\\[\\033[32m\\]"; else echo "\\[\\033[31m\\]"; fi\`[\u.\h: \`if [[ `pwd|wc -c|tr -d " "` > 18 ]]; then echo "\\W"; else echo "\\w"; fi\`]\$\[\033[0m\] "; echo -ne "\033]0;`hostname -s`:`pwd`\007"'

3. Multi lines prompt

If you’re the type who wants to pack your prompt full of information, then here’s the one for you. This one is a multi-line prompt containing date/time, full path, user and host, active terminal, even file count and space usage.
Example:

Code:

PS1="\n\[\033[35m\]\$(/bin/date)\n\[\033[32m\]\w\n\[\033[1;31m\]\u@\h: \[\033[1;34m\]\$(/usr/bin/tty | /bin/sed -e 's:/dev/::'): \[\033[1;36m\]\$(/bin/ls -1 | /usr/bin/wc -l | /bin/sed 's: ::g') files \[\033[1;33m\]\$(/bin/ls -lah | /bin/grep -m 1 total | /bin/sed 's/total //')b\[\033[0m\] -> \[\033[0m\]"

4. Color manage your prompt

There’s nothing particularly fancy about this prompt, other than the good use of color to separate the different pieces of information. As you can see, it provides time, username, hostname, and current directory. Fairly minimal but useful.

Example:

Code:

PS1="\[\033[35m\]\t\[\033[m\]-\[\033[36m\]\u\[\033[m\]@\[\033[32m\]\h:\[\033[33;1m\]\w\[\033[m\]\$ "

5. Show full path

This one’s a nice, clean, minimal 2-line prompt (plus a blank line at the top). You’ve got your full path at the first line and pretty much just the username at the bottom. If you want to remove the blank line at the start of every prompt, just take out the first “\n”.

Example:

Code:

PS1="[\[\033[32m\]\w]\[\033[0m\]\n\[\033[1;36m\]\u\[\033[1;33m\]-> \[\033[0m\]"

6. Show background job count

Another nifty 2-liner, but this one’s got some info we haven’t used before. The first line is the normal user@host, with full path. On the second line we’ve got history number and a count of the jobs running in the background.

Example:

Code:

PS1='\[\e[1;32m\]\u@\H:\[\e[m\] \[\e[1;37m\]\w\[\e[m\]\n\[\e[1;33m\]hist:\! \[\e[0;33m\] \[\e[1;31m\]jobs:\j \$\[\e[m\] '

7. Display directory information

A very elegant and nice looking prompt design. With this one we’ve got user/host, number of jobs, and date/time on the top line. Below that is current directory along with number of files in that directory and their disk usage.

Example:

Code:

PS1="\n\[\e[30;1m\]\[\016\]l\[\017\](\[\e[34;1m\]\u@\h\[\e[30;1m\])-(\[\e[34;1m\]\j\[\e[30;1m\])-(\[\e[34;1m\]\@ \d\[\e[30;1m\])->\[\e[30;1m\]\n\[\016\]m\[\017\]-(\[\[\e[32;1m\]\w\[\e[30;1m\])-(\[\e[32;1m\]\$(/bin/ls -1 | /usr/bin/wc -l | /bin/sed 's: ::g') files, \$(/bin/ls -lah | /bin/grep -m 1 total | /bin/sed 's/total //')b\[\e[30;1m\])--> \[\e[0m\]"

8. My Prompt

And finally, the prompt I personally like to use. It’s a modification of #7, changed to take up less space and include only the information I most want in my prompt. I like the two-line style as it lets me see the full path without reducing the space for my actual commands.

Example:

Code:

PS1="\n\[\e[32;1m\](\[\e[37;1m\]\u\[\e[32;1m\])-(\[\e[37;1m\]jobs:\j\[\e[32;1m\])-(\[\e[37;1m\]\w\[\e[32;1m\])\n(\[\[\e[37;1m\]! \!\[\e[32;1m\])-> \[\e[0m\]"

If you’d like to share your prompt, please do so in the comments below.

8 Useful and Interesting Bash Prompts originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Find Free Linux Ebooks and Courseware

Joshua Price — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:11:22 +0000

Like it or not, with Linux comes advocacy. There are a lot of people out there who like to spread the love in whatever ways they can. One nice side effect of this is the abundance of free Linux related information available to anyone. That’s good for us, as we’ll be covering just how to find all this great material.

Certainly not all Linux books are free (just ask Tim O’Reilly) but the nature of Linux means that the “spirit of freeness” tends to surround more than just the operating system. Some of the websites listed below offer full length dead-tree versions of the same books, the purchasing of which could be a great way to support these organizations. Without further delay, here are a few of the sites I’d recommend for anyone wanting to hone their Lin-jitsu.

1. OnlineComputerBooks.com

This site doesn’t so much host ebooks as link to them. There’s a VAST collection linked from here on all computer related topics from web design to hardware repair to systems administration. This is one of the first places I go when looking for good Linux books.

2. Scribd.com

Scribd describes itself as a “social publishing company”. The idea here is that any aspiring author can upload their book and have it accessible to everyone. I’ve found several high-quality Linux related ebooks here. Another interesting note about Scribd is that they use their own custom made book viewing system called iPaper. It resembles a PDF reader or presentation program built into a web browser. I’ve had both good and bad experiences with iPaper but it does give the site and the books a distinctive feel.

Here’s a shot of Scribd’s iPaper in action:

3. The Linux Documentation Project

We’ve touched on LDP a bit in the past but it certainly deserves a mention here. If there’s one place online to go when it comes to Linux documentation, this is it. According to the website,

LDP is a loosely knit team of volunteers who provide documentation for many aspects of Linux. There are several forms of documentation: Guides, HOWTOs, man pages, and FAQs.

4. Textbook Revolution

Textbook Revolution has a wide range of textbooks available on many topics, including Linux programming and other IT subjects. The interesting thing about Textbook Revolution is that it’s created by students.

Textbook Revolution is a student-run site dedicated to increasing the use of free educational materials by teachers and professors. We want to get these materials into classrooms. Our approach is to bring all of the free textbooks we can find together in one place, review them, and let the best rise to the top and find their way into the hands of students in classrooms around the world.

Courseware

Compared to ebooks, there’s not as much out there for Linux courseware. There are, however, several places that have related courseware available. Some of the places I’ll list here have Linux specific courses, while others are more general UNIX or other IT.

5. MIT

As can be expected, MIT has some great courseware available for free online. It includes assignments, syllabus, textbooks, the works.

6. Cornell University/arXiv.org

Links to a resonable collection of course related materials, books, and papers. From arXiv you can find info on subjects like cryptography or Asymptotically Optimal Assignments In Ordinal Evaluations of Proposals, whatever that may be.

7. Open University

The Open University refers to itself as “the United Kingdom’s only university dedicated to distance learning.” They’ve got a pretty good collection of materials available on the website on a variety of topics. The courseware includes exercises and course summaries. There’s not much here specifically Linux related, but what is there is well organized and easy to sort through.

Have you come across any other useful sites for Linux ebooks and courseware? Let us know in the comments.

How to Find Free Linux Ebooks and Courseware originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Enhance Your Browser with Greasemonkey

Joshua Price — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:26:25 +0000

How would you like to be able to customize the layout of the Google homepage? How about add better video controls and a download button to YouTube? Or set a profanity filter that works across all websites? Maybe remove all the “What type of leafy vegetable are you?” quizzes from Facebook? These are very few of the things that can be done with Greasemonkey.

By itself, Greasemonkey does essentially nothing. At least, nothing that you as a user would notice. To really use it, you download Greasemonkey scripts which all have some special purpose. For example, right now I’m writing this from a browser with Greasemonkey installed, and I’m using scripts to enhance YouTube, Facebook, and Google Images.

The Greasemonkey website describes the general function pretty well -

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.
Hundreds of scripts are already available for free. And if you’re the tinkerer sort, you can also write your own.

I should note that some other browsers support these scripts, but often in a limited fashion. Opera can run some Greasemonkey scripts, and Safari has Creammonkey to achieve a similar end.

Installation

You can download the Firefox extension from the Greasespot homepge. It will install normally just like any other Firefox addon, and you’ll likely have to restart your browser. Once it’s back open, you should see a Greasemonkey icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

Adding Scripts

Once installed, you can begin adding in scripts. The scripts will not require a browser restart, but if you’ve already got the page open that the script is meant to act on (such as YouTube), you may need to refresh the page. To get an idea of the type of changes Greasemonkey can do, here’s a comparison of the same YouTube video page with and without the YouTube Enhancer script.

First the normal YouTube play screen…

And now with Greamonkey enhancements…

As you can see, this gives you a LOT more options in terms of video quality and control. This is just one of MANY great user scripts available from userscripts.org.

Recommended Scripts

No Greasemonkey article would be complete without a list of some of the most useful user scripts. Here I’ve listed some of the ones I’ve found to be particularly helpful.

YouTube Enhancer – Demonstrated above, adds new video controls and download option to YouTube.
TinyURL Decoder – Shows you what’s behind those TinyURL redirects so you’ll never get Rickrolled again.
Textarea Resize – Allows for a larger text area in websites that only provide a small text box.
Folders4Gmail – Allows you to organize your GMail labels into a category hierarchy so you can use “sub-labels”.
YouTube Cleaner – Removes some of the extra cruft from YouTube (like comments) that you may not want. Can be easily enabled/disabled.
Pre-Fill Comments – If you frequently comment on blogs like MakeTechEasier, you can use this script to automatically fill in your name/email/URL.

And many, many more.

Do you have any Greasemonkey scripts you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments!

How to Enhance Your Browser with Greasemonkey originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Run Multiple Linux Distros Without Virtualization

Joshua Price — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:23:25 +0000

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on How To Run Multiple X Sessions Without Virtualization, which demonstrated how you can run multiple desktop environments at the same time on the same computer, and switch between them at the push of a button. I admit, this was somewhat of a warmup for the real show – how to run multiple Linux distributions at the same time without having to deal with the drawbacks of virtualization software.

Today, we’re going to be using chroot to treat certain parts of your Linux filesystem as (almost) completely isolated systems. This can let you do all kinds of interesting things, like run a full Gentoo system from inside your Ubuntu system with little to no performance loss.

How it works

Before we get started, it would be a good idea to go over exactly what we’re doing and how it all works. When you start up your Linux computer, you go through a series of steps to boot up. GRUB, your bootloader, loads the kernel that’s specified in GRUB’s config file, attaches it to your root partition, and runs the init scripts stored there. From then on, your system is running from within that root partition.

We’re going to be using a host Linux system (I’ll be doing it from Debian but the steps should be pretty much identical regardless of distribution) that goes through that normal boot process, but then treating a certain portion of your filesystem (like /mnt/guest) as its own isolated installation. That guest system won’t go through the boot process, won’t load a kernel, and won’t run init scripts. You’ll just tell your host “connect to this directory as if it’s the new root partition”. The diagram below should help demonstrate what I mean.

This is approximately how the files will be laid out on your system, just sitting there as normal files on a normal partition, treated the same as any other files until we use “chroot” to make them into something special.

But once we use chroot (CHange ROOT) and point it to /mnt/guest (or wherever we put the files in the next step), that directory is now its own root filesystem. It becomes completely oblivious to the host system. All programs and commands run from within that new root are run based on the software inside that new branch.

For example, if you’re chrooted into /mnt/guest and type “ls”, it’s reading the “ls” command from inside that chrooted environment, completely unaware of the “ls” command on the host system. If you type “firefox”, it runs the Firefox from inside the new root, whether or not you’ve got Firefox installed on the host.

Getting and Using the Guest Distro

To make this work, you just need the base filesystem of a Linux distro, whatever distro that may be. Debian has a great tool for just this purpose called debbootstrap which downloads the base files and places them wherever you like. To keep things interesting, and to demonstrate what chroot can do, we’re going to use a Gentoo filesystem for our guest. To keep things simple and direct, I’m going to include the download of the tarball as one of the steps we’ll do at the command line.

These steps are going to download all the base files for a Gentoo system, extract them into our target directory (I’ll be using /mnt/guest but you can use anything you like) and then chroot into that directory so it’s treated as the new root (/) directory. You may need root (sudo) permissions for some of the following commands.

mkdir /mnt/guest
cd /mnt/guest
wget http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/x86/2008.0/stages/stage3-x86-2008.0.tar.bz2
tar -jxvf stage3-x86-2008.0.tar.bz2
chroot /mnt/guest

Those commands take the following steps, in order of line number:

Create the space for our guest system to live
Move into that space
Download the Gentoo system files
Extract them
Treat this new space as the root (/) directory

The following screenshot should help demonstrate that once we’ve used chroot to connect our new directory as root, it is now isolated from the previous branches in the filesystem tree.

To explain the screenshot, we’re starting at a normal command prompt on the host system. I’m using pwd to display my current directory, where all Gentoo’s files are sitting as plain old files with no special meaning. I then use chroot to treat this directory as the new root, and you can now see visually that my prompt has changed because the command line is now pulling all its info (including how to draw the prompt) from within Gentoo’s root environment. ALL commands and actions I take while chrooted in depend on those commands existing within that new file tree. When I type pwd again, it no longer says /mnt/guest, because as far as that shell knows, nothing exists other than what it sees inside that tree.

Things to Keep In Mind

As I hinted above, this isn’t 100% isolated from the host system. The chrooted environment was never “booted up”, so it never loaded its own kernel, and never ran its own init scripts. In our example, we’ve got Gentoo running on the kernel that the host (in my case Debian) booted up with.

This method is certainly not a replacement for virtualization, and can not do everything VM software can do. The guest system never actually “boots” or runs init scripts, and it’s possible your guest OS may require some features your host kernel does not offer.

What for?

In the times I’ve mentioned this technique to people in the past, they’ve often said something along the lines of “That’s cool, but what would you use it for?”. Personally I’ve found several uses for chroot:

Test developing software in a pristine environment
Run software meant for another distribution
Run software that requires an older or newer version of your current distro
Access a Linux installation on a different partition without having to reboot
Boot a Live CD and use chroot to repair your installation or GRUB
Access a drive where you’ve forgotten the user/pass
Run a 32-bit app in a 64-bit environment

And I’m sure there are plenty more that I’ve never though of. Have you ever used chroot to run multiple distros? How about to repair a Linux system from a Live CD? Let us know in the comments.

How to Run Multiple Linux Distros Without Virtualization originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Videoconference Linux and Windows with Ekiga

Joshua Price — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:38:20 +0000

Ekiga, formerly known as GnomeMeeting, is a videophone program similar to Skype. It’s free, open source, and has so far worked better for me than Skype ever did. Today, we’ll cover how to use Ekiga to conference Linux and Windows clients together.

Installation

You can download the Windows Ekiga installer here. Linux users should be able to install Ekiga using your normal package manager. You will, of course, need a working webcam and microphone already set up. For the remainder of the article we’ll be using Ekiga for Windows 3.0.2 and Ekiga for Linux 3.2.5.

I won’t cover the basic installation as it’s the same as any other app on Windows or Linux. Things get more interesting on the first run, where you go through the Configuration Assistant. It’s a step-by-step “wizard” for getting everything configured. After entering basic info like name, you’ll be taken to the first real config screen.

SIP Account

You need to set up a SIP account. You create an Ekiga SIP account that you’ll use to make and receive calls. As shown on the screenshot above, it’ll be something like username@ekiga.net. Creation of a new SIP address is done through the Ekiga website. It’s fast and free.

Call Out Account

You do not need a Call Out account. The Call Out account is a pay service allowing you to use Ekiga to dial regular land line phone numbers to talk over VOIP. This is not needed for videoconferencing over Ekiga, so I won’t go into any details.

After that you choose your internet connection type, which should be fairly straightforward.

Device Setup

Here’s the only potentially tricky part. I’ve had mixed success over time when it comes to choosing the correct input and output devices, but to be perfectly honest I think it probably has more to do with the quirky hardware on my Windows machine.

This is also one of the only places where the Windows and Linux config screens differ by much. In Windows, you’ll probably be ok by leaving your choices at the defaults. Linux choices vary widely based on hardware and distribution, but for output device, /dev/dsp is usually a safe choice.

Next, you’ll choose video device.

This should be easy, as chances are you probably only have one video input device attached to your computer. In Windows, I’ve always had success with Microsoft WDM Image Capture, though your mileage may vary. Linux should show your device’s name in the dropdown menu. It’ll probably be the only one that’s not Moving Logo.

Setting Video Resolution

One of the first things I tend to do with videophone software is to to check out my video options. Ekiga’s got a full set of configuration options, including image resolution. A higher resolution of course means more data going in and out, which can cause choppiness or excessive delays. I would recommend keeping the resolution fairly low whenever possible.

To set your video resolution, open Edit > Preferences and move down to Video Devices. In there you’ll get the basic options for your cam.

Verifying Configuration

If you’re fairly confident that you’ve got everything set up correctly, you can make a test call to the built-in “Echo Test” number. This is a basic test tool so that you can verify that your cam is functioning, as well as test the delay in the audio and video. You can redo this test as many times as you like.

So if you like open source software, or just don’t like Skype, Ekiga is a very viable option. So far it’s given me none of the troubles I’ve had with Skype, and I’m not restricted to Skype’s proprietary protocols.

Have you tried Ekiga? How has it worked out for you? Let us know in the comments!

How to Videoconference Linux and Windows with Ekiga originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Install Ubuntu in Windows

Joshua Price — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:25:09 +0000

Here at MakeTechEasier, we’ve touched on Wubi here and there but have never really gone into detail on exactly what it can do and how it works. According to the website,

Wubi is an officially supported Ubuntu installer for Windows users that can bring you to the Linux world with a single click. Wubi allows you to install and uninstall Ubuntu as any other Windows application, in a simple and safe way…

That sums it up pretty well. You can use your Windows (98, 2000, XP, Vista) Control Panel to add/remove it as easily as any other Windows app.

The key thing about Wubi (Windows based Ubuntu Installer) is that you do not have to do any partitioning. It simply creates a file in Windows that both systems treat as if it’s a separate partition. You can choose the size of that file when you install.

In Windows, download the Wubi installer here. The initial options can be set at the main screen.

When choosing the drive to host your new Ubuntu installation, try to pick your C drive if possible. I’ve had nothing but bad luck trying to run a Wubi installation from a drive partition other than the one running Windows. Also, when it comes the deciding how much space to allocate to Ubuntu, I wouldn’t suggest going much below 20Gb if you plan to get much done.

Note the Desktop Environment option in the lower left corner. With Wubi, you have the option of four versions of Ubuntu:

Ubuntu – With GNOME, the standard option
Kubuntu – With KDE, a more “Windowsy” desktop
Xubuntu – With XFCE, more lightweight than GNOME or KDE
Mythbuntu – A PVR system using MythTV and XFCE

Once you’re ready to install, you’ll have to wait for the full ISO to download.

How it works

While we’re waiting for the download, we might as well go over exactly what’s happening. Instead of creating a partition to hold Linux and all its files, Wubi creates a loop device inside a file (typically C:\Ubuntu\disks\root.disk), which Windows treats as if it was a separate partition or hard drive.

When you boot the computer, you’ll see the Windows bootloader asking which OS to boot. If you choose Ubuntu, the Windows bootloader opens the file Wubi created earlier, and the Linux inside thinks it’s running on a typical Linux partition.

Finishing Up

I found that doing the Ubuntu 9.04 install over Wubi was quite comfortable and clear. I’ve suggested Wubi to a few potential converts, and I think I’ll continue to do so. In particular, I like how easy Wubi makes it to choose which of the various Ubuntu flavors to install. I think that makes it a little easier for people to try out something they’d otherwise never think to download. I look forward to seeing what the developers come up with in the future.

How to Install Ubuntu in Windows originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Getting Started with Pardus Linux

Joshua Price — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Pardus is a Linux distribution created and maintained by Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey. There’s certainly no shortage of customized and special-purpose Linux distributions available, but Pardus is unique in several ways. Today, instead of covering the usual aspects of an operating system like installation and included software, I’m going to cover the aspects of Pardus that make it so interesting.

One important note before we get too far – if you decide to install Pardus, make sure you hit F2 at the first bootup screen to set the language, unless you want your system in Turkish.

The version tested here is Pardus 2009 RC2

Kaptan

The first thing you’ll see on a new Pardus installation is Kaptan, a desktop config tool. It allows you to set things like desktop theme, wallpaper, mouse preferences, and menu style. I found this to be a useful tool for getting everything off on the right foot. Like all the custom Pardus applications I’ve seen so far, it’s oddly beautiful for something so maroon.

My only complaint about Kaptan was that at one point it brings you to a config screen for Smolt, without ever telling you what Smolt is or what it’s supposed to be doing. Everything else is clear and intuitive.

PiSi

One of the things that initially got me interested in Pardus was the the developers seem to share my affinity for the Python programming language. The Pardus developers used Python extensively in building the system, most notably in the package manager PiSi.

PiSi (pronounced pee-see) is the custom-built package manager for Pardus. it’s got all the features of a modern package manager, including things like dependency resolution, CLI and GUI interface, search functions and online repositories. The command line interface provides all the usual options, such as

pisi search package_name

to search for a package and

pisi install package_name

to install it.

One thing I particularly like about PiSi is the quality output it provides. If a package fails to install, you get clear output telling you why. When it does install, you get nicely formatted output (with color!) telling you all about the installation. Here, for example, is the output I got when I told PiSi to install my favorite video player, VLC.

It’s a little verbose, but I think quite useful. Particularly the use of color, which is something I’ve always liked about Gentoo’s emerge. That kind of clear, useful, detailed output is what I wish I could have in all package managers. Kudos to PiSi for that one!

The only downside I’ve encountered so far (and it is a big one) is the comparitively small amount of software available in Pardus’s PiSi repositories. It’s got about 2,000 packages, and many of the things I’ve tried to install have not been available. It’s not a huge project, and relatively new in the world of Linux distros, so a lack of packages is somewhat understandable. Still, having more software available would go a long way toward making Pardus a top-notch distro.

Package Manager

After covering PiSi, there’s not a whole lot to say about Package Manager, which is the graphical front-end to PiSi. It provides a browsable, searchable interface to the software available to PiSi. If you’ve ever used Synaptic, the default package GUI for Ubuntu, you’ll be right at home in Package Manager.

Network Manager

This was one thing that was a bit of a problem for me. After my initial install, I was surprised to see my network wasn’t up. This certainly wasn’t the first Linux ever run on that machine so there should be no driver issues. Even trying to bring it up manually at the command line came up with little success.

Then, I ran the Pardus Network Manager tool, and after creating a “profile” for my NIC, everything was up and running. Perhaps it was just the chipset on that machine (a common Intel chipset), but I hope not everyone would have to manually configure a network interface to get basic connection.

Firewall

Pardus continues the overall habit of clarity and simplicity with the Firewall utility. It should be familiar to anyone who’s used Windows firewalls like ZoneAlarm.

For some reason I have not yet figured out, the Firewall utility does not seem to recognize my keystrokes. All other applications take whatever typing I give them, but none of the text boxes in Firewall Manager seem to realize that I’m typing.

Conclusion

Overall I was surprised and impressed by Pardus. Surprised because it’s not a name you hear very often in news or conversation, and impressed by the clean, clear, clever design. To me, the real gem was PiSi. As a long time APT fan I have high expectations in a package manager, and so far PiSi hasn’t let me down, its even shown me a few things I wish other package managers could do. Pardus is really slick right now, and I’m betting it will only get better.

There’s certainly room for improvement, particularly with the Network and Firewall Managers, but the system itself is beautiful and well designed. I’m not quite ready to use Pardus as my main operating system, but in another release or two I think it could give the giants like Ubuntu a real run for their money.

For anyone who IS curious about the non-original included software, some notable packages are:

Kernel 2.6.30.1
KDE 4.2.4
Firefox 3.5
OpenOffice 3.1
Gimp 2.6.6
Xorg 1.6.2
Python 2.6.2

Getting Started with Pardus Linux originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Run Multiple X Sessions Without Virtualization

Joshua Price — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:00:00 +0000

One of the best things about a Linux system is its flexibility. Even though I’ve been a heavy Linux user for years, I still come across features in the OS a related applications that surprise me. A while back I learned to run multiple desktop environments at the same time, using nothing but the features of the software already built in to my distribution, and it’s been very useful for me. It may not sound like much, but it can be VERY useful to be able to run Gnome, KDE, Window Maker, and any other desktops all at the same time. You can flip from Gnome to Window Maker in seconds without having to log out or stop applications or use any kind of virtualization software. X already has everything you need.

To make sure there’s no confusion, I’m NOT talking about multiple monitors. The idea behind this article is that we’ll have multiple desktop environments running on the same computer at the same time, and we’ll be using keyboard shortcuts to switch between them.

For anyone who’s not sure what I mean when I talk about “X”, that’s the shorthand name for the X Window System. Most modern distributions use X.org to handle all their graphical needs. Basically, any time you’re seeing graphics (not just plain text), you’re probably looking at X. It manages the display for Linux and controls what’s on your screen and how it’s handled.

Virtual terminals

X keeps track of things by screens or displays. Right now, if you’re reading this article in Linux, you’re probably on the default screen number 0. You can access the different screens with key combinations. To try it out right now, try hitting Alt+Ctrl+F1. That’ll take you to your first console screen. To get back to the graphical screen, hit Alt+Ctrl+F7. Many people use this as a way to drop to a fullscreen terminal without having to close X.

At this point, you may be thinking “Why F1 and F7?”. Well I’m glad you asked, even though you didn’t really ask. When holding Alt+Ctrl, keys F1 through F6 are your console screens. They’re commonly called virtual terminals. Each one has a separate instance of the console running on it, and you can flip back and forth between them using Alt+Ctrl+(F1 through F6).

Once you get past F6, you’re in X’s territory. Much like the virtual terminals, each screen starting with F7 is a separate instance of X, which can have its own programs running, independent of the other screens. So what we’re going to do now is set things up to launch your other desktop environment in the next screen over.

Setting up the second screen

For starters, we’ll want to install whatever window manager or desktop environment you’d like to have running on your second display. In a move that will surprise no one, I’ll recommend Window Maker. For the remainder of this article, I’ll assume that you’re running Ubuntu in the default configuration and that the desktop environment you want to use is Window Maker.

Once you’ve installed Window Maker (or whatever other desktop you’d prefer) the first thing we need to do is open/create the file .xinitrc in your home. When X is launched from the command line, it reads this file to decide what needs to be run when X starts. So open or create the file .xinitrc in your home directory, and add the line:

exec wmaker

and save.

Running the second desktop

Now we’re at the main event. Open your command prompt and enter:

startx -- :1

That will tell X to start and to use display number 1 (instead of the default of 0 which you’re probably using as your main desktop). If all went well, you’ll find yourself looking at the default (and kinda ugly) base Window Maker desktop. To switch back to your main desktop, use Alt+Ctrl+F7. Back to Window Maker is Alt+Ctrl+F8. If things didn’t go so well, see the Troubleshooting section below.

Alt + Ctrl + F7 = Gnome desktop

Alt + Ctrl + F8 = Window Maker desktop

Troubleshooting

X: user not authorized to run the X server, aborting.
This one is a config issue, and one that’s easily remedied. Open the following file as root:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/Xwrapper.config

Change

allowed_users=console

allowed_users=anybody

I can’t claim to know enough about X’s programming to be able to make any educated statements about potential security problems this may or may not present, but it fixes the problem.

X: client 1 rejected from local host
Another simple fix, just delete any files in your home directory that has a filename starting with .Xauthority

You can repeat this process to add any other desktop environments you may happen to want, just change the 1 in

startx -- :1

to 2, 3, etc. There are plenty of function keys left!

How To Run Multiple X Sessions Without Virtualization originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

2 Useful SSH Tricks to Improve Your System Security

Joshua Price — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:33:53 +0000

A few days ago, Tavis wrote a great article on How to use SSH X-forwarding to Run Remote Apps. X forwarding is indeed a very handy feature of SSH, so I thought it would be a good time to expand on some of the other great uses for this excellent piece of software (and some related tools). Today, we’ll cover SCP and SSHFS.

To follow this guide, you’ll need the following:

- Client computer with openssh-client installed (for Windows, use Putty)
- Server computer with openssh-server installed (Available on any UNIX-style system)
- A working set of login credentials on the server

If you don’t have a computer with an SSH server, you can use the same PC as both client and server for the sake of trying all this out. If you do have a (Linux, Unix, BSD) computer available to act as server, make sure to install the OpenSSH server software. Debian and Ubuntu users can get this easily with

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

1. Using SSH to securely copy files

This is my second favorite use for SSH. When you install the OpenSSH client on your machine, it typically comes with a file copy tool called SCP (Secure Copy). This can be VERY useful as a way to not only send files to your friends (who have openssh-server running) but to do it in a completely encrypted way.

For example, a friend of mine in Michigan is a studio engineer. He mixes audio tracks for a recording studio. Sometimes, when he wants a second opinion, he’ll send me what he’s working on so I can give him my opinion. Now, since this is all copyrighted music which has not even been released to the public, he’s naturally reluctant to post it on a filesharing service or web site, and the files are often too large for email. Instead, we transfer using SCP.

The format for an scp command is:

scp filename user@remote-host:/where/to/save/it

So my friend, on the other side of the country, would enter something like

scp MyNewMix.wav nick@joshs-computer.com:/home/nick/mixes

This example is assuming my computer is accessible from joshs-computer.com and that he has a user account on it named nick. His file will be copied to my computer over a fully encrypted connection without having to be stored at some third-party website or email server.

2. Mount a network drive securely

Now here is my #1 favorite use of SSH. If you’re a Linux user, you’re probably familiar with mounting drives. You have a device like a cdrom drive (say, /dev/hdc for example), and to access it, you mount it to a directory such as /media/cdrom. Well you can use that same principle with a program called SSHFS to mount a filesystem over a network/internet and attach it to a directory on your computer.

SSHFS is not part of the standard openssh package. It’s a separately developed program that you’ll install independently using your normal package manager.

Let’s go back to the example with my friend at the studio. Perhaps he’s got several new mixes for me instead of just one, or perhaps we do this so often that using SCP to transfer back and forth starts to become a hassle. Well, if he’s got openssh-server installed and I have an account on his computer, I can mount his hard drive to any directory I wish. The command follows the structure:

sshfs user@remote-host:/what/I/want /where/to/put/it

So to connect to Nick’s computer I’d use something like:

sshfs josh@nicks-computer.com:/home/nick/mixes /home/josh/nicks-computer

That would make it so that any time I access the folder /home/josh/nicks-computer from my machine, it would actually connect to Nick’s computer over SSH and give me access to all those files just as if they were sitting in a normal directory on my computer. Any changes I make are made to the files on his computer, it’s completely transparent. I can use whatever audio software I like to work with the files, they are completely oblivious to the fact that they’re really reading the file from 2500 miles away.

A word of warning about SSHFS: since it’s reading the files over the internet instead of locally, combined with the encryption overhead, SSHFS can be SLOW. You probably wouldn’t want to use it to access files that need lots of speed or are constantly being read or written.

There are many great uses for SSH and related tools. I’d love to hear what other tricks you may have. SSH tunneling, for example, can be hugely beneficial for some people, but doing it justice would require an article of its own. Do you have any other tips to get the most out of SSH?

2 Useful SSH Tricks to Improve Your System Security originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Install Software from a Tarball in Linux

Joshua Price — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:30:17 +0000

Most of the time, installing software in Linux is a breeze. Package management utilities like Apt, Portage, and Yum have made software installation in Linux even easier than it is in Windows (in my opinion at least). If you know what you want, you simply tell your package manager that you want it, and it’ll find, download, install, and configure your new package for you.

Sometimes, however, the package doesn’t exist in your distribution’s repositories. Often, in cases like that, your only option is to download a tarball (usually .tar.gz, .tar.bz, or .tgz) which contains the source code for the program that you have to compile yourself. While it may be a little intimidating at first, compiling from source is normally a quick and easy process. Today, we’ll learn how.

First off, I should note that not all tarballs are the same. This guide will be assuming that the program you’re trying to install is a normal GNU-style source code collection. Most require all the steps noted below, but many skip one step or another. For the purposes of the tutorial I’ll be compiling the source code package of Python 3.0.1 from the Python homepage.

Step 1: Extract the tarball

For those new to Linux, tarball is a term commonly used to refer to a file which contains other files. It’s a lot like a ZIP or RAR file in Windows, except that the tar program, on its own, does not compress the files. Tar works with a compression program like gzip to actually compress the files, which is why you commonly see two extensions (.tar and .gz). This is sometimes abbreviated to just .tgz.

Fortunately, we don’t need to run two separate programs to extract the files, we just tell tar to run the files through gzip to decompress. You can use a graphical utility to extract those files by simply double clicking the tarball from your file manager, or you can do it from the command line with:

tar -zxvf mytarball.tar.gz

The options we gave tar are as follows:

-z to tell tar to run this file through gzip to decompress (use -j for bzip files)
-x to extract the files
-v for “verbose”, so we can see a list of the files it’s extracting
-f to tell tar that we’re working with a file

For easier unzipping, see the Tips section at the bottom of this page

Configure

Once the files are extracted, open a command terminal and go to the directory where the files have been unzipped. Before we can compile, we need to run the configure script. The job of the configure script is to check your system for all the software necessary to compile the program from source code into a usable binary program. It looks for things like gcc version and other tools needed to build the software. So once you’re in the directory with all the files that were unpacked from the tarball, type in

./configure

If all goes well it’ll go through a check of various parts of your system, then drop you back to the command line like below:

The most common cause of errors in this step is a missing dependency. Look closely at any errors you may get to determine what package is missing.

Make

This is the real meat of the process – where we compile the source code into a runnable program. This is normally the easiest step, only requiring a single command. If the configure step completed without errors, simply type in

make

On a large program, this step might take a few minutes. Once done, you’ll be dropped back to the shell prompt as shown here.

Technically, your program is now ready to use. Under most circumstances, however, you’ll want to run one more step so that she program can be fully installed into the correct locations for it to be run from anywhere.

Make install

All this really does is copy the now-compiled program into the system directories like /usr/bin so that it can be run from any directory without having to specify a path to the files. Since it’s copying to a directory outside your home, you’ll probably need root privileges. If the make step completed without errors, simply run

sudo make install

to copy the files. At this point, you’re all done! Your new program can be used like any other.

Tips

Chances are, you’ll be compiling from source more than once in your life. In fact, for those who like to use the latest and greatest software, this can be very common. To make it a little easier, open your .bashrc file from your home directory, and add the following aliases to the end:

alias ungz="tar -zxvf"
alias unbz="tar -jxvf"
alias cmi="./configure && make && sudo make install"

How to Install Software from a Tarball in Linux originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers

Joshua Price — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:33:30 +0000

Like many of you, I use a LOT of different computers. Some at home, some at work, some in between. Many of these computers have more than one operating system installed, and those operating systems may have more than one browser. All this leaves a LOT of places you may have saved your bookmarks. What’s saved on one might not be saved on another, or perhaps you reformatted your OS and forgot to backup your favorite websites. Fortunately, there are a multitude of ways to solve this problem, and today we’ll be covering some of them. Each of the programs/toolbars/extensions we’ll try out today can store your bookmarks outside your browser so that they can be accessed from anywhere.

1. Foxmarks/Xmarks

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, IE, Safari)

Saves: Bookmarks, Passwords

Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks) is a browser extension that allows you to synchronize bookmarks from several locations so that they can follow you anywhere. It used to be a Firefox-only extension, but now has extend its reach to Internet Explorer and Safari. The website has a type of content search where you can see reviews and ratings for many web sites based on the users of the Xmarks extension. With the Xmarks extension installed, you’ll also notice some new icons next to your Google search results indicating ratings and reviews for some of the sites in your search results.

Xmarks also includes an option to sync your saved passwords, so that you can keep the passwords saved in one browser and share them to all the others where you installed Xmarks.

To install the Xmarks extension, go to http://download.xmarks.com/download and choose the appropriate plugin for your browser.

2. delicious

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Safari, Chrome)

Saves: Bookmarks

Any topic on web bookmark services will always eventually lead to http://delicious.com/ (previously known as del.icio.us). This site has been around for a while and has always been a great place to store and share your bookmarks. Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks with keywords, so that you can search your (or other people’s) bookmarks based on tags. From the website you can search with those tags to see what bookmarks others have submitted on that topic.

The browser extension for Firefox can be found here.

The browser extension for IE8 can be found here

The browser extension for Safari can be found here

For Google Chrome, go to the delicious site and drag the bookmarklet to the bookmark bar.

3. Mozilla Weave

Type: Browser Extension (Firefox)

Saves: Bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs

Finally, there’s Mozilla Weave. This is a much more ambitious project than just saving your bookmarks online. Weave is intended to let you keep a complete browser “experience” from one computer to the next. It saves much more info online so that you can access things like your browsing history and tabs along with bookmarks and passwords when roaming to a different Firefox installation. Keeping things like your browser history saved online would make it a lot easier to access that page-you-were-on-yesterday-but-can’t-quite-remember-the-name, or pull up that news article you just saw but isn’t on the site’s front page anymore.

Weave appears to be a very useful tool, but unfortunately it seems to require Firefox 3.5, which is still in development. If you’re really excited to try out Weave but don’t want to wait until 3.5 is officially released as stable, you can get information on download and installation at the Mozilla Labs website.

There are some other options out there that I chose not to include in this article for various reasons such as platform portability or concerns about data privacy. If you’re using a bookmark sync program/extension to manage your bookmarks, I’d like to hear about your experiences in the comments below.

Three Easy Ways to Synchronize Your Bookmarks Across Various Browsers originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)