customising life

I’m quite proud of myself.

Over the course of the last year and a quarter (since I’ve been into Ubuntu), I have slowly been introducing my parents to FLOSS; I’ve already sold them on Firefox/Thunderbird and then OpenOffice.org.

Recently my Dad has been more than impressed with how you can style your computer to your likes and needs; backgrounds, panels, icons and Beryl. But I think the selling point, was when I was able to breathe life into his sound card using the Xubuntu LiveCD; he had been unable to hear sound for many months, due to a broken and stubborn Windows driver.

Now they are after for a new PC, and with the success of my brothers, have commissioned me to make one for them.

And they want to use Ubuntu.

I’m almost decided on the hardware, and want to get it assembled as soon as possible, and then give it to them with Ubuntu pre-installed. Because I think the crucial part in this endeavor, is making sure that they have everything they need. Once I hand it over, it’s got to just work.

I most definitely don’t want them getting frustrated, because MP3s won’t play, can’t organise their photos, blah, blah, etc. Simple things in the grand scheme of things, but key to ensuring my parents are happy with Ubuntu/GNU/Linux.

So far I’ve only got a short list of things to do and install …

What applications do you think a PC with Ubuntu pre-installed needs?

I put together my brothers PC yesterday. I found a nice computer shop in North Rocks; ITEstate, to gather the components for the upgrade to his ancient K6 processor.

Their prices are quite competitive (considering how easy it is for me to get there), and the girls at the sales desk are polite and helpful, as well as being super cute. The guys who get the parts for you are just as friendly. One thing I did like is that he made me stop and double check the serial number of each part before I left.

So for the fraction more I paid, than say going to Fluidtek (but only just), is worth the fact that I didn’t have to wait in queue, and I got what I wanted. Their website also made things easier too.

Anyway enough of a plug.

It took me just over an hour to assemble the parts in my brothers old, and way too small case, which was quick. The mainboard a Gigabyte M51GM-S2G was a micro ATX, so I was able to squeeze it in. It seems quite a good board from first impressions, but I don’t really delve into that area of hardware. So long as all the bits match and work, I’m happy. My only regret was not upping the hard drive specs.

After the ease of assembly, it was time for the pain of installing Windows. While I’ve sold my parents on Ubuntu for their new PC (which is now in the planning stages, and may even become a MythTV box), my brother wasn’t so easy …

He is wedded to iTunes.

But from what I gathered it’s mainly because of the insanely high playcount his library has; he’s so damn proud of it, he can’t let go!

So I started the process at around 3PM, as he returned from his day of Scuba diving (some have it tough don’t they?) and I just managed to finish installing drivers, basic software, etc in time to limp home to bed at around 11pm.

Not the worst time I’ve ever gone through, but made the more difficult by the fact that he had two old IDE drives, I only had one plugged in due to size restrictions, but once plugging in the second, I was left with a nice “hall.dll” not found error message.

Fortunately it was a simple as fixing the boot.ini file using bootcfg, which for the record was quite easy.

… damn it’s hot this weekend!

I was getting tired of having to wait until I could update to the latest version of Beryl, since it was announced on the 26th of December.

Turns out I had little bit extra in the line for the Beryl repository, which was keeping me from getting any updates. Perhaps it changed after the Beryl site was taken down?

If you’ve been following this post, you may have the same problem. Or you may be smarter than me and decided to act on this a lot earlier.

Anyway, long story short; the correct repository to get the latest version of Beryl is

deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ edgy main

Not that which I had previously (deb http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/ edgy main-edgy)

Edit: If you also want to ensure that the packages are authentic, you’ll need the updated GPG key

wget http://ubuntu.beryl-project.org/root@lupine.me.uk.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

With the new version of Beryl you get a nicer and more organised settings manager, and some new plugins/toys.

Kayee likes the snow and water effects.

And the 3D desktop effect (as in the windows are 3D off the desktop) is great too.

But seeing as I am just wrapping up watching the entire Stargate series, I just love the ‘beam-up’ animation!

Sadly it doesn’t lend itself to screenshots

(I had a similar problem with the sidekick animation when I first installed Beryl)

I just discovered this this morning. I’m 100% sure it wasn’t there before, but I’m not complaining.

I’m talking about Snap, and WordPress.com have kindly enabled Snap Preview Anywhere (SPA) on my blog! After discovering this plugin, I found an announcement from Matt. I must have lucked out! Cheers!

Edit: Turns out this feature is now available right across the board. Thumbs up to WordPress!

If you hover over a link on this blog for few seconds you should be shown a little preview of the link destination.

I think it’s a pretty neat plugin, and always nice to see where a link might take you, rather than have to interpret a URL.

It also does the same preview for my pictures as they are just links to the picture itself. I don’t know how much I like this, as looks almost like a picture in a picture kind of thing.

However if they were small thumbnails;

SPA could be quite helpful. I could just stop linking the pictures too.

What do you think is best?

So this is a follow on from my last post, where I used a simple bash script that will resize JPEG pictures into 1024×768 resolution (or whatever resolution you wish).

I want to customise this a little more, and incorporate it into Thunar’s Custom Actions. People do similiar things for Nautilus.

The first thing to do is create a folder for the script. I decided to put it in the configuration folder for Thunar, under a freshly made scripts folder.

When mousepad opens, just paste in the script. Don’t forget to set the script to executable.

mkdir ~/.config/Thunar/scripts
mousepad ~/.config/Thunar/scripts/resize1024×768 &
chmod +x ~/.config/Thunar/scripts/resize1024×768

Next fire up Thunar, and choose the Configure Custom Actions item from the Edit menu.

From there choose to add a new custom action.

When the next dialog appears, fill out the Name and Description fields to your liking.

Next step is to enter in the command to use for this custom action. Obviously we want to run our script, but in addition we also need to specify a command parameter that Thunar uses when executing the custom action.

For this action I decided to use the parameter %N, which passes the selected filename(s) (without the path). This way I can convert one file, or multiple files.

/home/liam/.config/Thunar/scripts/resize1024×768 %N

The last thing is to set the Appearance Conditions, which specify when Thunar will display the custom action. Remembering Linux is case-sensitive, the string I used was

*.JPG;*.jpg;*.JPEG;*.jpeg;

Once that’s done, you can close the dialog, and right-click the nearest jpeg picture and resize it!

You can find other useful scripts on the page dedicated to Thunar custom action.

After even further digging in the Ubuntu forums, I found someone who made a Zenity script to resize their pictures. So that’s next in line to do. It looks really quite nice!