customising life

It seems like only yesterday I finally sorted out my PC and installed Dapper. Now I’m moving on up.

This time I thought I would give the LiveCD install method a whirl. Being short on time, patience and DVDs, I decided to try installing Xubuntu Edgy straight over the root partition of my Dapper install, leaving all my other partitions intact. This provision has always existed, but I’ve not been game enough to try it.

The LiveCD installation, for the most part, is a cake walk. The first steps allow you to set up the time zone, keyboard, and the first user.

Then onto to the partitioning.

For my upgrade scenario, all that needs to be done is to reformat the root (/) partition and then install Edgy on that. All other partitions can be mounted as they were previously and left untouched.

After the partitions have been arranged, a confirmation screen summarises the installation to this point. A major plus (in my opinion) for the LiveCD this time round; you can alter the location that GRUB is installed to.

No more indiscriminate MBR wiping. I wouldn’t say it was intuitive, but if you need to specify a different location for GRUB, I think you should probably know a little more about what you are doing.

Having installed Ubuntu Edgy on my work PC that day, using the text-based Install CD, I was surprised that the LiveCD installation on my PC was much slower to complete, despite being on a much better machine than my work PC.

Finally a reboot and to my great pleasure, I have Xubuntu Edgy, complete with all my previous customisations. Very slick.

Do not try to use the update-manager, from the XFCE -> System Menu to upgrade Xubuntu Dapper to Edgy.
From Xubuntu.org

Upgrading
If you are using Xubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), you can easily update to version 6.10 (Edgy Eft).

Click here for instructions.
At the moment, it is not recommend to use this method, as there seem to be problems with it.

The method of apt-get dist-upgrade is still safe for those who are familiar with it, the issue is only with the update-manager.

I was almost going to give an update from Dapper a try too. Admittedly a dist-upgrade, but glad I held off a little while!

I’ve been out of the Ubuntu/GNU/Linux community/forum scene for so long, I have no idea what’s been happening.

So Compiz has been forked into a project called Beryl. AIGLX, Redhat’s offering to accelerate graphics now works straight out of the box on Ubuntu Edgy.

I discovered this while playing with the Edgy LiveCD at work. I read several reviews, and watched more than a few YouTube videos.

The effects are just amazing.

I just had to give it a try.

In a lot of the reviews I read, I thought it was strange how the authors claimed that now GNU/Linux can match Windows (Vista I presume) and Max OSX for eye candy and looks.

Perhaps I just haven’t seen enough of what these other OS’es can do, because …
I’ve been using GNU/Linux for just over a year now, and in my opinion it has always been ahead of Windows/OSX in terms of eye candy. Even before Compiz/Beryl came about.

Just my opinion of course. Anyway …

Following the HOWTO from the Beryl project website, I was able to set things up in less than 15 minutes (I already had XGL).

I had to make some minor adjustments, for using XFCE, but minor being the operative word. Xubuntu uses the GNOME Display Manager (GDM) so setting up a custom XGL session was easy, and setting up Beryl to run over XFWM was not hard either.

I’ll try to go over it later, both for Dapper, and Edgy when I install it soon.

I don’t know where Compiz is at the moment, so I’ll wanna check that out too at some time, but for the moment I am just drooling at my the rain falling on my desktop, or my windows folding when they are shaded.

I also just love how many options there are to configure the behaviour.

This is just too cool!

To my great surprise, delight and somewhat shame, it was very easy to set up a PPTP connection to my work VPN, should I ever feel the strange need to do some work of a weekend.

Now to setting up a remote desktop connection so I can actually use my work PC.

I’m gonna need two packages to do this; rdesktop (the client application) and grdesktop (a GUI frontend for rdesktop)

grdesktop came at a cost, in terms of GNOME dependencies, which isn’t such a big problem for my system, but just worth nothing. If GNOME dependencies are an issue, just install rdesktop. I’ll try to figure out how to use it next.

sudo aptitude install rdesktop grdesktop

We can almost fire up the VPN connection, which I’ve already gone through here, but before that there is an intermediate step that is required.

As it turns out, I did need to set up a route to get things working. The instructions were thankfully very straightforward. You can take one of two approaches (as always); the command line or the GUI. I’ll show both.

Adding the route through the command line is achieved by using the route command, specifying the starting address for the network, the netmask and connection to use. In my case it was somewhat like this

sudo route -add 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 dev ppp0

Adding the route via the GUI is done by clicking the Routing tab for the connection. Then select the routing style most applicable. In my case I am a Client connecting to a LAN, so Client to LAN is the easy choice.

Click Edit Network Routes, then you will be able to enter in the route IP address and the mask bits (netmask).

I now can start the PPTP connection, which should show that the new route is in use.

So now on to the Remote Desktop GUI. After installation a nice little Tux icon appears in the Network menu.

Once opened, all that is left is to correctly identify the local IP address of the computer you wish to take control of, and the username and password to do so.

Some other important settings, that may require some thought, include the size and colours available to the connection.

If everything works out correctly you’ll finally see the Windows desktop of the remote PC.

It’s almost the end of ‘it’s that time of year’ again… tax time. This was my first year doing a tax return as a full-time employee, and was pretty damn frustrating, more than usual. I think I will need to write to the tax office with an ammendment .

Anyway, this year I decided to do my tax return with Xubuntu. The tax office only supplies their eTax program for Windows, but I figured, if this isn’t a good opportunity to use Wine I don’t know what is.

Wine is dead easy to install …

Just backup and edit the apt-get sources list

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list_backup
sudo mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add the Ubuntu specific Wine repository (Dapper of course)

deb-src http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt dapper main

Then install Wine with your preference of apt-get interface

sudo apt-get install wine

Then configure Wine and install the program (in this case eTax)

winecfg
wine /downloads/etax2006.exe

As it turned out, eTax installed superbly using Wine, and ran without many of the problems you would expect. I was able to create a new tax data file, and load my previous years data, which was handy. There were no problems filling in the information, from a technical point of view, comprehending tax law aside. The only issues I could determine, were the inability to load the help file, and not being able to see a running estimate of my return.

Printing was another problem, but was sorted by using the CUPS-PDF printer.

I’ll wait to see what comes of my ammendment letter, but it looks like a pretty successful tax reutrn using Wine. If not I don’t have very long to sort it out :$