I origionally switched to Linux over 10 years ago because my modest hardware could not keep up with Windows, and I was rewarded with a reliable, stable, and responive system. Fast forward 8 years and I am now a very satisfied Ubuntu user, however, I have never been a fan of desktop enviroments such as GNOME and KDE. I normaly prefere something very light weight such as WindowMaker.However, I found a way to keep a “mostly default” Ubuntu install with a light weight desktop. I had used Xfce a couple of years ago while experimenting with Redhat 8,9 and Fedora, and I quite enjoyed it.

Xubuntu delivers a light weight desktop on Ubuntu, prefering light weight applications, and also utilizing ubuntu repositories. Ubuntu is nice, and works very well, but I just don’t like GNOME, or its heavy memory usage. I’m also cheap, and I do not like spending a lot of money on hardware. Requiring less than 192Mb of RAM, Xubuntu is now running on my main desktop, laptop, and office desktop. Its also running on my backup home workstation.

So if you are finding Ubuntu a little heavy on your machine, give Xubuntu a try! Switching from Ubuntu to Xubuntu is quick and easy, and if you do not like it, you can easily go back.

To install Xubuntu from Ubuntu type:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Enjoy, if you have any questions please leave a comment.

If you want to install and use Thunderbird 2.0, here is your quick and dirty guide:

The first thing we need to do is download Thunderbird 2 from Mozilla, save it to somewhere you will remember, the default is your Desktop under Ubuntu. This brief how to will assume that you saved the file to your Desktop.

Open a Terminal Session (applications -> accessories -> Terminal)

cd Desktop

tar zxvf thunderbird-2.0.0.0.tar.gz

sudo mv thunderbird /opt/thunderbird2

Now we have Thunderbird installed, but we do not have an Icon to launch it, we need to add one. I like to keep icons for Firefox and Thunderbird on the top Panel, beside the system menu, these instructions will work if you choose to create a launch icon on the desktop.

1. Right click on the top launch bar, select “add to panel”
2. Click “Custom Application Launcher” on the pop up window. (If you chose to create an Icon on your desktop, right click your desktop and select “Create Launcher…”)
3. Set type to “Application”
4. Name: Thunderbird 2.0
5. Command: /opt/thunderbird2/thunderbird
6. Next, click on Icon, and scroll down until you see the Thunderbird icons, choose the “mozilla-thunderbird.xpm” icon.
7. Click “OK”

And thats it. Enjoy Thunderbird 2.0!

My A100 uses an ATI SB450 soundcard, which worked out of the box in 6.06, 6.10, and the early beta stages of 7.04. From what I can see, this problem is related to the release kernel not detecting the sound card model correctly.

After searching the Ubuntu forums, and Launchpad, I found this fix posted by Ubuntu forums member “djails“:

sudo rmmod snd-hda-intel

sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel probe_mask=8 model=auto

After running the above commands, your sound card should now work, however, these changes are not permanent, to make the above changes permanent, add the following line to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=8 model=auto

After applying these changes, all components of the Toshiba Satellite Pro A100 appear to be working, including the built in wireless card.

If you need help with your soundcard, or Satellite Pro A100, post below and I will do my best to help out.

Automatix adds an easy to use interface for installing 3rd party packages that are not maintained by Ubuntu, or the Ubuntu community, these typically consist of commercial packes such as Google Earth, Windows Media Codecs etc.

Here is the quick and dirty way to get started with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04):

1. sudo apt-get install python (if you do not already have python 2.4 installed)
2. wget http://www.getautomatix.com/apt/dists/feisty/main/binary-i386/automatix2_1.1-3.5-7.04feisty_i386.deb
3. sudo dpkg -i automatix2_1.1-3.5-7.04feisty_i386.deb
4. automatix2

Follow the directions on screen and enjoy. Please note that Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, 7.04 is currently beta.

read more | digg story

read more | digg story

via digg:
This is very simple tutorial how to mount your NTFS and FAT partitions under Ubuntu with read and write access.

Note: The Ubuntu installer will mount NTFS and DOS partitions as read only by default, under /media/
read more | digg story

Installing the Citrix ICA client. The Citrix ICA client does not work out of the box on Ubuntu Edgy Eft. The problem is that it relies on Motif for the setup and management GUI. Here are the steps. To start, you need to download client from Citrix and unpack in its own folder.

sudo apt-get install libmotif3
sudo ./setupwfc

Flash keeps crashing Firefox. I noticed that after I had installed the flash player plugin, sites with flash ads would crash my browser. For some reason, the OEM/Alternate install CD set my graphics card to use 16 bit colour. To fix this, I had to change the default depth from 16 to 24 and everything is fine so far.

A must have for Edgy Eft is Automatix. Automatix gives you all the “good” stuff that you cannot get for various reasons, it is a must have for Ubuntu. To install Automatix2, follow the steps below:
Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www getautomatix.com/apt edgy main to /etc/apt/sources

Then, issue the following commands:

sudo apt-get install automatix2
automatix2

If you need to connect to more than one wireless network with any frequency, then you need to install and use wifi-radar. This handy little utility is the easiest and most reliable way to go from hotspot to hotspot with ease. I tried to use the built in wireless configuration tool and found that it caused problems with my wireless card.

Once started, wifi-radar will find your preferred wireless network and automatically connect to it. To install wifi-radar, issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install wifi-radar

That’s all I have so far. If you have something essential that you want to share, or you need help with any of the above, feel free to post a comment below and I will do my best to help.

One of the most significant changes was made under the hood. “init.d” has been replaced by “Upstart” which cuts the normal boot up time in half.

The major changes include:

• GNOME 2.16
• TomBoy
• F-Spot
• Evolution 2.8.0
• Firefox 2.0 (just released October 24th)
• Open Office 2.0.4
• Gaim 2.0 Beta 3.1
• Orca
• A new theme
• Rounded window borders
• Upstart

And with the release of Edgy Eft we also get a new version of Automatix, which is much more refined. I have been running the release canidate for Edgy for a couple of weeks now, and my laptop has been running much smoother than it was before with Dapper.

If you want to upgrade your existing Dapper Drake (6.06) install, you can do so by entering the following command in a terminal window:

sudo update-manager -c

All the packages will be downloaded and installed on your machine. Make sure that you have a fast connection or you could be waiting a while.

So far everything on my Toshiba Satellite Pro A100 works (with the exceptions of the FnFx keys), originally 6.06, upgraded to 6.10 with the command above. My workstation also works great, and it was installed from scratch with the release cd.

Using the installer on the live CD I was able to resize the current XP Pro partition (just in case), and install Ubuntu. Everything was done in about 30 minutes and I now had a working Linux laptop.

Sound, Video, Lan, and the DVD+/-RW all worked out of the box. The only piece of hardware that did not work out of the box was the built in wireless card ( an Atheros AR5006GE). Atheros cards are normally supported by the “MadWifi” open source driver, but this card is “too new” at the momment. But thankfully, Ubuntu installs ndiswrapper by default which you can use to wrap around the windows driver. By default, ubuntu should have mounted your XP Pro partition under /media/sda1 and all that is required is to run a couple of commands, and ndiswrapper will make a copy of the driver in /etc/ndiswrapper for you.
To active ndiswrapper, issue the following commands:

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils

sudo ndiswrapper -i "/mnt/sda1/Program Files/Atheros/driver/net5211.inf"

sudo ndiswrapper -m

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

At this point there should now be a wlan0 interface available on your system.

There is one small bug however, and as of yet, I am unsure if it is related to madwifi or not. If you try to connect to a WEP protected AP it will try to associate in restricted mode. (Both of my access points do not use restricted mode). The workaround for this is to put the card into open mode (which still allows wep encryption):

sudo iwconfig wlan0 key open

The other manual setup that you will want to do is to setup the ATI card in the laptop, doing this will give you accelerated 3d graphics (which is great for google earth!).

To install the ATI Drivers, install the fglrx packages from synaptic package manager. You can find synaptic under System – > Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager. Do a search within Synaptic for “fglrx” and install the associated packages. Once fglrx is installed, run the following command:

sudo aticonfig

This program will setup and configure the ATI Drivers to work with Xorg giving you 2D acceleration and Hardware Open GL Support.

So far everything works well and I am quite happy with this notebook, considering that it is currently retailing at the big box electronics stores for $699.00 Canadian. The specs on the notebook are:

• Intel Celeron M 410 @ 1.4Ghz
• 512MB DDR2 Ram
• 60 GB Hard drive
• ATI Radeon Express 200m Mobile Graphics
• Integrated Lan and WLAN.
• 1 PCMCIA Type II slot
• 4 USB ports
• DVD +/- RW Drive
• 15.4″ widescreen display. (1280×800)

If you have any questions about running Ubuntu Linux on your Toshiba Satellite Pro A100, or if I have missed something, please post below and I will do my best to help.