The other day I was doing some cleaning and came across some old Ubuntu & Kubuntu Disks. I can’t bring myself to throw them away since, they no longer do the disks and it reminds me of when I first discovered the world of Linux.

Ubuntu & Kubuntu Disks

Chrome recently implemented a change removing the ability to install scripts & extensions from 3rd party websites. You can easily work around this to install the ice quick stream script and other user scripts & extensions from 3rd party locations by doing the following.

• Find the google chrome icon on your desktop
• Right click on the icon and then select properties
• In the dialog that opens you’ll see a box labeled target
• The target box contains something similar to the following line

  C:UsersusernameAppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe

• at the end of the line add a space then paste the following:

  –enable-easy-off-store-extension-install

• your end result should look like this:

  C:UsersusernameAppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe –enable-easy-off-store-extension-install

• Click apply and then click OK
• close chrome completely by clicking the wrench and clicking exit and then relaunch it using the shortcut you just modified. You should now be able to install user scripts & extensions from any website once again.

I hope this helps.

p.s. this also works on linux launchers.

Today I purchased the humble bundle and I’m very glad I did. The humble bundle is a collections of cross platform(meanin they support windows, mac, and linux) collection of games. You decided what you want to pay then you can even decide how what you paid gets diveyed out, such as how much to developers and how much to charity. They are pretty neat games as well. If you get a chance I suggest checking out the bundle.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

I just discovered that you can go into your myspace account settings and under the option “Sync” you can set it up so updates to your twitter will now also update your myspace status. Which I think is completly great, since there is currently no myspace desktop clients for linux.

I just finished installing Kubuntu 9.10 and it’s absolutely amazing.I didn’t have any of the issues that occurred when I installed Jaunty, my sound worked great right out of the box!

Aside from not having any sound issues, the new notifier is great, even my gtk apps have kde style pop-ups. I even found a new extension for Thunderbird witch uses libnotify. In jaunty, firefox and other gtk apps looked like gtk apps, however even firefox looks very beautiful in kubuntu karmic. I’m assuming the that means gtk-qtcurve has been updated in some manner. Speaking of firefox; kubuntu karmic now has a nice installer for it, that really made things easier. kopete now surpports facebook which in my opinion is a plus. Karmic is faster, I suppose that’s because I’m now using the ext4 file system instead of ext3. Overall I would say Kubuntu karmic just feels nicer. It’s not clunky or resource consuming. The over feeling you get is one of comfort. The only downside I found was for an application and can’t be laid at kubuntu’s feet. The new version of amarok has removed the shoutcast plugin due to some licensing problems.

After having installed KDE 4.3 on my Ubuntu installation and really enjoying using it, I decided I wanted the full Ubuntu/KDE experience. So I decided to wipe my Ubuntu installation and install Kubuntu 9.04. It turns out the switch wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. There we’re definitely a few stumbling blocks along the way.

First I couldn’t get tomboy notes to work. I’m aware that KDE offers Basket Notepad but I really prefer Tomboy. I love the wiki style and simplicity of it. I could install it fine but attempting to launch gave me errors. I never did quite figure out what the issues was but I knew it was very important for me to get it working as all my installation notes we’re in tomboy which I sync to dropbox so I can have them available to me anywhere (this is really handy as tomboy also has a windows version so I can run them back and forth). Well after much googleing I discovered it’s some kind of issue that won’t let tomboy run with out gnome. Well I thought, at the very least I can install ubuntu in virtualbox and access my notes this way. So that’s what I proceeded to do. Well I decided to have a look at the article on how to forge entitled The Perfect Desktop – Kubuntu 9.04 This article is very thorough and allowed me to get everything I needed on kubuntu without the primary use of my notes.

After following the guide and picking the software I wanted (I didn’t install all the software mentioned as I use alternatives to some of them) I then went to google to search for a way to test my browser plugins. This is when I noticed I had no sound in my browser. Flash, totem and mplayer remained silent. So off to google again. Many hours and much googleing later I discovered the reason for my sound issues was that Kubuntu does not install pulseaudio by default. So I needed to install it. So I followed the instructions found in this post. But for some reason I still had no sound. This drove me completely insane, at this point I was highly frustrated. Well somewhere in the mirad of google pages I came across a post and the reply to that post was that this person had discovered that their PCM volume was turned down and when they turned it up they had sound. So I checked my PCM volume using the mixer option available when clicking on the volume in the system tray and sure enough it was turned all the way down. Now I had sound in my browser. Flash, Mplayer totem they all worked!

Supposedly they are working on these sound issues and most of them should be fixed with the release of Karmic Koala in October. I really hope so as this is a bit complicated for anyone to fix.

I updated my KDE to 4.3 which is far supieror to the KDE that ships with Kubuntu Jaunty. The widgets are great and I love using them, also I noticed that the networking widget, which refused to work under kde installed on top of ubuntu, now worked perfectly under Kubuntu. Also I no longer have annoying sounds when using gtk applications under kde this was the most annoying thing about using kde ontop of ubuntu.

I almost forgot to mention that after following the Perfect Desktop article, my tomboy notes began working. So I have it installed now and running as well. From the error I was receiving when attempting to launch it through the terminal, I know it was some kind of Mono error, though I can’t be sure what as I don’t know anything about programming.

After having installed KDE 4.3 on my ubuntu installation and really enjoying using it, I decided I wanted the full Ubuntu/KDE experience. So I decided to wipe my Ubuntu installation and install Kubuntu 9.04. It turns out the switch wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. There we’re definitely a few stumbling blocks along the way.

First I couldn’t get tomboy notes to work. I’m aware that KDE offers Basket Notepad but I really prefer Tomboy. I love the wiki style and simplicity of it. I could install it fine but attempting to launch gave me errors. I never did quite figure out what the issues was but I knew it was very important for me to get it working as all my installation notes we’re in tomboy which I sync to dropbox so I can have available to me anywhere (this is really handy as tomboy also has a windows version so I can run them back and forth). Well after much goggling I discovered it’s some kind of issue that won’t let tomboy run with out gnome. Well I thought, at the very least I can install ubuntu in virtualbox and access my notes this way. So that’s what I proceeded to do. Well I decided to have a look at the article on how to forge entitled The Perfect Desktop – Kubuntu 9.04 This article is very thorough and allowed me to get everything I needed on kubuntu without the primary use of my notes.

After following the guide and picking the software I wanted (I didn’t install all the software mentioned as I use alternatives to some of them) I then went to google to search for a way to test my browser plugins. This is when I noticed I had no sound in my browser. Flash, totem and mplayer remained silent. So off to google again. Many hours and much goggling later I discovered the reason for my sound issues was that Kubuntu does not install pulseaudio by default. So I needed to install it. So I followed the instructions found in this post. But for some reason I still had no sound. This drove me completely insane, at this point I was highly frustrated. Well somewhere in the mirad of google pages I came across a post and the reply to that post was that this person had discovered that their PCM volume was turned down and when they turned it up they had sound. So I checked my PCM volume using the mixer option available when clicking on the volume in the system tray and sure enough it was turned all the way down. Now I had sound in my browser. Flash, Mplayer totem they all worked!

Supposedly they are working on these sound issues and most of them should be fixed with the release of Karmic Koala in October. I really hope so as this is a bit complicated for anyone to fix.

I updated my KDE to 4.3 which is far superior to the KDE that ships with Kubuntu Jaunty. The widgets are great and I love using them, also I noticed that the networking widget, which refused to work under kde installed on top of ubuntu, now worked perfectly under Kubuntu. Also I no longer have annoying sounds when using gtk applications under kde this was the most annoying thing about using kde ontop of ubuntu.

I almost forgot to mention that after following the Perfect Desktop article, my tomboy notes began working. So I have installed now and running as well. From the error I was recieveing when attempting to launch it through the terminal, I know it was some kind of Mono error, though I can’t be sure what as I don’t know anything about programming.

I’m running Neverwinter Nights 2 with wine on my new rig

• Systemax PC
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64×2 4400
• RAM: 3 GB DDR2 800 (PC2-6400)
• Display: Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS

I installed using the 7 Disk PC/CD version in order to get it working I had to use winetricks I installed the following with winetricks:

• DirectX9 (not d3dx9 but the actual DirectX9)
• dotnet20
• vcrun2005
• vcrun2005sp1

in order to update to the latest version I ran

/home/angel/.wine/drive_c/windows/regedit.exe

and changed the value of

HKey_Local_Machine>Software>Obsidian>NWN2>Neverwinter>NWUpdate

from 0 to 1

The only issue I had was that the game only recognized a resolution of 1024×768 so I had to edit

/home/angel/Neverwinter Nights 2/nwn2.ini

manually and put in my 1600×900 resolution. All this info I found at The Wine Appdb.

I hope this information helps other people.

Today I have my very first all Linux Box! This system came without an OS and windows has never touched it. First Some Specs:

• Systemax AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 2.30GHz
• 3GB DDR2 800 (PC2-6400)
• 250GB Hard Drive
• 9-in-1 Media Reader
• Realtek ALC883 High Definition Integrated Audio
• DVD±R/RW
• Integrated NVIDIA GeForce 6100
•  I have added a NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS 512 mb card

We paid $249.97 for it from tiger direct.

The other PC works fine, we purchased this with the intent on taking the other computer to the living room and hooking the T.V. up to it. We are planning to cancel our cable to save more money in the long run.

After getting the box setup in it’s proper location, I proceeded to turn it on. It of course informed me that there was no OS and I should pick something to boot from. I inserted the Ubuntu 9.04 disk & within 20 minutes had a fully functioning Ubuntu Desktop.

The System runs great I also finally have a working microphone, as my other p.c. had some sort of bug which refused to allow the microphone to work in Linux.

I’m totally stoked about having a new rig which runs Ubuntu so wonderfully.