Installing Google Chrome on Ubuntu 12.10

Google officially released its much awaited Chrome browser for Linux in September 2008. It is still not available in the Ubuntu 12.10 repositories as of now. But this cannot stop the ones who want to use this browser. The installation process is smooth and completes quickly.

The Google Chrome browser is available on the official Google Chrome website -

 www.google.com/chrome/

You will be redirected to your operating systems available installation options. Here you will need to select the kind of Chrome Browser based on your operating system. For example, if you are using Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit Linux, then you need to select the option 64-bit .deb (For Debian/Ubuntu)

After selecting the correct download package for your operating system, click the "Accept and Download" button at the bottom of the page, to begin to download.

If you have the default location set for the downloads, eg "Downloads" folder, the chrome .deb file will be saved there, otherwise a Browse Folder dialog box will open up prompting you for a location to save the chrome .deb file. Select the download location and soon the download will complete, and a "Thank You" message will be displayed on the browser.

Now since the chrome .deb file has been downloaded to your computer, we need to install it in our operating system. We have two options to complete this final task - The Graphical Install and the Command line install.

Graphical Installation of Google Chrome browser -

This is the easy way to install the Google Chrome browser or any other .deb file in Ubuntu. Simple navigate to the downloaded location and double-click the Chrome .deb file.

Press the Install button in the Ubuntu Software Center and wait for it to complete.

Note: Please connect to the internet so that the required dependencies are downloaded during the install. In case the installation is stopped due to the dependencies problem, then there is no need to worry. Just open the terminal and type in the following command and the installation will complete.

sudo apt-get -f install

This command will download the required dependency files and complete the installation.

Command line installation of Google Chrome browser -

This installation method requires some advanced knowledge of the operating system, such as using the command line and knowing about the various command options. We would be using the dpkg command to install this downloaded chrome package.
Since dpkg command is a privileged command, we would require sudo access to execute. The complete command syntax is given below:

sudo dpkg -i

the package name in our case is google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb, so the command will be

sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

Press enter key after entering this command, and wait for the installation to complete. Make sure your computer is connected to the internet before you fire this command to make sure that all dependencies for the installation, if any, are downloaded along with the install.

Congratulations! You have just installed the Google Chrome browser in your Ubuntu 12.10. Open your Dash and type in Chrome to start surfing the internet with your new browser :)

Happy Birthday RMS, Richard Matthew Stallman - The Free Software God

The day - March 16th, 2013, marks the 60th birthday for the man, Richard Matthew Stallman, also known as "rms" or "St. iGNUcius".

There was a time when all software was free and open to all. But then, some proprietary software vendors introduced some licences which took away the user's freedom to share or modify or even have a look at the source code of the program they are using! This led to denial of the user to share the program with his friends or make changes to the source code of the program he is using. Stallman opposed this. Stallman believed that the attempts by such proprietary software vendors are unethical and anti-social.

Stallman founded the GNU Project in the year 1983. In the year 1984, Stallman listened to the voice of his heart and quit his job at the MIT, and took to work on his GNU Project full time, to which his dedication can be seen till date. He started working on the GNU Operating System and later started a non-profit organisation by the name Free Software Foundation. This Free Software Foundation became a common platform for all the free software programmers, all over the world, and further led to the creation of a legal platform for protecting them from the Copyrights of the proprietary software vendors. This involved the creation of term - Copyleft, to battle the term Copyright, used by the proprietary software vendors.

Today, many of the tools created by GNU are being used by many popular operating systems, most notably Linux. Infact the term "Linux Operating System" is not correct. The correct term is "GNU/Linux Operating System", since Linux is just a kernel, with all other tools being provided by GNU, and a combination of them makes the Operating System work together.

In his early days of his Free Software Movement, Richard M. Stallman, composed a song which later became an anthem for all Free Software enthusiasts all over the world.

RMS singing the Free Software Song

We all can support RMS and our Free Software Movement by various methods listed on their website. Help doesn't mean monetary or financial or technical, we all can help in many other ways, based on our personal skills and knowledge.

Let us all congratulate RMS on his 60th birthday. God bless him a long life and we all wish that Free Software Foundation is successful in all its fronts.




Personal Website - http://stallman.org/
Wikipedia Page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Matthew_Stallman
FSF Website - http://www.fsf.org/

Installing Eclipse-PDT with PHP support in Ubuntu 12.10

Eclipse is a full fledged IDE which is being used for the development and debugging of many programming languages like Java, PHP, ROR etc.

In this article we are going to discuss the installation of Eclipse in Ubuntu with support for the PHP. The version of Eclipse which comes default in the Ubuntu repositories is Eclipse 3.8

Eclipse Splash Screen

First of all we will install Eclipse, and then we will proceed with the PDT (PHP Development Tools) installation. All this is pretty easy.

Open the Ubuntu Software Center from the Unity Dash.

Unity Dash

Type in Eclipse in the search box (1) there and click the More Info (2) button, as shown in the screenshot below.

Click the Install button and the Part 1 of the Eclipse installation will be complete.

An alternative way to installing Eclipse is using the Command-line install. It is quite easy too - Just paste the following command into the terminal and Eclipse will be installed.

sudo apt-get install eclipse

Command line currently shows Eclipse as installed already

Now we proceed to the PHP Development Tools installation in Eclipse. For this we need to open up our Eclipse and click the Help menu at the top and click on the Install New Software link. The Install New Software dialog box opens up and next we select the Indigo repository in the dropdown (1). Select the Programming Languages>PHP Development Tools (PDT) SDK Feature (2) and click Next.

Install New Software dialog box in Eclipse

Accept the End Users License Agreement (EULA) and click Next. Restart Eclipse and your Eclipse-PDT or Eclipse with PHP Development Tools is ready to use.

To verify, click the File menu and click New Project and select Other. Keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl+N. You will see the PHP project options there.

File>New>Other Menu in Eclipse-PDT

Your Eclipse PDT is ready to use. Happy PHP-ing with Eclipse :)

Remove Amazon Ads and Amazon Launcher from Ubuntu 12.10

After installing or upgrading to the new Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal), you might have noticed a new feature - Advertisements from Amazon Store, in the Unity Dash and a new Launcher for Amazon services in the Unity Bar.

If you're not the kind who like all this stuff, then you can surely remove them from your Ubuntu installation. It is pretty simple.

Remove the Amazon Ads from displaying in the Unity Dash:
Open the terminal, and paste the following command...

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

Remove Amazon Launcher:
Just right-click the Launcher icon and click the "Unlock from Launcher" option, and its gone :)

 

Now you just need to log out and log back in! The ads are gone :)

Installing New Fonts in Ubuntu

Installing fonts on an Ubuntu box is pretty easy. I used a terminal to do all the stuff. Given below is the procedure which Linux newbie's can use to install new fonts in an easy manner :)

1. Find the truetype font you like and download the .ttf file.


2. Save anything you are working on and close all open applications.


3. Open your terminal of choice. On default Ubuntu installations the gnome-terminal is available under the main Applications>Accessories menu. Type or copy+paste the following and then enter your superuser/sudo password:
   
   sudo nautilus /usr/share/fonts/truetype


4. Go back to the truetype .tff font files you downloaded and wish to install. Select and copy (ctrl+c) them to the clipboard.


5. Paste (ctrl+v) the truetype .tff font files into the newly opened nautilus window.


6. Close the nautilus window.


7. Return to the terminal. Type or copy+paste the following into the terminal and then enter your superuser password (if requested). Note: This step is important.
   
   sudo fc-cache -f


8. Allow your computer a few minutes to rebuild the fonts cache. A new terminal line with your username prompt will appear when the fonts cache is rebuilt.

This makes the font usable from any application installed on your Ubuntu box.

Changing Audacious Skins/Using Winamp Skins in Audacious

Linux has an abundance of MP3 Players, most popular being, Amarok, RhythmBox, Xmms, Audacious and so on. Totem is the default player for Gnome, and Amarok for KDE. The development of Bmp stopped last year.
Audacious is a good substitute for Xmms and very fast.

Audacious installation is very easy in Ubuntu (sudo apt-get install audacious). Now, the good thing about Audacious is that it can use the skins of Winamp. Wow! And how we do that?

Extract the winamp skin file and copy it to "/usr/share/audacious/Skins/" and (NOT "~/.audacious/Skins" which is being told on many sites on the Internet).

To do it, open your terminal of choice. On default Ubuntu installations the gnome-terminal is available under the main Applications>Accessories menu. Type or copy+paste the following and then enter your superuser password:

sudo nautilus /usr/share/audacious/Skins/

When you paste the skins in this directory, you will immediately see them in the Skins List in the Audacious player. If not, then press the small Refresh button over there. Or simply, restart the Audacious player.
Enjoy! :D

Setting up Prelink in Ubuntu Linux

Prelink ELF shared libraries and binaries to speed up startup time.

Technical Details

Prelink is a program that modifies ELF shared libraries and ELF dynamically linked binaries in such a way that the time needed for the dynamic linker to perform relocations at startup significantly decreases. Due to fewer relocations, the run-time memory consumption decreases as well (especially the number of unshareable pages). The prelinking information is only used at startup time if none of the dependent libraries have changed since prelinking; otherwise programs are relocated normally.

Prelink first collects ELF binaries to be prelinked and all the ELF shared libraries they depend on. Then it assigns a unique virtual address space slot to each library and relinks the shared library to that base address. When the dynamic linker attempts to load such a library, unless that virtual address space slot is already occupied, it maps the library into the given slot. After this is done, prelink, with the help of dynamic linker, resolves all relocations in the binary or library against its dependent libraries and stores the relocations into the ELF object.

It also stores a list of all dependent libraries together with their checksums into the binary or library. For binaries, it also computes a list conflicts (relocations that resolve differently in the binary’s symbol search scope than in the smaller search scope in which the dependent library was resolved) and stores it into a special ELF section.

At runtime, the dynamic linker first checks whether all dependent libraries were successfully mapped into their designated address space slots, and whether they have not changed since the prelinking was done. If all checks are successful, the dynamic linker just replays the list of conflicts (which is usually significantly shorter than total number of relocations) instead of relocating each library.

To enable Prelink in Ubuntu, you have to enable the "Universe" repository. Before using Prelink do google about Prelink and do your research before trying it out.

How to enable prelink

1. Activate Ubuntu universe sources. Goto System>Administration>Software Sources. Check the second box "Community-maintained Open source software (universe)". Reload the softwares list after this (prompted automatically).
2. Now, use apt-get or synaptic to install prelink. (Type sudo apt-get install prelink in gnome-terminal)
3. Open /etc/default/prelink file with your favorite editor, as sudo/root, e.g. (sudo gedit /etc/default/prelink)
4. Change the line PRELINKING=unknown to PRELINKING=yes
5. Adjust the other options if you know what the heck you're doing. Defaults work well.
6. To start the first prelink type in sudo /etc/cron.daily/prelink. This would be the longest one to execute. Took about 2 minutes on my machine. So, be patient. In the future, prelink performs a quick prelink (a less-than-1-minute procedure on most systems) daily, usually at midnight. Every 14 days, or whatever you changed it to be, a full prelink will run.

If you just did a major apt-get upgrade that changed systemwide libraries (i.e. libc6, glibc, major gnome/X libs, etc etc etc) and experience cryptic errors about libs, rerun step 6.

Stopping Prelinking

In case you do not want to use Prelink anymore, maybe due to some problem etc., follow these steps.

1. Change step 4, above, from PRELINKING=yes to PRELINKING=unknown
2. Rerun step 6.

Prelinking works well in i386 architectures. Some users have reported some problems in AMD64. You can try it though. If you experience any problems, then you can stop it anytime :)