I'm not going to rave about 8.04, the latest Ubuntu release. There are already plenty of reviews around (here and here and here) even though the final version only hit the servers last Thursday. Rather, I'm going to go through my post-install routine and show you how I tweak things to set them the way I prefer.

I should note here that I installed 8.04 (aka "Hardy Heron") on my Dell Latitude D531 laptop. Laptops can be tricky under Linux on account of the odd drivers and tricksy hardware they tend to use. While Dell do release a range of Ubuntu-powered laptops -- at least in the States -- the D531 ain't one of them. But, amazingly, installation correctly detected almost everything "out of the box".



Graphics Driver
On booting, my graphics didn't look quite right. But an icon on the panel showed the availability of restricted (ie: proprietary) drivers for my system.



Clicking it revealed an ATI Accelerated Graphics Driver could be added. I clicked to install it and, after a three minute download followed by a reboot, graphics were perfect.



Sexier Graphics
The graphics looked great, it was time to spice them up further. Choosing System / Preferences / Appearances and clicking the Visual Effects tab showed that using the ATI driver had also enabled a Normal level of graphics effects. But I wanted more, so I clicked Extra Effects. Wee, now I've got wobbly windows!



More Desktops
I like four virtual desktops (they're called "workspaces" in Ubuntu); the system defaults to two. That's an easy fix. Right-click in one of the workspaces



and choose Preferences.



Now you can pick as many as you like, and how you'd like them arranged.



Adding Favourites to the Panel
I like quick access to a number of applications, so I added their icons to the panel that runs along the top of the screen.



Naturally, you can add whatever you like.

• Right-click on the panel and choose Add.
  
• Select Application Launcher (to copy a launcher from the appications menu).
  
• Then simply pick the program.

To move the icon where you want it, right-click and choose Move. Note that the default icons are locked in place. Right-click 'em and untick Lock to Panel to move them too.



Autologin
On my day-to-day desktop I use automatic login. It's not such a good idea on a laptop on account of them being a lot easier to lose, but it's simple enough to do:

• Click System / Administration / Login Window and choose the Security tab.
  
• Click Enable Automatic Login and select the appropriate User.

Changing Desktop Icon Size
I find Gnome's desktop icons a little big for my taste. You can resize them individually by right-clicking on them and choosing Stretch Icon, but I prefer a global fix.

• Start the Nautilus file manager by clicking Places / Home Folder.
• Choose Edit / Preferences and select the Views tab.
• Change the Default Zoom Level under Icon View Defaults. 75% works for me.

Note: Changing the Global setting under Nautilus won't alter individual changes made with Stretch Icon.



Desktop Fonts
I also prefer a slightly smaller font to match my smaller desktop icons. Under System / Preferences / Appearance / Fonts I reset the destop font to 8pt.



Change the Default Boot Program
Many of my unenlightened clients still use Windows, so I prefer the laptop to default there on the boot menu. Installing Ubunut naturally makes it the default, so to change it...

• Hit Alt+F2 to start Run Application and enter gksu gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst to open file /boot/grub/menu.lst in the gedit program.
  
• Lines beginning with a # are simply comments. The first uncommented line reads
  default        0 
  which is the number of the operating system to boot. (Numbering starts from 0.)
  
• Scroll down the file (there are plenty of comments) till you find the line
  ## ## End Default Options ##
  Under this is an uncommented line that reads
  title        Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
  That's 0, the system you're currently booting into.
  
• Now scroll down, counting each uncommented title line till you reach the default system you want to boot. Remember this number!
  
  In my case, here are the title lines I counted:
  (0) title        Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic
  (1) title        Ubuntu 8.04, kernel 2.6.24-16-generic (recovery mode)
  (2) title        Ubuntu 8.04, memtest86+
  (3) title        Other operating systems:
  (4) title        Dell Utility Partition
  (5) title        Microsoft Windows XP Professional
  
• Scroll back to the top of the file and set default to this. (In my case I made it 5.)
  
• Save the file and close gedit. When you reboot, you'll default to the selected operating system.
  

I'll have some more advanced tweaks next time -- including how I solved the mystery of the missing wireless driver -- but right now you'll probably want to start downloading Hardy. Click here.



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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:51 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 5 )

The Commerce Commission's High Court loss to Telecom last week over its 1999 introduction of  the 0867 dialing scheme brought back memories of my own case against the corporation - which took somewhat less than eight years (eight years!) to resolve.

To be fair, my case was somewhat simpler. When Telecom took over the old Post Office telephone network in 1990, they made three promises, the first of which read: "Local free calling will remain available to all residential customers." A television advertisement at the time had that chiselled in stone and concluded with the words, "A promise is a promise". So when, in March 2000, they charged me $29.70 for dialing my local ISP on the same local number I'd been using for years, I filed a claim with the Disputes Tribunal.


Telecom TV ad, circa 1990



A Little Background
It was all about the internet, of course, and how badly Telecom were prepared for its sudden uptake.

In 1996 they signed an interconnect agreement with then main rival, Clear. That agreement included  call termination charges, meaning that the terminating network would pay 2 cents per minute to the network originating the call. Telecom had zillions of customers, Clear had a handful, so it wasn't hard to see which way the money would flow.

Then someone at Clear had a brainwave: sign up ISPs. Forget voice calls lasting  minutes. People spent hours online. That meant calls from Telecom customers to Clear-based ISPs would become a goldmine for the upstart network.

And indeed they did. At its peak it was estimated that Telecom was forking out between twelve and twenty million dollars a year to its rival.

So Telecom changed the rules. Because internet traffic was endangering the 111 emergency network -- a lie, the two networks are actually functionally separate -- it would have to have its own prefix: 0867. Users had two months to make the change or they'd be charged -- quite coincidentally -- 2 cents a minute.

I refused. Actrix, my ISP at the time, still had a local number and were ten minutes walk from my front door. Why should I use 0867 for a local call when Telecom had promised they'd stay free forever? Hence my Disputes Tribunal case.



To Court (Almost)
I wrote about my claim in the April 2000 print edition of this magazine, and shortly after that things went a little crazy. The story made national news, I was the subject of a 60 Minutes documentary, and received hundreds of letters and emails, all supporting my claim.

Then Telecom refunded my money.

They explained that they understood my confusion and would let me off this time with a warning. (And without a bill, of course, they had no case to answer.)

So when the next month's phone bill came in, I did it all again!



A Dangerous Precedent
It's probably worth noting here why Telecom were so scared of the Disputes Tribunal. The previous year a disgruntled phone card user had taken them to court after they'd unilaterally invalidated his old phone card. The corporation lost and, as a result of the precedent set, had to refund not just the plaintiff's card but tens of thousands of others.

My second claim was set down for Tuesday, 16 May 2000. A few hours before the hearing, I received a call from Telecom's legal counsel to say the charges would be refunded so again there'd be no case to answer.

The call wasn't unexpected. A couple of days earlier - and just hours before my 60 Minutes segment was due to screen - Telecom and Clear kissed and made up. They announced they'd come to an agreement: that Telecom would scrap the so-called "internet tax" and that Clear would encourage users to use 0867 numbers.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Immediately afterwards, Telecom repented of its evil corporate ways and set about providing the country with the most modern, cost-effective, high-speed broadband network on the planet. New Zealand's knowledge economy boomed, ex-pats flocked back as internet businesses relocated here, and Theresa Gattung was made a saint...

Sorry, I think I got a little delusional back there.

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 2 )

VirtualBox is a virtualisation manager. It allows you to install and run one operating system inside another. Here, for example, I'm running Windows XP and the latest KDE 4 beta release of Kubuntu 8.04 inside Kubuntu 7.10...



(Click for a larger view)

Both operating systems are fully functional. At the touch of a key I can flip them into full-screen mode and work with them as if they'd been natively installed. They boot up and shut down just like you'd expect -- except that all happens inside a window -- or I can simply tell VirtualBox to save their current state to disk. That not only means that WinXP essentially boots in about 4 seconds, but whatever I was working on at shutdown is exactly as I left it.

So how do you make all this magic work for you? Just follow these steps...


There are two versions of VirtualBox. You'll probably find the Open Source Edition (OSE) in your distribution's repositories. There's also a Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL) edition. The main difference between the two is that PUEL adds USB support. If you opt for OSE, USB devices won't work in your guest operating system.

Download either the binaries (PUEL) or OSE from here. It's also a very good idea to download the manual!

If you're going the binaries route, heed the instructions! Some additional libraries may need to be added to your system. In the case of Debian and Ubuntu, this is just a matter of adding a line to the /etc/apt/source.list file. (Details of what to add is at the bottom of the first download page.)

Select the appropriate platform and continue. You'll be offered the choice of using Sun's Download Manager (SDM) or just clicking to download the file. SDM didn't work for me. It started okay then got locked up displaying a license window so I just right-clicked on the .deb file and downloaded it manually.

After that a single click installed VB and all the required dependencies.


Up and running... almost

During installation, a new group is created called vboxusers. In order to run a virtual machine you have to make yourself a member of that group. Here's how to do so in Kubuntu;

1. Choose System Settings / User Management
2. Click the Administrator Mode button.
3. On the Groups tab, select Show System Groups.
4. Scroll down to find vboxusers, right-click it and choose Modify.
5. In the Edit Group box, scroll down to find the names of the user(s) you want to add, select them, click Add then click OK.
6. Log out an log back in.

Once you're back in, you can run VirtualBox from the command line or by clicking on the Start button and choosing System.



From here on in it's pretty straightforward. The VirtualBox GUI guides you through the virtual machine installation process and you'll find extra information in the excellent User Manual.

A couple of things you may overlook in your haste to get started:

• You can install other operating systems from either CDs, DVDs or .ISO files. That means there's no need to burn that latest Linux distro to disk in order to try it out.

• Once you've got a guest operating system up and running, click on Devices and choose Install Guest Additions. That'll add a number of extra features and enhancements (see the User Manual for details), including the ability to properly utilise the OS in full-screen mode.

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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 6 )

There's often a little lag between new software releases and the time they're incorporated into Linux distribution updates. That's understandable. But there's one open source app I like to install the moment it hits the servers: OpenOffice.org.

Version 2.4's just been released and features a whole bunch of new addtions. The Linux download's 166 MB (get it here), but what's not clear from the documentation is how to actually install it! So here's a quick newbie guide.

1. Download the file to your Desktop, right-click it and choose Extract Here from the pop-up menu.


2. Open the new folder this creates, right-click on Setup, choose Open With / Other and enter kdesu in the Open With box. (Gnome users should choose Open with Other Application then enter gksu in the Use Custom Command box.)

This will kick off the familiar Installation Wizard and you're away. But wait, there's more!

3. Once the installation's finished, navigate through the RPMS folder and on to desktop-integration. Here you'll find a collection of packages to update your system menu. Just click on the package appropriate to your distribution to install it.

4. If you originally installed OOo via your system's package manager, you can now uninstall it, though I like to leave it place for a few days to confirm the new version's working correctly.

Check out OpenOffice.org's Extension Repository. It contains over 70 useful application extensions. (There's even an OOo Menu Addon for Firefox to help you find what you're looking for on the OOo site.)

And don't forget to register! Since OpenOffice.org is free and can be downloaded and distributed by anybody, Sun are having difficulty estimating the size of OOo's market share. You can help them out by choosing Help / Registration from the program.


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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

If I was to tell you Phun is a 2D physics sandbox designed teach you about concepts such as restitution and friction, your eyes would probably start to glaze over. Before they do, check out this video to get a flavour of a great new desktop distraction...



Phun began life as a Master of Science Thesis by Computing Science student Emil Ernerfeldt and seems to have taken on a life of its own. (Just type "Phun" in YouTube's Search to see what people have been doing with it!)

The download -- also available for Windows with a Mac version on the way -- is a modest 2.5MB and comes with a few pre-built Phun scenes under File / Load Scene. Of course you're going to want to build your own, so take a look at this page of the wiki for a quick backgrounder on how to fully utilise the tools. And have phun!


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Posted by Geoff Palmer at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Microsoft reacted swiftly this morning to close down a site distributing the complete source code of its flagship Vista operating system -- but not before dozens of other sites had mirrored the code.

Loo Flirpa, spokesperson for a little-known Macedonian hacking group based in the provincial capital Morelies, said the code was discovered by a junior member of the group on a routine "training hack" of a Seattle-based server.

"These Windows Servers, they are playthings for the children," Flirpa commented shortly before his arrest and extraordinary rendition to Redmond. "Then we see what he bring us. Whoa! Better get this on the torrents!"

The compressed 4.2GB file called Ballmers_Balls.zip -- apparently in reference to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer -- is, according to one source, "all over the net like a rash."

Here, exclusive to PC World, is a snippet of that code...



Analysts familiar with the operating system have declared it to be "obviously genuine."

Posted by Geoff Palmer at 6:38 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 48 )