mateo's musings » Jaunty

gwibber, the one I’ve been searching for

matt — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:18:33 +0000

In my quest to use Linux full-time, I’m building a list of “equal or better” Linux programs to replace the ones I used in my former Windoze life. I think many others are on that same quest.

When it comes to chat/social network all-in-one clients, nothing can compare to digsby. Unfortunately, although we’ve been promised a native Linux version for quite some time, it has not yet been delivered. As such, I’ve been quite happy with Pidgin for a chat client, but have been looking everywhere for a decent standalone twitter client.

I’m not sure why I never found it before, but today I found gwibber hanging out in the Jaunty repositories. A ‘sudo aptitude install gwibber’ later, I was very pleasantly surprised.

As you can see, it has a very smooth interface that blends quite well in gnome. What sold me on it though, was how nicely it integrates with Jaunty’s new notification system. I have it set to check every 5 minutes, and when new updates come in, they show up in the now-familiar fade-in-fade-out-overlay in the top right corner of the screen. I like it.

I Love the Internets

matt — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:11:24 +0000

For a while now I’ve been dual-booting Windows 7 and whatever flavor of Linux I’m currently interested in. I feel like I’ve really settled in with the release of Ubuntu 9.04 and I wondered if there was a way for me to easily get into my current Windows installation without having to reboot my computer (a la parallels). Well, a quick google on the internets turned up a very helpful article which stepped me through creating a virtual disk which was really my physical hard drive, and the rest is just standard stuff.

I booted my virtual/physical disk, was very careful to only select the Windows installation from GRUB (see warning in article), and Windows came up like a champ. I didn’t even have to do the extra steps outlined at the end of the article, but I may go back and do them as a safeguard… hopefully not borking my install in the process. The good news for everyone is that VirtualBox is free/open and available for all three major platforms. Look out, parallels…

Beautiful, isn’t it? I’ll be able to work much more quickly and efficiently now, and that’s what computers are all about, right?

and furthermore…

matt — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:36:36 +0000

I really am almost done with the post about all the Linux distros I’ve tried in the recent past, but in the meantime, I’ve replaced my Ubuntu Jaunty install with Mythbuntu 8.10, which gave way to Sabayon 4.0, which was VERY quickly ousted for CrunchBang.

So far, I LOVE CrunchBang. I think it may be a little too geeky for me to put on machines for my friends, but it seems to be just about perfect for me. Here’s a little screenshot for ya… (clicky-clicky for slightly bigger pic)

Like I said, I’m loving it. It’s super fast, super clean, and gives me quick access to the stuff I use 90% of the time (terminal, Firefox, and file manager). Oh, and it’s built on the best distro out there (Ubuntu).

VPN in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

matt — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:37:20 +0000

I really don’t know how applicable this is to all users of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope), but it took me a while to figure out the issue, so hopefully it helps somebody.

In Ubuntu 8.10 I had no issues setting up a pptp-vpn connection with Gnome network manager.

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp
click network-manager icon in system tray>VPN connections>Configure VPN…
Type in server (vpn.yourcompany.com), Username, and Password.

The first time I tried the same in Jaunty, I kept getting an error that the VPN could not connect. If folks want more technical details (log file errors, more specific info on our VPN server, network-manager version, etc.) I can provide them.

The main thing you need to know is that I found one additional step fixed the problem.

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp
click network-manager icon in system tray>VPN connections>Configure VPN…
Type in server (vpn.yourcompany.com), Username, and Password.
Click on Advanced…>checkmark “Use point-to-point encryption (MPPE)”