Ubuntu How To

I have been playing with the new Ubuntu. Lucid Lynx works great out of the box. The boot time got improved and it loads very fast. No errors, no bugs, all the drivers work perfectly for my relatively new custom i7 with the latest hardware. I had trouble with my logitech keyboard and mouse last time I tried Ubuntu, but this time everything worked great. Not even one problem.

Installation was super easy – download and burn the os from http://www.ubuntu.com/, make pc boot from cd and click “install” once it loads. I will try to go through detailed installation process soon as I will reinstall Lucid Lynx one more time with everything I need just to see how fast it will install with all the server packages, and perhaps when I will try to put it on a laptop.

Finding applications is relatively easy via the software center, just look for a couple of the best rated apps that fit the requirements and keep the one you like the best. There are quite a few new ones that I haven’t used yet,  so I will probably post on it later as well. Usually you hear about all the cool apps before even trying, but who knows, may be I will be able to discover a gem that is not too popular yet. After all, its all free and ready for download. 🙂

Lucid Lynx is great so far. I still rely on Windows for personal use due to the software limitations, but will be looking more through http://appdb.winehq.org/ and trying to make everything I use on Windows work on Linux. Last time I could not get Dreamweaver to work without crashing, hopefully it will be different this time.

Lucid Lynx comes with window buttons on the left by default, similar to the ones on Macs. As a previous Ubuntu and Windows user, I find them easier on the right hand side. Luckily, it is really easy to change and it took me less than a few minutes to find the solution.

All you have to do is:

Step 1: Go to Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal

Step 2: Type “gconf-editor” with no quotes

Step 3: You will see “Configuration Editor” window now. Go to apps -> metacity -> general.

Step 4: Find “Button Layout” key and change it. It is “close, minimize, maximize:” by default. To have it on the right hand side, type in “menu:minimize,maximize,close”. This will add the menu button on the left hand side, which I find useful. If you don’t need the menu, just type “:minimize,maximize,close”.

This was very simple, yet made the whole lot of difference for me.

Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed “Lucid Lynx” was released on April 29, 2010 almost as scheduled (a little delay due to the bug in a boot loader) and includes the 2.6.32-21.32 kernel which has quite a few performance updates. The next version, Ubuntu 10.10 (“Maverick Meerkat”), scheduled for  October 10 2010.

Talking about performance, they removed HAL from the boot process, which makes Lucid boot quite a bit faster.

Lucid Lynx is now available in 29 languages: Spanish, English (United Kingdom), Brazilian Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, Russian, Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, Portuguese, Finnish, Danish, Japanese, Greek, Korean, Czech, Catalan, Polish, Galician, Chinese (Traditional), Slovenian, Bulgarian, Asturian, Vietnamese, Basque, Turkish and Serbian.

Likewise-open package got updated. It is version 5.4 now. nVidia drivers got updated as well and run on Nouveau by default. Ubuntu 10.04 comes with Gnome 2.30, which has just a few extra features. Wonder what upcoming Gnome 3 would be like… 🙂

Lucid featured 2 new themes, Ambiance (Dark) and Radiance (Light), which have quite a few changes. They got new wallpapers and icons as well. We will probably have to put it into a different post.

New Ubuntu has a few new social features. MeMenu, which is built on the Gwibber provides easy access to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and a few other social platforms and allows to see several feeds at the same time.

OS has a new feature to purchase favorite songs right from the desktop. Not sure if you need it, but it is there now and works well with Rhythmbox player. It has improved sync features for easier file sharing.

You can download Lucid Lynx here, which list the most popular downloaded images.

We are not sure if a lot of Mac users get hurt by the economy and switch to Linux, but what catches the attention right away is the placement of the window buttons. They are on the left-side now. While it can be changed, many users seem to like it. As for me, I still run Windows at work and on my laptop, so I think I will be looking into changing it shortly.

I decided to start this blog about Ubuntu Lucid Lynx quite a bit ago, however, got really busy and kept on delaying the project. Well, today I finally got around to installing WordPress, configuring it and getting appropriate theme.  Looking for a theme took quite a bit of time and I even started to think about making my own when I accidentally stumbled across the theme you see right now on Ubuntu wiki page. There are quite a few other Linux themes, however, I believe this looks the closest and makes you feel right at home. 🙂 Besides, all the other Linux themes had funky looking penguins all over, why can’t they just use a regular one. You know, the one that doesn’t drink from a Windows juice box? 🙂

Anyway, I got a start! As for now, I still have a lot of work to do. There are still a lot of WordPress plug-ins to install and articles to write. I hope I can make this blog interesting and be able to teach some of you as I learn Lucid Lynx myself. I will be installing it and writing as I go. I used Ubuntu a year ago or so (which was the coolest thing since sliced bread, but didn’t have decent drivers for my new hardware), but I heard some things may have changed and I hope to find a lot of changes in Lucid Lynx.

I hope you like it, stay tuned! 🙂